6 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes on Truth

Alfred North Whitehead quotes on truth

25. The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

51. There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

56. What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

57. The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

70. It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.

74. There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. -P.R. preface