Alfred Whitehead

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.

The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. . . . Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. . . . We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them.

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

War can protect; it cannot create.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.