Alfred Whitehead

Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new development.

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

The science of pure mathematics . . . may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

"One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.

So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.