QuoteProject
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Progress involves balancing stability and transformation.

Alfred North Whitehead's quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining stability while embracing change. It suggests that real progress is achieved not by eliminating order for the sake of change, nor by resisting change to cling to order, but by finding a harmonious balance between the two forces.

Themes

ProgressChangeOrderBalanceTransformation

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used during a leadership workshop to inspire managers on the importance of balancing structure and innovation.

More from Alfred North Whitehead

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead

Similar quotes

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.
James JoyceRead
The basis for true change is freedom from negativity. And that's what acceptance implies: no negativity about what is. And then you see what this moment requires: what is it that is required now so that life can express itself more fully?
Eckhart TolleRead
I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body - not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family.
Mona EltahawyRead
Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
We all remain who we are. But on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions. This requires clear decisions. Because it does not happen by itself, it is in a way "unnatural" or "supernatural" . . . (we) simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process . . . make mistakes.
Richard RohrRead
For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.
Ralph NaderRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.