Q0351

Alfred North Whitehead

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Seek simplicity and distrust it.
Thinker Alfred North Whitehead
School Process philosophy
Source Adventures of Ideas
Theme Simplicity
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Adventures of Ideas, within the tradition of Process philosophy. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of simplicity, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Alfred North Whitehead's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Alfred North Whitehead. (n.d.). Seek simplicity and distrust it. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0351

MLA: Alfred North Whitehead. “Seek simplicity and distrust it..” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0351.

Chicago: Alfred North Whitehead. “Seek simplicity and distrust it..” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0351.

Same thinker

More from Alfred North Whitehead

  1. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
  2. The many become one, and are increased by one.
  3. In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.
  4. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

All quotations by Alfred North Whitehead

Same theme

More on simplicity

  1. Plurality should not be posited without necessity.
  2. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.
  3. Simplify, simplify.
  4. The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.

Browse the simplicity theme