Alfred North Whitehead was born at Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, England on February 15th in 1861. Though young Alfred was a normally healthy child, his parents took it in mind that he was frail and kept him out of school until he was fourteen. In 1879 he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and stayed on as a lecturer after graduation. After his marriage in 1891 he started to question his Anglican upbringing, spending seven years carefully considering joining the Roman Catholic Church - and finally deciding he was an agnostic. For a decade he was a professor of mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology at London, then suddenly switched fields and countries to become a professor of philosophy at Harvard.
Today's Quotes:
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. All from Alfred North Whitehead, 1861 - 1947
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