11 Quotes by Brand Blanshard

I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.

Most men live like raisins in a cake of custom.

When the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence.

Once the anchor of reason has been cut, ones craft may go anywhere. One may become a St Francis or equally a Hitler.

Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.

Custom calls me to 't: What custom wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heap't For truth to o'erpeer.

To think at its best is to find oneself carried down the current of necessity.

I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.

If science could get rid of consciousness, it would have disposed of the only stumbling block to its universal application.