Brand Blanshard Quotes

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.

Most men live like raisins in a cake of custom.

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

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

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.

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.

[How to think about a problem:] The first step is to make the problem specific . . . ; The second step is to form theories freely of how to rid yourself of that burden . . . ; The third step is to develop in foresight the consequences of your proposals . . . ; The fourth and final step in thinking is to compare the consequences of your proposals to see which is best in the light of your scheme of life as a whole . . . ; Whether you choose a vacation or a spouse, a party or a candidate, a cause to contribute to or a creed to live by - think!

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