Brand Blanshard quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Most men live like raisins in a cake of custom.