Quotes from Brand Blanshard

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.

Most men live like raisins in a cake of custom.

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.

Style is the ultimate morality of mind." ... [It has] a double aim of complete fidelity to fact and to one's complex sense of fact. ... We are shooting at a star when we aim at style in this sense; we are trying to do justice at once to an infinity without and a near infinity within.

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.