Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.

It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.

Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.

It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.

All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.

The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.

My language is the sum total of myself.

We cannot begin with complete doubt.

There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.

Effort supposes resistance.

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.

All the progress we have made in philosophy ... is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.

Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.