Charles Sanders Peirce quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

My language is the sum total of myself.

The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.

We cannot begin with complete doubt.

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

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

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

We think only in signs.

There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

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

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

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

To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .

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

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

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

The universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any character.

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

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

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

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.

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

Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up.

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

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

And it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

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