Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

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.

- Charles Sanders Peirce

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

- Charles Sanders Peirce

The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

- Charles Sanders Peirce

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

- Charles Sanders Peirce

It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

- Charles Sanders Peirce

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

- Charles Sanders Peirce

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.

- Charles Sanders Peirce

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

- Charles Sanders Peirce

A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.

- Charles Sanders Peirce

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

- Charles Sanders Peirce