Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes
"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
(Related: Chaos, Existence, Nothing, Reality)
"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
(Related: Nature, Thought, Action, Belief, Effect, Exercise, Future, Influence, Thinking, Will)
"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
(Related: Belief, Facts, Harmony, Man, Will)
"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
(Related: Envy, Man, Reason)
"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
(Related: Change, Belief, Doubt, State, Struggle)
"Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic."
- Charles Sanders Peirce
(Related: Fact, Logic)
"All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite."
- Charles Sanders Peirce
(Related: Evolution)
"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
(Related: Quality, Character, Habit, Being, Future, Law, May)
"Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment."
- Charles Sanders Peirce
(Related: First, Judgment, Mind)