Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Charles Sanders Peirce's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 104 quotes on this page collected since September 10, 1839! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.

    Prayer   Facts   Praying  
    Charles Sanders Peirce “Scientific meta-physics”
  • 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.

    Past   Ideas   Feelings  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, Harvard University Press
  • Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .

    Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Running   Science   Men  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers”, p.32, Harvard University Press
  • No general description of the mode of advance of human knowledge can be just which leaves out of account the social aspect of knowledge. That is of its very essence. What a thing society is! The workingman, with his trade union, knows that. Men and women moving in polite society understand it, still better. But Bohemians, like me, whose work is done in solitude, are apt to forget that not only is a man as a whole little better than a brute in solitude, but also that everything that bears any important meaning to him must receive its interpretation from social considerations.

    Moving   Men   Essence  
  • If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust.

    Death   Betrayal   Men  
    Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.149, Indiana University Press
  • The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.

    Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser (1998). “The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings”, p.263, Indiana University Press
  • It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

    Wine   Men   Psychology  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.408, Courier Corporation
  • Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

    Charles Sanders Peirce (1933). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Exact logic (Published papers).. The Simplest mathematics”, Harvard University Press
  • Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

    Stress   Math   Perfect  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study ofphilosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

  • Theology, I am persuaded, derives its initial impulse from a religious wavering; for there is quite as much, or more, that is mysterious and calculated to awaken scientific curiosity in the intercourse with God, and it [is] a problem quite analogous to that of theology.

    Charles Sanders Peirce “Scientific meta-physics”
  • Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete.

    Morning   Spring   Mean  
  • A true proposition is a proposition belief which would never lead to such disappointment so long as the proposition is not understood otherwise than it was intended.

    Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, p.397, Harvard University Press
  • I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.

    Thinking   Lakes   Long  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.

    Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.149, Indiana University Press
  • Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

    Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.

    Past   Ideas   Infinity  
    Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.326, Indiana University Press
  • When an image is said to be singular, it is meant that it is absolutely determinate in all respects. Every possible character, or the negative thereof, must be true of such an image.

    Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.47, Indiana University Press
  • Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

    Math   Needs   Ethics  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1933). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Exact logic (Published papers).. The Simplest mathematics”, Harvard University Press
  • ...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.

    Dream   Math   Science  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • For example, there are numbers of chemists who occupy themselves exclusively with the study of dyestuffs. They discover facts that are useful to scientific chemistry; but they do not rank as genuine scientific men. The genuine scientific chemist cares just as much to learn about erbium-the extreme rarity of which renders it commercially unimportant-as he does about iron. He is more eager to learn about erbium if the knowledge of it would do more to complete his conception of the Periodic Law, which expresses the mutual relations of the elements.

    Science   Men   Law  
  • The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

    Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.113, Indiana University Press
  • 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 (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, p.255, Harvard University Press
  • All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. 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.

    Truth   Real   Mean  
    Charles Sanders Peirce, Morris Raphael Cohen, John Dewey (1968). “Chance, love, and logic philosophical essays”, p.306, Charles Sander Peirce
  • The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.

    Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.69, Courier Corporation
  • The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.

    Letter to William James, January 08, 1909.
  • 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.

    Charles Sanders Peirce, Patricia Ann Turrisi (1997). “Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism”, p.160, SUNY Press
  • The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

    Ideas   Ego   Unity  
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1991). “Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic”, p.229, UNC Press Books
  • By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

    Mean   Thinking   Objects  
    "Reflections on Real and Unreal Objects". Manuscript MS 966 according to the Commens Bibliography,
Page 1 of 4
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 104 quotes from the Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, starting from September 10, 1839! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!