Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes (16 Quotes)


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

    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.

    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.

    ...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.



    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.



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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.


    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.


    More Charles Sanders Peirce Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Belief & Faith - Obstacles - Mathematics - Facts - Mind - Logic - Science - Doubt & Skepticism - Man - Actions - Reasoning - Habit - Dreams - Death & Dying - Thought & Thinking - Art - Law & Regulation - Sadness - Harmony - View All Charles Sanders Peirce Quotations

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