Charles Sanders Peirce
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.
All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
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.
Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.
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.
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.
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.
It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.
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.
We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.Collection: Thinking
Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.Collection: Men
The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.Collection: Ifs
The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.Collection: Essence
It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.Collection: Knowledge
It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.Collection: Easy
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.Collection: Past
All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.Collection: Achievement
The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.Collection: Art
The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.Collection: Ideas
My language is the sum total of myself.Collection: Language
We cannot begin with complete doubt.Collection: Doubt
There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Teacher
Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.Collection: Math
Effort supposes resistance.Collection: Effort
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. That is the way I would explain reality.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Running
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.Collection: Acceptance
There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.Collection: Simplicity
We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.Collection: Prayer
To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.Collection: Law
It has often been argued that absolute scepticism is self-contradictory; but this is a mistake: and even if it were not so, it would be no argument against the absolute sceptic, inasmuch as he does not admit that no contradictory propositions are true. Indeed, it would be impossible to move such a man, for his scepticism consists in considering every argument and never deciding upon its validity; he would, therefore, act in this way in reference to the arguments brought against him.Collection: Mistake
It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.Collection: Men
And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.Collection: Symphony
A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody,that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.Collection: Ideas
Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.Collection: Past
There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Science
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Real
We may say that feelings have two kinds of intensity. One is the intensity of the feeling itself, by which loud sounds are distinguished from faint ones, luminous colors from dark ones, highly chromatic colors from almost neutral tints, etc. The other is the intensity of consciousness that lays hold of the feeling, which makes the ticking of a watch actually heard infinitely more vivid than a cannon shot remembered to have been heard a few minutes ago.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Decision
The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.Collection: Reality
The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief weare inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.Collection: Dream
The one [the logician] studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other [the mathematician] the science which draws necessary conclusions.Collection: Science
... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.Collection: Secret
The difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of mankind are naturally optimistic.Collection: Optimistic
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.Collection: Ideas