Quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

About Charles Sanders Peirce:

Charles Sanders Peirce is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.
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’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of —such penetrating minds as and —were abandoning the study of geometry ... because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the h...

Charles Sanders Peirce

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since ’s time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though w...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Sanders Peirce

Let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief; and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.

Charles Sanders Peirce

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,...

Charles Sanders Peirce

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribe...

Charles Sanders Peirce

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet ...

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

Author Bio

  • NameCharles Sanders Peirce
  • DescriptionAmerican philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist
  • AliasesCharles Peirce
  • BornSeptember 10, 1839
  • DiedApril 19, 1914
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionMathematician; Philosopher; Logician; Pragmatist; Statistician