Quotes by 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 i...”

“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 tru...”

“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 follo...”

“To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thi...”

“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, howe...”

“It may be asked how I know that there are any Reals. If this hypothesis is the sole support of my method of inquiry, my method of inquiry must not be used to support my hypothesis. The reply is thi...”

“Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truththat hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. Bu...”

“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. ...”

“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.”

“We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason) but upon that department that is deep and sure which is instinct.”

“We one and all of us have an instinct to pray and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.”

“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, ho...”

“We one and all of us have an instinct to pray and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.”

“True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.”

“The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler. p. 49”

“Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocinat...”

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the ...”

“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 … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of t...”

“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 pe...”

“You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism.”