117 Quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.

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.

...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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.