Charles Sanders Peirce > Quotes

“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 inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.”
― Charles S. 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, Experience.”
― Charles S. Peirce

“There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.”
― C.S. 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 understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.”
― Charles S. Peirce

“All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted would betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.”
― Peirce Charles Sanders

“My language is the sum total of myself.”
― Charles S. Peirce

“We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.”
― Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893–1913

“We think only in signs.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”
― 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

“I hear you say: ‘All that is not /fact/ : it is poetry’. Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life goes with it.”
― Charles Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays

“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 ratiocination, and does not extend to that of other men.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Fixation of Belief

“If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“Kepler’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler—such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal—were abandoning the study of geometry ... because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the human race almost trembling in the balance; for had not the geometry of conic sections already been worked out in large measure, and had their opinion that only sciences apparently useful ought to be pursued, the nineteenth century would have had none of those characters which distinguish it from the ancien régime.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes V and VI, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and Scientific Metaphysics

“Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton’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 we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes V and VI, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and Scientific Metaphysics

“Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings

“All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. 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. But what, without death, would happen to every man, with death must happen to some man . . . It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce

“What the pragmatist has his pragmatism for is to be able to say, Here is a definition and it does not differ at all from your confusedly apprehended conception because there is no practical difference.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“Signs are of three classes, namely, Icons (or images), Indices, and Symbols. Article 6. An icon is a sign which stands for its object because as a thing perceived it excites an idea naturally allied to the idea that object would excite.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings

“L'homme a un penchant naturel à imaginer des théories correctes de toutes espèces... Si l'homme n'était pas doué d'un esprit adapté à ses besoins, il n'aurait jamais pu acquérir aucune connaissance”
― Charles S. Peirce

“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.”
― Charles Sanders Pierce

“Are you sure twice two are four? Not at all. A certain percentage of the human race are insane and subject to illusions. It may be you are one of them, and that your idea that twice two is four is a lunatic notion, and your seeming recollection that other people think so, the baseless fabric of a vision.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings

“Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth–that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. These things are proved. The reader is at liberty to think so or not as long as the proof is not set forth, or as long as he refrains from examining it. Just so, he can preserve, if he likes, his freedom of opinion in regard to the propositions of geometry; only, in that case, if he takes a fancy to read Euclid, he will do well to skip whatever he finds with A, B, C, etc., for, if he reads attentively that disagreeable matter, the freedom of his opinion about geometry may unhappily be lost forever.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1

“[…] it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, Semiotic & Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce & Victoria Lady Welby

“„Oni koji izvršavaju na različite načine organizovanu moć u državi neće se nikada moći uveriti u to da opasna razmišljanja ne treba na neki način potčinjavati. Tamo gde pravo govora nije otvoreno sprečavano, jedinstvo mnenja se postiže moralnim terorom sa kojim su poštovani u društvu izričito saglasni. Slediti mišljenje vladajućih znači ići stazom mira. Neka su skretanja dopuštena, druga koja važe kao nesigurna, zabranjena. Ona su različita u različitim zemljama i različitim epohama, ali ma gde bio: ako je poznato da pripadaš tabuisanoj veri možeš biti siguran da će s tobom postupati s okrutnošću koja je manje brutalna, ali rafinovanija od lova na vuka. Najveći duhovni dobročinitelji čovečanstva nikada se nisu usudili a i danas se ne usuđuju da iznesu svoje misli. Senka sumnje prima facie pada na svako razmišljanje koje se čini važnim za sigurnost društva. Po pravilu proganjanje dolazi samo spolja: čovek se sam razdire i često je preplašen time što zastupa stavove protiv kojih su ga njegovog mišljenja autoritetu učili da se bori. Mirnom i dobronamernom karakteru stoga teško pada da se suprotstavi pokušaju potčinjavanja.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Fixation of Belief

“Now if we are to accept the common idea of continuity . . . we must either say that a continuous line contains no points or . . . that the principle of excluded middle does not hold of these points. The principle of excluded middle applies only to an individual . . . but places being mere possibilities without actual existence are not individuals.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

“Они који извршавају на различите начине организовану моћ у држави неће се никада моћи уверити у то да опасна размишљања не треба на неки начин потчињавати. Тамо где право говора није отворено спречавано, јединство мнења се постиже моралним терором са којим су поштовани у друштву изричито сагласни. Следити мишљење владајућих значи ићи стазом мира. Нека су скретања допуштена, друга која важе као несигурна, забрањена. Она су различита у различитим земљама и различитим епохама, али ма где био: ако је познато да припадаш табуисаној вери можеш бити сигуран да ће с тобом поступати с окрутношћу која је мање брутална, али рафинованија од лова на вука. Највећи духовни доброчинитељи човечанства никада се нису усудили а и данас се не усуђују да изнесу своје мисли. Сенка сумње прима фацие пада на свако размишљање које се чини важним за сигурност друштва. По правилу прогањање долази само споља: човек се сам раздире и често је преплашен тиме што заступа ставове против којих су га његовог мишљења ауторитету учили да се бори. Мирном и добронамерном карактеру стога тешко пада да се супротстави покушају потчињавања.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, The Fixation of Belief