Quotes from 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.

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

Still, 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.

All the progress we have made in philosophy ... is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .

All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.

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

It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.

There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

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.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

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.

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.

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust.