Charles Sanders Peirce Short Quotes

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Metaphysics has always been the ape of mathematics.

Charles Sanders Peirce
There is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any character.

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

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

Charles Sanders Peirce
Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.

Charles Sanders Peirce
By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i. e. anything we can talk about.

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

Charles Sanders Peirce
The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

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

Charles Sanders Peirce
We have here a question of difficulty, analogous to the question of nominalism and realism.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The man of action has to believe, the inquirer has to doubt; the scientific investigator is both.

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

Charles Sanders Peirce
Indeed, even this last moment will be recognized like the rest, at least, be just beginning to be so.

Charles Sanders Peirce
A chemical compound might be expected to be quite as much a proposition as like an algebraic invariant.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Understand me well. My appeal is to observation — observation that each of you must make for himself.

Charles Sanders Peirce
May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.

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

Charles Sanders Peirce
We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.

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

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

Charles Sanders Peirce
Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.

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

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

Charles Sanders Peirce