Charles Sanders Peirce's Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.

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.

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.

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.

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.