Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes.
The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
It is… easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
We cannot begin with complete doubt.
Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.
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.
Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
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 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.
We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.
My language is the sum total of myself.
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.
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.
It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.
We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
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.
The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.
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.
