“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 Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
“There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
“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 Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
“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 (1839-1914)
“To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
“My language is the sum total of myself.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
“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 (1839-1914)
“We think only in signs.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"a rapid deterioration of intellectual vigor is just what is taking place before our eyes."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"it is no longer the reasoning that determines what the conclusion shall be, but the conclusion that determines what the reasoning shall be."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"If we are to define science, ... it does not consist so much in knowing, nor even in "organized knowledge," as it does in diligent inquiry into truth for truth's sake, without any sort of axe to grind, nor for the sake of the delight of contemplating it, but from an impulse to penetrate into the reason of things."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"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."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by comparison with facts"
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"We cannot begin with complete doubt."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"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."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"Effort supposes resistance."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"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 (1839-1914)
"Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"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."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)