Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind , As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves.

The motion of the mind is conveyed along a cloud of meaning.~ There is this paradox that we get to meaning only when we strip the meaning from symbols.

You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at.

... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.

Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery.

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes.

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.

When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

Being that can be understood is language.