Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

Words are not brains, you know.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

Only where there is language is there world.

For it was not so much that by means of words I came to a complete understanding of things, as that from things I somehow had an experience which enabled me to follow the meaning of words.

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.

A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

Everything I think in life is about context and intention.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.

To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

Being that can be understood is language.

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to 'know' another, and to what extent would this be possible?

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

The way we see things is the source of the way we think or the way we act

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

The forehead is the gate of the mind.