Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

A lot of writing is thinking.

You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.

Ideas are information taking shape.

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.

The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.

Creative thinking - in terms of idea creativity - is not a mystical talent. It is a skill that can be practised and nurtured.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

Most intuitive ideas have to be clarified, so there is a trial and error process.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

We are excellent at launching Tomahawk missiles; we need to get better at launching ideas.

Most people don't grab the right ideas or don't know what to do with them.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?

Usage is like oxygen for ideas.