Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

The ultimate aim of the human mind, in all its efforts, is to become acquainted with Truth.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

The things of which we want the proof are those we know the best.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

Concepts antedate facts.

Truth will have no gods before it.- The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.

The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.

I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.

It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition.

Truth happens to an idea

What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?

I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a process. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition.

I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.