Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

I had writer's block for almost a year.

Some people have constipation of the brain but their mouth has the runs.

Rain on my head, call that brainstorming.

Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.

Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind.

Nothing is more tragic - or more common - than mental inertia.

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought. Of a sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn't know were there run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general.

Negativity is the enemy of creativity. For instance if you're filled with depression, you can hardly even get out of bed, let alone feel like creating something. If you are filled with bitter, selfish anger, this occupies the mind and leaves little room for creative ideas.

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.

The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

My mind contains many good ideas, but it's not always easy to squeeze one out.

I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

Even the scholars in various lands have been acting as if their brains had been amputated.

This job's a pain-it's so mundane It sure don't stimulate my brain.

Methodology gives those with no ideas something to do.

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.

In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.

I actually believe in denial.