Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

Logic is one thing and commonsense another.

We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

People are trying to be smart - all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it's harder than most people think.

I think when it comes to decisions, I try not to be emotional. To drown out the noise and look at the important facts.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

I don’t think we can pass a law that fixes stupid.

If you can get rid of the emotion and concentrate on the problem, you can solve the problem.

It's called common sense, but it's not common. Most people don't have it.

The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count.

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.

It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.

The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.

The investigation of mathematical truths accustoms the mind to method and correctness in reasoning, and is an employment peculiarly worthy of rational beings.

Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers?

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.