Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

... the fallibility of human brains is in nothing more obvious than in proof reading.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

Everyone makes mistakes, even if some are worse than others. Accidents happen.

Man errs as long as he strives.

Even a president makes mistakes.

To be human is erroneous.

Reason deceives us more often than does nature.

If you want to talk about mistakes, every country has mistakes, every government has mistakes, every person has mistakes. When you have a war, you have more mistakes. That's the natural thing.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

How full of error is the judgment of mankind! They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

To conduct great matters and never commit a fault is above the force of human nature.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

I'm sorry,' he says simply. 'People make mistakes, Gemma. We take the wrong action for the right reasons, and the right action for the wrong reasons.

No one's walking around here perfect. Everyone's gonna make mistakes. That's part of how you learn.

Even the worthy Homer sometimes nods.

Nothing is more dangerous in practice, than an obstinate, unbending adherence to a system, particularly in its application to the wants and errors of mankind.

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

One of the reasons people might be fallible, why we might fail to do what we try to do isignorance, that we have a limited understanding of the laws of the world - the physical laws that govern the world and of all the particulars of the world upon which those laws work. And then there's ineptitude, meaning that the knowledge is available, but individuals fail to apply it correctly. The third source is "necessary fallibility." That is, we're never going to be omniscient, there is some knowledge that we will simply never achieve, and there are limits to what we will be able to do.

That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn't alter the fact that I'm bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!

We're all human at the end of the day, making mistakes. But learn from them is the key.