Quotes by Charles Peirce

• The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.
• The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.
• It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.
• It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.
• Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.
• Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
• All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
• A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.
• Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.