Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.

Philosophy is not one truth, but thousands of truths. You don't have to believe in just one thing. When you chose one idea, you close yourself to the rest.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.

I read all the great philosophers but most people just hear what they want to hear and it makes it easy for them to brand us devil worshippers.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.

In other philosophies, my questions would get answered to some degree, but then I would have a follow-up question and there would be no answer. The logic would dead-end. In Scientology you can find answers for anything you could ever think to ask. These are not pushed off on you as, 'This is the answer, you have to believe in it.' In Scientology you discover for yourself what is true for you.

Of all the weaknesses little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.

One must be oneself very little of a philosopher not to feel that the finest privilege of our reason consists in not believing in anything by the impulsion of a blind and mechanical instinct, and that it is to dishonour reason to put it in bonds as the Chaldeans did. Man is born to think for himself.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.

Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.

I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse.

"You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry."

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.

However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.