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Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.

— Charles Sanders Peirce The Law of Mind (1892)

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Mind

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990)

The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.

Collected Papers (1931)

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.

Collected Papers (1931)

A sign is in a conjoint relation to the thing denoted and to the mind.

On The Algebra of Logic (1885)

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis.

Pragmatism (1907)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Charles Sanders Peirce (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.