Quotes about common-sense

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.

— John Berger

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

— Josh Billings

Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

— Samuel Butler

Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.

— Raymond Chandler

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.

— Rene Descartes

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

— Albert Einstein

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.

— Euripides

There is nothing a man of good sense dreads in a wife so much as her having more sense than himself.

— Henry Fielding

The common people of America display a quality of good common sense which is heartening to anyone who believes in the democratic process.

— George Gallup

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Common Sense is very uncommon.

— Horace Greeley

My greatest strength is... common sense. I'm really a standard brand -- like Campbell's tomato soup or Baker's chocolate.

— Katharine Hepburn

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Common sense is compelled to make its way without the enthusiasm of anyone.

— Edgar Watson Howe

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

— Victor Hugo

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

— Thomas H. Huxley

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

— Thomas H. Huxley

When two men share an umbrella, both of them get wet.

— Michael Isenberg

A person must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.

— Charles F. Kettering

He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.

— Charles Kingsley

Common Sense is in medicine the master workman.

— Peter Latham

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

— Madeleine L'Engle

When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.

— Abraham Lincoln

The question of common sense is what is it good for? A question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

— James Russell Lowell

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn, tired of common sense and civilization.

— F. L. Lucan

Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

— W. Somerset Maugham

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

— George Meredith

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

— George Orwell

He who does not have common sense at age thirty will never have it.

— Proverb

No one tests the depth of a river with both feet.

— Ashanti Proverb

Common sense hides shame.

— Gaelic Proverb

One pound of learning requires ten pounds of common sense to apply it.

— Persian Proverb

If a man has common sense, he has all the sense there is.

— Sam Rayburn

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all try something.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

It makes sense that there is no sense without God.

— Edith Schaeffer

Common Sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.

— Henry Wheeler Shaw

Everybody gets so much common information all day long that they lose their common sense.

— Gertrude Stein

What a grand thing it is to be clever and have common sense.

— Terence

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

— Henry David Thoreau

A handful of common sense is worth a bushel of learning.

— Source Unknown

The biggest shortage of all is the shortage of common sense.

— Source Unknown

In the war for individual rights, common sense becomes the first and major casualty.

— Source Unknown

Good sense is the master of human life.

— Source Unknown

Common sense is what tells us the Earth is flat and the Sun goes around it.

— Source Unknown

Common sense is seeing things as they are, and doing things as they should be done.

— Source Unknown

Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.

— Giambattista Vico

Common sense is not so common.

— Voltaire

Nothing ventured, nothing gained -- but if everything is ventured, and still nothing gained, give up and venture elsewhere.

— Peter Wastholm

Common sense is genius in homespun.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

— Oscar Wilde

Doesn't make much sense to me to spray everything with chemicals when you're trying to clean.

— James Dye

There is no school of philosphy that approaches ordinary common sense.

— Michael Lipsey