Common Sense Quotes - Page 5

• Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Truth, Utterance, Favors

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.90, University of Georgia Press

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

  Katharine Hepburn

  Strength, Wedding, Chocolate

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• 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

  Running, Acceptance, Elephants

  Abraham Lincoln (1999). “The Wit & Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: A Treasury of Quotations, Anecdotes, and Observations”, Gramercy

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• Philosophy is common sense with big words.

  James Madison

  Philosophy, Medicine, Liberty

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• A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

  Thomas Paine

  Pain, Thinking, Long

  Thomas Paine “Annotated Common Sense with English Grammar Exercises: by Thomas Paine (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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

  Charles Kettering

  Inspirational, Creativity, Ignorance

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• The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

  William Ralph Inge

  Wise, Wisdom, Degrees

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• Common sense as well as common values all lead us. Our future depends upon it and our present is going to be vastly better when we get back to these basics.

  Joan Blades

  Basics, Our Future, Wells

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• In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

  Norman O. Brown

  Science, Essence, Long

  Norman O. Brown (1972). “Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History”

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• Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.

  Rene Descartes

  Thinking, World, Share

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• 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

  Character, Names, Childhood

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• A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Courage, Men, Taste

  Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) "Julius Caesar"

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• There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Knowledge, Thinking, Uncommon

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• Common sense is the guy who tells you that 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 grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.

  Raymond Chandler

  Monday, Morning, Mistake

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

  Giambattista Vico

  Reflection, Race, Class

  Giambattista Vico (2015). “The New Science of Giambattista Vico”, p.27, Cornell University Press

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• Common sense is genius in homespun.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Genius, Common

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• The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.

  Euripides

  Prophet, Wit, Native

  Euripides (1968). “Euripides: The Cyclops, translated by W. Arrowsmith. Heracles, translated by W. Arrowsmith. Iphigenia in Tauris, translated by W. Bynner. Helen translated by R. Lattimore”

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• Science ... is organized common sense.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Common, Organized

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1919). “The field of philosophy: an outline of lectures on introduction to philosophy”

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

  Ashanti

  Rivers, Feet, Depth

  "The last word on Prudence" by AC Grayling, www.theguardian.com. September 24, 1999.

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• In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and repossession, and suffer his reason and feelings to determine for themselves; and that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of man, and generously enlarge his view beyond the present day.

  Thomas Paine

  Character, Science, Simple

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• The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.

  Christopher Lasch

  Party, Lost Friendship, Popular Song

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

  Victor Hugo

  Education, School, Results

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• The question of common sense is always: 'what is it good for?' -
  a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

  James Russell Lowell

  Rose, Cabbage, Abolish

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “My Study Windows”, p.250

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• Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.

  Esther Dyson

  Thinking, Technology, Firsts

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• If the grass is greener on the other side it`s probably getting better care. Success is a matter of sticking to a set of common sense principles anyone can master.

  Earl Nightingale

  Get Better, Principles, Care

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