Sensible Quotes - Page 30

• Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seeming credible?), insufficient numbers of Catholics have been able to be sensible.

  A.C. Grayling

  Religious, Men, Views

  A.C. Grayling (2012). “Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness”, p.12, Oberon Books

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• Only the gamefish swims upstream, But the sensible fish swims down.

  Ogden Nash

  Swim, Fishes

  Ogden Nash (1941). “The face is familiar: the selected verse of Ogden Nash”, Garden City publishing company, inc

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• Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Hero, Men, Evil

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• People enter states of consciousness where they think they've become enlightened. The best thing to do, if you've gone through one of those phases, is to be sensible, laugh at yourself for how foolish you were.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Thinking

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• When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help form supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself.

  Francesc Ferrer i Guardia

  Men, Atheism, Needs

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• Sensible men no longer belive in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants.

  Alfonso X of Castile

  Men, Miracle, Priests

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• If, therefore, man has come into the world to search for God and, if he has found Him, to adhere to Him and to find repose in adhering to Him-man cannot search for Him and attain Him in this sensible and corporeal world, since God is spirit rather than body, and cannot be attained in intellectual abstraction, since one is able to conceive nothing similar to God, as he asserts-how can one, therefore, search for Him in order to find Him?

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Men, Order, Intellectual

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• The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences.

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  War, Reality, Differences

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• What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.

  Rex Stout

  Running, Believe, Mean

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• Dinner with Steven Moffat in Bar Shu, spent mostly in enthusiastic Dr Who neepery. I love my life....As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's 'Why Don't You Run Linux?' talks are staring to seem much more sensible.

  Neil Gaiman

  Running, Love Of My Life, Watches

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• The strongest symptom of wisdom in man is his being sensible of his own follies.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Wisdom, Men, Symptoms

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• Music for a long time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by.... [If] the world is the oneness of opposites - and music says it is - the world is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at once?

  Eli Siegel

  Opposites, Oneness, Long

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• Some sensible person once remarked that you spend the whole of your life either in your bed or in your shoes. Having done the best you can by shoes and bed, devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house.

  Elizabeth David

  Food, Building Up, Shoes

  Elizabeth David (1969). “French Country Cooking”

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• Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Spirit, for such things as God has promised.

  John Bunyan

  Prayer, Soul, Pouring

  John Bunyan (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of John Bunyan (Illustrated)”, p.1846, Delphi Classics

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• She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.

  Jane Austen

  Clever, Women, Joy

  Jane Austen (2007). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen”, p.5, Wordsworth Editions

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• Stop telling yourself that dreams don't matter, that they are only dreams and that you should be more sensible.

  Julia Cameron

  Dream, Inspiration, Matter

  Julia Cameron (2012). “The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, p.24, Souvenir Press

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• We're never going to have respectful and reverential relationships with the planet- and sensible policies about what we put in the air, the soil, the water - if very young children don't begin learning about these things literally in their houses, backyards, streets and schools. We need to have human beings who are oriented that way from their earliest memories.

  Elise M. Boulding

  Respect, Children, Memories

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• In time of war, soldiers, however sensible, care a great deal more on some occasions about slaking their thirst than about the danger of enteric fever. Better known as typhoid, the disease is often spread by drinking contaminated water.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Drinking, Water

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• In the evaluation of the dominant moods of any historical period it is important to hold fast to the fact that there are always islands of self-sufficient order — on farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters — where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives: as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.

  Erik Erikson

  Happiness, Home, People

  "Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History".

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• Gotta have safety at our borders. We're a sovereign nation, gotta protect our borders. Make sure the workplace doesn't become a magnet for folks to be hired without the authorization. And then let's be realistic and sensible about how we approach all those folks who made America their home, established businesses, have children who have gone on to be valedictorians at their high school - and let's do these things in a very sensible way.

  Xavier Becerra

  Children, Home, School

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• He who owns a wood of proper land in this country, and, in the face of all the personal riches of the day, only raises crabs and choke pears, deserves to lose the respect of all sensible men.

  Andrew Jackson Downing

  Country, Men, Garden

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• We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Thinking, People, Opinion

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• Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

  David Hume

  Nature, Children, Science

  David Hume (1874). “A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, p.452

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• Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Age, Decay, Youth

  Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, Eugenia Stanhope (1827). “Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son”, p.142

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• Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate.... It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -even to the limit of God.

  Fred Hoyle

  Thinking, Origin Of Life, Limits

  "Big enough to bury Darwin", www.theguardian.com. August 23, 2001.

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