Sunday, May 26, 2013 – Common Sense
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
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. ~ Albert Einstein
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. ~ William James
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
He’s a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. ~ George Bernard Shaw
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. ~ H. L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. ~ H. L. Mencken
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense. ~ Helen Rowland
Romantics consider common sense vulgar. ~ Mason Cooley
My greatest strength is common sense. I’m really a standard brand – like Campbell’s tomato soup or Baker’s chocolate. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense. ~ Julian Casablancas
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
Genius ain’t anything more than elegant common sense. ~ Josh Billings
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. ~ Thomas Huxley
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. ~ Thomas Huxley
Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people. ~ George Jean Nathan
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited. ~ George Santayana
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. ~ Charles Baudelaire
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious. ~ Charles Baudelaire
Because you can’t argue with all the fools in the world. It’s easier to let them have their way, then trick them when they’re not paying attention. ~ Christopher Paolini
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens. ~ Alan Watts
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails. ~ John Mortimer
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
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense. ~ David Deutsch
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. Lucas
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 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 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
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
Just Above Sunset 