Quotations: Common Sense

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

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Henry Ward Beecher

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 instinct, and enough of it is genius.
Josh Billings

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

Common sense is as rare as genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Common sense is very uncommon.
Horace Greeley

Common sense has given to words their ordinary signification, and common sense is the genius of mankind.
Francois Pierre Guizot

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

Common sense in one view is the most uncommon sense. While it is extremely rare in possession, the recognition of it is universal. All men feel it, though few men have it.
Henry Norman Hudson

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

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

Common sense is science exactly so far as it fulfils the ideal of common sense; that is, sees facts as they are or at any rate without the distortion of prejudice, and reasons from them in accordance with the dictates of sound judgment.
Thomas Henry Huxley

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
Robert Ingersoll

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James

If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common sense will suffice to do everything else.
Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

Fine sense and exalted sense are not half as useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense. And he that will carry nothing about him but gold will be every day at a loss for readier change.
Alexander Pope

Common sense ain't common.
Will Rogers

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is Genius.
George B Shaw

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

Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.
Samuel Smiles

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

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

Common sense is in spite of, not because of age.
Lord Edward Thurlow

Common Sense is not so common.
Voltaire

To act with common sense, according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know; and the best philosophy, to do one's duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one's lot, bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it, whatever it is, and despise affectation.
Horace Walpole

In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.
Edwin Percy Whipple

Common sense is genius in homespun.
Alfred North Whitehead

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