Common sense

"Common sense should be renamed, cos nower days it's rare"

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

"Common sense is the favorite daughter of Reason, and altho thare are menny other wimmin more attraktive for a time, thare is nothing but death kan rob common sense ov her buty"

"Wit, without sense, iz like a razor without a handle"

"Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was common sense in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. ... If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense."

"Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you 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 somebody else's money he's adding up."

"Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat."

"A weak mind with no common sense magnifies trifling things and cannot receive great ones."

"Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom."

"Common sense is only the application of theories which have grown and been formulated unconsciously as result of experience."

"Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée; car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont."

"Unless the materials involved can be traced back to the material of common sense concern there is nothing whatever for scientific concern to be concerned with."

"I don’t profess to be profound, but I do lay claim to common sense."

"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen."

"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

"Common sense is as rare as genius."

"The physician would be even worse off than he is, if not for the occasional emergence of common sense which breaks through dogmas with intuitive freshness."

"Science and common sense differ as cultivated fruits differ from wild fruits. Science sows its seeds of inquiry, and gathers the fruit. Common sense picks the fruit, such as it, is by the wayside. Common sense has no fields or orchards of knowledge."

"Common Sense and Education: The more you think you have of one, the less you think you need of the other."

"In all spheres of science, art, skill, and handicraft it is never doubted that, in order to master them, a considerable amount of trouble must be spent in learning and in being trained. As regards philosophy, on the contrary, there seems still an assumption prevalent that, though every one with eyes and fingers is not on that account in a position to make shoes if he only has leather and a last, yet everybody understands how to philosophize straight away, and pass judgment on philosophy, simply because he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason."

"The phrase is self-contradictory; "sense" is never "common"."

"It is a strange irony that the principles of science should seem to deny the necessary conviction of common sense."

"Consider the very roots of our ability to discern truth. Above all (or perhaps I should say "underneath all"), common sense is what we depend on – that crazily elusive, ubiquitous faculty we all have to some degree or other.... If we apply common sense to itself over and over again, we wind up building a skyscraper. The ground floor of the structure is the ordinary common sense we all have, and the rules for building news floors are implicit in the ground floor itself. However, working it all out is a gigantic task, and the result is a structure that transcends mere common sense."

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

"What is common sense? That which attracts the least opposition: that which brings most agreeable and worthy results."

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

"Science, is I believe, nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields a club."

"Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world."

"The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology."

"Common-sense contents itself with the unreconciled contradiction, laughs when it can, and weeps when it must, and makes, in short, a practical compromise, without trying a theoretical solution."

"In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgement, his freedom from eccentricity, his gumption."

"We know that the probability of well-established induction is great, but, when we are asked to name its degree we cannot. Common sense tells us that some inductive arguments are stronger than others, and that some are very strong. But how much stronger or how strong we cannot express."

"A small overweight of knowledge is often a sore impediment to the movements of common sense."

"I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic."

"I am one of those philosophers who have held that that "the Common Sense view of the world" is in certain fundamental features, wholly true."

"Common sense is not wrong in the view that is meaningful, appropriate and necessary to talk about the large objects of our daily experience…Common sense is wrong only if it insists that what is familiar must reappear in what is unfamiliar."

"Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles cannot lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true as to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd. There is therefore a justification for common sense in philosophy, but only as showing that our theoretical principles cannot be quite correct so long as their consequences are condemned by an appeal to common sense which we feel to be irresistible."

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

"Common sense is the very antipodes of science."

"There is absolutely no common sense; it is common nonsense."

"Whatever the common-sense of earlier generations may have held in this respect, modern common-sense holds that the scientist's answer is the only ultimately true one. In the last resort enlightened common-sense sticks by the opaque truth and refuses to go behind the returns given by the triangle of facts."

"On dit quelquefois: "Le sens commun est fort rare.""

"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 so much happiness with it, whatever it is, and despise affectation."

"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."

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

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."