Explore Quotes on Common Sense

At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.'

Self-sacrifice which denies common sense is not a virtue. It's a spiritual dissipation.

Never,ever confuse what happens on a runway with fashion. A runway is spectacle. It's only fashion when a woman puts it on. Being well dressed hasn't much to do with having good clothes. It's a question of good balance and good common sense.

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.

My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.

The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness.

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

All my growth and development led me to believe that if you really do the right thing, and if you play by the rules, and if you?ve got good enough, solid judgment and common sense, that you?re going to be able to do whatever you want to do with your life.

Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

Now I do not myself share that superstitious reverence for the beliefs of common sense which many contemporary philosophers profess. But I think that we must start from them, and that we ought to depart from them only when we find good reason to do so.

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.

One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense.

Fred Hoyle and I differ on lots of questions, but on this we agree: a common sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence.

The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is nonintuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions.

Average people and the average community can change the world. You can do it just based on common sense, determination, persistence and patience.

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.

What the founders of modern science ... had to do, was not criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science - and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

If the question were, "What ought to be the next objective in science?" my answer would be the teaching of science to the young, so that when the whole population grew up there would be a far more general background of common sense, based on a knowledge of the real meaning of the scientific method of discovering truth.

The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.

Because desperation breeds gullibility. People want to lose weight so much that their common sense shuts off.