When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.
- Edward Abbey
Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities.
- William R. Alger
Common sense is nature's gift, but reason is an art.
- James Beattie
Common sense, alas in spite of our educational institutions, is a rare commodity.
- Christian Nestell Bovee
Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it; the difference is, therefore, in the degree, not nature.
- Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
If common sense has not the brilliancy of the sun, it has the fixity of the stars.
- Fernan Caballero (pseudonym of Caecilia de Faber)
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
- Albert Einstein,
in "Mathematics, Queen and Servant of the Sciences" by E.T. Bell
The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.
- Euripides
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 G. Guizot
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 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
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 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 is instinct. Enough of it is Genius.
- George Bernard 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 in spite of, not because of age.
- Lord Edward Thurlow (1), 1st Baron Thurlow
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 (Horatio) Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford
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
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 (Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde)
