61 Quotes On Common Sense

In a world where information is abundant and opinions are diverse, common sense remains a timeless compass guiding us through the complexities of daily life. It acts as an innate wisdom, a form of judgment that transcends formal education and intellectual prowess. Often underappreciated, common sense influences our decisions, shapes societal norms, and fosters understanding among individuals. This collection of the top 61 quotes on common sense captures the essence of this invaluable trait, drawing insights from great thinkers throughout history. Whether you're seeking clarity or simply appreciating the wisdom of everyday practicality, these quotes are sure to resonate and inspire.

1. “Common sense is not so common.” - Voltaire

2. “Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe

3. “intuition is always right in at least two important ways;It is always in response to something.it always has your best interest at heart” - Gavin De Becker

4. “Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. ” - W.C. Fields

5. “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

6. “Common sense ain't common.” - Will Rogers

7. “The only thing a person can never have too much of is common sense.” - Kathryn Smith

8. “I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!” - J.K. Rowling

9. “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.” - St Jerome

10. “Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.” - Stuart Chase

11. “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” - Winston Churchill

12. “Common sense is as rare as genius.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

13. “Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.” - Euripides

14. “Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.” - Oscar Wilde

15. “Never assume the obvious is true.” - William Safire

16. “People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.” - Malcolm Gladwell

17. “He who must travel happily must travel light.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

18. “In this life you've got to hope for the best, prepare for the worst and take whatever God sends.” - Lucy Maud Montgomery

19. “That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.” - Vladimir Nabokov

20. “Should I have taken him by the hand and led him over to the Zappa? No. I won't spoon-feed the customers. If you don't know your alphabet, you have no business leaving your house, let alone shopping for premium music.” - Yvonne Prinz

21. “It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?” - Isaac Asimov

22. “Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it; it will counsel you best.” - Lord Chesterfield

23. “Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.” - Lord Kelvin

24. “For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam’s front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.” - Vera Nazarian

25. “If you want to be sure of unusual thing such as aliens or UFOs, then you have to think about it from an unusual way of thinking.” - Toba Beta

26. “What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense — none of which can be taught in a classroom... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.” - Hyman G. Rickover

27. “The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense.” - Kedar Joshi

28. “It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.” - Robert G. Ingersoll

29. “Shoot, I must have lived such a doggoned sheltered life as a normal, independent American up there in the Last Frontier, schooled with only public education and a lowly state university degree, because obviously I haven't learned enough to dismiss common sense.” - Sarah Palin

30. “Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.” - William Blake

31. “Maybe the problem was that we never struggled. We just coasted along. The thing about coasting is that it usually means you're going downhill.” - Molly Harper

32. “The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.” - Jeannette Walls

33. “It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.” - Guy de Maupassant

34. “Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.” - An Wang

35. “Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal.” - Mike Ditka

36. “His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes.” - G.K. Chesterton

37. “Stay in the boat, I told myself, watching them walk up to the pavilion. I'll just stay in the boat. I won't go anywhere near that creature.But in spite of that wise warning, I climbed out of the boat.Fine, stretch your legs, I told myself. Just don't follow them.But of course, I followed them.You are without question your own worst enemy, I scolded myself, even as I tiptoed after them.” - Merrie Haskell

38. “There will come a time in every girl's life when she realizes that your ex-girlfriend wasn't crazy. Actually, she was right (about you).” - Nakia R. Laushaul

39. “A lack of common sense usually ends in some heroic feat, much like the soldier who dives onto the grenade so that others may live.” - Criss Jami

40. “If you could sum up your life in one sentence, then you didn’t live much of a life.” - Carroll Bryant

41. “The accident in your rearview mirror already happened. The one in front of you is still preventable. Pay attention.” - Nakia R. Laushaul

42. “When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we’re being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don’t have a very good vocabulary to describe what others species do to us, because we think we’re the only species that really does anything.” - Michael Pollan

43. “There is no monopoly of common senseOn either side of the political fenceWe share the same biologyRegardless of ideologyBelieve me when I say to youI hope the Russians love their children too[...]There's no such thing as a winnable warIt's a lie we don't believe anymore ..."(The Russians)” - Sting

44. “[He was aware] of the value of the word of praise dropped at exactly the right moment; and he would have thought himself extremely stupid to withhold what cost him so little and was productive of such desirable results.” - Georgette Heyer

45. “Knowledge counts but common sense matters.” - LouAnne Johnson

46. “Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.” - Ludwig Von Mises

47. “Never raise your hand to your children - it leaves your midsection unprotected” - Robert Orben

48. “Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.” - M.M. Kaye

49. “It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

50. “I have neither the ability of a poet or the flourish of a dramatist. But I must admit I was floored” - Tushar Raheja

51. “Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

52. “I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.” - Emma Goldman

53. “You can always start over the next day.” - B. Anonymous

54. “Was it possible to do both, to contribute to the world while merely observing it? To be content in the moment, but plan for the future? Could you follow your heart without losing all common sense?” - Holly Robinson

55. “Life is a game of common sense. You can know all the data that the encyclopedia holds, but if you can't apply it to social situations and day to day events, you're on the same rank as someone with no data at all.” - Zack W. Van

56. “Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.” - Don DeLillo

57. “The past is behind us unless we fail to learn from it.” - L.M. Fields

58. “Tis the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle

59. “Shut out anyone who upsets your peace of mind, right now.” - Sindhu S.

60. “All's well that ends well.''Assuming there's an end somewhere,' Aomame said.Tamaru formed some short creases near his mouth that were faintly reminiscent of a smile. 'There has to be an end somewhere. It's just that nothing's labeled "This is the end." Is the top rung of a ladder labeled "This is the last rung. Please don't step higher than this'?"Aomame shook her head.'It's the same thing,' Tamaru said.Aomame said, 'If you use common sense and keep your eyes open, it becomes clear enough where the end is.'Tamaru nodded. 'And even if it doesn't' -- he made a falling gesture with his finger -- 'the end is right there.” - Haruki Murakami

61. “On Lincoln: "A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.” - James Russell Lowell