“Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.”

“Common sense is as rare as genius.”

“Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.”

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”

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

“brings domesticity and common sense, and that propriety which every man loves, directly into this hurly-burly, and makes every bully ashamed.”

“I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.”