This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Common opinions often conflict with common sense; for reason in most minds is no match for prejudices, a hydra whose heads grow faster than they can be cut off." - Edward Wigglesworth
"To say that people have a moral sense is not the same thing as saying that they are innately good. A moral sense must compete with other senses that are natural to humans - the desire to survive, acquire possessions, indulge in sex, or accumulate power - in short, with self-interest narrowly defined. How that struggle is resolved will differ depending on our character, our circumstances, and the cultural and political tendencies of the day. But saying that a moral sense exists is the same thing as saying that humans, by their nature, are potentially good." - James Q. Wilson
"I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean of the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man - a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things." - William Wordsworth
"Patriotism is a lively sense of responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill." - Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington
"Reverence is an ennobling sentiment; it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it. He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down." - Washington Allston
"A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it." - François Arago, fully François Jean Dominique Arago
"Books are no substitute for living, but they can add immeasurably to its richness. When life is absorbing, books can enhance our sense of its significance. When life is difficult, they can give us momentary release from trouble or a new insight into our problems, or provide the hours of refreshment we need." - May Hill Arbuthnot
"When it comes to your health, I recommend frequent doses of that rare commodity among Americans - common sense." - Vincent Askey, fully E. Vincent Askey
"In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"Few, without the hope of another life, would think it worth their while to live above the allurements of sense." - Francis Atterbury
"Wine-drinking is the mother of all mischief, the root of crimes, the spring of vices, the whirlwind of the brain, the overthrow of the sense, the tempest of the tongue, the ruin of the body, the shame of life, the stain of honesty, and the plague and corruption of the soul." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"A simple-minded believer would say, ‘God is in Heaven.’ A man of trained mind, knowing that God must be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’ But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and spatial sense, that formula, too, is likely in error. Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in spaced he might more justly say that space and matter are in God." - Averroes, full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd NULL
"Unless there is a recovery of the true dualism or, what amounts to the same thing, a reaffirmation of the truths of the inner life in some form - traditional or critical, religious or humanistic - civilization in any sense that has been attached to that term hitherto is threatened at its base." - Irving Babbitt
"It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant - birth, struggle, and death are constant - and so is love, though we may not always think so - and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths - change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not - safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, but which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope - the entire possibility - of freedom disappears." -
"If all the gold in the world were melted down into a solid cube, it would be about the size of an eight-room house. If a man got possession of all that gold - billions of dollars' worth, he could not buy a friend, character, peace of mind, clear conscience, or a sense of eternity." - Charles F. Banning
"Common sense is nature’s gift, but reason is an art." - James Beattie
"From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave... which rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter.. this rising wave is consciousness... running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes... the brain underlines at ever instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependence of consciousness and brain is limited to this... consciousness is essentially free." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"Reenchantment with the Earth as a living reality is the condition for our rescue of the Earth from the impending destruction we are imposing on it. To carry this out effectively, we must now, in a sense, reinvent the human as a species within the community of life species. Our sense reality and of value must consciously shift from an anthropocentric to a biocentric norm of reference." -
"Religious addiction is using God, the Church, or a belief system as an escape from reality, in an attempt to find or elevate a sense of self-worth or well-being... It is the ultimate form of co-dependency - feeling worthless in and of ourselves and looking outside for something or someone to tell us we are worthwhile... Recovery means discovering divinity in one's own life." - Leo Booth
"There is no sense of weariness like that which closes a day of eager and unintermitted pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten and the core sticks in the throat. Expectation has given way to ennui, and appetite to satiety." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"To cultivate the sense of the beautiful is but one, and the most effectual, of the ways of cultivating an appreciation of the Divine goodness." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"To quote copiously and well requires taste, judgment and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties. It is the cause of patience; gives endurance; overcome pain; strengthens weakness; braves dangers; sustains hope; make light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them." - John Christian Bovee
"To quote copiously and well requires taste, judgment and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound." - John Christian Bovee
"Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is." - William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade
"Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life. It is only found in men of sound sense and understanding." - Jean de La Bruyère
"If poverty is the mother of crimes, want of sense is the father of them." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"No state can be more destitute than that of a person, who, when the delights of sense forsake him, has no pleasures of the mind." - James Burgh
"Getters generally don't get happiness; givers get it. You simply give to others a bit of yourself - a thoughtful act, a helpful idea, a word of appreciation., a lift over a rough spot, a sense of understanding, a timely suggestion. You take something out of your mind, garnished in kindness out of your heart, and put it into the other fellow's mind and heart." - Charles H. Burr
"Conscience is a great ledger book in which all our offenses are written and registered, and which time reveals to the sense and feeling of the offender." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
"Sickness and disease are in weak minds the sources of melancholy; but that which is painful to the body, may be profitable to the soul. Sickness puts us in mind of our mortality, and, while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a proper sense of duty." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
"The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is." - Samuel Butler
"To keep from gravitating toward genocidal conflict, we must stop demanding perpetual progress. For quiet nonpolitical reasons, governments and politicians cannot achieve the paradise they habitually promise. Political leaders who continue to dangle before their constituents enticing carrots that are becoming unattainable hasten the erosion of faith in political processes. Circumstances have ceased to be what they were when the once-New World’s myth of limitlessness made sense." - William R. Catton, Jr.
"Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste genius is only sublime folly." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"For health and the constant enjoyment of life, give me a keen and ever present sense of humor; it is the next best thing to an abiding faith in providence." - George Barrell Cheever
"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"The artist (in literature) appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"I noticed an almost universal trait among Super Achievers, and it was what I call Sensory Goal Vision. These people knew what they wanted out of life, and they could sense it multi-dimensionally before they ever had it.. They could not only see it, but also taste it, smell it, and imagine the sounds and emotions associated with it. They pre-lived it before they had it. And that sharp, sensory vision became a powerful driving force in their lives." -
"There is a master key to success with which no man can fail. Its name is simplicity. Simplicity, I mean, in the sense of reducing to the simplest possible terms every problem that besets us. Whenever I have met a business proposition which, after taking thought, I could not reduce to simplicity, I have left it alone." - Henri Deterding, fully Henri Wilhelm August Deterding
""Faith is tendency toward action." According to such a view, faith is the matrix of formulated creeds and the inspiration of endeavor... Faith in its newer sense signifies that experience itself is the sole ultimate authority." - John Dewey