“Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.”
“He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.”
“Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.”
“There is nothing a man of good sense dreads in a wife so much as her having more sense than himself.”
“When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.”
“That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.”
“Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.”
“Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.”
“Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.”
“Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.”
“My greatest strength is... common sense. I'm really a standard brand -- like Campbell's tomato soup or Baker's chocolate.”
“Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.”
“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all try something.”
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained -- but if everything is ventured, and still nothing gained, give up and venture elsewhere.”
“Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.”
“The common people of America display a quality of good common sense which is heartening to anyone who believes in the democratic process.”
“The question of common sense is ''what is it good for?'' A question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.”
“Nowadays 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.”
“Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.”
“The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn, tired of common sense and civilization.”
“Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.”
“Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.”
“Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.”