What is common sense?

Famous quotes containing the words common sense, common and/or sense:

    The British are a self-distrustful, diffident people, agreeing with alacrity that they are neither successful nor clever, and only modestly claiming that they have a keener sense of humour, more robust common sense, and greater staying power as a nation than all the rest of the world put together.
    —Quoted in Fourth Leaders from the Times (1950)

    Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.
    William James (1842–1910)

    Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it’s a piece of humbug.
    Max Frisch (1911–1991)