Sense Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort.

Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time. Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity. However, knowing this, one must attend to medical practice not primarily to plausible theories, but to experience combined with reason. For a theory is a composite memory of things apprehended with sense perception.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

G. K. Chesterton

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.

Variant: Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Albert Einstein

She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.

A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense out of life.

A tranquil summer sunset shone upon him as he approached the end of his walk, and passed through the meadows by the river side. He had that sense of peace, and of being lightened of a weight of care, which country quiet awakens in the breasts of dwellers in towns.

Charles Dickens

To bed, to bed; sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses,
As infants empty of all thought.

William Shakespeare

The charm of the Platonic mode of thought... consisted precisely in the resistance to the obvious evidence of the senses.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

Simone de Beauvoir

All knowledge must be recognition, on pain of being mere delusion; Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians... Whatever can be thought of has being and its [arithmetic] being is a precondition, not a result, of its being thought of.

Bertrand Russell

I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed.

I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them.

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

Bertrand Russell

The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that "things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal."

Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.

Henry David Thoreau

Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The war is total disaster. It's a catastrophe, nothing less. It is such a shame that this took place. In fact, I gained a lot of respect for our current president's father by the fact that he had the sense not to go in to Iraq. He won the war and then said let's not go the rest of the way and he turned out to be right. And Saddam Hussein, whether they like him or didn't like him, he hated terrorists. He'd shoot and kill terrorists. When terrorists came in to his country, which he did control and he did dominate, he would kill terrorists. Now it's a breeding ground for terrorists. So, look, the war is a total catastrophe...and they have a civil war going on.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Raymond Chandler

There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas; even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed, by repeated exercises of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.

I honestly believe that this is one of the greatest secrets to true peace of mind — a decent sense of values. We could annihilate 50 percent of all our worries at once if we would develop a sort of private gold standard — a gold standard of what things are worth to us in terms of our lives.