Sense Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

Søren Kierkegaard

Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without.

BIRON: What is the end of study? let me know?
KING: Why, that to know, which else we should not know.
BIRON: Things hid and barr'd, you mean, from common sense?
KING: Ay, that is study's godlike recompense.

William Shakespeare

If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love — so what difference would it make?

A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.

I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction--the Messiah.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. 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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dogma is intended for, and suited to, the great mass of the human race; and as such it can contain merely allegorical truth that it nevertheless has to pass off as truth sensu proprio [in the proper sense].

Arthur Schopenhauer

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Albert Einstein

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Bertrand Russell

He had used the word in its Pickwickian sense…He had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.

Mr Blotton

Charles Dickens

In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendor and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details....

Bertrand Russell

The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.

G. K. Chesterton

Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one whoobeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word "accident" makes sense.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place. Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

The soul of animals is characterized by two faculties, (a) the faculty of discrimination which is the work of thought and sense, and (b) the faculty of originating local movement.

One is honest about oneself either with a sense of shame or with vanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[I was] conscious of a profound sense of relief. I felt as if I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.

As Prime Minister

Winston Churchill

I take it that our state, having been founded and built up on the right lines, is good in the complete sense of the word.

Let the spirit out - Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one's bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will.

We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.

Henry David Thoreau

Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ultimately a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense or conscience.