Sense Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

It is my opinion that human history can make no sense unless evil doings are recognized for what they are, and that they are bearable only if somehow they may be redeemed.

Simon Conway Morris

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men

Frederick Winslow Taylor

A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.

Anna Brownell Jameson

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself.

Anna Brownell Jameson

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands.

Robert Benchley

And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

Lionel Trilling

Good-nature and good-sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive, divine.

I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

William Makepeace Thackeray

My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930.
I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature.
I told him I would like to make them oscillate he objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly-but in two weeks I was back again among plastic materials.
I think that at that time and practically ever since, the underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.

Alexander Calder

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Nadine Gordimer

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Norman O. Brown

Should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, from whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this cast are an insult to common sense, and savour of passion. The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger, and though conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, yet, when any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Stanley Milgram