sense

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

—Stein, Gertrude

'God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction,'she said.'It's different with us,I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sinonmyconscience, but I know when I'mdoing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me.' 'Of course, duckie,'said Jeremy†'once a Catholic always a Catholic.'

—Wilson, SirAngus FrankJohnstone

If the art of poetry is†the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

—MacLeish, Archibald

I will not look upon the quickening sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure; Time shall not lose our passages.

—Donne,John

But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity; ay me, that fear Comes thund'ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenceless head; both Death and I Am found eternal, and incorporate both, Nor I on my part single, in me all Paradise Lost Posterity stands cursed: fair patrimony That I must leave ye, sons; O were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!

—Milton,John

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu. Bestow a purer sense on the language of the horde.

—Mallarme¤  , Ste¤  phane

   The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

—Jung, Carl Gustav

   The same principles which at first lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point bring men back to common sense. See Bacon 48:95.

—Berkeley, George

No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.

—Mortimer, SirJohn Clifford

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

—Nabokov,Vladimir

And he, who servilely creeps after sense, Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence.

—Dryden,John

   I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.

—Herbert, George

Only the deep sense of some deathless shame.

—Webster,John

To be no more; sad cure; for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion?

—Milton,John

Hay hombres que de su ciencia tienen la cabeza llena; hay sabios de todas menas, mas digo, sin ser muy ducho: es mejor que aprender mucho el aprender cosas buenas. There are some men who have their heads full up with the things they know. Wise men come in all sizes, but I don't need so much sense to say

—Herna¤ n dez,Jose¤

Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?

—Kuhn,Thomas S(amuel)

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

—Pope, Alexander

   In the established sense it issocially nil.Happy-go-lucky, don't-you-bother, we're-in-Australia. But there also seems to be no inside life of any sort: just a long lapse and drift. A rather fascinating indifference, a physical indifference to what we call soul or spirit. It's really a weird show.

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

: Ihavea finesense oftheridiculous, but nosense of humour. 9

—Albee, Edward Franklin, III

A perpetual fountain of good sense.

—Dryden,John

Beware thoughts that come in the night. Theyaren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.

—Heat-Moon,William Least originally  WilliamTrogdon

He still had his glorious sense of words drawn from the special reservoir from which Lincoln also drew, fed by Shakespeare and thoseTudor critics who wrote the first Prayer Book of Edward VI and their Jacobean successors who translated the Bible.

—Acheson, Dean Gooderham

Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partage¤  e: car chacun pense en e"  tre si bien pourvu, que ceux me"  me qui sont les plus difficiles a'   contenter en toute autre chose n'ont point coutume d'en de¤  sirer plus qu'ils ont. En quoi il n'est pas vraisemblable que tous se trompent; mais pluto" t  cela te¤  moigne que la puissance de bien juger et distinguer le vrai d'avec le faux, qui est proprement ce qu'on nomme le bon sens ou la raison, est naturellement e¤  gale en tous les hommes. Good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world; for everyone thinks himself so well supplied with it, that even those who are hardest to satisfy in every other way do not usually desire more of it than they already have. In this matter it is not likely that everybody is mistaken; it rather goes to show that the power of judging well and distinguishing truth from falsehood, which is what we properly mean by good sense or reason, is naturally equal in all men.

—Descartes, Rene¤

A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

—Emerson, RalphWaldo

The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.

—Miller, Henry Valentine

The power that created the poodle, the platypus and people has an integrated sense of both comedyand tragedy.

—Thurber,James Grover

It can't be Nature, for it is not sense.

—Churchill, Charles

It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

—Wilbur, Richard

Of all affliction taught a lover yet, 'Tis sure the hardest science to forget! How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, And love th'offender, yet detest th'offence? How the dear object from the crime remove, Or how distinguish penitence from love? 659

—Pope, Alexander

'The firm'öa proud Victorian word.It evokes the lost sense of Victorian regard for the pride of people in their daily trade.

—Pritchett, Sir V(ictor) S(awdon)

The difference inthis case between a manof senseand a fop, is, thatthefopvalueshimself uponhis dress; theman of sense laughs at it, at the same time that he knows he must not neglect it.

—Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of

Men of sound sense have Law for their god, but men without sense Pleasure.

—Plato

The philosophy which isso important in each of us isnot a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means† it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

—James,William

Much Madness is divinest Senseö To a discerning Eyeö Much Senseöthe starkest Madnessö

—Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth

And though she had some decays in the face, she had none in her sense and wit.

—Behan, Brendan Francis

He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.

—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Lo! the poor toper whose untutored sense, Sees bliss in ale, and can with wine dispense; Whose head proud fancy never taught to steer, Beyond the muddy ecstasies of beer.

—Crabbe, George

These two ignorant and unpolished people had guided themselves so faron in their journey of life, bya religious sense of duty and desire to do right.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

Aconspiracy iseverything thatordinary lifeisnot.It'sthe inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us.We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle.Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach.

—DeLillo, Don

Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour. Let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.

—de la Mare,Walter

'To every Form of being is assigned,' Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage, 'An active Principle:öhowe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things, in all natures.'

—Wordsworth,William

Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

—Wordsworth,William

People out of work are not given to talking much about the one thing on their minds.You only sense by indirection, degrees of anger, shades of humiliation and echoes of fear.

—Evans,Walker

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from another.

—Thurber,James Grover

I know my life's a pain and but a span, I know my sense is mocked in every thing; And to conclude, I know myself a man, Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

—Davies, SirJohn

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

—Mailer, Norman Kingsley

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

—Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

—James, Alice

   A bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.

—Balliett,Whitney

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter whichpresentsitselfasnot wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant), but which, carefullyattended to, can supply a kind of 'sense'of what isgoing on. This 'sense' is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces), but by reading the lines themselves.

—Barthelme, Donald

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.

—Socrates

For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often-times The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

—Wordsworth,William

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day.

—Dryden,John

They find pearlsby theseashore, diamondsand rubiesin certain cliffs, but never go out of set purpose to look for them.If they happento find some, they polishthem, and give them to the children who, when they are small, feel proud and pleased with such gaudy decorations. But after, when they grow a bit older, and notice that only babies like such toys, they lay them aside. Their parents don't have to sayanything, they simply put these trifles away out of a shamefaced sense that they're no longer suitable, just as our children when they grow up put away their rattles, marbles and dolls.

—More, SirThomas

The function of kings consists primarily of using good sense, which always comes naturally and easily.Our work is sometimes less difficult than our amusements.

—Louis XIV knownas the Great or leRoiSoleil [theSunKing]

'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense, And splendour borrows all her rays from sense.

—Pope, Alexander

Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul, Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole.

—Pope, Alexander

Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.

—Dodgson

I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artistsö unless one should scour the worldö you have the ground sense necessary.

—Williams,William Carlos

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made still a blund'ring kind of melody; Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, And in one word, heroically mad.

—Dryden,John

Refined himself to soul, to curb the sense And made almost a sin of abstinence.

—Dryden,John

Le toucher est le plus de¤  mystificateur de tous les sens, a'   la diffe¤  rence de la vue, qui est le plus magique. Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

—Barthes, Roland

Instead of using onlycomparativeWords and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course†to express myself inTerms of Number,Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature.

—Petty, Sir William

Immodest words admit of no defence, For want of decency is want of sense.

—Dillon,Wentworth

   So did I weave my self into the sense.

—Herbert, George

If a work of art is to be truly immortal, it must pass quite beyond the limits of the human world, without any sign of common sense and logic. In this way the work will draw nearer to dream and to the mind of a child.

—Chirico, Giorgio de

   Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense, But good men starve for want of impudence.

—Dryden,John

To endeavour to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.

—Pope, Alexander

Ever since I was engaged on Principia Mathematica, I have had a certainmethod of whichat first Iwasscarcely conscious, but which has gradually become more explicit in my thinking. The method consists in an attempt to build a bridge between the world of sense and the world of science.

—Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl