This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Any one is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
Common Sense | Rule | Sense |
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Awareness | Belief | Experience | Individual | Language | People | Reality | Sense | Tradition | Words | Awareness | Victim |
W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
Common Sense | Day | Future | Present | Sense | Will | Value |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Reverence requires imagination and vital warmth; it requires least actual achievement or power. The child is weak and superficially foolish, the teacher is strong, and in an everyday sense wiser than the child. The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises the child for these outward inferiorities.
Achievement | Imagination | Power | Reverence | Sense | Child | Teacher |
Niels Bohr, fully Aage Niels Bohr
An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.
Observation | Reality | Sense |
What we call good sense in the conduct of life consists chiefly in that temper of mind which enables its possessor to view at all times, with perfect coolness and accuracy, all the various circumstances of his situation: so that each of them may produce its due impression on him, without any exaggeration arising from his own peculiar habits. But to a man of an ill-regulated imagination, external circumstances only serve as hints to excite his own thoughts, and the conduct he pursues has in general far less reference to his real situation than to some imaginary one in which he conceives himself to be placed: in consequence of which, while he appears to himself to be acting with the most perfect wisdom and consistency, he may frequently exhibit to others all the appearances of folly.
Accuracy | Circumstances | Conduct | Consistency | Exaggeration | Folly | Good | Imagination | Impression | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Sense | Temper | Wisdom |
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
Intelligence | Sense |
David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
The notion of soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and its significance (which is mental) are not in any sense separately existent, but rather that they are two aspects of one overall reality... Meaning is an inherent and essential part of our overall reality... We are the totality of our meanings.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what IS stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless.
Comedy | Ego | Mind | Nature | Nonsense | Paradox | Reality | Reason | Self | Sense | Words |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
To become conscious of what is unconscious and thus to enlarge one's consciousness means to get in touch with reality, and - in this sense - with truth (intellect-ually and affectively). To enlarge consciousness means to wake up, to lift a veil, to leave the cave, to bring light into the darkness. Could this be the same experience Zen Buddhists call "enlightenment?"
Consciousness | Experience | Light | Means | Sense | Truth | Zen |
Edward Hoagland, fully Edward Morley Hoagland
The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.
Common Sense | Right | Sense | World |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Contrast | Isolation | Love | Man | Paradox | Power | Sense |