Sensible Quotes - Page 9

• Many get the repute of being witty but thereby lose the credit of being sensible. Jest has its little hour, seriousness should have all the rest.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Witty, Should Have, Credit

  Baltasar Gracian, Baltasar Gracián y Morales (2004). “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”, p.44, Shambhala Publications

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• I know how to take good ideas and turn them into sensible law at great odds.

  Elizabeth Emken

  Odds, Law, Ideas

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• As you get older you're told to be sensible, but it's important for writing if you're a comic that you're able to still access that childlike thing.

  Tim Vine

  Writing, Important, Able

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• When we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things, their good opinion and our own improvement; for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Two, Talking

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Real, Men, Occupy Yourself

  W. Somerset Maugham (1930). “Cakes and Ale”

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• My father didn't think running was sensible. He told me running is just wasting time.

  Haile Gebrselassie

  Running, Father, Thinking

  "Q & A with Haile Gebrselassie". CNN Interview, edition.cnn.com. November 9, 2007.

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• 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. The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn’t sound so sensible in short snatches.

  Robert Benchley

  Men, Average, Two

  Robert Benchley (1951). “My ten years in a quandary and how they grew”

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• Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.

  Stephen Leacock

  Clever, Tired, Reality

  Stephen Leacock (2014). “My Discovery of England”, p.101, The Floating Press

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• The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

  Walter Lippmann

  Wise, Hurt, Opponents

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• Karl Popper once advised a student that if he wanted to reap intellectual fame, he should write endless pages of obscure, high-flown prose that would leave the reader puzzled and cowed. He should then here and there smuggle in a few sensible, straightforward sentences all could understand. The reader would feel that since he has grasped this part, he must have also grasped the rest. He would then congratulate himself and praise the author.

  Anthony de Jasay

  Writing, Intellectual, Pages

  "The Seen and the Unseen. Part I. On the Economics of Protecting Employment" by Anthony de Jasay, www.econlib.org. December 6, 2004.

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• If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

  Rebecca West

  Age, Investment, Workhouses

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.27, Open Road Media

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• It is wonderful to me that old men should not be sensible that their minds keep pace with their bodies in the progress of decay.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Mind, Progress

  Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence and Papers, 1808-1816”, p.212, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are.

  Larry Kramer

  Stupid, People, Belief

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• Creativity can flourish within sensible financial limitations.

  Michael Eisner

  Creativity, Financial, Limitation

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• Men of superior vivacity and wit, when they take a wrong turn, are generally worse than other men: because wit, consisting in a lively representation of ideas assembled together, gives every sensible object those heightening touches, and that striking imagery, which is unknown to men of slower apprehensions: wit being to sensible objects, what light is to bodies; it does not merely show them as they are in themselves: it gives an adventitious colour, which is not a property inherent in them: it lends them beauties which are not their own.

  Jeremiah Seed

  Men, Light, Ideas

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• Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.

  Bill Mollison

  Weed, Past, Balance

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no 'distinct ideas' or truths, since they do not make any 'sensible difference to anybody.

  Max Horkheimer

  Dark, Thinking, Ideas

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.31, A&C Black

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• After listening to the debate on unemployment I can see a danger that Liberals lose to the Tories their claim to have new and sensible ideas and are left saying "Me too" to a Socialist conventional wisdom which is failing. The salient need of this country to produce more and much more efficiently hardly figured on the agenda.

  Jo Grimond

  Country, Ideas, Listening

  The Sunday Times, September 19, 1976.

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• Now these two questions Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics. Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

  Pierre Duhem

  Reality, Two, Theoretical Physics

  "The aim and structure of physical theory". Book by Pierre Duhem, translated by Philip P. Wiener, p. 10, 1991.

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• Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy, on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste, on the other, by which on the same income another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.

  Samuel Johnson

  Nice, Men, Hands

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Edmond Malone (1824). “The life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., comprehending an account of his studies, and numerous works, in chronological order: a series of his epistolary correspondence and conversations with many eminent persons; and various original pieces of his composition, never before published; the whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century during which he flourished”, p.254

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• That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

  Ron Chernow

  Sound, Strategy, Individual

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• A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

  Jane Austen

  Girl, Sports, Boys

  Jane Austen (2007). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen”, p.824, Wordsworth Editions

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• Mankind are in the end always governed by superiority of intellectual faculties, and none are more sensible of this than the military profession. When, on my return from Italy, I assumed the dress of the Institute, and associated with men of science, I knew what I was doing: I was sure of not being misunderstood by the lowest drummer boy in the army.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Military, Army, Boys

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• But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.

  Lauren Groff

  Talking, Ledges, Care

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• Celebrities in general are pretty democratic, just being in the theater. Plus, I'm from Chicago. But Obama's sensible... he's just a reasonable, sensible human being.

  James Belushi

  Chicago, Just Being, Theater

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