
„Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, but brains saves both.“
— Erwin Rommel German field marshal of World War II 1891 - 1944
A collection of quotes on the topic of wisdom, sense, making, can.
„Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, but brains saves both.“
— Erwin Rommel German field marshal of World War II 1891 - 1944
„You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.“
— John Nash American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate 1928 - 2015
Statement of 2006, partly cited in Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real (2015) by Scott Wilson, p. 117
2000s
Context: You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers. A movie, by the way, was made — sort of a small-scale offbeat movie — called Pi recently. I think it starts off with a big string of digits running across the screen, and then there are people who get concerned with various things, and in the end this Bible code idea comes up. And that ties in with numbers, so the relation to numbers is not necessarily scientific, and even when I was mentally disturbed, I had a lot of interest in numbers.
„The meaning of life is to give life meaning.“
— Viktor E. Frankl Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor 1905 - 1997
Source: book Man's Search For Meaning
„I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!“
— William Shakespeare English playwright and poet 1564 - 1616
„The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.“
— Pablo Picasso Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer 1881 - 1973
„Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.“
— Sören Kierkegaard Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism 1813 - 1855
Source: The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin
„Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.“
— Mark Twain American author and humorist 1835 - 1910
„Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.“
— Ludwig Van Beethoven German Romantic composer 1770 - 1827
Musik höhere Offenbarung ist als alle Weisheit und Philosophie.
http://books.google.com/books?id=W2k6AAAAcAAJ&q=%22Musik+h%C3%B6here+Offenbarung+ist+als+alle+Weisheit+und+Philosophie%22&pg=PA193#v=onepage
As reported by Bettina von Arnim in a letter to Goethe, 28 May 1810.
Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde: Seinem Denkmal, Volume 2, Dümmler, 1835, p. 193.
Variant: Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
„It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.“
— René Descartes French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist 1596 - 1650
Variant: It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
Source: Discourse on Method
„I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.“
— Vincent Van Gogh Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890) 1853 - 1890
Total 6468 quotes sense, filter:
— Sukavich Rangsitpol Thai politician 1935
The Reason and the objective of Education Reform
— Adolf Hitler, book Mein Kampf
1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)
Source: Mein Kampf
Context: Jewry is a Folk with a racial core that is not wholly unitary. Nevertheless, as a Folk, it has special intrinsic characteristics which separate it from all other Folks living on the globe. Jewry is not a religious community, but the religious bond between Jews; rather is in reality the momentary governmental system of the Jewish Folk. The Jew has never had a territorially bounded State of his own in the manner of Aryan States. Nevertheless, his religious community is a real State, since it guarantees the preservation, the increase and the future of the Jewish Folk. But this is solely the task of the State. That the Jewish State is subject to no territorial limitation, as is the case with Aryan States, is connected with the character of the Jewish Folk, which is lacking in the productive forces for the construction and preservation of its own territorial State.
— Sadhguru, book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy
Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy
— Helen Keller American author and political activist 1880 - 1968
Variant: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Russian writer 1918 - 2008
Source: Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals
— Heinz Guderian German general 1888 - 1954
Arguing with Adolf Hitler about the German army being cut off in the Courland Pocket; as quoted in Inside the Third Reich : Memoirs (1971) by Albert Speer, p. 534
— Henry Beston American writer 1888 - 1968
Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Context: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
— Noam Chomsky american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928
Source: Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, The Common Good (1998)
— Joseph Goebbels Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister 1897 - 1945
Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932).Translated as “Those Damned Nazis: Why a Workers Party?
“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
1930s
„I'm reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.“
— Kobe Bryant American basketball player 1978 - 2020
1988
— Alexis Karpouzos 1967
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2
„When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.“
— Viktor E. Frankl Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor 1905 - 1997
— Daniel Kahneman, book Thinking, Fast and Slow
Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 19, "The illusion of understanding", page 201 (ISBN 9780141033570).
— Michael Faraday, book Experimental researches in chemistry and physics
Source: Experimental researches in chemistry and physics
— Marilyn Monroe American actress, model, and singer 1926 - 1962
Attributed to Monroe in self-help books and on social media, this quotation is of unknown origin and date.
Misattributed
— George Orwell English author and journalist 1903 - 1950
This is often attributed to George Orwell book 1984. We cannot find it inside. Perharps this is post-mortem paraphrase of his quote "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past".
— Thomas Merton Priest and author 1915 - 1968
Variant: Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone we find it with another.
Source: Love and Living
„The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.“
— W.B. Yeats Irish poet and playwright 1865 - 1939
— Sergei Rachmaninoff Russian composer, pianist, and conductor 1873 - 1943
Interviewed by Leonard Liebling in The Musical Courier, 1939; cited from Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) p. 351.
„There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.“
— Douglas Adams, book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
— James Baldwin, book The Fire Next Time
"Me and My House" in Harper's (November 1955); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Source: The Fire Next Time
— Edward Jenner English physician, scientist and pioneer of vaccination 1749 - 1823
The Life of Edward Jenner M.D. Vol. 2 (1838) by John Baron, p. 447
„Great men of action never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job.“
— Oswald Mosley, book My Life
My Life (1968), Ch.12.
— Witold Pilecki World War II concentration camp leader and resistor 1901 - 1948
During his trial, 1948.
„I am being vilified by feminists for merely having a common-sense attitude about rape.“
— Camille Paglia American writer 1947
Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), The Rape Debate, Continued, p. 59
Context: I am being vilified by feminists for merely having a common-sense attitude about rape. I loathe this thing about date rape. Have twelve tequilas at a fraternity party and a guy asks you to go up to his room, and then you're surprised when he assaults you? Most women want to be seduced or lured. The more you study literature and art, the more you see it. Listen to Don Giovanni. Read The Faerie Queene. Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle. Girls hurl themselves at guitarists, right down to the lowest bar band here. The guys are strutting. If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them. Women have the right to freely choose and to say yes or no. Everyone should be personally responsible for what happens in life. I see the sexual impulse as egotistical and dominating, and therefore I have no problem understanding rape. Women have to understand this correctly and they'll protect themselves better. If a real rape occurs, it's got to go to the police. The business of having a campus grievance committee decide whether or not a rape is committed is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. Today, on an Ivy League campus, if a guy tells a girl she's got great tits, she can charge him with sexual harassment. Chickenshit stuff. Is this what strong women do?
— Alexis Karpouzos 1967
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross American psychiatrist 1926 - 2004
As quoted in " Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Messenger of Love https://books.google.com/books?id=3esDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=%22Yoga+Journal%22+Kronisch&source=bl&ots=B895e3lzeI&sig=7V4uALc6CTiPrF02-cV8AAzsgbw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM1enasPLSAhWs6oMKHbpyAbQQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=%22Elisabeth%20Kubler-Ross%22&f=false" by Lennie Kronisch in Yoga Journal, Issue 11, November-December 1976, pp. 18-20
Context: Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
— Eric Voegelin American philosopher 1901 - 1985
Source: The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
— Clive James Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist 1939 - 2019
„The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. —NDT“
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Variant: The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Source: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
— Thomas Sankara President of Upper Volta 1949 - 1987
Source: Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
„You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul.“
— Gabriela Mistral Chilean poet-diplomat, writer, educator and feminist. 1889 - 1957
— Baron d'Holbach French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist 1723 - 1789
Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/gsens10.txt), preface
Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.
— Julius Evola Italian philosopher and esotericist 1898 - 1974
American "Civilization" (from "Civilta Americana") http://lkwdpl.org/wildideas/mysticalgeography.html
— Richard Wurmbrand Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent 1909 - 2001
Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 58.
— Bhakti Tirtha Swami American Hindu writer 1950 - 2005
Meditation 8 - Illness as a special gift from God
Books, The Beggar, Volume III: False Ego: The Greatest Enemy of the Spiritual Leader (Hari-Nama Press, 2002)
„If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.“
Si quem enim videris deditum ventri, humi serpentem hominem, frutex est, non homo, quem vides; si quem in fantasiae quasi Calipsus vanis praestigiis cecucientem et subscalpenti delinitum illecebra sensibus mancipatum, brutum est, non homo, quem vides. Si recta philosophum ratione omnia discernentem, hunc venereris; caeleste est animal, non terrenum. Si purum contemplatorem corporis nescium, in penetralia mentis relegatum, hic non terrenum, non caeleste animal: hic augustius est numen humana carne circumvestitum.
— Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, book Oration on the Dignity of Man
8. 40-42; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)
— Suman Pokhrel Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist 1967
<span class="plainlinks"> Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/</span>
From Prose
— Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Fragments
— Heath Ledger Australian actor 1979 - 2008
November 2007 interview remarks quoted by Susan Chenery, "Who Is That Man?" http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23097733-15803,00.html, In Touch Weekly, January 23, 2008.
— Ted Bundy American serial killer 1946 - 1989
1984 interview with Detective Robert Keppel (regarding the Green River Killer)
— Sukirti Kandpal Indian actress 1987
Sukirti on rumours and success http://www.bollywoodlife.com/news-gossip/sukirti-kandpal-i-dont-care-a-damn-what-people-think/
— Bill Skarsgård Swedish actor 1990
Interview: Bill Skarsgård http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/bill-skarsgard-1#_ (June 5, 2017)
„If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science. So the Philosopher argues in chap. 2 of his first book of the work [Metaphisics]. And he immediately indicates what the greatest science is, namely the science which is about those things that are most knowable. But there are two senses in which things are said to be maximally knowable: either [1] because they are the first of all things known and without them nothing else can be known; or [2] because they are what are known most certainly. In either way, however, this science is about the most knowable. Therefore, this most of all is a science and, consequently, most desirable…“
sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia". Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.
— Duns Scotus Scottish Franciscan friar, philosopher and Catholic blessed 1265 - 1308
sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia".
Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.
Quaestiones subtilissimae de metaphysicam Aristotelis, as translated in: William A. Frank, Allan Bernard Wolter (1995) Duns Scotus, metaphysician. p. 18-19
— Émile Durkheim French sociologist (1858-1917) 1858 - 1917
Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 3
— Eugene Cernan United States Navy officer and former NASA astronaut 1934 - 2017
In the Shadow of the Moon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Moon
— Elliott Smith American singer-songwriter 1969 - 2003
before playing "Between the Bars" at a concert in 1996. http://www.archive.org/details/esmith2006-09-25..flacf.
— Chuck Close American artist 1940
Inside the Painter's Studio, Joe Fig, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, p. 42
— Rita Levi-Montalcini Italian neurologist 1909 - 2012
Of the fact that she never married; quoted in Associated Press obituary.
— Lotfi A. Zadeh Electrical engineer and computer scientist 1921 - 2017
Zadeh (1972) "Fuzzy languages and their relation to human intelligence". in: Proceedings of the International Conference Man and Computer, Bordeaux, France. Basel: S. Karger, pp. 130-165. cited in Gaines (1976) "Foundations of fuzzy reasoning" in: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 8(6), p. 624
1970s
— Elliot Rodger American spree killer 1991 - 2014
I ended up walking for two hours, and at the end of it I was crying to myself because I felt so sad.
My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 19, Longing
— Johnny Depp American actor, film producer, and musician 1963
Quoted in "'Johnny Depp - From Hell' special," http://www.johnnydeppfan.com/interviews/From%20Hell%20Special.htm ITV (January 2002)
— Temple Grandin USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist 1947
First Person (TV series) Episode 1 "Stairway to Heaven" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Person_(TV_series)#Season_1
— Sophia Loren Italian actress 1934
As quoted in Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story (1979) by A. E. Hotchner, p. 76.
Context: I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself. So failure or reversal does not bring out resentment in me because I cannot blame others for any misfortune that befalls me.
— Muhammad Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam 570 - 632
Sahih Muslim, Book 001, Number 0142
Sunni Hadith
Context: It is narrated on the authority of 'Abdullah b. Umar that the Messenger of Allah observed: O womenfolk, you should give charity and ask much forgiveness for I saw you in bulk amongst the dwellers of Hell. A wise lady among them said: Why is it, Messenger of Allah, that our folk is in bulk in Hell? Upon this the Holy Prophet observed: You curse too much and are ungrateful to your spouses. I have seen none lacking in common sense and failing in religion but (at the same time) robbing the wisdom of the wise, besides you. Upon this the woman remarked: What is wrong with our common sense and with religion? He (the Holy Prophet) observed: Your lack of common sense (can be well judged from the fact) that the evidence of two women is equal to one man, that is a proof of the lack of common sense, and you spend some nights (and days) in which you do not offer prayer and in the month of Ramadan (during the days) you do not observe fast, that is a failing in religion. This hadith has been narrated on the authority of Abu Tahir with this chain of transmitters.
— George S. Patton United States Army general 1885 - 1945
Speech to the Third Army (1944)
Context: Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.
„I'm still so remote from God that I don't even sense his presence when I pray.“
— Sophie Scholl White Rose member 1921 - 1943
As quoted in At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl (1987) edited by Inge Jens, translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn; also in Voices of the Holocaust : Resistors, Liberation, Understanding (1997) by Lorie Jenkins McElroy
Context: I'm still so remote from God that I don't even sense his presence when I pray. Sometimes when I utter God's name, in fact, I feel like sinking into a void. It isn't a frightening or dizzying sensation, it's nothing at all — and that's far more terrible. But prayer is the only remedy for it, and however many devils scurry around inside me, I shall cling to the rope God has thrown me in Jesus Christ, even if my numb hands can no longer feel it.
— H.L. Mencken American journalist and writer 1880 - 1956
Baltimore Evening Sun (12 February 1923)
1920s
Context: The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
— John Green, book Looking for Alaska
Miles "Pudge" Halter about Alaska Young, p. 88
Looking for Alaska (2005)