Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

I believe in being an innovator.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

There’s no formula.

My main hope is eventually, in modern education field, introduce education about warm-heartedness, not based on religion, but based on common experience and a common sort of sense, and then scientific finding.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Common sense is not so common.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

I get that racism exists, but it’s not a catalyst for my content. I don’t need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with ‚topics‘ – race, white versus black – you’re not separating from the pack. You’re doing what everybody else is doing.

My biggest skill is common sense. I understand life.

Young love is wild and outrageous, laughing at moderation and blinding us to common sense.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Sometimes it’s flattering when people copy you, but sometimes it gets to a breaking point.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Working out another system to replace Newton’s laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one’s common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement – it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

My greatest strength is common sense. I’m really a standard brand – like Campbell’s tomato soup or Baker’s chocolate.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

No man was ever great by imitation.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.

Today different ethnic groups and different nations come together due to common sense.

I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.