Common Knowledge Quotes

“The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge.
No real knowledge is common.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“Never stop acquiring the commonsense, it is as good as the knowledge.”
― Amit Kalantri

“In spite of being complicated people choose superstitions over common sense.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Sometimes an act of common sense is indistinguishable from an act of genius.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.”
― Annie Dillard, The Abundance

“Other feelings too can be philosophical—pain, grief, tedium, delight, exultation—if they are experienced on behalf of humankind. “I looked around me, and my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind” is the opening of Alexander Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790), which laid the foundation of all subsequent Russian philosophy. It is a philosophy shaped by feelings of suffering and compassion, by the Karamazovian question of how to justify a child’s tears. The range of philosophical feelings is wide.”
― Mikhail Epstein

“Ecclesiastical officials have placed a votive prayer box beneath a mural of the Virgin Mary, and the box is continuously emptied and refilled during two annual pilgrimage days. When the box is full, the chapel officials bless the votive messages and then, to my enormous exasperation, burn them. Despite my repeated requests, they never have allowed me to examine these scraps of paper, adamantly informing me that these are messages from believers to God. That relationship clearly does not include a third-party ethnologist.”
― Benoît Fliche

“Starting on the side of particulars, Tolstoy approaches the problems of history and the will through literature. Starting on the side of universals, Schopenhauer approaches the problems of history and the will through philosophy. In this way, they can be said to say the same thing, approaching it from different sides.

The most striking difference between the two, however, lies neither with their epistemological starting points nor with the genres in which they write, but with the quietism that each is attempting to impart. Each wants us to accept the world and renounce the will, and consequently each rejects the notion that history is progressing and is governed by the actions of “great men.” But Schopenhauer’s aim in writing The World as Will and Representation is to cure our hearts “of the passion for enjoying and indeed for living,” while Tolstoy, in writing War and Peace, takes as his task “to make people love life in all its countless manifestations.”
― Caleb Thompson

“What soul is to to the body, common sense is to the mind.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Men are visual creatures, everyone knows this.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Fuck genius. Or anything other than what we make with many hands. Injecting mixed thoughts into the superstructure, into the fight between classes, into the annals of history’s radical traditions means finding theory in the most meagre places. The most squalid atmosphere.”
― Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise