A Quote by Mark Rothko

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

Mark Rothko

Quote Topics

Common Common Sense Fancy Free Imagination Opposed Sense This World Violently World

Quote Author

Mark Rothko
American - Artist
September 25, 1903 - February 25, 1970

Mathematics is often erroneously referred to as the science of common sense. Actually, it may transcend common sense and go beyond either imagination or intuition. It has become a very strange and perhaps frightening subject from the ordinary point of view, but anyone who penetrates into it will find a veritable fairyland, a fairyland which is strange, but makes sense, if not common sense.

Edward Kasner

Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

Walter Savage Landor

For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam's front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters? And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.

Vera Nazarian

When I was a child, I was reading books filled with people different from me, all French, all foreigners. There was a sense of disconnect between my sense of imagination and the world around me, which I don't think is common for Americans. It forces you to learn to look at the world through other people's eyes.

Laila Lalami

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.

Joseph Joubert

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Richard Dawkins

The general mental qualification necessary for scientific advancement is that which is usually denominated "common sense," though added to this, imagination, induction, and trained logic, either of common language or of mathematics, are important adjuncts.

Joseph Henry

I talked on my blog recently about "uncommon sense." Common sense is called "common" because it reflects cultural consensus. It's common sense to get a good job and save for retirement. But I think we all also have an "uncommon sense," an individual voice that tells us what we're meant to do.

Theodora Goss

Theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist.

Cornel West

Common sense is usually lack of imagination, and imagination is usually lack of common sense.

Evan Esar

If you want a symbol of Roman power and strength look no further than the Praetorian or Imperial Guard. We could take this one step further. It was this world of Roman power into which Christ came, in which the Apostles ministered, in which the New Testament authors wrote, and in which Christianity came into being. And to all of those things, Rome stood opposed, violently opposed.

Stephen Nichols

Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

Oscar Wilde

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.

Annie Dillard

Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

Oscar Wilde

Victims recite problems. Leaders develop solutions. That might seem like common sense, but common sense is rarely common practice.