Being Irish he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity in the finest sense of the word.

At 35 I'm definitely starting to feel more like a grown-up than I ever have. There's nothing in my life that is childish or whimsical. Having fun is fantastic and I never want to lose a sense of that - and also I think you have to have that to put into your work or else it's going to feel stiff.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it to kill it to rid it of its soul to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not to be endured with patient resignation.

In a very real sense it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

What people don't understand about Sarah Palin is that she is a rancher's wife. From Alberta down to Texas I've known women like that: good common sense bright and vilified by city people.

I tend to go for women with common sense. Being down to earth stands out more than looks.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness we do not know its root and men are making no effort to discover it.

Yet consider now whether women are not quite past sense and reason when they want to rule over men.

They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force and their submission is wisdom but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment endowed with senses memories emotions thoughts and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War - both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There's a pulse to it.

These days our senses are bombarded with aggression. We are constantly confronted with global images of unending escalating war and violence.

It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

Every gun that is made every warship launched every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed those who are cold and are not clothed.