"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... defended and applied with violence and with a superfluous hatred of the clergy, it forms the justifiable element in the endeavors of the deists. It is a commonplace to-day that everything which claims to be true and valid must justify itself before the criticism of reason; but then this principle, together with the distinction between natural and positive religion based upon it, exerted an enlightening and liberating influence. The real flaw ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and broad and ugly man, approaching middle age; of a commonplace cut of features, of poor birth, of mean fortunes, of small account in the scheme of things; but he had an eye for beauty; he had a soul; and his eye was filled with a beauty completely satisfying his conception; and with his soul he ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... rhythms and tunes, their music cannot be said to have made any mark in the world. In order to show the poverty of this style, let us take a sonata by Mehul (1763-1817). The first movement has already a well-defined second theme, but otherwise is a mere collection of more or less commonplace progressions. The second part is a dance tune, pure and simple; indeed the first part had all the characteristics of the farandole (see Bizet's "l'Arlesienne"). The last part is entitled rondo, "a round dance," and ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Sir H. Risley writes of the Dacca washermen: [552] "For washing muslins and other coloured garments well or spring water is alone used; but if the articles are the property of a poor man or are commonplace, the water of the nearest tank or river is accounted sufficiently good. Indigo is in as general use as in England for removing the yellowish tinge and whitening the material. The water of the wells and springs bordering on the red laterite formation on the north of the city has been for centuries ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Few would dispute that Milton divides with Shakespeare the supremacy in English poetry. In Dryden as a man there is little to attract or interest us. In character and in private life he appears to have been perfectly commonplace. We close his biography, and our curiosity is satisfied. With Milton it is far otherwise. We feel instinctively that he belongs to the demi-gods of our race. We have the same curiosity about him as we have about Homer, Aeschylus, and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... grave over which the mocking-bird now sings his liquid requiem. Has it not been sweet good fortune to love Maggie Tulliver, Margot of Savoy, Dora Spenlow (undeclared because she was an honest wife—even though of a most conceited and commonplace jackass, totally undeserving of her); Agnes Wicklow (a passion quickly cured when she took Dora's pitiful leavings), and poor ill-fated Marie Antoinette? You can name dozens if you have been brought up ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... whole spirit of England. It's the English policy in a line: We don't threaten, and we don't wish to be threatened by another. Let them fire if they like,—that's all in the game. But don't swing a gun on us with a threat. St. Alban was lucky to say it. He got the reserve, the restraint, the commonplace understatement that England affects, into the sentence. It was a piece of good fortune to catch the thing ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... once, if you like. I shall wear the same dress to-morrow which I have on to-day. Leave out the straw bonnet and the light shawl, and put everything else into my boxes. I have no new dresses to pack; I have nothing ordered for the occasion of any sort." She tried to add some commonplace phrases of explanation, accounting as probably as might be for the absence of the usual wedding outfit and wedding-dress. But no further reference to the marriage would pass her lips, and without an other word she abruptly left ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... ogling several mouldy polemical writers through an eyeglass. He soon contrived to slip on the voluminous mantle of one of the old fathers, and having purloined the gray beard of another, endeavored to look exceedingly wise; but the smirking commonplace of his countenance set at naught all the trappings of wisdom. One sickly-looking gentleman was busied embroidering a very flimsy garment with gold thread drawn out of several old court-dresses of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Another had trimmed himself magnificently ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... is not mere dirt, but a marvellous structure, more complicated in its processes than the chemist's laboratory, from which the sustenance of our own and all other lives is drawn. We feel our own bodies as dear but commonplace possessions, though we should understand them as inheritances from the inconceivable past, which have come to us through tens of thousands of different species and hundreds of millions of individual ancestors. We must overlook these ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... travel about in rather a proud fashion. There are servants who think that their masters cannot do without them; and the public also may occasionally have some such servant. What if this too successful minister were one of them! And then a discreet, commonplace, zealous member of the Lower House does not like to be jeered at, when he does his duty by his constituents and asks a few questions. An all-successful minister who cannot keep his triumph to himself, but must needs ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... thoroughly enjoy the experience. For the wealthy, to whom all things are possible, this may be hard to find. To those of limited means and of little free time, opportunity is more abundant. To them joy shines forth from even the so-called commonplace ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... about to exclaim in words of pleasure and welcome, when his attention was arrested by the strange expression upon the thin, eager face—an expression so strange that it checked the commonplace words of greeting that sprang naturally to Cuthbert's lips, and he waited in silence for what ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... he heard a breath, a whisper, a soft word that said "good-bye." It had a tenderness that set a lump in his throat, but it was followed almost at once with a calmer commonplace. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... single book tells us more than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the recurrent pulses of a slow working order, and the wonder of a year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of the strongest ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Colonel Antony's heroic disregard of commonplace safeguards in various outstanding cases made Gerrard persist. "Colonel Antony will choose the man he thinks best fitted for the post, as in the sight of God, Maharaj-ji, and it will be my duty to acquiesce ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... criticism more searching than that of her amiable Polly, her style and orthography would doubtless have been more correct, and her Journal quite as commonplace as most of those that find their ...
— Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, 1782 • Lucinda Lee Orr
... perpetual attempts and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of a commonplace charity at the present moment. There is need for a help which should mark the beginning of a historical change in the lives of both peoples. Both peoples should not only silence their material sufferings, but they should draw a spiritual comfort from this great historical trial and make it ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... the sensible woman of Glenfern. She had attained this eminence partly from having a little more understanding than her sisters, but principally from her dictatorial manner, and the pompous decisive tone in which she delivered the most commonplace truths. At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the whole neighbourhood. As sensible woman she regulated the ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... to-morrow," she remarked. "She's just the same. I'm rather glad, you know, that Krak hasn't been softened by age. It would have been commonplace." ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... and smile, which were apt to convey more friendliness than other people's words. Desmond set her ceremoniously in the place of honour; and the 6.30 breakfast, prepared at ten minutes' notice, and eaten in Mess uniform, proved a remarkably cheerful affair; one of those simple, commonplace events which, for all their simplicity, go far to cement friendship and form refreshing cases along the dusty ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... third he expatiates upon the qualifications of authors. One may admit at once the comparative worthlessness of the pamphlet as a contribution to criticism or critical theory. Defoe's comments upon specific writers are thoroughly conventional and commonplace, as may be seen from a glance at his remarks about Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... stared in at the old man plying his twine-shuttle in front of the door. The fact that he was Emmett's father and ignorant of the secret which Richard shared, made an object of intense interest out of an otherwise unattractive and commonplace old man. Now that interest grew vast and overshadowing as the children ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the life and soul of the Royal Society's soirees; but really you're rather trying on more commonplace occasions. ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... they had to turn their backs upon the body left lying face downward in the cold, damp woods. Men of no compassion, unreached by ordinary sympathies, they felt the furtive skulking back, step by step, along ways commonplace enough in the daytime, but begirt with terrors now and full ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... of those bones, picked bare by the carrion birds, at the foot of the cliff. "It seems to be one of the mysteries of the day," he said. "Commonplace enough, no doubt, if one only had the key ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... left the audience chamber with an awkward, aggrieved bow. It was a scene characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century—an overfed, commonplace, pursy little man who had been born in a Brixton semi-detached villa, and whose highest idea of pleasure was a Sunday up the river in an expensive electric launch, confronting and utterly routing, in a hotel belonging to an American millionaire, the representative of a race of men ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Him for a life of earthly bliss. But—that fatal BUT—did He ever live, did He still live, did He love her, did He know how much she loved Him? Thus it has always been. There is an impulse in man which drives him to faith; the commonplace world does not satisfy him; he is forced to assume a divine object for his homage and love, and when he goes out into the fields ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... grand old town, coming upon it thus at its best; and I was glad that fate had driven me into my own land en automobile. Even though, in following Carmona to watch over the girl we both loved, I might have to keep often to the beaten track made commonplace by tourists, the way would never be really commonplace, as to sightseers who take ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would be disappointed. A man might seem a marvel of eloquence and wisdom to poor Theodore, while you would find him a very commonplace, perhaps obtrusive individual." ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... male voice I may refer to George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, probably the most intimate and personal of George Eliot's works. In Book VI of this novel the influence of Stephen Guest (a somewhat commonplace young man) over Maggie Tulliver is ascribed almost exclusively to the effect of his base voice in singing. We are definitely told of Maggie Tulliver's "sensibility to the supreme excitement of music." Thus, on one occasion, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... these details, which are so commonplace and seem so slight," said the worthy man, looking at Godefroid, "it is not without good reason. I want to explain to you how I was led to act, as most men act, in defiance of the rules which savages observe in the smallest matters. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... think, then, of my humiliation, when, at the touch of trial, all your qualities proved false, and I beheld you the slave of the meanest vanity—selfish, untrue, base! Think, sir, what a humbling of my pride to have been thus deceived; to have taken for my idol such a commonplace imposture as yourself; to have loved—yes, loved—such a shadow, such a mockery of man. And now I am unworthy to be the wife of any gentleman; and you—look me in the face, George—are you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the great savage there was no such thing as peril in any of the objects of nature. Full of strength and calm matter-of-fact courage, climbing rocks or making his way into such a place as this was a very commonplace affair. His idea of danger was in the sight of enemies thirsting for his blood. Now that they were out of reach, and he believed that he had thrown them off the scent, he was perfectly content, and ready to smile at the perfection of ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... of our monthly elevators. I once found it so, and certainly I thought that here was plain sailing. A tender interview at the garden gate. She "sighed and looked down as Charles Thorndike took her hand"—unavoidable and not unacceptable subject. Lovers are all commonplace young men with large eyes, long legs, and small moustaches (villains' moustaches grow apace); moreover, lovers, I believe, generally take care to avoid observation; but no! it appears that "our subscribers" have a stern code which may not be lightly infringed. A letter from the editor ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions. And one result of this belief ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... far in her resolute kindness. "Perhaps he has changed his mind," she thought, "and wishes me not to change mine." So these two people, whose hands and hearts were aching to come together, sat in the same drawing-room talking of commonplace things, while their spirits grew ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... encouragement from me was the chief obstacle that deterred him from embarking upon a literary career. He commenced several novels but never finished them, and his chief literary remains are principally confined to the limits of his "commonplace-books." ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... prepared, one should drink it with art. The mere commonplace drinks one absorbs with free heart; But this—once with care from the bright flame removed, And the lime set aside that its value has proved— Take it first in deep draughts, meditative and slow, Quit it now, now resume, thus imbibe with gusto; While charming the palate it burns yet enchants, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... else, to view the bridge quite from my point of view; I looked on it as a child of mine, brought up through stress and danger and troubles of all kinds, but the ordinary traveller of course knows nothing of this and doubtless thinks it only a very commonplace and insignificant structure indeed. ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... the work of Levau and J. H. Mansart (1647-1708). Its erection, with the laying out of its marvellous park, almost exhausted the resources of the realm, but with results quite incommensurate with the outlay. In spite of its vastness, its exterior is commonplace; the orders are used with singular monotony, which is not redeemed by the deep breaks and projections of the main front. There is no controlling or dominant feature; there is no adequate entrance or ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... that they do not care for reading, or that less attention is paid to them than to the French or American passengers? One would think Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, or Moratin, better worth buying than many commonplace novels which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... plant, the name of which I forget at the moment, also trained to the walls; and ivy. Altogether, six plants grow up the walls of the cottage; and over the wicket-gate there is a rude arch—a framework of tall sticks—from which droop thick bunches of hops. It is a very commonplace sort of cottage; nothing artistically picturesque about it, no effect of gable or timber-work; it stands by the roadside in the most commonplace way, and yet it pleases. They have called in Nature, that great genius, and let the artist have his own way. In Italy, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... news; at times he would even give a grunt and a wave of the hand, while himself sucking at his pipe, as though he had suddenly recollected something extraordinarily amusing or important, then he would open his mouth, let off a few rings of smoke, and utter the most commonplace remarks, or even keep silence altogether. After gossiping a little with Ivan Afanasiitch about the neighbours, about horses, the daughters of the gentry around, and other such edifying topics, Mr. Bublitsyn ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... I pray that I may not let my life become commonplace through habit. May I not be content to rest in my virtues and let the days pass neglected. Awaken my dull satisfactions to a desire to live for the greatest, that I may have the greatest to live ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... author's will, and is altogether apart from his intention. Words and their rhythm have varied. Verses which affect us to-day with a vivid delight, and which delight, in many instances, may be traced to the one source, quaintness, must have worn in the days of their construction, a very commonplace air. This is, of course, no argument against the poems now-we mean it only as against the poets thew. There is a growing desire to overrate them. The old English muse was frank, guileless, sincere, and although very learned, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cloud-cap'd towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort. It will give him a shock. You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is, until you bite into a layer of ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... little embarrassed, smiled. It seemed to him something quite abnormal to hear Fantomas mentioned in this gathering, so simple, so natural, so commonplace. ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... amusing to read about "Kipps" and those commonplace people whom Mr. H.G. Wells describes so cleverly, but to have to live with them in barracks ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... little, and that little was commonplace; but I was not especially disappointed: my opinion of him was made up long before, and time has but confirmed it. The more I have considered his doings as minister or parliamentarian, and the more I have read his works, whether his political pamphlet known as the "History of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Slang is to language what feathers are to a hat—they give it distinction, class. They lift it out of the drab commonplace." ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... eloquence of which George Robins, the auctioneer, might have been proud. I do not think, however, he was half so much disappointed as my colleagues were when I returned to them and dictated a dozen lines of severe catalogue as the only "description" I was capable of giving of the furniture of two commonplace bedrooms. I never met the Great Man in after life without seeing him, in my mind's eye, flourishing a chair upside down, or lovingly patting with his mighty hand an ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... inadequacy of the phrase as it stands to convey justly the composer's idea. Take, for instance, the well-known change which every soprano who sings the role of Leonora introduces in the Miserere scene of Il Trovatore. The passage occurs four times in succession, and as printed becomes commonplace and monotonous. ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... consideration in the scale; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part, and was found wanting in the strength to keep ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Stephen Witwicki; others are by Adam Mickiewicz, Bogdan Zaleski, and Sigismond Krasinski, poets with all of whom he was personally acquainted. As to the musical settings, they are very unequal: a considerable number of them decidedly commonplace—Nos. 1, 5, 8, and also 4 and 12 may be instanced; several, and these belong to the better ones, exceedingly simple and in the style of folk-songs—No. 2 consists of a phrase of four bars (accompanied by ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... a Fox trot, she played it with unaccountable spirit and taste, so that the sound did not jar me—but the inference hurt a little. I said nothing, however. Then she played "Smiles," and the sweet commonplace air said all sorts of things to me—Desire to live again, and dance, and enjoy foolish pleasures—How could this little iceberg of a girl put so much devilment into the way she touched the keys? If it had not been for the interest this problem caused me, the longing the sounds aroused ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... have softened his tone in general. She wrote: "He gave me wit, but I reformed his heart." M. d'Haussonville has proved, without doubt, that her restraint modified many of his maxims that were tinged with the spirit of the commonplace and trivial. While Mme. de Sable—essentially a moralist and a deeply religious woman—was more of a companion to him, and though his maxims were, for the greater part, composed in her salon, Mme. de La Fayette, by her tenderness ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... was angrily pacing up and down the room. "What arrant nonsense a man can be capable of when he is headstrong to begin with! To think of the elegant Horatio King, a model for all men, surrounding himself with this commonplace family. Faugh! It is easy enough to see what they are all after. But I shall prevent it. Meanwhile, the only way to do it is to break the spirit of this Polly Pepper. Once do that, and I have the task ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... mixture could have brought about the decadence of the Italian teaching of song. In Germany no attention is paid to it. The ah, as sung generally by most Italians of the present day, quite flat, sounds commonplace, almost like an affront. It can range itself, that is connect itself, with no other vowel, makes all vocal connection impossible, evolves very ugly registers; and, lying low in the throat, summons forth no palatal resonance. ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... were the qualities which in practice proved him so admirably fitted to the task, and have given him an enduring and illustrious record among the rulers and governors of the nations? I should be disposed to assign the first place to what sounds a commonplace—but in its persistent and unfailing exercise is one of the rarest of virtues—his strong, abiding, dominating ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... life, particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite objects, of any concerted purpose in the lives that were going on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewhere in social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who would intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit belief that in ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... southward migration is the key to the interpretation of the geographical distribution of plants. It derived enormous support from the researches of Heer and has now become an accepted commonplace. Saporta in 1888 described the vegetable kingdom as "emigrant pour suivre une direction determinee et marcher du nord au sud, a la recherche de regions et de stations plus favorables, mieux appropriees aux adaptations acquises, a meme que la temperature ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... was easy," said the girl, rousing to the commonplace. "I can always shoot. Only you were hard to drag away. You seemed to want to stay there ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... enough that the lawyer regarded this marriage just as Quarrier did, the pisaller of a disappointed and embarrassed man. There was no more interest in his career; he had sunk finally into the commonplace. ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... appeal. Again he felt a great wave of tenderness and of reverence, too. She was far better than he. Words of humility and apology leaped once more to the end of his tongue, but they did not pass his lips. He could not say them. His stubborn pride still controlled and he rambled on with commonplace and idle talk. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... early 1996, the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. It is now a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also {network, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... those qualities make the reader remember his stories well. It is almost impossible to forget—under the general impressions—about his striking and standing-out figures ("The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall"), about the individual impression they leave on our minds. Apparently they are commonplace, every-day people, but the author's talent puts on them an original individuality, a particular stamp, which makes one remember them forever and afterward apply them to the individuals which one meets in life. No matter how insignificant socially ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... infamous career had branded him as the arch-monster of modern times, so vain and garrulous. He could account for it by no other hypothesis than that much killing had indurated the warped mind of the slayer until the taking of a human life was to him a commonplace. He was not capable of remorse, any more than he had been disposed to pity. He was not a man, only the blighted and cursed husk of a man, indeed, but doubly dangerous for his irresponsibility, for his ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... thereby devolved upon him. We do not mean to indulge ourselves in any nonsensical rhetoric about usurpations like those which cost an English king his head, for we consider the matter in too serious a light, and no crowded galleries invite us to thrill them with Bulwerian commonplace; but we have a conviction that the exceptional circumstances of the last five years, which gave a necessary predominance to the executive part of our government, have left behind them a false impression of the prerogative of a President in ordinary ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the next in age to Pamela, though so many years lay between them, a hundred petty cares fell on her girlish shoulders, and tried her patience greatly with their weight, sometimes. And in the hard family struggle for everyday necessities there was too much of commonplace reality to admit of much poetry. The wearisome battling with life's needs had left the mother, as it leaves thousands of women, haggard, careworn, and not too smooth in disposition. There was no romance about her. She ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in hot pursuit. The moment we showed ourselves above the companion the skipper rose to his feet—he had been sitting cross-legged on the deck, under the weather bulwarks—and joined us, evidently under the impression that it was an essential part of his duty to make himself agreeable. He made some commonplace remark about the weather, to which we both vouchsafed a ready and gracious response, very fully realising by this time the peculiarity and perilous nature of our position on board the felucca—a position from which it was, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... hurt me; but it unsettles me completely. I feel that something is going to happen. And there are other symptoms. Scraps of tunes come into my head that seem to me very pretty, though theyre quite commonplace. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... stage of romance, and the subject of dazzling pictures, is one of the most commonplace towns I have ever been in. It has its one big street—the Nevski Prospect—where people walk and shop as they do in Oxford Street, and it has a few cathedrals and churches, which are not very wonderful. The roadways are a mass of slush and ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... woman should have faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths of faith and the facts of human life—a discord which is felt in every age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana's book could ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... or thereabouts with an expressive taking face, lit up with a pair of deep blue laughing eyes. He had any amount of physical vivacity, and told a good story with immense verve, without for a moment getting above the commonplace: to him the Corinthian journalism of The Daily Telegraph was literature. Still he had the surface good nature and good humour of healthy youth and was generally liked. He took me to his mother's house one afternoon; but first he had a drink here and a chat ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... this and nothing else is the meaning of his love." "To bestow all the qualities one would like to possess, but never can quite possess, on another individual, to make it the representative of all values, that is to love." It is a commonplace experience that genuine love will awaken in the soul new and transcendent emotions, compared to which all previous experience appears petty and insignificant. The waves of this emotion are able to carry the lover to the infinite, or at least his emotion will ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... triumphant because he had moved a girl to the deeps of her nature. But something in him, some saving sense of embarrassment, of reverence for the purity and innocence he sensed in her, made him shrink from pressing the victory. His mind cast about for a commonplace with which ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... that she meant this would be the end of their intimacy, of anything but the commonplace service ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... carelessly abandoning, you will shed light and reawaken love and hope in the heart of many a Jew, who seemed to feel that our glorious faith had no message for the child of to-day, unless it were shorn by our 'religious' barbers, robbed of its native beauty and reduced to some platform-commonplace. As a lamented London Maggid told me, "There still live some real soldiers of God." Such are those who use persuasion from the pulpit, such as shine through the example of their own humane Jewishness and such as capture our hearts by artless beautiful ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... walked home despondently. She climbed in at the acting-room window, and went to her own room. The sun was shining on the apple-blossom in the orchard opposite, and she looked for the charm of yesterday, but finding only the garish commonplace of fruit-trees in flower with the sun on them, she drew down the blind. Then she took off her hat and jacket, threw herself on her bed, and fell into a heavy sleep, with her brow puckered and the corners of her mouth ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... At one moment he thought it a marten near at hand; then it became a caribou far away; then a fox between the two. Finally, instantaneously, as though at a bound it had leaped from indeterminate mists to the commonplace glare of every day, he saw it was ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... aware of the thousand emotions that are responsible for the blush of woman. I was again annoyed by the discovery that my pulses were not beating wildly, and that my heart was not throbbing tumultuously, and when I addressed a commonplace remark to her I was thoroughly ashamed and humiliated. It seemed like taking a mean advantage of ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... words, and those the homeliest, which the hand writes and the eye reads as trite and commonplace expressions—when spoken convey so much,—so many meanings complicated and refined? "Ah! if you ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... seen some of them on Tuesdays—Raoul Wermant, the one who so distinguished himself as a leader in the 'german', or Yvonne's brother, the officer of chasseurs, who had gained the prize for horsemanship, and others besides these—seemed to her very commonplace by comparison. No!—he whom she loved was a man in the prime of life, well known to fame. She didn't care if he ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... department were to call the deserving man into his office, and then and there to promote him, and to grant him an increase of salary. Thus vice would be punished, virtue would prevail, and the staff of that department would live in peace together. Here we have an example from everyday, commonplace life. How, therefore, could you bring yourself to send me that book, my beloved? It is a badly conceived work, Barbara, and also unreal, for the reason that in creation such a Tchinovnik does not exist. No, again I protest ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of still October days seems to fill the pasture with such mysteries as this. Commonplace things are touched with the softening haze of romance, and in the crystal stillness, the happy aloofness of the place, the consciousness goes groping for the unseen. It may be that by digging and grubbing I might unearth the veritable home of my chipmunks, trace their cunning runways under ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... 'stuck up,' and when some rough Frank or Gaul from the mountains looked on disapprovingly, and said that the world was coming to a pretty pass if such daintiness was to be allowed? A bowl to one's self was etiquette then. All sorts of things which to us seem matter of course and commonplace, began by being novelties and subjects for discussion and wonderment. Remember that tea, potatoes, carpets, tobacco, matches, almost all our modern conveniences, were quite unknown even so lately as four ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... ended, his language had a tendency to compliment and flatter. I contented myself with occasional sentences. The young woman sat directly across from me, our words overheard by all, and as I knew both men possessed some slight knowledge of English, I dare not venture beyond commonplace conversation in that tongue. With quick wit she took her cue from me, so that nothing passed between us, either by word of mouth or glance ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes a la Chopin; clever, I admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up into Twelve Etudes Transcendentales—listen to the big, boastful title!—is better than the furbished up later collection. His three concert studies are Chopinish; ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... are all made up of such small, commonplace things and this is such a commonplace old world, Mary. 'The commonplace earth and the commonplace sky make up the commonplace day,' and 'God must have loved common people, or He would not have made so many of them.' And, ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... vision as she spoke of the house in Dawson Place when George lived with his mother and sisters—a house in which furniture and everything else were commonplace and bourgeois to the last degree, and where nothing could have been altered since his boyhood; indeed she had often secretly pitied him for having to live in such surroundings, and admired the filial patience that had made him ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... inequality and imperfection of style like that which so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it that the thought is often impar sibi—that, like Wordsworth's, it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on the whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of his poetry ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... teaching at lycees, provincial or parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost. Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... expected to protect individuals in the exercise of activities which it regards as detrimental, or in the neglect of duties which it regards as essential, to the general well-being. It cannot restrain anyone's conscience; but it must control everyone's conduct. All this, of course, is the commonplace of political theory, and it is curious that at this late day one should have to repeat Burke's destructive criticism of metaphysic liberties, or Bentham's damning exposure of the "anarchic fallacy" of the ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... doing the author anything but a service—in fact, we should be giving the whole thing away; therefore, we will only state that the work is cleverly conceived, and carried out with great literary ability. There are numerous flashes of originality that lift the author above ordinary commonplace." ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... the official language, though English is commonplace; inhabitants of the isolated southwestern islands speak a ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... corner of that quaintest of stone staircases beheld a vision at sight of which he stood transfixed and astounded. Spirits of ancestors, indeed! Here was one before his very eyes, a picture out of its frame, a dream of grace and beauty such as is not vouchsafed to mortal eyes in this commonplace, matter-of-fact twentieth century! The first glance was admiration alone, the second brought a thrill of something uncomfortably like fear, for to the most unsuperstitious of minds there was still something unpleasantly eerie in this unexpected ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... there was a moment's profound silence. Then Lady Edith, drawing a long breath, expressed the welcome commonplace which restored the atmosphere of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... attempted to send up a coloured rocket, but its stick became stuck between the sides of the dug-out shaft and, by the time the efforts of Sergeant Collett had prepared the rocket for firing, the barrage died down as suddenly as it had started. This very commonplace episode illustrates the routine of this phase of warfare. The trenches were, of course, blown in and some Lewis guns damaged, but, as frequently, few ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... girls met and formed their club seems commonplace, but this writer makes it fascinating, and how they made their club serve a great purpose continues the interest to the end, and introduces a new type ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... was dim and indistinct to me then. I had placed it in a very faraway future. My ideal of love was such, that beside it all my friends' love affairs and many of those in fiction seemed commonplace and mediocre. I prized highly the distinction of Breckenridge Sewall's attentions, but marry ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... time before the excitement quieted down and they gave her a chance to say she would go. Even then she spoke the words with fear and trembling as one might step off a commonplace threshold into a fairy palace, not sure but it might ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... much since then has happened, much has been achieved; Marvels, commonplace to-day, few then would have believed. Science, Liberty, Pure Manners, order, Peace, Goodwill, Punch for Fifty Years has championed, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various |
