"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a burden of gratitude." The saying is a little too much like Rochefoucauld, and too true to be pleasant; but it was one of those keen remarks which Johnson appreciated because they prick a bubble of commonplace moralizing without demanding too literal an acceptation. He went home to sup with Reynolds and became his intimate friend. On another occasion, Johnson was offended by two ladies of rank at the same house, and by way of taking down their pride, asked Reynolds in a loud ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... horns for sale trailing along the platform, and, not ten yards from the track, a cinnamon bear and a young grizzly standing up with extended arms in their pens and begging for food. It was strange beyond anything that this bald telling can suggest—opening a door into a new world. The only commonplace thing about the spot was its name—Medicine Hat, which struck me instantly as the only possible name such a town could carry. This is that place which later became a town; but I had seen it three years before when it was even smaller and was ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... infernal regions, an episode evidently imitated by Virgil from his Grecian master, into a minute description of the initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries. A notion so perfectly new was at least worth a commonplace truth. Was it not delightful to have so many particulars detailed of a secret transaction, which even its contemporaries of two thousand years ago did not presume to know anything about? Father Hardouin seems to have opened the way for Warburton, since he had discovered that the whole AEneid ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... quietly, without a smile, to assure herself that it was he and no one else. She said nothing, and he sat down upon the other side of the fireplace. There was an air of embarrassment about their meetings, until one or the other had made some remark which led to a commonplace conversation. On the present occasion neither seemed inclined to be the first speaker and for some minutes they sat opposite to each other in silence. Giovanni glanced at his wife from time to time, and once she turned her head and met his eyes. ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... illuminations in Paris mean and vulgar by comparison. It is not in the costliness of the display that its splendour lies; it is in what may almost be termed the zeal with which Nature works with art towards the same end. Without the rocks and precipices the spectacle would be commonplace; but the site being what it is, the scene has a strange and wonderful charm that may be called either fairylike or heavenly, as the imagination may prefer. The artistic means employed are simple enough—paper lanterns and little lamps of coloured glass; but what an effect is produced ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... but it's rather awful, isn't it, that any one should have to think of her mother as Sylvia must? Why, my mother—" He stopped, flushing as he thought of how commonplace, how homely and ordinary, his mother had often seemed to him, how he had brooded over his father's "unfortunate match." "My mother has worked her fingers to the bone for all of us, and I believe she'd let herself be chopped in pieces to help us ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... that certain 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 knew how I ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of the household read, or sang, about far-away knights and heroes, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... delight in the flesh; it thrills the spirit with reverence. It glorifies into beauty commonplace things. It draws nearer in sickness and sorrow, and is not the sport of change. When a woman loves truly she has the passion of the mistress, the selfless tenderness of the mother, the dignity and devotion of the wife. She is all fire and snow, all will and frankness, all ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... at the expense of our ear-drums, the members of the Evening Press staff knew what that meant; for as you already know, the major's conversational specialty was the Civil War—it and its campaigns. Describing it, he made even war a commonplace and a tiresome topic. In his hands an account of the hardest fought battle became a tremendously uninteresting thing. He weeded out all the thrills and in their places planted hedges of dusty, deadly dry statistics. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... spoke in bursts of trembling anger, her words sounding tamely in her own ears. All she could say seemed commonplace and inadequate beside the knowledge that this man ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... her soul the poignant thorn of grief, not only because it would make her FEEL, but because it would emphasize in her own mind the divine self-sacrifice which she wanted to believe she was making. But when the moment came to close the door of the old home behind them, her husband was cruelly commonplace about it—for poor Lewis had no more drama in him than a kindly Newfoundland dog! He was full of practical cares for his tenant, and he stopped even while he was turning the key in the lock, to "fuss," as ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... I, earnestly (for my theory was being touched upon), "that on all ordinary occasions all of us use commonplace language to convey our thoughts. You will remember that up to the moment when the captain makes his terrible discovery all the characters on the stage talk pretty much as they would, in real life. But I believe that I am right in allowing him lines suitable ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be tinged with the ashen hue of the commonplace, though the scenes they attempt to depict are all of the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... smote him a little at that word "worthy," and muttered some commonplace civility in return. Valencia saw it, and attributing it to his usual awkwardness, drew off the conversation ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Fathers with reference to their own work; and if later developments have presented some surprises, some situations which they did not foresee, as was indeed inevitable, their prescience is nowhere shown to have been seriously at fault. Some of the speeches are commonplace; a few are wearisome; but many of them are examples of parliamentary eloquence at its best, and the ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... it was not more than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people- -and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... 1597, in his "Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman" (written in the name of Richard Litchfield, the barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge), also alludes to this commonplace: "The virtuous riches wherewith (as broad-spread fame reporteth) you are endued, though fama malum (as saith the poet) which I confirm," &c. Perhaps this was because Nash had previously employed it, or it might be supposed that the barber would ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... herself now for the impulse that urged her to run as fast as she could from the man. Mentally upbraiding herself for her foolishness she forced a smile of greeting and in her haste to say something that would put the meeting on a commonplace basis, burst out with ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... my dead out of my sight—bid farewell to the old resplendent, stately, scarred, defiant Raglan, itself the grave of many an old story, and the cradle of the new, and alas! in contrast with the old, not merely the mechanical, but the unpoetic and commonplace, yes vulgar era of our island's history. Little did lord Herbert dream of the age he was initiating—of the irreverence and pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps, wasting, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... her wrist, feeling the quick pulse, and dropped it. She was effectually humbled by this direct method of dealing with her secret heart. After some commonplace remarks had passed, she herself urged him to send out men in search for Emilia. Before he went, she murmured a soft "Forgive me." The pressure of her fingers was replied to, but the words were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... converts, a man who realised something of the grandeur of his master's schemes and their reach beyond a merely commercial ideal through discovery to empire, yet preserves in the speeches and actions of captains and seamen alike, proof enough of the thoroughly commonplace aims of most of ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters {3} went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... glory, there is no more sport to war. It has become scientific, businesslike, and commonplace. Never has an unprepared nation been so helpless against the prepared as to-day. The American Revolution could never have been won by untrained levies to-day against the British regulars if they possessed modern weapons. Our forefathers had their fowling ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... neighbourhood, and the only thing was to go to all of them. Stroeve accompanied me unwillingly. His own plan was to run up and down the streets that led out of the Avenue de Clichy and ask at every house if Strickland lived there. My commonplace scheme was, after all, effective, for in the second shop we asked at the woman behind the counter acknowledged that she knew him. She was not certain where he lived, but it was in one of the three houses opposite. Luck favoured us, and in the first we tried the concierge ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... water. He was even an eager bather in France, rejoicing in the feeling of superiority and stoicism which accompanied the pang and pain of it. But in England, where everybody bathed—or at any rate had water in their rooms and splashed and said ah! ah! and oh! oh!—he regarded the morning bath as commonplace, and had often to be ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... continuous or sustained, so that groups of successive words seem to run on one unbroken tone; others will be abrupt and irregular. Some will be rapid, some slow; some light, others weighty; some affected by long pauses, others by no pause, and some will be done in a dry, matter-of- fact, or precise, or commonplace, or familiar manner, others will be touched with feeling, colored by imagination, glowing with persuasive warmth, elevated, dignified, or profound. A repetition of the selections to be learned, with full expression by voice and action, repetition again, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... ask her as much as before; she wasn't happy; and her people began to talk to him about a divorce—naturally they had been against her marrying him all along. He said—as they and she pleased. Then, one night about a year ago, he took the train to Niagara—of course it was a very commonplace thing to do—and two days afterwards he was found, thrown up by the whirlpool; you know, where all ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could be richer in instruction, and even entertainment, than those of our greater bards. The inner life of every true poet must be poetical. But in proportion to the romance of their souls' story, is often the commonplace of their outward career. There have been poets, however, whose lives are quite as readable and as instructive as their poetry, and have even shed a reflex and powerful interest on their writings. The interest ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... violence had long since become almost a commonplace occurrence to Keith, yet now he shrank for an instant as his eyes perceived the figure of a man lying motionless across the broken wagon tongue. The grizzled hair and beard were streaked with blood, ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... rarest and most piquant melodic beauty, and the accompaniments are rich in colour and originality. A well-known critic writes: "Her music breathes the true spirit of romance shown in the poems that inspire it. Her themes are never commonplace or affected, and are gracefully supported by fluent, appropriate, and finely blended harmonies." Among her most recent compositions are some choral works, three of these, for orchestra in old style, being of especial interest. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... a wholly forgotten shabby garment, which nevertheless has taken to itself from the stillness of undisturbed years the faint aroma of romance; the rapture of discovering in the dusk of a concealed nook some old spur or broken knife or rusty pistol redolent of the open road. Such essentially commonplace affairs they are, after all, in the light of our mature common sense, but such unspeakable ecstasies to the romance-breathing years of fancy. Here would no fancy be required. To rummage in these silent chests and boxes would be to rummage, not in the fictions ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... judgments will be as a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will ultimately occupy. The commonplace as to the impossibility of prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet's fame, is often insincere, and but an excuse of indolence. To dogmatise were the height of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... you see, the horse and armor was only a frame, an accidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date and practical and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thing with a gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we call machinery. But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le Duc Somebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... man of good counsel and a shrewd experience in life. In the reading-room he saw many of the country clergy and an Archdeacon; there were three journalists and a writer upon the Higher Metaphysic, playing pool; and at dinner only the raff of ordinary club frequenters showed their commonplace and obliterated countenances. None of these, thought Mr. Rolles, would know more on dangerous topics than he knew himself; none of them were fit to give him guidance in his present strait. At length, in the smoking-room, up many weary stairs, he hit upon a gentleman of somewhat portly build and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... type of the chivalry of Spain, silver-tongued, a follower—nay, a companion of the Muses, one to whom in every previous adventure of the heart to love had been to conquer, could still prefer that broad-faced, painfully commonplace, if worthy, young representative of the Dutch middle classes, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... and quenchless curiosity of youth are in these pages—and the magic power of youth to wrap about the commonplace ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... the copious stores of all the various inventions which he had ever seen, or had ever passed in his mind. These ideas are infused into his design, without any conscious effort; but if he be not on his guard, he may reconsider and correct them, till the whole matter is reduced to a commonplace invention. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... my mother in her closet, who was talking to me on the old subject, matrimony, I saw Pamela's commonplace book, as I may call it; in which, by her lady's direction, from time to time, she had transcribed from the Bible, and other good books, such passages as most impressed her as she read—A method, I take it, my dear" (turning to me), "of great service to you, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... teach her duly to respect the prejudices of Pi. Not that it matters twopence to Le Breton, of course: but if she talks that way to any of the other men here, they'll be laughing in every common-room in Oxford over my Christmas raisins and pounds of sugar—commonplace cynics that they are. I must tell her about it the moment we get home again, and adjure her by all that's holy not ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... girl of twenty-two sat gazing from the casement in that turret-chamber—a girl whose face even a flatterer would have praised but little; and Philippa Fitzalan had no flatterers. The pretty child—as pretty children often do—had grown into a very ordinary, commonplace woman. Her hair, indeed, was glossy and luxuriant, and had deepened from its early flaxen into the darkest shade to which it was possible for flaxen to change; her eyes were dark, with a sad, tired, wistful look in ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... until midnight. Just as Cinderella left the ball when the clock struck 12, so do the holders of the Creole revels stop dancing immediately that Lent has commenced. The next day all is over. Men who the night before were the leaders in the masquerade, resume their commonplace existence, and are seen at the ordinary seats of custom, buying and selling and conducting themselves like ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... shame-faced, sister-hating, commonplace creature that the collective boy thinks it due to himself to be in society,' said Ethel, 'and me from an enjoying sister, into an elderly, care-taking, despised spinster—a burden to ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were to penetrate all the fortifications, and discipline were to give way to panic, and the mighty wall should dissolve into its component parts, human beings fleeing madly to save their lives? Then the "Victor of ——," the almighty fairy tale king, would sink back again into the sordid commonplace of old. He would have to eke out his existence in some obscure corner, crowd his trophies into some modest apartment, and content himself, like other discharged officers, with being a coffeehouse king. Were he to suffer a single defeat, the world would instantly forget its enthusiasm. ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... and then, when at last she dried her eyes, and went down-stairs to gratify Mary by pretending to eat some breakfast, a supremely commonplace and yet poignantly sad reflection brought another flood of tears. What wretched little chances can produce the most tragically terrific upheavals! Had she not bought a return railway ticket, the whole disaster might have been averted. But for that ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... such a glimpse of empire; but, in justice to the magic of such glances which come once from the eyes of every good woman, for some good man, in each lifetime, it must be acknowledged that their potent wizardry turns the commonplace, even the tawdry surroundings of a thousand million every-day lives, ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... to have grieved either of them, but it had been the first time in Ishmael's life that even the thought of death as a possible happening had occurred to him. Hilaria—a sense of outrage had been added to that; it was not her death that taught him anything beyond the mere commonplace that death can be a boon, but the news of her illness, that illness which unseen had been upon her even in the days when they had tramped the moors together and she had read to an enthralled ring of boys the breathless instalments of "The Woman ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and depth produced a state of consciousness in which height and depth were accepted as the ordinary conditions of existence; and from the horse's back to look sheer down four hundred or five hundred feet became quite commonplace and non-productive of thrills. And as carelessly as the trail and the horses, we swung along the dizzy heights and ducked around or ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... where it had fallen, the white face turned up to the gas. In life he had been a commonplace-looking man, not to say vulgar; now Burleigh, with a feeling of nausea, drew back toward the door, until the body was hidden by the table, and relieved from the sight, he could think more clearly. He looked down carefully and examined his clothes and his boots. ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... you like it? I wonder! Or think you it's stupid To send such a commonplace gift as a Purse? Do you sigh for the tinsel, and gauze, and the Cupid, And the wonderful sentiments written in verse? Well, suppose I had sent them. You'd murmur, "How pretty!" Then not see them again as you put them away. Shall I candidly tell you I thought 'twere ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... could see in such commonplace things to inspire him to write his fine poem, I can not understand," said Lucy. "There is a peculiar jingle in his lines ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... Hope moved quietly about, cooking supper, straining and putting away the milk Hugh brought in. In the kitchen Lance sat and watched her, and made love to her with his big eyes, with his voice that made of the most commonplace remark a caress. ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... all meant to Mary no one ever knew—she saw, now, no return to her hills, and her longing for them grew as the years passed, and her curiosity flattened in the dull round of duties and commonplace routine. Only one emotion largely controlled her thought and that was a dumb gratitude for what she believed she was receiving. She could not agree that her devoted service gave ample return. She was under obligation, and the feeling was blighting to the girl's independence. Work, the necessity ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... I hope you have not kept them waiting long? Show them up, please; and—here, wait a moment—on your way you can take Makins an armful of my commonplace books—eighteen sixty-three to seven; that will do. Tell him to look through the indexes himself; he'll find ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... eat, for feasting her eyes. And when they went up-stairs to their rooms that feast still continued. The house was irregular, with rather small rooms and low ceilings; which itself was pleasant after the more commonplace regularity to which Miss Frere had been accustomed; and then it was full—all the rooms were full—of quaintness and beauty. Oak wainscottings, dark with time; oaken doorways with singular carvings; chimney-pieces, ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... about in their pleasure yachts, on roving expeditions, under a pretended 'right of search,' armed to the teeth, and boarding all sorts of crafts to obtain plunder for their favorite gratification. They are most uneasy and uncomfortable companions, having no ear for commonplace subjects of conversation, and no eye for ordinary objects ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the country. There was generally a volume of Burke or Emerson in his pocket, whose sonorous periods filled the interval when we lunched frugally or rested. I have never known him anything but good-humoured under any conditions. His enthusiasm for our most commonplace jests was unfailing—perhaps one of the surest ways of getting to a man's heart and staying there—and he had a wide tolerance for the minor offences of undergraduate thought and deed. Yet, as for the tone of conversation when he was near, I need scarcely say that one simply did not think ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... from the commonplace countenances of the boys climbing out of the carriage to Malcolm's noble face. "It is a doubtful experiment," he said to himself. "They may never amount to anything, but at least they shall have a chance to see what clean, honest, country living can do ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... saw or read it written or in print. But I remember hearing it read in one of the college clubs more than fifty years ago. He has Longfellow's style very happily, including the dropping from a bright and sometimes a sublime line to one which is flat and commonplace, as for instance in the ode on the death of the Duke ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... his impious feast, that it would seem more ideal and more magnificent than a star "trembling on the hand of God" when newly created, or trembling on the verge of everlasting darkness, when its hour had come. A slipper seems a very commonplace object; but how interesting the veritable slipper of Empedocles, who flung himself into Etna, whose slipper was disgorged by the volcano, and as a link, connecting the seen with the unseen, the grassy earth with the burning entrails of the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... than my share, that I shall insist, will ye, nill ye, on your sharing it with me. I have a heart to open to somebody, and you are the very man. So, sit you down, and bear with my egotism, for I have a little tale to tell you, of who I am and how I came here. The story is not so commonplace but that your kindness will find, here and there, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... her delightful "Commonplace Book," illustrates this admirably by one or two test cases. She takes, for instance, from one of Humboldt's letters a much-admired passage ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... character. What he suffered, the manner in which he lived during those years of study, God only knows. He suffered as much as great men suffer when they are hounded by poverty and hunted like wild beasts by the pack of commonplace minds and by troops of ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... scarlet that Lady Grenville knew her secret on the spot, and would have tried to turn the conversation: but before she could speak, some burgher's wife blundered out a commonplace about the jealousy of Spanish husbands; and another, to make matters better, giggled out something more true than delicate about West Indian masters ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... like America?" said the elder, with commonplace indifference, as he crunched a lump of sugar in the bottom of the glass, dissolving the particles with a few drops ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... "As all the effects of song are, in the last analysis, the product of the vocal organs, I have submitted the study to physiological considerations." This statement of Garcia's idea of scientific instruction strikes us as a commonplace. But that serves only to prove how thoroughly the world has since been converted to the idea of mechanical Voice Culture. At that time it was generally believed to be a distinct advance. Garcia expected to bring about a great improvement in the art of Voice Culture. His idea ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... went on Mr. Nestor, "that Tom isn't quite steady enough. He's thinking of so many things, perhaps, that he can't get his mind down to the commonplace. I remember he once sent something here in a box labeled 'dynamite.' Though there was no explosive in it, it gave us a great fright. But Tom is a boy, in spite of his years. Professor Beecher seems much older. We all like him ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... shown,' reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by kneeling attendants. More often, however, the old Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and characterized well the vulgarity and commonplace which marked the ambition of the new princes. 'What else mean their trumpets and their bells, their horns and their flutes, but "come, hangmen come, vultures!"' The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is lofty and solitary, full of dungeons and listening-tubes, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the universe of misery. For was not the world full of men and women who groaned, not merely under poverty and cruelty, weakness and sickness, but under dullness and stupidity, hugged in the paralyzing arms of that devil-fish, The Commonplace, or held fast to the rocks by the crab Custom, while the tide of moral indifference was fast rising to choke them? Was there no prophet, no redemption, no mediator for such as these? Were there not thousands of women, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... "not in the long run. Of course," she went on with a smile, "to say a thing is not 'natural' is simply begging the question, and sounds as if one were dismissing a very complicated problem with a commonplace formula, but it has truth in it all the same. It is difficult enough to fashion existence in the right way, even with the help of others, but to do it single-handed is a task few people are qualified to achieve. I am quite sure that a woman has more chance of happiness if she marries than if ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not to shrink from an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of his enemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... few weeks of W.'s ministry were very trying to me—I went to see so many people,—so many people came to see me,—all strangers with whom I had nothing in common. Such dreary conversations, never getting beyond the most ordinary commonplace phrases,—such an absolutely different world from any I ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... was leaning forward in his place, the reins loosely held in his hand, and a groom was already upon the path, recovering the whip which had slipped from his fingers. His eyes were fixed not upon Mrs. Bollington-Watts nor upon Lady Elisabeth, but upon Maraton. He was a young man of harmless and commonplace appearance but his features were at that moment transformed. His mouth was strained and quivering, his eyes were lit with something very much like horror. Some words certainly left his lips, but they ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... There was no sign of emotion, even at the moment of his arrival. Jeff launched his request at father and daughter in a voice such as he might have used in the most commonplace ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... was for some time commonplace. Then the presents which had been brought were offered, among which was a fine Arab horse, the gift of Sir Robert himself. Port wine was then served out, greatly to the satisfaction of the chiefs, when all, with the exception of two of the principal ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... spoken and in use," in Latin and English; and 'Timber, or discoveries' "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times." The 'Discoveries', as it is usually called, is a commonplace book such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled, passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing opinions noted. Many passage of Jonson's 'Discoveries' are literal translations ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... brooding mother; a third is fickle, and leaves her nest so often and for such long intervals that the eggs become chilled, and incubation ceases. Some are tame and tractable, others as wild as hawks, and others still are not of much account in any direction, and are like commonplace women, who are merely good to count when the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... memory of man or maiden aunt ran not to the contrary. She always declared, indeed, that they were born married, and that their wedding-day would seem like a silver wedding. Harry was quiet, unobtrusive, and manly. He might seem commonplace at first beside the brilliant Kate and his more gifted sister; but thorough manhood is never commonplace, and he was a person to whom one could anchor. His strong, steadfast physique was the type ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of Goldsmith's works by the substitution of the commonplace "breathes" for "breasts"—and that, after Johnson had drawn particular attention to the line by quoting it in his Dictionary. Perhaps, indeed, it may be admitted that the literary charm of the Traveller is more apparent than the value of any doctrine, however profound ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... idea of losing time in commonplace remarks—he wished to take up their intimacy on the terms it had been formerly, to resume the romance ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... and commonplace seen from above. In the very early days the stone vaultings had remained uncovered, with no other concealment beyond the light-looking carved balustrade, but the rain had begun to damage them, threatening their destruction, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... said he to Forester—"my essay has not been thought worthy of the prize! The medal has been given to the most wretched, tame, commonplace performance you ever saw. Every thing in this world is done by corruption, by party, ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... of course, is of the commonplace book. Well, have you ever kept one, or, to be more accurate, tried to keep one? Personally, I believe in the commonplace book so long as we don't expect too much from it. Its two dangers are (1) that one is apt to make far too many and too minute ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... with the sole idea of accuracy by a young artist will in all cases be devoid of artistic feeling; it will creep in, if he has the artistic instinct. But it is not enough encouraged, and the prize is generally given to the drawing that is most complete and like the model in a commonplace way. If a student, moved by a strong feeling for form, lets himself go and does a fine thing, probably only remotely like the model to the average eye, the authorities are puzzled and don't usually know what to make ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... instance, write to George Elgood and question him concerning his silence: could not ask how it came to pass that while his brother had written to Margot, to Ronald, even to herself, he remained silent, content to send commonplace messages through a third person. As for Margot herself, she never mentioned the younger of the two brothers, but was always ready to talk about the elder, and seemed unaffectedly pleased at her sister's appreciation of the kindly, ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was new, every face that of a stranger. Now we are surrounded by familiar sights and sounds, and above all by friendly faces. But though novelty, which has its charms and its desagremens, has gone, nothing in Mexico even appears commonplace. Everything is on so large a scale, and everything so picturesque. Then there is so much interest attached to its old buildings, so much to see, even though there are no sights and no show-places, unless we are to put in that class the Minera, Museum, Cathedral, University, and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... yet the philosophical chapters for which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem commonplace. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Herald, those who relish and admire his writing in-the former would regard it as little less than a betise to suggest that the companion article in The Family Herald could be anything but miserable commonplace, which no one with any reputation to lose in "literary circles" would venture to read. The same arrogance of ignorance is observable in the supercilious way in which many men speak of the articles appearing in other penny miscellanies of popular literature. They richly ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... for you to realise that what is an ordinary matter of course to the young of my age is, to me, all a delightful novelty?—that I am enjoying to a perfectly heavenly degree what to you and others may be commonplace and uninteresting? All I ask is to be permitted to enjoy it while I am still young enough. I—I must! I really need it, Mr. Neville. It seems, at moments, as if I could never have enough—after the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... For what am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and gentlemen—soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books, common knowledge, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... simplicity. How profound, nevertheless, are the issues which hang on this elementary truth, we shall discover immediately. Nothing in this age is more needed in every department of knowledge than the rejuvenescence of the commonplace. In the spiritual world especially, he will be wise who courts acquaintance with the most ordinary and transparent facts of Nature; and in laying the foundations for a religious life he will make no unworthy beginning who carries with him an impressive sense of so ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... know how long I sat there; probably not five minutes, certainly long enough to be struck with the smallness of the chamber, the commonplace appearance of the personages forming the historic assembly, and the perfect manner in which they dissembled their interest in current proceedings. Then I became conscious of a movement in the sunken boxes before me, where the reporters, taking their turn, sat. Heads were turned ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Elizabethans in preferring magnificent to commonplace images. It has been often noticed that if he essays to write of buildings in general, he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge of the intellectual side of human nature is especially remarkable, but, unlike Shakespeare, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... kind. The poor could not afford to use unguents and keep their dead till the third day; they could not afford real cypress trees, but must use cheaper substitutes, if anything at all. They could not afford all the processionists and paraphernalia of the undertaker, but must be satisfied with four commonplace bearers, who hurried away the corpse in the evening, not on a couch but in a cheap box, and carried it out to the common necropolis beyond the Esquiline Gate. Seldom could they afford the fuel to burn the body, and in many cases it must simply be ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... 'incidentals,' that wasn't drawn into the modest 'terms' of the circular. I nearly forgot her Friday afternoon lectures, for which she sometimes substitutes Hannah More, and the Young Ladies' Own Book. These lectures are as commonplace as expatiations on the importance of cultivating the mind and heart, interspersed with 'hence the necessity,' and 'highly essential,' can mate them. Last Friday, as she was enlarging on the advantage of having had our birth in an enlightened, Christian land, Jenny Dean wrote on a slip ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dignity without pompousness or grandiloquence, feeling without hysteria. His variety seems endless, his energy never flags, and often he has more than a touch of the divine quality. He did not attempt to compose tragedies of life, for his temperament forbade it; but in his finest music he is never commonplace, because he had a strongly marked temperament and was poetically inspired. By dint of a sincerity that was perfect he made music which, though it is shaped in outline by the classical spirit, will be for ever interesting. To listen to him immediately after Tschaikowsky is hard, sometimes ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... might appropriately be applied to himself, that he formed the most intense conception of things and then embodied them by a single stroke of his pen. In a phrase or in a sentence he stamped the character of an author indelibly, and, enemy to commonplace though he was, became a cause of commonplace in others. No matter how much might already have been written on a subject (and Hazlitt did not make a practice of celebrating neglected obscurity) his own view stood out fresh and clear, and yet his judgments were never eccentric. He wrestled with ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... generations talk in the same fashion about the stern morality which rebukes their vice. They call it weak, commonplace, fit for children, and they pretend that they despise it. They are much too enlightened for such antiquated teaching. Old women and children may take it in, but men of the world, who have seen life, and know what is what, are not to be fooled so. 'What will this babbler ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs," occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... developments at our home. I had supposed, when the events spoken of in the last chapter had settled down to their proper places in our little history, that our life would flow on in an even, commonplace way, with few or no incidents worthy of being recorded. But this did not prove to be the case. After a time, the uniformity and quiet of our existence ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... women would be disposed to pity Stella, or think her life one of blight or injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, "She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice.... Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall?" Whatever we may surmise, there is nothing to prove that she was disappointed. She was the one star which brightened Swift's storm-tossed course; it is well that she was spared seeing the wreck ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... enough, whilst Ora's husband was a commonplace though intelligent attorney, Ora was married to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... churches. Thoughtless youth discovered that there are only two great things in the universe—God and the soul. Personal religion became the supreme interest of the hour. Men went into the crucible commonplace; they came out of it heroic stuff. All over the country the churches were open every night in the week. Moving across the country the traveller saw the candles burning in the little schoolhouses, while the farmers ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... you tell me that one is not the master of his own heart, in disposing of it where he wishes, and that consequently you are not at liberty to choose the object of your attachment? Morals of the opera! Abandon this commonplace to women who expect, in saying so, to justify their weaknesses. It is very necessary that they should have something to which to cling: like the gentleman of whom our friend Montaigne speaks who, when ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 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 ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... called him. It would be well if one could believe the story; there would seem a dramatic justice—a tragic retribution—about it. Its very terror would dignify the story of a life that, on the whole, was commonplace and vulgar. But, for ourselves, we confess that we cannot believe in the mysterious letter, the fatal summons, the sudden fulfilment. There are too many stories of the kind floating about history to allow us to attach any special significance to this particular ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the queer girl distracted her mind so that she could not go back to her attitude of lazy indifference. She had thought Anne a little commonplace until now; but it had not been a commonplace thing, that changing from prettiness to plainness. She even wondered if Anne had not done a finer act than ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... in their last interview, resolves to brave the edict, and perform those rites so indispensably sacred in the eyes of a Greek. She communicates her resolution to her sister Ismene, whose character, still feeble and commonplace, is a perpetual foil to the heroism of Antigone. She acts upon her resolutions, baffles the vigilant guards, buries the corpse. Creon, on learning that his edict has been secretly disobeyed, orders the remains to be disinterred, and in a second attempt Antigone is ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
