"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mine to speak them; but if we would lay them to heart, and realise how true it is about every step of our earthly course that 'ye have not passed this way heretofore,' we should complain less than we do of the weariness and prosaic character of our commonplace lives, and feel that all was mystical and great and awful; and yet most blessed in its ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Dupre followed alone, his heart heavy within him and a grip in his throat of tears. On through the leafy forest, parting the lacing vines, holding each branch that it might not swish to place, they went, far from safety and the commonplace of life, and a prescience of disaster weighed on the ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Don't ask me! Anything you suggest is sure to be right. You know far more about these things than I do. But Maidenhead—isn't it just a little commonplace? A little noisy and crowded, ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... and led the way into his own chamber, which was a plainly furnished and commonplace room. As we moved across it in the direction of the window, Holmes fell back until he and I were the last of the group. Near the foot of the bed was a small square table, on which stood a dish of oranges and a carafe of water. As we passed it, Holmes, to my unutterable astonishment, leaned ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... much more so than those of Edinburgh; and it requires no small exertion to mount one or two without stopping to breathe at the top. Upon the whole, it is anything but a pretty town (at least in winter), the houses being high, and the streets very narrow. The buildings, too, are commonplace; and the monument to Wolfe and Montcalm is a very insignificant affair. In fact, Quebec can boast of little else than the magnificent views it commands from the ramparts, and the impregnable strength of its fortifications. Some of the suburban villas, however, are very beautiful; and although ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... first commonplace that he could think of at the moment, and relapsed into uncomfortable silence. The arrival of James, in his most pompous mood and accompanied by a stiff, elderly shipping-agent, did not improve matters; and ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... to say nothing of their parents, was an unspeakable charm and novelty to us all. We all worshipped the elder, and the little one was like a new discovery and toy to us, who had never been used to such a presence. She was not a commonplace child; but even if she had been, she would have been as charming a study as a kitten; and she had all the four of us at her feet, though her mother was constantly protesting against our spoiling her, and really kept up so much wholesome discipline that the little maid never exceeded ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rogers dined with the Oyster Club as Smith's guest, but he has made no specific entry of the event in his journal, and no record of the conversation. Black and Playfair seem to have been there, and possibly other men of eminence; but the whole talk was usurped by a commonplace member, and Smith felt—and possibly Rogers too—that the day was lost. For next time they met Smith asked Rogers how he liked the club, and said, "That Bogle, I was sorry he talked so much; he spoiled our evening." ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... single-handed and alone would require unremitting effort through the very best years of his manhood. His brain, his strength, his ability, his ambitions, what were they all in the strife after place and power, compared to the money of some commonplace adversary? Preston Cheney, the native-born American directly descended from a Revolutionary soldier, would be handicapped in the race with some Michael Murphy whose father had made a fortune in the saloon business, or who had himself acquired a competency ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... practical advice or severe admonitions; and in the old times he was apt, in moments of irritation, to supplement his admonitions by a free use of his fists. Victor Alexandr'itch, on the contrary, never could give any advice except vague commonplace, and as to using his fist, he would have shrunk from that, not only from respect to humanitarian principles, but also from motives which belong to the region of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the rest. 'SHE would scorn such a commonplace suggestion. Do you remember that novel of Hardy's, THE WELL-BELOVED? She's like the man there, who was always in love with the same Ideal—under different forms—until he found that he'd made a mistake, and then the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... 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 ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... for war; the "Odyssey" for wandering; but where is the great domestic epic? Yet it is but commonplace to say, that passions may rage round a tea-table, which would not have misbecome men dashing at one another in war-chariots; and evolutions of patience and temper are performed at the fireside, worthy to be compared with the ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... superstitions, wondered how this man should be considered great, who is now clean forgotten (as copious Guthrie before mentioned); how this should have been thought a patriot who is but a knave spouting commonplace; or how that should have been dubbed a philosopher who is but a dull fool, blinking solemn, and pretending to see in the dark; when he shall have examined all these at his leisure, smiling in a pleasant contempt and good-humored superiority, and thanking heaven for his increased ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... market-place a child is standing with her mother—a commonplace-looking, little girl of about twelve, blue-eyed, light-haired, with thin arms and legs, dressed, poorly enough, for her holiday. The mother, stoutish, in her best but much-worn black gown and a brown straw, out-of-shape hat, decorated with bits of ribbon and a few soiled and frayed artificial flowers. ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... "Good commonplace story. Just the sort that is never questioned. Of course if she did not correspond with her family during all that time she could adopt any name for her return to respectability that she chose. Delano wasn't it? That's certain. ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... came, but presently a rapid, steady clicking, strangely familiar and commonplace. He peered in again. The Red Wand stood by the abacus, rattling the brown beads with flying fingers, like a shroff. Plainly, it was no real calculation, but a ceremony before the answer. The listener clapped his ear to the crevice. Would ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... had published, the country at large eventually became acquainted with an ethical view-point which was already fairly familiar to nearly every resident in and about Chickaloosa. Reading the narrative, one living at a distance got an accurate picture of a personality elevated above the commonplace solely by the role which its owner filled; a picture of an old man thoroughly sincere and thoroughly conscientious; a man dull, earnest, and capable to his limits; a man who was neither morbid nor imaginative, but filled with rather a stupid gravity; a man canny about the pennies ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... a very prosaic and commonplace nature. He simply asked whether Count Vasilovich happened to be at home; and upon being informed—somewhat to his surprise—that he was, he scribbled a word or two in Russian upon one of his cards, and directed ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... man!" roared Dr. Rankin, beating the table, "that's just what I've been trying to tell you. You ought not to care so much for punishing as for deterring. Don't you know that it's a commonplace that it isn't the terrifying quality of the penalty that acts as a deterrent to crime, but it's the certainty of the penalty! If a horse thief knows that there's merely a chance the community will get ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... Isouard (1777-1818), to give him his full name, shone less by musical science or dramatic instinct than by a delicate and pathetic grace which endeared his music to the hearts of his contemporaries. He had little originality, and his facility often descends to commonplace, but much of the music in 'Joconde' and 'Cendrillon' lives by grace of its inimitable tenderness and charm. Nicolo is the Greuze of music. Boieldieu (1775-1834) stands upon a very different plane. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... one's glove in a foeman's face was one proper form of deadly insult preceding mortal combat, for, ignoring lances, steeds and all about them, the assailed personage immediately "clinched," and the boys rolled over in a struggle, earnest, certainly, but altogether commonplace. It was with the greatest difficulty, while defending himself, that Grant was enabled to explain that his act was one rendered necessary by the laws of chivalry and a part of the preliminaries of the occasion, instead of an attack in cold blood upon an unwarned adversary. Alf accepted the ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... journey to Naples, Calabressa and his companion talked much more of the commonplace incidents and wants of travel than of the graver matters that lay before them. Calabressa was especially resolute in doing so. He did not like to look ahead. He kept reminding himself that he was simply the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... less than the picturesque force of his language, which contributed in no small degree to the success of his book. But, above all, it was the sweetness and pathos of the exquisite love story. Susanna, though as to talents not much above the commonplace, is ravishing. To have breathed the breath of such warm and living life into a character of fiction is no small achievement. It is the loveliness of love, the sweetness of womanhood, the glorious ferment of the blood in the human springtide ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door which opened into the street. Somehow the commonplace, trivial interruption produced on both a strange, even startling effect. It suddenly produced in their minds a feeling of apprehension, as though there was whispered in their ears, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... time in that state of exaltation in which the impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen his father's house-door, at which were always hanging some blue-and-gray ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... stimulus, let it alone. On the contrary, if in a healthy pursuit of knowledge it brings the varied mental powers into a natural sequence where they will strengthen and support one another, it should be studied and used by teachers. It would be very commonplace to say that each of the faculties or activities involved in the inductive process should be disciplined and strengthened by school studies. There is but little difference of opinion on this subject, though some would lay more stress upon sense training, some on memory, some on reasoning. ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... accidental and from a scientific point of view it is not spectacular. It did not mark a new discovery in the same sense as the discovery of X-rays. However, it is an excellent example of the great rewards which come to systematic, thorough study of rather commonplace physical laws in respect to a given condition. Such achievements are being duplicated in various lines in the laboratories of the industries. Scientific research is no longer monopolized by educational institutions. The most elaborate and best-equipped laboratories are to be found in the industries ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... effect was very curious; where, a few moments before, there had been ready repartee, interspersed with laughter, now there was low-toned commonplace conversation, or a dead silence. We were wrapped in a cloud; moisture began to form in tiny drops upon the stanchions and the deck, upon the beards and moustaches of the male part of the voyagers, upon the woolly texture of the garments of all, even upon the smoothly ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... of producing, and though not so great a man as Giotto, was a much greater painter. Then came Lionardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the men of universal genius, who could make use of tradition without being commonplace, who could be realistic without being coarse, and who understood how to produce illusion without being theatrical. In the decay of Italian art what strikes one most strongly is the combination of the three faults which the great men knew how ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the province of the courts to inquire into the policy underlying action taken by the "political departments"—Congress and the President—in the exercise of their conceded powers. This commonplace maxim is, however, sometimes given an enlarged application so as to embrace questions as to the existence of facts and even questions of law which the Court would normally regard as falling within its jurisdiction. Such questions are termed "political ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... a ruddy-faced, benevolent old gentleman, with spectacles and a kindly manner. He made a few commonplace remarks to his colleagues with the good-natured intention of giving the confused-looking student before him time to compose himself. Then, turning blandly towards him, he said in ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur—call it by whichever name anybody likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it—is one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single "French book"—the reference to which is a commonplace of the subject—from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with Shakespeare ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... these that Challoner, coming round the corner of the block, beheld his charming companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for he had long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths, he damned this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone a second, ere the swing-doors reopened, and she appeared again in company with a young man of mean and slouching attire. For some five or six exchanges they conversed ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... she removed her school to Troy, in 1821. It was a new departure, and there was ignorant prejudice to overcome. Governor Clinton, in an appeal to the legislature for aid, said: "I trust you will not be deterred by commonplace ridicule from extending your munificence to this meritorious institution." They were not deterred. An act was passed for the incorporation of the proposed institute, and another which gave to female academies a share of the literary ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... man. He was, in truth, in the language of the poet Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil." His greatness did not consist in growing up on the frontier. An ordinary man would have found on the frontier exactly what he would have found elsewhere—a commonplace life, varying only with the changing ideas and customs of time and place. But for the man with extraordinary powers of mind and body, for one gifted by Nature as Abraham Lincoln was gifted, the pioneer life, with its severe training in self-denial, patience, ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... although attractive as a mass of light, is not really good. Its patterns are trivial, its paintings and statues commonplace; and I personally have the feeling that it would have been more fitting had Giotto's marble been supplied rather with a contrast than an imitation. As it is, it is not till Giotto's tower soars above the facade that one can rightly (from the front) appreciate its ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... began to listen with a determination to remember it in order, but it was without method, or order, or system. It was like a beam of light moving in the undulatory waves, meeting with occasional meteors in its path; it was exceedingly captivating. It surprised me that there was not only no commonplace thought, but there was no commonplace expression. If he quoted, he quoted from what we had not read; if he told an anecdote, it was one that had not reached us. At the outset he was very severe upon the science of the age. He said that inventors and discoverers helped ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... a composer as Handel—or rather it would take as great a composer if he could be found—to be able to be as easily and triumphantly commonplace as Handel often is, just as it takes—or rather would take—as great a composer as Handel to write another Hallelujah chorus. It is only the man who can do the latter who can do the former as Handel has done it. Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... uttered by those two young people in the noisy railway station, be taken by themselves and regarded, they will be found to consist of the dullest commonplace. No two strangers in all that crowd could have addressed each other in a more indifferent fashion. But the trivial nothings which the mouth utters may become possessed of awful import when accompanied by the language of the eyes; and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... seclusion, silence, and scenery of Cape Cod, and who enlivened that remote and restful country by flashes of talk often brilliant, almost always entertaining. Miss Trumbull's work is delightful reading: the sameness of the commonplace and the obvious is so ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... use of talking? I'm afraid all this is so commonplace that my confession will be taken for a schoolboy exercise—the work of some ambitious lad writing in the hope of his work 'seeing the light'; or perhaps my readers will say that 'I had perhaps something to say, but did not know how to ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the diagonal shadow which crosses it, and emerges above it just as the embankment does above the cliff brow. Lower, come the opposing curves in the two boats, the whole forming one group of sequent lines up the whole side of the picture. The rest of the composition is more commonplace than is usual with the great master; but there are beautiful transitions of light and shade between the sails of the little fishing-boat, the brig behind her, and the cliffs. Note how dexterously the two front sails[R] of the brig are brought ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... a man reaches the top of the hill of life and starts down on the sunset side. The ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting down, and cannot fail to be interesting ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art, vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health—there are some signs of it—what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in it. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that breathes from the grassy quadrangles and stone walls of halls and colleges—was at home in the Bodleian; and at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered Ciceroni that attended us, and that pointed, in vain with his wand to commonplace beauties in matchless pictures.—As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not feel confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without a companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own language. There is an involuntary ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... taste for what is imperishable in antiquity. As such he is justly regarded as an immortal benefactor; for it is art which gives to nations culture, refinement, and the enjoyment of the beautiful. Art diverts the mind from low and commonplace pursuits, exalts the imagination, and makes its votary indifferent to the evils of life. It raises the soul into regions of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... divined his own future influence and fame when, as a boy on his father's farm in Braintree, he toiled in rural and commonplace drudgeries, or when he was an undistinguished student at Harvard or a schoolmaster in a country village. It was not until political agitations aroused the public mind that a new field was open to him, congenial ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... effected; but the former would scarcely have been a Cecil had he not also read his royal master. His Majesty must have the matter so communicated to him that he should be able to believe that his own supernatural sagacity had solved a mystery impenetrable to the commonplace brains of the Lords of the Council. It might be reasonably anticipated that such a warning should be no mystery to the son of Lord Darnley—that his thoughts would fly rapidly to that house in the Kirk o' Field, where his own father ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... 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 tales ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... inducing certain people to say that her books were good. She did work hard at what she wrote,—hard enough at any rate to cover her pages quickly; and was, by nature, a clever woman. She could write after a glib, commonplace, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... as mellifluous and melodious names exercise a mollifying influence on the activities of the sub-conscious self, so the possession or choice of strange or ferocious appellations incites the bearer, if I may be permitted to use so commonplace a term, to live ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... always wanted to do something of the kind," says Auntie. "True, I may not look like that sort of a person, and I suppose that I do lead rather a dull, commonplace existence. Not from choice, however. Once I was ship-wrecked in the Mediterranean, and I found it a thrilling experience. Also I once spent nearly a week on a snow-bound train in the Rockies; I would not have missed that for anything. ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... with him among strangers, received it as his due. If he were asked why he considered himself above the majority of people he would not be able to answer, as there was nothing in his life transcending the commonplace. The fact that he spoke English, French and German fluently; that his linen, clothing, scarf and cuff-buttons were of superior make would not be sufficient reason for assuming his superiority, as he himself well understood. And yet he doubtless acknowledged in himself this superiority, ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... his guest appear this morning. His dreams would have been pleasanter had he been perfectly sure that she would not in her youthful horror and despair evade him in the one way possible. He bade her good-morning with an inoffensive commonplace. He had shot his bolt; now his policy must be soothing and unexacting until her fear of him had abated and custom had reconciled her to her new life. She was silent at breakfast, speaking only when spoken to, and observant ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... commonplace-books of William Blundell, there is an interesting comment, dated 1659, on the lack of advertising facilities at that period—It would be very expedient if each parish or village might have some place, as the church or smithy, wherein to publish (by papers posted up) the wants either ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... girls slept on in the dreamless, heavy sleep of tired girlhood. Of course, not one of the three had had the least intention of doing anything so commonplace as going to sleep; in fact, the very idea had been vaguely irritating. Had they not looked forward to this very thing for months—at least, so it seemed to them—and it was almost impossible for them to have patience with the idiocy of any one who could calmly suggest slumber at such a ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... old friend the Burgomaster, and she was anxiously consulted by that worthy on the momentous occasion when the Prince made known his intention of coming in person to open a sanatorium outside the town. All the usual items in a programme of welcome, some of them fatuous and commonplace, others quaint and charming, had been arranged for, but the Burgomaster hoped that the resourceful English lady might have something new and tasteful to suggest in the way of loyal greeting. The Prince was known to the outside world, if at all, as an old-fashioned reactionary, combating modern ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... are rivaled in intensity by the mystic passion of their souls for the Heavenly Wisdom. They stand amid the wild whirl of selfish strife in the society of their day, and lift on high the holy forms of Justice and Brotherhood, as though expecting their commonplace cotemporaries to turn aside from practical affairs, and seek for them; and, so subtle and searching are the appeals of these heavenly visions, men do actually turn from mammon to worship these impoverishing ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... Assisi, he covered the walls and ceiling of the church with the wonderful frescoes of the life of St. Francis; and the little round commonplace Arena Chapel of Padua is made exquisite inside by his pictures of the life of ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... full of surprises, and the greatest of these almost always arise out of the most commonplace looking objects. No more striking instance of this can be found than that furnished by the story of the Jelly-fish. Most, if not all, of my readers have met with this creature, either in the shape of a lifeless lump of clear ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... more taste was displayed in receiving guests and giving a ball. Altogether she was hardly to be recognised. She seemed completely transformed, and instead of the unapproachable "noble lady" (Stepan Trofimovitch's expression) seemed changed into the most commonplace, whimsical society woman. But perhaps this may only have ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... ran a speech, "thou draggest forth, trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river's bank in the dawn of the morning" [thou causest them to be slaughtered]. Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in a commonplace novel, occur. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... his wife's lamentations recommence, her discouragement, her pretended misconduct, the husband's jealousy, the intervention of the bystanders, and the reconciliation. There is in all this an ingenuous, even commonplace, lesson, which savors strongly of its origin in the Middle Ages, but which always makes an impression, if not upon the bride and groom,—who are too much in love and too sensible to-day to need it,—at all events, upon the children and young girls and boys. The ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... discerning taste and fostering care, that he owed the encouragement of his studies, and the leisure which rendered them possible. He has registered this gratitude in both prose and verse. The Latin hexameters, "Ad patrem," written at Horton, are inspired by a feeling far beyond commonplace filial piety, and a warmth which is rare indeed in neo-Latin versification. And when, in his prose pamphlets, he has occasion to speak of himself, he does not omit the acknowledgment of "the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... nobody likes to be bored, but I think it would be better to be bored to extinction than to mortify and pain people by rejecting their society because they are not intensely amusing or distinguished, or even because they are intensely tiresome and commonplace.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... settlement. During the sessions Washington was overrun with "Smartness": Smart pages, smart messengers, smart cabmen, smart publicans, smart politicians, smart women, smart scoundrels! Greatness became commonplace here, and Mr. Douglas might drink at Willard's Bar, with none so poor to do him reverence, or General Winfield Scott strut like a colossus along "the Avenue," and the sleepy negroes upon their backs would give him the attention of only one eye. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... girl, neither attractive nor unattractive to the ordinary observer; simply commonplace. Her position at the time of our acquaintance was not so good as mine. My father was a solicitor, as I think I have told you. She was a young girl in a music-shop; and it was represented to me that it would be beneath my position to marry her. Hence ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society, and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace, has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... think?—that he should hold out "Oulton Hall" as an address to those who were not likely to visit him.' When Mrs. Borrow, senior, was persuaded to leave Willow Lane, Norwich, for Oulton, her son took lodgings for her at the 'Hall,' and here she died. Very commonplace farm houses in East Anglia are frequently called 'halls,' to the great amazement of visitors from other counties, although there are some very noble ones, as, for example, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... mother's grave in Old St. Pancras Churchyard. This girl of seventeen had a strong if rather narrow mind; she was imperious, ardent, and firm-willed. She is said to have been very pale, with golden hair and a large forehead, redeemed from commonplace by hazel eyes which had a piercing look. When sitting, she appeared to be of more than average height; when she stood, you saw that she had her father's stumpy legs. Intellectually, and by the solidity of her character, she was better fitted to be ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... production of what is most immortal and most precious in the world of thought, as well as of what is most useful and beautiful in the world of matter, there is one which cannot fail to arise before the most actual and commonplace imagination. This is, the great apparent care exhibited by nature in the preparation of the nidus—or matrix, if we may so style it—in which the genius of the great man is to be perfected and elaborated. Nature creates nothing in sport; and as much foresight—possibly even more—is displayed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... It was all commonplace, and the spectators waited patiently, seeing the glance up of the slave, the trying of the left stirrup, and the impatient, imperious gesture to the man to adjust the other leather, the rider swinging himself round with his back to the Emir as the white slave darted ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... the most noble and grand religious edifices in France, with all the qualities of a monument of the first order, of perfect dimension, beauty of plan, unity of workmanship, and distinction of form." Any one of these attributes, were it literally so, might well turn a commonplace structure into an unapproachable masterpiece. In a measure, all of his eulogy is quite true, and the pity is that more do not know of its ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... house-pride having grown calm, the Bolderos settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life tempered by the amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian worked, Doria read Dante and attended performances of the Intellectual Drama; when Adrian relaxed, she cooked dainties in a chafing dish and accompanied him to Musical Comedy. They entertained in a gracious modest way, and went out ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... necessity becomes an invincible necessity. "The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be devoured in the streets." But when the necessity pleaded is not in the nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation: because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonorable existence, without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they aim at obtaining the dues of labor without industry, and by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... fascinate the imagination. The consciousness of union with God produces an exquisite confidence in the wise and sweet enchantment of life; the constant receptivity of the soul to the influence and the guiding of the Holy Spirit make an atmosphere ecstatic, even under the most commonplace or outwardly depressing circumstances. Celestial harmonies thrill the air. In this divine atmosphere—the soul's native air—every energy is quickened. The divine realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man—who, temporarily inhabiting a physical body that he ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... and science. It is true that the style is sometimes stiff, and even rigid; but the stiffness is the stiffness of a richly embroidered cloth, into which threads of gold and silver have been worked. Bacon kept what he called a Promus or Commonplace-Book; and in this he entered striking thoughts, sentences, and phrases that he met with in the course of his reading, or that occurred to him during the day. He calls these sentences "salt-pits, that you may extract ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price, simnels and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... school she spent a week with her friend, Margaret Louise, in the Connecticut town where she lived with her comfortable, commonplace family. It was while she was on this visit that the most significant event of the entire year took place, though it was a happening that she put out of her mind as soon as possible and never thought of it again when she could ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... susceptible and molding it—supplying it with lofty concepts of interpretation and expression. Of course Auer (I studied with him in Petrograd and Dresden) has been especially fortunate as regards his pupils, too, because active in a land like Russia, where musical genius has almost become a commonplace. ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... many other tasks which are ordinarily done either by automatic machinery or by highly skilled specialists in labor—for these two, thrown upon their own resources, had long since learned how much specialization may be represented by the most commonplace article. Whenever they needed a thing they did not have—which happened every day—they had either to make it or else, failing in that, to go back and build something that would enable them to manufacture the required item. Such setbacks had become ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... 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 the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... attempt at philosophical history in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... man,—to define it anew, and cite the witness of the ages, may seem an audacious attempt, likely to issue in failure or in commonplace. By the scholar this work must often be judged as crude, to the churchman it will sometimes seem mischievous, and to the man of science it may appear to lack solidity of demonstration. But its essential purpose is to utter afresh, though it be with stammering tongue, the message ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... stood a head and shoulders above the level of the weaklings excluded as "finished" from these commonplace educational institutions—schools called colleges and colleges called universities, resulting necessarily from the proclamation of man's equality. He sickened at seeing the neutral-tinted lake of society, with "shallow-swells," more painful to the right-minded ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... years. Every woman in the comfortable walks in life can find time for such a study. No woman of tact, charm, refinement and feeling need ever let her husband, unless she has married a clod, become indifferent or commonplace in his treatment of her. Man reflects to an astonishing ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same unfathomable sea and bound to ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... is, behind the observed facts. They fail to see that the more blind, the more accidental, so to speak, the process of differentiation may be; the more it is shown that the struggle for existence drives the wheels of progress along the {37} lines of least resistance by the most commonplace of mechanical necessities, in the same proportion must a law be posited behind all this process, a reason in nature which gathers up the beginning and the ending. The protoplasmic cell which the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... reconstruction of the old capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is no doubt beneficial, not to say necessary, and we make no protest against these wholesale changes, which have certainly tended to destroy utterly its ancient character and appearance. But all seems commonplace, new, smart, and unpoetic, and we quickly grow weary of Naples now that it has been turned into a Liverpool of the South without the local colour and the peculiar attributes of which author and ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... poignant; she began to feel that it might be particularly important to have them. "This might be the night!" She was still at the age to dream that the night of any dance may be the vital point in destiny. No matter how commonplace or disappointing other dance nights have been this one may bring the great meeting. The unknown magnifico ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... than strange, he did not get up. Not unlikely this circumstance was owing to the fact that several of the rude chairs had soft layers of old blanket tacked on them. Whatever were Frank's internal emotions, he presented a remarkably placid and commonplace exterior; but when Jim began to search for the missing pan of dough, the joker slowly sagged ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... friendship, Patty," and Kenneth's deep voice trembled a little; "I mean I don't want ONLY your friendship. And yet I know I can't hope for anything more. I'm too dull and commonplace to attract ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... I stared at it curiously. It looked rather like a British swagger stick: slim, dainty, well balanced. But the ornamental gadget at its top was not commonplace. It seemed to be a knob or a dial of some kind, divided into segments scored with vernier markings. I gazed ...
— Lighter Than You Think • Nelson Bond
... dwelt on 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
... continued to 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 ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... relics are 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 ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Byzantine Greeks, who, by the assiduous study of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, who, from his horn of plenty, has poured the names and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... interested for or against Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he has composed it. The world is tolerably ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the greatest and foremost nations of the world. Thus Germany, in its present Prussianised state, through the mouths as well as through the actions of those rulers and leaders, denies most of the conclusions here set forth. In Germany it is a commonplace to declare that war is the law of Nature, that the "struggle for existence" means the arbitration of warfare, that it is by war that all evolution proceeds, that not only in savagery but in the highest civilisation the ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... give the words of the minister's prayer. The words are not the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the preciousness of the departed ones, and that its refining touch manifests to our blind eyes what we did not see so clearly when they were beside us. We all know that it needs distance to measure men, and the dropping away of the commonplace and the familiar ere we can see 'the likeness' of our contemporaries 'to the great of old.' We have to travel across the plains before we can measure the relative height of the clustered mountains, and discern which is manifestly the loftiest. And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... seem to have been transplanted from copy-books. They speak of "the bounding main," "the raging billows," "seas mountains high," "the breath of the gale," "the seething breakers," and so on; but regarding the commonplace, quiet everyday life at sea they know nothing. Strangely enough, only Mr. Clark Russell has attempted to give in literary form a vivid, veracious account of sea-life, and his thrice-noble books are far too ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... an illustration before proceeding?—some sentence easily handled, some commonplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim, I care not what. 'Contentment breeds Happiness'—That is a proposition with which you can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously true; provoking delirious advocacy as little as controversial ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the little disappointment? or was it the sense of his blindness brought home to him in that ludicrous commonplace way, and for that very reason all the more humiliating? or was it the sudden revulsion of overstrained nerves, produced by that slight shock? Or had he become indeed a child once more? I know not; but so it was, that he stamped on the floor with pettishness, and then checking ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... hoping he would hear the monosyllable "me." But the word was not spoken. In its place the phrase "us poor exiles," with which somewhat commonplace remark the young ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them we owe, however, these noble ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... 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 ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... rise above the commonplace, in an extensive building hastily constructed. And Portugal is shining in all the glory of wedding-cake ornamentation that the plaster of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... Lawyer Ed had suggested at first that the Mayor ride down in his automobile, but as all the horses in town had to be out at the same time, the experiment was voted too dangerous and the Mayor drove in a commonplace but safe cab. ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... to justify the privilege—the sick woman would be guarded, soothed, fortified by every expedient of science, every resource of humanity. Chance to be poor, and not only must you die when you need not, but must die with the minimum of comfort, the extreme of bodily and mental distress. This commonplace struck so forcibly upon Will's imagination, that it was as a new discovery to him. He stood amazed, bewildered—as men of any thinking power are wont to do when experience makes real to them the truisms of life. A few coins, or ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew Baines, Esq., a barrister, became a member of the cabinet, and another ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... took me so often to her encampment, and at the interest with which I listened to what they called her stupid talk. Certainly there was nothing poetical about the woman. Leigh Hunt's friend could not have elevated her commonplace into the sublime. She was immensely tall, and had a hard, weather-beaten face, surmounted by a dreadful horn comb and a heavy twist of hay-colored hair, which, before it was cut, and its gloss all destroyed ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... an understood thing. The president's violence was the first intimation to reach him in the heart of his artificial consciousness that his action was at all in the line of those foolish peculators whose discovery and flight to Canada was the commonplace of every morning's paper; such a commonplace that he had been sensible of an effort in the papers to vary the tiresome repetition of the same old fact by some novel grace of wit, or some fresh picturesqueness in putting it. In the presence of ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... not form a homogeneous class; men of widely differing tastes and attainments were included among them. There were workers and drones; there were men who made a signal success as seigneurs, and others who made an utter failure. But taken as a group there was nothing very commonplace about them, and it is to her two hundred seigneurs or thereabouts that New France owes much of the glamour that marks ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... whether about herself or others, only because they were the truth. The reader who shall condescend to bear this in mind will possess some little clew to the color and effect of her words as spoken. Often, where they seem simple and commonplace—on paper, they were weighty by their extraordinary air of truthfulness as well as by the deep music of her mellow, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Challoner, coming round the corner of the block, beheld his charming companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for he had long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths he damned this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone a second ere the swing-doors reopened, and she appeared again in company with a young man of mean and slouching attire. For some five or six exchanges they conversed together with an animated air; then the fellow shouldered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was already getting old. His daily cares and stormy domestic life,[61] his disappointments and passions, his commonplace and often degrading work, soon wore him out and, finally, exhausted his power. "Would you believe it?" he wrote to his friend Ferrand, "that which used to stir me to transports of musical passion now fills me with indifference, or even disdain. I feel as if I were ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... is a thing called love. I think women are none the better for knowing it. To a woman, it means to take some man—some utterly commonplace man, perhaps—perhaps, only an idle poseur such as you are, Felix—and to set him up on a pedestal, and to bow down and worship him; and to protest loudly, both to the world and to herself, that in spite of all appearances her idol really hasn't ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... all my life. If he's not an aristocrat to the finger tips, I'll give up all my work, turn Catholic, and go into a nunnery—which will distress you exceedingly. And then"—she waved a plump hand—"and then, as I've mentioned before, he reads the Religio Medici. The commonplace, vulgar young man of to-day no more reads Sir Thomas Browne than he reads Tertullian ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... is a name for a clown or commonplace character. Miss Burney ('Diary', 1904, i. 222) says of Dr. Delap:— 'As to his person and appearance, they are much in the 'John-trot' style.' Foote, Chesterfield, and Walpole use the phrase; Fielding Scotticizes it into 'John ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... his hearers this essential article of his faith—that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and form of celebration were "idolatry"—may have been quite a new idea. It was already, however, a commonplace with Anglican Protestants. Nothing of the sort was to be found in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI.; broken lights of various ways of regarding the Sacrament probably played, at this moment, over the ideas of Knox's Scottish disciples. Indeed, their consciences appear to have been ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... drilled more rigidly than the Western men, and had comparatively few long marches. Its members had something of the stiffness and precision of English and German soldiery, while the Western boys had the long, "reachy" stride, and easy swing that made forty miles a day a rather commonplace ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... would select a picturesque background for his figures; but events have an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In the present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,—a straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city neighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has none of those colonial associations which, like ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... winding ways and crown of turrets, forms the background of one scene; in another the drama is localised amid Renaissance architecture of the costliest style. Rustic types have been selected for the soldiers, and commonplace details, down to a patched jerkin or a broken shoe, bear witness to the patience and the observation of the master. But over all these things the glamour of Medusa's head has fallen, turning them to stone. We are clearly in the presence of a painter ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Bonaparte,' and articles on 'Where is France at?' with monographs in the leading reviews every month on 'Why I am what I am,' and all such stuff as that, I'd have condensed my career into one or two years, and ended by having my head divorced from my shoulders in a most commonplace fashion. Taciturnity is a big thing when you know how to work it, and so is proneness to irritability. The latter keeps you from making friends, and I didn't want any friends just then. They were luxuries which I couldn't afford. You have ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... Greek or Egyptian, he would have accepted it as a matter of course. But when she did speak it was in the soft, clear tones of a well-bred Englishwoman, and what she said was commonplace enough. ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... 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, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... a drum.[12] Enough of this class of epigrams are extant to be perfectly wearisome, were it not that, like the engraved gems from which their subjects are principally taken, they are all, however trite in subject or commonplace in workmanship, wrought in the same beautiful material, in that language which is to all other languages as a ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... means that the life contained in that form has gone back to the universal life, and will express itself again in some higher and better form. To think of God in this way is an inspiration and a help in the doing of the humblest tasks. It redeems life from the dominion of the sordid and commonplace. It supplies an incentive to endeavour, and fills the heart with hope and confidence. To put it in homely, everyday phraseology, God is getting at something and we must help Him. We must be His eyes and hands and feet; we must be labourers ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... was a man of small frame, but a large brain and a generous heart. His style of speech was clear, distinct and rapid. He could reason a question with great force, and could fringe the most commonplace subjects with wit and humor. He was a true man, a good ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... an example of the ridiculous lengths to which the national defence cranks will go in their hatching of alarmist reports, a rumour was actually spread in Fleet Street at an early hour this morning that this commonplace accident to the telegraph wires was caused by an invading German army. This ridiculous canard is reminiscent of some of the foolish scares which frightened our forefathers a little more than a century ago, when the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... with a woman whom you have never seen—with a shadow, a chimera? for what else can Miss Daw to be you? I do not understand it at all. I understand neither you nor her. You are a couple of ethereal beings moving in finer air than I can breathe with my commonplace lungs. Such delicacy of sentiment is something that I admire without comprehending. I am bewildered. I am of the earth earthy, and I find myself in the incongruous position of having to do with mere souls, with natures ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... officers, he found so much to be done, that in after years he used to look back upon the time spent there as the happiest of his life. After the stirring scenes through which he had passed in the Crimea and in China, it may have appeared to some a very commonplace, uninteresting sort of life to eke out for so many years, but no one more than Gordon felt the force of the truth conveyed ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... ear— "is accompanying the singers." I should have said drowning them. There are occasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them. High class moods come to all of us. The difference between the really high-class man and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, the eagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken. I have my wings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid earth and soar into the realms of art. I do fly ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... sward of the hill; psyche, the soul that longed to be loose. I would write psyche always instead of soul to avoid meanings which have become attached to the word soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy inddeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself. Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... might have dwelt and illustrated by many instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of hob-nobbing with all sorts and conditions of men, this desire of wide contact and intercourse has little show in his novels—the ordinary fibre of commonplace human beings not receiving much celebration from him there; another case in which his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in his novels. But the fact lies implicit in much I ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... recollections of Florence and Rome; modern Catholic art as it was being developed in the Jesuit churches of the Continent: of these things Williams would talk, and talk eagerly. Sometimes Augustina would timidly introduce some subject of greater practical interest to the commonplace English Catholic. Mr. Williams would let it drop; and then Mrs. Fountain would sit silent and ill at ease, her head and hands twitching in a helpless ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but the world would never accuse him, nor shut its doors upon him because he had accepted what she had so freely given. He was not an emotional man, but even he longed for some turn of life in which for her sake he might do something above the dead level of that commonplace heroism which begins in hard work and ends in the attainment of ordinary necessities. He felt his strength in him and about him, and he wished that he could let it loose upon some adversary in the physical satisfaction of fighting for what he loved. It was not ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... The commonplace-looking man in tweeds, who was the entire reverse of one's idea of an Emperor, grew confidential, and it was plain that he was quite as much impressed by Grichka as the Empress had been, for throughout the audience the monk had used to the full his ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... neat as to the matter of linen, was garrulous to the point of noisiness. He confined his remarks to the Colonel, or, in a general way, to the tables near by, with an occasional furtive glance at his wife's set, unsmiling face by way of noting the effect on her. The topics were commonplace enough: the weather, the prospects ahead, the improvements to be made in the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... And, Geoffrey, if I can't make you see this one of mine, I shall know your love could never mean strength to me—only weakness. And I shall be afraid,' she whispered. Her dilated eyes might have seen a ghost lurking there in the commonplace room. 'So afraid I should never dare give you the chance of making me loathe myself.' There was a pause, and out of the silence fell words that were like the taking of a vow. 'I would never see ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Grace's tone, Betty felt her own nerve slipping. She did not want to go into that silent house any more than the other girls did. Every instinct in her commanded that she run from the place to the commonplace safety of the road. She was afraid of what she might find on the other side of ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... she began again, and then, feeling that she must go on, she forced herself to utter words which at the time she felt to be commonplace. "People cannot marry without an income. Mr. Fielding did not think of such a thing till he had a living assured ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... not a very great event, even a dozen years ago; but somehow, I do not know why, I felt as though I was setting out in a new career of existence. I expected to return in a week, or in two weeks, at the most; yet, in spite of my exertion to make myself believe that the trip was quite a commonplace affair, it continued to thrust itself upon me as one of ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... Chatterton 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 easy ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... A commonplace series of Preces dia, with miniatures, were first sold off at mediocre prices. Needless to say, the illuminations of these books were ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house, a very poor, commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and make it symbolic. Not artistic—Heaven—O Heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things: the brave old bones of life. There are ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Doubtless the poems of Anacreon were delivered in this way. His themes were simple,—wine, love, and the glorification of youth and poetry; but his imagination and poetic invention so animated every theme that it is the perfect rendering which we see, not the simplicity of the commonplace idea. His delicacy preserves him from grossness, and his grace from wantonness. In this respect his poems are a fair illustration of the Greek sense of self-limitation, which guided the art instincts of that people and made them the creators ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... patient sufferer, and high minded conqueror, of her own accord took up a commonplace book, and read aloud for two mortal hours to her mother and Aubertin. Her voice only ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... forwarded to his proposed antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the "Oxford ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... invincible argument, when 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 the gout attacked him, would have been very angry if he had not been ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 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 ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or 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 the Japanese. ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... said he, in his nervous, hurried manner, "perhaps you would be better able to answer my question were I first to tell you a story—an ordinary, a very commonplace one, I fear, but with the virtue that it is short, and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... abundance of beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and execution that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The modern work of countries where gold is found in quantities is commonplace, vulgar and inartistic, when compared with the work of the old Irish period. Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of varying size and shape, were worn as diadems, collars, or even belts; crescent bands of finely embossed sheet-gold were worn above the forehead; ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... present who did not quite see the connection of this prayer with the topic of the evening. There were those who thought it very commonplace and rather childish in language. But how can we tell what strange, bewildering thoughts it raised in the ...
— Three People • Pansy
... talk—by Jove, how the man can talk!—and he has the faculty of throwing the glamour of romance over the most commonplace adventures. Indeed, the difficulty which I am going to have in writing this narrative is largely due to this romantic influence of his. I might have succeeded in writing a plain tale, for I have kept my diary faithfully, from day to day, and can set down our adventures, such ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... assume that a few years hence you will be in your hearts to one another what you are to-day. All I say before speaking to you according to that assumption is, if you DO change— if you DO come to find that you are more commonplace cousins to each other as man and woman than you were as boy and girl (your manhood will excuse me, Rick!)—don't be ashamed still to confide in me, for there will be nothing monstrous or uncommon in it. I am only your friend and distant kinsman. I have no power over you whatever. But I wish ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of Loneliness:[2] a parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find his proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful void and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is just this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the commonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning, creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, which presently vanish, to resolve his Eden into nothing, and leave him, with no companion but the horror of his own intensified isolation, in ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... and marked character seemed to breathe from the little, rather bowed figure, crowned with a lion-like head and falling light hair,—to glow in the keen, eager, blue eyes glancing on either side as he walked along. Nothing could be less commonplace, nothing less conventional, than his appearance in a room or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various |
