"Commonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... often, and I have always been so fond of him. And things are prettier there, somehow. There is a great difference in the way people live, and I mean to change some things. It isn't because one is ashamed to be old-fashioned; some of the old ways are lovely. It is only when you tack hardness and commonness on them and think ugliness has a real virtue in it. We will have both sides to talk about. But if you were going back to England, it would break ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... place—sometimes for a little while it almost seems as though it had petered out altogether. But when once the plunge has been taken, and the strangeness and wonder and glory of the new life have become ordinary and commonplace with the sweet commonness of dear, familiar, daily things, then the old friendship comes stealing back—deeper and more understanding, perhaps, than in the days before one of the two friends had come into ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... banks here now and triturates its own atoms, the hearts, to dust in the process. Yellow omnibuses and red cabs, dark shining carriages, chestnut horses, all rushing, and by their motion mixing their colours so that the commonness of it disappears and the hues remain, a streak drawn in the groove of the street—dashed hastily with thick camel's hair. In the midst the calm lions, dusky, unmoved, full always of the one grand idea that was infused into ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... able to recognize the superiority of a woman who lived in a cottage, the young ladies felt and disliked it; and the matron felt the commonness of the girls, without knowing what exactly it was. The girls, on the other hand, were interested in the young man: he looked like a gentleman! Ian was interested in the young women: he thought they were shy, when they were only "put out," ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... hood with a quilt from which the cotton was oozing; brought out the wash-boiler, did a washing, had dinner, sang about the fire; granther and the youngest baby gamboling together, while the limousinvalids, insulated from life by plate glass, preserved by their steady forty an hour from the commonness of seeing anything along the road, looked out at the campers for a second, sniffed, rolled on, wearily wondering whether they would find a good hotel that night—and why the deuce they hadn't ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid the strange, repellent grossness of him, the slight sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his rather fat ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the stages of reaction when in the representation of beauty we try to avoid everything that is obviously pleasing and that has been crowned by the sanction of convention. We are then tempted in defiance to exaggerate the commonness of commonplace things, thereby making them aggressively uncommon. To restore harmony we create the discords which are a feature of all reactions. We already see in the present age the sign of this aesthetic reaction, which proves ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... rough and scrubby), with dark grey eyes (I knew at once they were grey because the light struck into them) rimmed with black lashes, so long you couldn't help noticing them; black eyebrows and hair short and sleek like Stan's, or any other well-groomed man one knows. Besides, commonness shows in people's mouths more than anywhere else; it's hard to define, but it's there; and this man's mouth is the best part of his face—unless it's the chin; or perhaps the nose, I'm not quite sure which, though I've thought a good deal about them all, because of the mystery of finding such ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... there is little else in it to engage one. Aida is alive, but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery—something between the stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The music very rarely rises above commonness—that commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act) ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... picture that? Surely we should have pictured it coming with pomp and display that would at once have attracted all eyes; but God orders that it shall come without observation, unfolding its quiet beauty like the wayside flower, which there are few to see and very few to love. Commonness: that is the great note of the incarnation and the purposed ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... strongest claim upon its workmen, is the representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the present day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of which men see the most—that type of things which could never have been but that it might pass. The demand marks the commonness, narrowness, low-levelled satisfaction of the age. It loves its own—not that which might be, and ought to be its own—not its better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the sake of whose approach it exists. I do not think that the age is worse in this ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... that look of angry disgust with which Mr. Lovel surveyed it. Curtains and carpet were something the worse for wear, the old-fashioned furniture was a little sombre; but the rich binding of the books and a rare old bronze here and there redeemed it from commonness—poor jetsam and flotsam from the wreck of the great house, but enough to give some touch of elegance ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... friends, death is an enemy,—a hideous, hateful thing. The longer one looks at it, the more one hates it. The more often one sees it, the less one grows accustomed to it. Its very commonness makes it all the more shocking. We may not be so much shocked at seeing the old die. We say, 'They have done their work, why should they not go?' That is not true. They have not done their work. There is more work in plenty for them to do, if they could but live; and it seems ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... folk-songs, that existed among ourselves before the time of the Puritans, and survives in cottage gardens. Instinctive happiness, or joy of life, is one of the most important widespread popular goods that we have lost through industrialism and the high pressure at which most of us live; its commonness in China is a strong reason for thinking well ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... is our common schools which gives the keys of knowledge to the mass of the people. Our common schools are important in the same way as the common air, the common sunshine, the common rain,—invaluable for their commonness. They are the corner-stone of that municipal organization which is the characteristic feature of our social system; they are the fountain of that widespread intelligence which, like a moral ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... possible commerce with the rest of the world, wherein there were but an hundred families, but there were sheep, horses and cows, with other useful animals, wholsome fruits, and land enough for corn for a hundred thousand times as many, but nothing in the island, either because of its commonness, or perishableness, fit to supply the place of money; what reason could any one have there to enlarge his possessions beyond the use of his family, and a plentiful supply to its consumption, either in what their own industry produced, or they could barter for like perishable, useful commodities, ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat and the colour of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement, above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing he appreciated his commonness could present ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... box, and for once Bess was too ravenously hungry to protest at the "commonness" of it, and they set to at its delicious contents with ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... same there was something striking in that appearance. Face, figure and dress represented the wreck of more than one kind of distinction. The face must once have been exceptionally handsome, before an underlying commonness and coarseness had been brought out or emphasized by developments of character and circumstance. The mouth was now loose and heavy. The hazel eyes had lost their youth, and were disfigured by the premature wrinkles of either ill-health or dissipation. None the less, a certain ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at their bases. Sometimes the pillager meets prickles that sting him, as in the roses and briers; and if he is a little fellow he is sure to regard him with intense disgust, a bristly guard of wiry hair—hence the commonness of that kind of fortification. Against enemies of larger growth a tree or shrub will often aim sharp thorns—another piece of masquerade, for thorns are but branches checked in growth, and frowning with a barb in token of disappointment at not being able to smile in a blossom. In ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... once, and four years had altered him but little in that respect. He had not yet grown stout, but it was evident that Nature had that injury in reserve for him. To grow stout is not necessarily to look common, but if there is an element of inherent commonness in man or woman, a very little additional surface will make it manifest, as an enlarged photograph magnifies its own defects. The "little more and how much it is" had come upon the unhappy Tristram, once the slimmest of the slim. Life had evidently not gone too ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... life, the next best thing was to take his horse. Where cow thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to express the nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt" made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in swiftness ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... blow prepared to fly from your fists on provocation. I will merely say to you that it is a great thing to be a Man!—a Man as God meant him to be, brave, truthful, and self-reliant, with a firm faith in the Divine Ordainment of Life as Life should be lived. There is no disgrace in work;—no commonness,—no meanness. Disgrace, commonness, and meanness are with those who pretend to work and never do anything useful for the world they live in. The king who amuses himself at the expense and ruin of his subjects is the contemptible person,—not the labourer who digs the soil for the planting ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Reply Obj. 2: The commonness of a sin diminishes the shamefulness and disgrace of a sin in the opinion of men, but not as regards the nature of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... will not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations? All these things might be alleged against ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... thought an inseparable unit, forever joined, "though seldom together—like Castor and Pollux." His interest is in "Humanity," that is to say, a superior type of the species, with a corresponding contempt for "commonness," especially for the common man as a mere machine of "duty." On performances he set no great store: "Those countenances are most interesting to me in which Nature seems to have indicated a great design without taking time ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... quite two hours to reach it from San Francisco by train and nearly that by fast driving in a car, owing to the poor roads. Thus it was removed for the present from the contaminating contact of the "commuter" and all the commonness of suburbanism. Bellevue had, of course, its country club, with a charming new clubhouse, where polo was played in season, as well as the humbler forms of sport such as golf and tennis, and where a good deal of lively entertaining went on at all seasons. It ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... the same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment, the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all things became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell of love, but only after its barbs were already sticking in my heart. He was, I know now the bastard of that great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart; he brought the light of a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... argument in his favour. There was no book, Mr. Lowell said, that he knew of, or that occurred to his memory, with which Pepys's Diary could fairly be compared, except the journal of L'Estoile, who had the same anxious curiosity and the same commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself. Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... point, he did not "want him here," victorious over England, and he could not fail to see, with insight quickened by self-knowledge, that greatness and genius possess no charm against littleness and commonness, and that the "glory of the terrestrial" meets with its own reward. The moral is obvious, and as old as history; but herein lay the secret of Byron's potency, that he could remint and issue in fresh splendour the familiar coinage of the world's wit. Moreover, he lived in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... The commonness of fraud of this kind among the Virginia planters of the earlier period does not necessarily stamp them as being conspicuously dishonest. They were subjected to great and unusual temptations. Their vast power and their immunity from ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... give the woman half-a-sovereign and let her depart, for it was late. And in paying the half-sovereign to the woman Vera was suddenly overcome by temptation and asked for her fortune. The woman's grimy simplicity, her smiling face, the commonness of her teapot, her utter unlikeness to anything in the first act of Macbeth, encouraged Vera to believe in her magic powers. Vera's hand trembled as, under instructions, she tipped the tea-leaves into ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... law of priority, and he gave it up in such well-known names. I am in a perfect maze of doubt on nomenclature. In not one large genus of Cirripedia has ANY ONE species been correctly defined; it is pure guesswork (being guided by range and commonness and habits) to recognise any species: thus I can make out, from plates or descriptions, hardly any of the British sessile cirripedes. I cannot bear to give new names to all the species, and yet I shall perhaps do wrong to attach old names by little better than guess; I cannot at present tell ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... doubt that life in the more civilised nations has, in our own generation, largely increased. It is not simply that its average duration is extended. This, in a large degree, is due to the diminished amount of infant mortality. The improvement is shown more conclusively in the increased commonness of vigorous and active old age, in the multitude of new contrivances for economising and therefore increasing time, in the far greater intensity of life both in the forms of work and in the forms of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... various crested fowls {226} as sub-breeds under the Polish fowl; but I have great doubts whether this is a natural arrangement, showing true affinity or blood relationship. It is scarcely possible to avoid laying stress on the commonness of a breed; and if certain foreign sub-breeds had been largely kept in this country they would perhaps have been raised to the rank of main-breeds. Several breeds are abnormal in character; that is, they differ in certain points from ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... "the sea relieves everything about or near it, from the humiliation of commonness. The stamp of distinction rests on its printless waves. It was the first surface of the earth, and its primal regency has never been lost or forfeited;" a suspicion crossed my mind: "How was it your father ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... yieldeth for the help and health of such as would have the water of life to drink, and to cure their diseases withal: it yields a river of water of life. Moreover, since grace is said here to proceed as a river from the throne of God and of the Lamb, it is to show the commonness of it; rivers you know are common in the stream, however they are at the head (Judg 5). And to show the commonness of it, the apostle calls it 'the common salvation'; and it is said in Ezekiel and Zecharias, to go forth to the desert, and into the sea, the world, to heal the beasts ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... scope of the book—like Longfellow's "Psalm of Life"—have been omitted because of their exceeding commonness and their accessibility. Many hymns of very high value—like "Jesus, Lover of my soul," "My faith looks up to thee," "Nearer, my God, to thee," "When all thy mercies, O my God," "How firm a foundation"—have also been omitted because they are ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... others, and out in the open, Phoebe seemed to shed the commonness that had blighted her at that dreadful tea. She still coquetted, but it was with a fresh and dewy coquetry as of some innocent woodland creature that displays its charms as naturally as it breathes. Ishmael found himself pleased instead of irritated when he received her weight as he helped ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of her work. Comparing her with two other contemporaries, he wrote: "Miss Fannie Hurst shows the same artistic quality, the same instinct for reality, the same confident recognition of the superficial cheapness and commonness of the stuff she handles; but in her stories she also attests the right to be named with them for the gift of penetrating to the heart of life. No one with the love of the grotesque which is the American portion of the human tastes or passions, can fail of his joy in the play of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... shrinks from originality lest it should be regarded as impertinent; the other lest, being new, it should be wrong. We detect the one in the sensitive discreetness of the style. We detect the other in the complacency of its platitudes and the stereotyped commonness of its metaphors. The writer who is afraid of originality feels himself in deep water when he launches into a commonplace. For him who is timid because weak, there is no advice, except suggesting the propriety of silence. For him who is timid because fastidious, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the simplest of night-gear by Miss Alcott, and was wearing besides a blue cotton overall or wrapper in which the Rector's sister was often accustomed to do her morning's work. There was a marked incongruity between the commonness of the dress, and a certain cosmopolitan stamp, a touch of the grand air, which was evident in its wearer. The face, even in its mortal pallor and distress, was remarkable both for its intellect and its force. Buntingford stood a few paces from her, his sad eyes meeting hers. ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... trifling, the more impressive from the unusualness of their producing any impression at all—gives a philosophic pertinency to this last image; but it has likewise its dramatic use and purpose. For its commonness in ordinary conversation tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the reader or spectator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and in its component ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the maturing youth, love for women seemed something especially base and unbeautiful, for it showed itself to me first in all its commonness. I avoided all contact with the fair sex; in short, I ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... that the accurate measurement of the magnitude of our own failings should precede our detection of our brother's. Christ assumes the commonness of the opposite practice by asking 'why' it is so. And we have all to admit that the assumption is correct. The keenness of men's criticism of their neighbour's faults is in inverse proportion to their familiarity with their own. It is no unusual thing to hear ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is it to say, for instance, that the cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy, distinction? There was never a touch of commonness. Whatever he did or said, blood ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Piero della Francesca and others of Domenico Veneziano's following. They probably belong to the years 1460-1465. In the later of his preserved works, while there is no abatement of precise and laborious finish, we find beginning to prevail a certain harshness and commonness of type, and a lack of care for beauty in composition, the technical and scientific searcher seeming more and more to predominate over ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric in his ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... congestion makes for commonness and the death of the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of metropolitan America. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... which Augustus was to govern. This is the noble invention of our author, but it hath been copied by so many sign-post daubers that now it is grown fulsome, rather by their want of skill than by the commonness. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social inheritance and environment"; and Mr. Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on contemporary social circumstances, of the talents which we are accustomed to associate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is proved by the fact that some of the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock |
