"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... notions regarding appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment, the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local colours. Severe pedagogic handling of a historic ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... man talked to every one around him, tilted his hat over one eye, smoked cigars just as those men were doing that day in the lobby; acted like them, was one of them. In the Gold Nugget, Clayte was a very average Gold Nugget guest—don't you see? Commonplace there, just as the other Clayte had been commonplace in a bank or ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a commonplace against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer nowadays in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... of miracles are indeed over, ma'am," said the black sheep, "but then that is no reason why things which are in themselves commonplace should not appear miraculous to the uninstructed mind. When I inform you that our laws compel cabmen under heavy penalties to convey left umbrellas and parcels to the police-office, the miracle may not ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... them off from one another; if the whites are bigger than this it both tends to illegibility and makes the page ugly. I remember once buying a handsome fifteenth-century Venetian book, and I could not tell at first why some of its pages were so worrying to read, and so commonplace and vulgar to look at, for there was no fault to find with the type. But presently it was accounted for by the spacing: for the said pages were spaced like a modern book, i. e., the black and white ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... glaciers mingled with the clouds, or reared their grey ridges against the dark winter sky. It was a scene of cold, wild magnificence and desolation, which might have produced awe in the hearts of civilised men, though of course it must have seemed commonplace and tame enough to natives who had never seen anything much softer or ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... dinner in his admiration of a common ant-hill. La Fontaine did so once, because the well-known little community was engaged in what he took to be a funeral. He could not in decency leave them till it was over. Verse-making out of the question, this was to be a genuine poet, though, with commonplace mortals, it was also ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... might be set on foot in order to shake the fidelity of the Spaniards he commanded. I saw from his despatch that he feared the plotting of Romanillos, who, however, was not a person to cause much apprehension. Romanillos was as commonplace a man as could well be conceived; and his speeches, as well as his writings, were too innocent to create any influence on ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... unbecoming to be married—fades one's ribbons and makes one look old. An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy. A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace! The brutality of marriage creates definite situations; suppresses the will; kills choice; has a syntax, like grammar; replaces inspiration by orthography; makes a dictation of love; disperses all ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... "There isn't any pallid bust of Pallas," he announced. "But that jolly old raven's method of paying a visit was crude and commonplace compared to yours. He came tapping and rapping in the most old-fashioned way; but you reach me with a wonderful disembodied voice through the ever mysterious avenue of the telephone. It really makes me creepy. Won't you locate it? Give it ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... three, I believe,' answered Melville. 'Sir John has the commonplace courage of a common soldier, is honest enough, does what he is commanded, and understands what is told him, but is as fit to act for himself in circumstances of importance, as I, my dear parson, to occupy ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its domestic establishment by means ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... for it was not made in a commonplace manner. It said that his coming had consummated the else imperfect beauty of nature, and won its expression from Gnulemah's lips. The commonplace wondered to find itself transmuted into a compliment of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... you are seriously half in love 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 so finely ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... deadened the sound of rolling wheels, and the voices and footfalls of western London. The drawing rooms of those days were neither artistic nor picturesque—neither Early English nor Low Dutch, nor Renaissance, nor Anglo-Japanese. A stately commonplace distinguished the reception rooms of the great world. Upholstery stagnated at a dead level of fluted legs, gilding, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... yet retired, it would not be safe to commence operations for some hours. The stale, commonplace method of tying the sheets and blankets together, and thus forming a rope by which he could descend to the ground, occurred to him; but he had not much confidence in the project. He lay quietly on the bed till he heard the clocks on the churches ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... interpretation of Dis Aliter Visum. Mr. Symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal mistake." . . . But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our standpoint. That is, simply, that love is the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... many dozens of scripts that the writers have seen slipped into the "stamped addressed envelope enclosed" and sent back to amateur photoplaywrights, one of the greatest mistakes that the young writer makes in his choice of titles is in making them commonplace and uninteresting. When an editor takes out a script and reads the title, "The Sad Story of Ethel Hardy," would he be altogether to blame if he did put the script back into the return envelope utterly unread, as so many editors are accused ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... quoth Tommy, "I am a society bird, and Nature has marked out for me a course beyond the range of the commonplace, and my wife must learn to accommodate. If she has a brilliant husband, whose success gratifies her ambition and places her in a distinguished public position, she must pay something for it. I'm sure Billy Wren's wife would give her very bill to see her husband in the circles ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... happy, says her quivering under-lip. 'And are not you?' 'How can I be?' 'Take ship! For happiness is somewhere to be had.' 'Nowhere for me!' Her voice is barely heard. I am not melted, and make no pretence. With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the official language, though English is commonplace; inhabitants of the isolated southwestern islands speak ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sexual commerce there are only vestiges or caricatures of the poetry of amorous intoxication. It is no longer a question of deep love, but of essentially commonplace sexual enjoyment, wisely and prudently adapted to other objects of concupiscence, such as money, social position, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... have been watching some time now, ever since the death of Marinkovich; and I am certain that Mr. Pike never ventures on the main deck after dark. Yet he holds his tongue, confides in no man, and plays out the bitter perilous game as a commonplace matter of course and all in ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... him a commission for a royal staircase. I am going to ask the Little Genius to take me to see his work, but, alas! there will be an unsurmountable barrier between us, for I cannot utter in my new Italian anything but the most commonplace and conventional statements. ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sideboard, and filling a glass carried it to Wogan. The liquor was brandy. Wogan drank it as though it had been so much water. He was in that condition of fatigue when the most extraordinary events seem altogether commonplace and natural. But as he felt the spirit warming his blood, he became aware of the great difference between his battered appearance and that of the old gentleman with the rich dress and the white linen who stooped so hospitably above him, and he began to wonder at the readiness ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... fixedly at the old and familiar enough symbol of the rayed eye within the triangle. It was not commonplace or familiar set up there in that secret and awesome place and seen by a pale light. There was about it a stark and stern solemnity, such as suggested the winged circle of immortality carved above the rock-hewn doors of the tombs ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... realised something of the grandeur of his master's schemes and their reach beyond a merely commercial ideal through discovery to empire, yet preserves in the speeches and actions of captains and seamen alike, proof enough of the thoroughly commonplace aims of most of the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... in life, a pretty, commonplace woman, who had grown thin and querulous in the years that had passed since then, and who was not at all fitted to be the great lady of Gershom, as the rich man's wife might have been. That place was filled by Elizabeth, who filled it well and ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... surprising that I considered the devout father the true one, and the unbeliever perverted through evil influence. Thus, despite her absence, mother's influence prevailed. My memory had stripped her image of all that was trivial, commonplace and unlovely, and, little by little, with her suffering, her tears, her beauty, her tenderness, she began to shine for me in pure angelic holiness, the subject of my faithful and ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... preaching of that missionary with bald forehead and hoary beard, called Time. A voice less austere meanwhile enchains the captive ear of the poet. In fact, I am persuaded that the talent of Madame Sand has some of its roots in corruption; in becoming modest she would become commonplace. It would have been otherwise had she always remained in that sanctuary not frequented by men; her power of love, restrained and concealed beneath the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her heart those decent melodies which belong at once to the woman and the angel. However that may ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... she meant this would be the end of their intimacy, of anything but the commonplace service of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... It is a commonplace observation, but none the less true, that the story commenced in the Acts of the Apostles could not be finished by Luke, because the great activity, the commencement of which he recorded, is still going forward. Every tale ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... change as rapidly as some other commonplace things. In Willis' early life, money valued at less than one dollar was made of paper just as the dollar, five dollar or ten dollar bills were. There was a difference however, in the paper representing ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... to those commonplace but heartrending words. The door shut once more, and he went down ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... mind of the gazer all the horror seemed focussed in that calm statement, those commonplace letters written ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... the ship turned into the wide beauty of the Lower Bay, a situation grew out of the commonplace of life upon the steerage-deck which sharply and dramatically involved him with the two who had so ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... chip broken off from home, and every silent, ungainly step of the camels was carrying them more hopelessly away from it. That very morning how beneficent Providence had appeared, how pleasant was life!—a little commonplace, perhaps, but so soothing ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... possess some optic aid which should overcome the grossness of our vision, so that we might watch the dance of atoms in the double process of making and unmaking in the living body, we should see the commonplace, lifeless things which are brought by the blood, and which we call food, caught up into and made part of the molecular whorls of the living muscle, linked together for a while in the intricate figures of the dance of life, giving and taking energy as they dance, and then ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when it lifts a man's soul out of the slough of vulgar commonplace, and turns his thoughts to the contemplation of noble things, while at the same time it enables him to give something to the world which it would not willingly lose, and for which he can obtain adequate remuneration. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee, ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creation. First you gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for five whole years. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium? What says the Precieuse about you ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... 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 roseate ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... certain way—but I'm not heroic enough to be content with a shadowy love. I'm not an idealist. Imagination doesn't content me in the least. I'd rather have an inferior substance than ideal perfection. You see, I'm a very commonplace person at heart, Lawrence—almost vulgar. But these are my last words to you, so I've gone in for plain speaking. Now ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the Philistines, which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc., for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities. "Young Germany" was making itself felt in all cooerdinate directions: forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,—a sharp and spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... such an original way of speaking," he said, somewhat abashed by her sudden demand. "I mean—that—that what you say sounds different from what one would naturally expect. Not ordinary, not commonplace; I hardly know how to express it. ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... earth, she has divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered, that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent of human ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dipped, made a glory of splendor out of this commonplace bank. It soaked the mud in gold; it was in a royal mood, throwing its largess with reckless abundance to this poor of earth—to the slime and the mud. The long, yellow, lichen leaves massed on the rocks were dyed as if lying in a yellow bath. The sands were ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... most other parts of the world. Few visit it, unless driven by stern necessity; and still fewer are disposed to struggle against the enervating influence of the climate, and keep up even so much of intellectual activity as may suffice to fill a diurnal page of Journal or Commonplace Book. In his descriptions of the settlements of the various nations of Europe, along that coast, and of the native tribes, and their trade and intercourse with the whites, the writer indulges the ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... appreciated by the Romans. To them the form was what constituted a work poetical, not the creative idea that underlay it. To utilise fictitious situations as a vehicle for individual conviction or lofty declamation on ethical commonplace, was considered quite legitimate even in the Augustan age. And Seneca did but follow the example of Varius and Ovid in the tragedies now before us. It is to the genius of German criticism, so wonderfully similar in many ways ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... daily discussion. Formerly we concentrated our thoughts to read it, but now that is no longer possible; the attention is distracted and divided. There are still the same spirit and the same articles, but it is disagreeable to encounter by their side these commonplace and every-day matters." M. Augustine Thierry was right. The 'Globe' sank materially by becoming a political journal, like so many others; but it had not been the less essentially political from its commencement, in tendency and inspiration. Such was the general spirit of the time; and, far ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... them particularly well suited. Ruth, pardon me, dear, has imbibed some very peculiar and high-flown notions. No merely commonplace young man would make her happy. A man must have some ideas outside of what his daily life brings him, if she is to spend a moment's interested thought on him. She has repelled some of the most eligible advances for no obvious reasons whatever. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... keep alive the memories that make the place romantic. It would be a pity if utilitarian axe and fire were to spoil the beauty of Te Puke Tapu. There is plenty of other good land to be had. No need for us to covet this, fertile as it is; no need to make a commonplace farm out of that picturesque old battle-ground. May it long remain just as it is now—a lovely natural monument to ancient Maori valour, a quiet undisturbed resting-place for the warrior dead, the patriot ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... are continually made known by the press, not merely to those who attend the new jury courts established in the present reign, but to every one. And what do we read almost daily? Of things beside which the present case grows pale, and seems almost commonplace. But what is most important is that the majority of our national crimes of violence bear witness to a widespread evil, now so general among us that it is difficult to contend ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... unless you engage my services your wife is at the mercy of all the strangers she may meet and being in that peculiar condition of mind where she is bound to be attracted by things that would otherwise seem commonplace, there is no telling what the end might be. But with me she is perfectly safe. I guarantee results. I insure your heart's happiness against the future. Terms reasonable. ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... traveller. And then the next morning—she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for young wives to see young husbands away to the front with ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... my schoolmasters and my schoolfellows combined in thinking me so dull, I will display a tardy touch of 'proper spirit' and ask whether it may not partly have been because they were themselves so commonplace. I think that if some drops of sympathy, that magic dew of Paradise, had fallen upon my desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or, at all events, like that chimerical flower, the Rose of Jericho. As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual drought, gave me no opportunity ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... philosophic calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... through a confidant, of the still awkward youth whom she regarded as a boy. She had no intuition to divine the presence, or appreciate the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England, nor any ambition to ally herself with the wild race of Newstead, and preferred her hale, commonplace, fox-hunting squire. "She was the beau ideal," says Byron, in his first accurate prose account of the affair, written 1823, a few days before his departure for Greece, "of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful. And I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... never-dying youth of his nation than in voluminous encyclopaedias, or even in the marble Walhallas of Germany? The story and the songs of a miller's man who loves his master's daughter, and of a miller's daughter who loves a huntsman better, may seem very trivial, commonplace, and unpoetical to many a man of forty or fifty. But there are men of forty and fifty who have never lost sight of the bright but now far-off days of their own youth, who can still rejoice with those that rejoice, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... such as a black pearl, is a more distingue possession than a large brilliant which any rich and tasteless vulgarian can buy as easily as yourself. Of all precious stones, the opal is one of the most lovely and least commonplace. No vulgar woman purchases an opal. She invariably prefers the more showy ruby, emerald, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... any soul-destroying drudgery and devote his time and brains to better work. Beneath his journalistic ability there was a sound and delicate literary flair; and it had long been his dream to found a magazine which, while neither commonplace nor unduly "precious," should hit a happy mean between the cheap magazines devoted to more or less poor fiction, and the somewhat pompous reviews which held up the light of learning and research in a rather severe and ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the balcony. Then his place was taken by the Governor—small imperial, chapeau de forme, evening dress, landau and pair. Mademoiselle was desolee. Why couldn't civilised men look like Spahis? Why were all Parisians commonplace? Why—why? Her sister and brother-in-law called her the savage worshipper, and took her down to the cafe on the terrace to dine. And all through dinner mademoiselle talked of the beaux Spahis—in ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... nature than an oyster? Is the conversation between men and women filled exclusively with twaddle? You would think so, from reading these books; and why? They are written by married people, most of them, people who don't dare step over the line of the commonplace any more than a woman would dare order her dressmaker to ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics which concern only the interests of eternity; the men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a commonplace censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves. Against these objections, your candid judgment ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... fearful. A storm classed as "periodic," whose velocity can be measured, whose duration and direction can be determined beforehand by hours and distances, ceases to be terrifying. It becomes an accepted fact, akin to the steam-engine and the electric telegraph, marvelous yet commonplace. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... burning incense, are such simple and obvious procedures that any people might adopt them without prompting or contact of any kind with other populations who do the same sort of things. But if such apparently commonplace acts be investigated they will be found to have a long and complex history. None of these things that seem so obvious to us was attempted until a multitude of diverse circumstances became focussed in some particular community, and constrained some individual to make ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... I, 'that you with that angel face are to be the wife of a commonplace man, to be the mother of a family and go into a dirty, smoky kitchen. Shall your tender hands become hard as leather with washing, ironing, kneading, and who knows what housework beside? Shall your angel cheeks fade from ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... it that certain words, and those the homeliest, which the hand writes and the eye reads as trite and commonplace expressions—when spoken convey so much,—so many meanings complicated and refined? "Ah! if you ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... missionary like that, he'd make Glendow hum, an' the old church 'ud be packed to the doors every Sunday. It's them missionaries who has the hard time. Oh, they're wonderful people. Parson John's a good man, but he ain't in the same line with them nohow. He's too commonplace, an' don't stir ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... in the midst of the dull waters of daily triviality. It is impossible not to be serious under the weight of indefinable anxiety produced in us by such a spectacle. The surface of things may be smiling or commonplace, but the depths below are austere and terrible. As soon as we touch upon eternal things, upon the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, upon the secrets of life and death, we become grave whether we ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... usual homage paid to Princess Zairoff, for she possessed that rare and delicate mixture of indifference, languor, and disdain that is in itself a distinction, and makes ordinary womanhood and beauty suddenly feel coarse and commonplace. ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... Wittenberg had not yet kindled his firebrands. But the poet's object was not merely to reprove and to animadvert; he instructs also, and shows the fools the way to the land of wisdom; and so far is he from assuming the arrogant air of the commonplace moralist, that he reckons himself among the number of fools. The style of the poem is lively, bold, and simple, and often remarkably terse, especially in his moral sayings, and renders it apparent that the author ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... the performance with relative indifference. He had regarded it merely as a display of commonplace ability to amuse the people. Then came the wagon with the imitation of the Goose Man. On it stood Schwalbe the sculptor, gloriously drunk. Beside him stood Kropotkin the painter in his shirt sleeves, apparently ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... landscape that day—something of its brilliancy, color, and charm. The water seemed sluggish, the sky-tones dull, the meadows flat and commonplace. ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... drawn out a slender hand from the mass of furs in which she was enveloped, and extended it to him, as she replied in a tone which had a ring of tenderness beneath its commonplace tone,— ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... then he seemed likely to be one of the foremost men of the day, and if he could achieve his present position at his age, what would he not be in ten years' time? Quite a match for Anna Pynsent, in spite of her beauty and her sixty thousand pounds. If Nan had been a little more commonplace, Sir John would have aspired higher for her. But there was a strain of "quixotry," as he called it, in her nature, which made him always uncertain as to her next action. And he felt that it would be a relief to him to have her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of a town which had been spoken of this afternoon. She had somehow grasped the whole life of the place, and laid it bare to him in a few words—the light-hearted gaiety and the sordid misery, the black superstition and the towering history which overhung it, and the cheerful commonplace which, like the street cries and the gutter streams, ran through it all—the whole flavour of the thing. The girl opposite had been to the place too; she told him of the historic spots she had visited; she ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... had gathered from that individual, during his short visits home; and as she possessed a surprisingly retentive memory, her maternal reminiscences would have filled volumes,—to all of which James listened with the most earnest attention, not on account of the adventures, for they were commonplace enough, but for the mere pleasure of hearing Mrs. Waddel talk broad Scotch, from which he seemed to derive the most ludicrous enjoyment. Mrs. Waddel had two daughters, to whom nature had been less bountiful than even to herself. Tall, awkward, shapeless dawdles, whose ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... his brother's moroseness, attributed it to his strong feeling for a certain damsel, Silas turned on him in a fury. Ambition had even driven out all other feelings, and Dely Manly seemed poor and commonplace to the dark swain, who a month before would have gone any length to gain a smile from her. He compared everything and everybody to the glory of what he dreamed the Springs and its inhabitants to be, and ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... than any man who has ever lived in this country for the perilous task of occasional oratory. The freedom of movement which renders most speeches of this class diluted and commonplace was exactly what he needed. He required abundant intellectual room for a proper display of his powers, and he had the rare quality of being able to range over vast spaces of time and thought without becoming ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... thy dagger, Melpomene, at this profanation! The scandal is not ours, but Aubrey's, Shakspeare's earliest biographer, but who did not write till forty-six years after his death. His name and signature are connected with the buying and selling of land and theatrical shares, and such-like commonplace transactions; and his last will and testament, with which everybody is familiar, is as plain and prosaic as if it had been the production of a pig-headed prerogative lawyer. Now, in all this we see a sensible, sagacious, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... of company came Constance's return from extravaganzas to a sufficiently graceful every-day manner, only enough touched with high spirits and lawlessness to free it from the charge of commonplace. But the contrast of these high spirits with her own rather made Fleda's mood more quiet, and it needed no quieting. Of the sundry people that she knew among those presently assembled there were none that she wanted to talk to; the rooms were ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... gain the ideal of art. To see these reliefs best, one should stand directly across the lagoon from the rotunda. In the panel facing East one sees the figure of Art personified. On either side is a group showing the champions of art combating centaurs, that stand for the commonplace, materialistic things of life. In the next panel to the left, facing Southeast, is represented the bridling of the winged horse Pegasus, which to the Greeks symbolized the attainment of poetic inspiration. Here ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... isolated he is, mainly by reason of the poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... blind, soft, mad thing with beating, tremulous wings,—that should be Love! Whirled into the very heart of the ravening fire,—crushed, shrivelled out of existence in one wild, rushing rapture—that is what Love must be to me! One cannot prolong passion over fifty years, more or less, of commonplace routine, as marriage would have us do. The very notion is absurd. Love is like a choice wine of exquisite bouquet and intoxicating flavor; it is the most maddening draught in the world, but you cannot drink it every day. No, my dear Helen; ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted. Nor will any modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his banal brotherhood, the striking and often startling phases of the foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with well-worn and commonplace English equivalents, thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It was this beau ideal of a translator's success which made Eustache Deschamps write of his contemporary ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," in very truth "the observed of all observers," surely to-night he should be happy! For the soaring pinions of youth have borne him up and up at last, into the empyrean, far, far above the commonplace; the "Coursing Hound," with its faded sign and weatherbeaten gables, has been lost to view long and long ago (if it ever really existed), and to-night he stands above the clouds, his foot upon the topmost pinnacle; ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... was actually the famous Whatsitsname, she had drunk it in the ordinary way, neither holding it up to the light and saying, "Ah, there's a wine!" nor rolling it round the palate before swallowing. On the next day they went to a commonplace restaurant and drank a local and contemporary vintage at five francs the bottle, of similar colour but very different temperament. When she had finished her glass, she said hesitatingly, "Of course, I don't know ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... Margaret, can you see a little what that Christmas box has been to us? I can't bear to say, "Thank you"; it seems so commonplace and inadequate. And yet there is n't anything else I can say. And we do thank you, each and every one of us. We thank you both for our own gift, and for all the others, for each one's gift is making all the others happy. Do you see? Oh, I hope you ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... egregiously important; Kingsley so overwhelmed by the duty that lay before him; the woman in a whimsically embarrassing position with the odds, the laugh, against her, yet little likely to take the obvious view of things and so make possible a commonplace end. What would she do? What would Kingsley do? What would he, Dicky Donovan, do? He knew by the look in Kingsley's eyes that it was time for him to go. He moved down to Foulik Pasha, and, taking his arm, urged him towards the shore with a whispered word. The Pasha responded, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... burning of sweet incense in the temple of the ideals is not necessarily incompatible with a just regard for the commonplace realities. In the aftermath of the fine artistic glow, Griswold found himself straightway wrestling with the problem of present safety. If Miss Farnham had recognized him, his chances of escape had suddenly narrowed down to flight, immediate and speedy. He must leave ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... be commonplace and puerile—all the same it is true, it is inexhaustible, and the poets of all times have been open ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... asking the doctor what he meant, the Welshman, whose under jaw began to move violently, replied that he meant what he said. Here the matter ended, for the Lion, turning from him, looked at the writer. The writer, imagining that his own conversation hitherto had been too trivial and commonplace for the Lion to consider it worth his while to take much notice of it, determined to assume a little higher ground, and after repeating a few verses of the Koran, and gabbling a little Arabic, asked the Lion ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may {465} be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long, lonely years of waiting ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... mainsprings of political action, and fixed in his mind clear principles for England's foreign policy. Such a mass of facts and such a maze of interests would have encumbered and perplexed a more commonplace intellect, but Defoe handled them with experienced and buoyant ease. He had many arts for exciting attention. His confinement in Newgate, from which the first number of the Review was issued ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... of this, they are not satisfied with a commonplace mascot. Soldiers and sailors, and marines too, must have a mascot. A cat, a dog, a goat, a parrot, a monkey, a pig, a lion cub, or a bear are among the commonest and most popular of mascots. Therefore the marines would usually disdain any one of these. If any of them should happen ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... has been no point of contact. Even before Synge published his proofs of the keen poetry in everyday life, Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggishness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before him. An ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... "Louisa Hawthorne was a most delightful, lovable, interesting woman—not at all 'commonplace,' as has been stated. Her death was a great sorrow to all her friends. Her name was Maria Louisa, and she was often called Maria by her mother ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... taken her cash, and turned her loose, my lord," answered Solmes, as if he had been speaking of the most commonplace transaction in the world; "but I know the woman's nature so well, and am so much master of her history, that I can carry her off the country in twenty-four hours, and place her where she will never think of returning, provided your lordship ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... exquisite work of art, such as a fine intaglio or cameo, or a natural rarity, such as a black pearl, is a possession more distingue than a large brilliant which any one who has money enough can buy as well as yourself. Of all precious stones, the opal is the most lovely and commonplace. No merely vulgar ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost |
