"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the leading feature of the international history of the whole century. But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries. It was a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of literature that appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the French books, which ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... see her to-morrow," she remarked. "She's just the same. I'm rather glad, you know, that Krak hasn't been softened by age. It would have been commonplace." ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... regretted as the best the country had ever had. Colonel Wetherall's merit did not depend on his being the last of a series. Phrases such as 'he was worshipped by the men' have become so hackneyed as to be meaningless, nor shall I use an even worse commonplace, that 'he was sparing of his words.' Wetherall was just a rattling good Commanding Officer, a true friend, and a fine soldier. His successor, E. M. Woulfe-Flanagan, came from the East Surreys. He bore a distinguished record of ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... taking a place in standard literature. He was conscious of it himself, and was accustomed to say that it was the mission of his life to make up cartridges for others to fire. The little volume of 'Miscellanies,' including his commonplace book and his notes for his books, which was published by his daughter, exhibits with great clearness the character of his mind. Though a very candid and, in the best sense of the word, a very tolerant man, and an excellent scholar, he had, I think, little power of reproducing ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... there is often in the public mind this poorer type of teacher; and when an idea or an ideal, however low, becomes once established, it is changed only with difficulty. The commonplace individual, the mediocre type of man or of woman, is by many regarded as a fairly typical representative of what the teacher usually is; or, as the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than the average. ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... a number of pictures of Cuyp there, which satisfied my thirst for coloring, and appeared to me as I expected the Claudes would have done. Generally speaking, his objects are few in number and commonplace in their character—a bit of land and water, a few cattle and figures, in no way remarkable; but then he floods the whole with that dreamy, misty sunlight, such as fills the arches of our forests in the days of autumn. As I looked ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... Minnesota and Dakota have established classes in "the Scandinavian language" in their state universities, evidently leaving it to be decided as an academic question which is the Scandinavian language. Without brilliance, producing few leaders, the Norseman represents the rugged commonplace of American life, avoiding the catastrophes of a soaring ambition on the one hand and the pitfalls of a jaded temperamentalism on the other. Bent on self-improvement, he scrupulously patronizes farmers' institutes, high schools, and extension courses, and listens with intelligent ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... caress was beautiful and pathetic in its lowliness of humility and earnest affection—too earnest for the commonplace outlet of words. It was to slip to her knees at his feet, and kiss his hand, then lay her cheek upon it, as some dumb, devoted ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... justly the composer's idea. Take, for instance, the well-known change which every soprano who sings the role of Leonora introduces in the Miserere scene of Il Trovatore. The passage occurs four times in succession, and as printed becomes commonplace and monotonous. ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... commonplace remark tranquillized Mrs. Dean at once, and, taking off the upper shawl with a fussy gesture, she settled herself ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... sections of the world. He had visited every country. He had entered every port that could be reached from the ocean—and all the time he had felt the Earth shrinking before the gods of speed. The time would soon come when everything on Earth would be commonplace. Then man's urge to go places he hadn't seen before would take him away from the Earth entirely—when he would begin the task of making even the universe shrink to appease the gods of speed. Somehow the thought was a ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... night in the hay loft upon the newly harvested hay. There, buried in its fragrant depths and drawing deep breaths of the clean unbreathed air that swept in through the great open barn doors, Cameron experienced a joy hitherto undreamed of in association with the very commonplace exercise of sleep. After his first night in the hay mow, which he shared with Tim, he awoke refreshed in body and with a new courage in ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... "The clothes are commonplace," remarked Holmes, "save only the overcoat, which is full of suggestive touches." He held it tenderly towards the light. "Here, as you perceive, is the inner pocket prolonged into the lining in such fashion as to give ample space for the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... they had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, shall be no longer with us to warp our better judgment, Jefferson Davis will sink to the ordinary level as a statesman and a soldier. It will be seen that his intellect was of the commonplace, his judgment ofttimes faulty,—that he can have no claim on the bays that lie ever green upon the brow of genius; but his dauntless courage, his devotion to his people, his purity of purpose—in a word, his American manhood—may well defy the crucial test ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... waiting to take the guests up to the church. 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
... institutions as mechanically constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the frame apart. Then a new ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Socialist movement. Since his life had been caught up into the current of this great stream, things which had before been the whole of life to him came to seem of relatively slight importance; his interests were elsewhere, in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know—so many wonders to be discovered! Never ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... rival, in any particular, being Richard Henry Lee. It helps one now to understand the real reputation he had among his contemporaries for practical ability, and for a habit of shrinking from none of the commonplace drudgeries of legislative work, that during the first few days after his accession to the House he was placed on the committee of ways and means; on a committee "to inquire into the present state of the account of the commonwealth against ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... do a good deed, you may do a hundred small kindnesses on the way. Elsie's quest seemed very likely to prove fruitless, but in the seeking she was scattering flowers as she went along. Andrew, who sometimes found his life sadly commonplace, picked up a blossom or two, and wore them thankfully. The street, the shop, and the parlour were all touched and beautified by these little graces which a woman ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... irregular; the mouth being too large and the lips too thick, with—alas! the shade of a moustache; white teeth, a little too small; a commonplace nose, a slightly pug; and her mother's eyes—her best feature. She has the eyebrows of her Uncle Des Rameures, which gives an air of severity to the face and neutralizes the good-natured expression-a reflex from the softness ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... a flaming tree, perhaps some cave man making fire and consumed on the instant when he succeeded, had ignited the sheet of rising gas, and the result was the wall of flame. It was all natural and commonplace, for the time. There were other upleaping flame sheets in the surrounding region forever burning—as there are in northern Asia to-day—but Ab knew of these fires only from Old Mok's tales. He stood wonderstruck at what ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... its object. Imitation is a way in which this endeavor may gratify itself when the interest in the object is of a certain kind. It is obvious that we do not try to imitate all manner of actions, without distinction, merely because they take place under our eyes. What is familiar and commonplace or what for any other reason is unexciting or insipid fails to stir us to re-enact it. It is otherwise with what is strikingly novel or in any way impressive, so that our attention dwells on it with relish ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... aspen tree in an Iowa slough! Yes, but more than that. This is the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring. When the pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more than that which met the eye existed in the sacred things; that whosoever entered the temple of Lindus, to do honor to Demeter, the productive and nourishing power of the earth, must be pure in heart if he would gain reward. ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... unworthy of an honest inquirer, and never can be decisive of anything. It is the cowardly expedient of men who shrink from scrutiny, and dread exposure. Nothing so easy, for example, as to repeat the old commonplace about "irreconcileable discrepancies" in the "Synoptical Gospels:" but why, instead, are we not told, which these irreconcileable discrepancies are? For my own part, I freely renew in this place the challenge ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... is at best, but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... didn't seem to care for work, he wasn't much at school. His speech was slow and commonplace—you wouldn't call him fool. And yet until the war broke out you'd calmly pass him by, For nothing in his make-up or his way would catch your eye. He seemed indifferent to the world, the kind that doesn't ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... everything is complete; the humour, though brilliant, is yet always subordinate to the progress of the story; the plot is inevitable, and its turning-point (the first proposal of Darcy) occurs exactly when it ought; while all fear of a commonplace ending is avoided by the insertion of the celebrated interview between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth. It gives us also an excellent example of the way in which Jane Austen composed her stories. We are always in the confidence of the heroine, who is hardly off the stage throughout the whole novel; ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... evident. We ought to 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 chivalry of ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... furniture as a stove, as if they were an old married couple returning home after paying a visit, had a restorative effect on nerves still a little jangly. That was the only way to look at it: In a thoroughly commonplace manner. As he had said himself, it was a business undertaking. She gave a perfectly natural ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... for water to run down from the upper springs, but it requires a divine impulse to flow up from the valley in the nether springs. There is nothing that tells more of Christ than to see a Christian rejoicing and cheerful in the humdrum and routine of commonplace work, like the sailors that stand on the dock loading the vessel and singing as they swing their loads, keeping time with the spirit of praise to the footsteps and movements of labor and duty. No one ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of the Hellenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference between Man and God. Sophrosyne in religion was the message of the classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first Theos. At any rate the primeval kings ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... heard him for the first time his appearance was always a disappointment. Altgeld was so earnest and sincere, so full of his message that he scorned all the tricks of oratory, but still he must have been aware that his insignificant form and commonplace appearance were a perfect foil for the gloomy, melancholy and foreboding note of earnestness that riveted his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... emergency. According to the current assumptions of the writer and the preacher, the one commanding law is that men should cling to truth and right, if the very heavens fall. In principle this is universally accepted. To the partisans of authority and tradition it is as much a commonplace as to the partisans of the most absolute and unflinching rationalism. Yet in practice all schools alike are forced to admit the necessity of a measure of accommodation in the very interests of truth itself. Fanatic is a name of such ill repute, exactly because one who deserves ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... survivors. That was all they ever knew of the fate of their late captain. But for what some would term a mere accident, even that and their own fate would have remained unknown to the world—at least during the revolution of Time. The romances of life are often enacted by commonplace people. Many good ships with ordinary people on board, (like you and me, reader), leave port, and are "never again heard of." Who can tell what tales may be revealed in regard ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masque.' She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... three songs were kept in his desk for a year and then kept by a publisher for a year longer, and finally brought out in 1889. To his great surprise, the "Serenade," which he calls "just a little bit of commonplace melody," had an immense sale and created a demand for more of his work. The absolute simplicity of this exquisite gem is misleading. It is not cheap in its lack of ornament, but it eminently deserves that high-praising epithet (so pitilessly abused), "chaste." It has the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... as the cave stretched. He came to a sharp turn in the cave, with the failing lamplight now behind him, so that his shadow confronted Jurgen, blurred but unarguable. It was the proper shadow of a commonplace and elderly pawnbroker, and Jurgen regarded ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... you mention, convince me, without doubt, that it is no other reason (than that of reverence to her mother's name). Strange enough, this pupil of mine is unique in her speech and deportment, and in no way like any ordinary young lady. But considering that her mother was no commonplace woman herself, it is natural that she should have given birth to such a child. Besides, knowing, as I do now, that she is the granddaughter of the Jung family, it is no matter of surprise to me that she is ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... good Cure, in his calm, philosophical way, had brooded much over the talk in the garden upon France, the Revolution, and Napoleon. As a rule, his sermons were commonplace almost to a classical simplicity, but there were times when, moved by some new theme, he talked to the villagers as if they, like himself, were learned and wise. He thought of his old life in France, of two ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... put his pipe back to his lips—keenly alive to the fact that the exigency of the moment demanded a little polite exchange of commonplace. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... with their eyes and tongues, and you come to have the same interest in the world that other men have—and why shouldn't you?—then your imagination will not be running away with you, or making angels out of common little persons like myself—how dreadfully prosy and commonplace you have no idea! And I forbid you to allow Willie to stick your hat full of flowers, when you go fishing together; and order you to make that young impudence respectful to you on all occasions—asserting your authority, if necessary. And, lastly, I prefer you should ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the art which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like genius. 5. In 1685 Louis XIV. signed the ordinance that revoked the Edict of Nantes. 6. The thirteen colonies were welded together by the measures which ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... all right again in a few days," he said formally as his eyes met Patty's upraised glance. In the warm room all the glamour of the twilight—and of that hidden country within his mind—had faded from her. She looked fresh and blooming and merely commonplace, he thought. A brief half hour ago he had felt that he was in danger of losing his head; now his rational part was in the ascendant, and his future appeared pleasantly tranquil. Then the girl smiled that faint inscrutable smile of hers, and the disturbing green rays shot from her eyes. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... from the very simplest, most commonplace point of view, that it is madness to remain under the roof of a building which cannot support its weight, and that we must leave it. And indeed it is difficult to imagine a position more wretched than ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... not even come out of his hut, but sent Naaman word to go and wash seven times in Jordan and he would be cleansed. Now Naaman flew into a rage, because the prophet had, in the first place, not even deigned to speak to him, and, secondly, had ordered a ridiculously commonplace cure for him. He stormed that he would do no such thing as wash in that old Jordan River. He had better waters at home. Let the prophet keep his old Jordan for such as he was. And he rode off in great dudgeon. Rome is the leprous gentleman, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the Parish Church will stand for ever before he upsets it, and he will never approach that altitude of polemical phrenitis which will induce him to smash any part of it. His pulpit language is invariably well chosen; some of his subjects may be rather commonplace or inappropriate, but the words thrown into their exposition are up to the mark. He seldom falters; he has never above one, "and now, finally, brethren," in his concluding remarks; he invariably gives over when he has done—a plan which John Wesley once ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... pitied; but any expression of sympathy seemed repugnant to her. Any one so utterly lonely, so absolutely without interest in existence, he had never seen or thought to see; and yet he could not bring himself to like her, or to say more than the mere commonplace utterances of society. Though he was her clergyman, and bound by the sacredness of his office to be specially tender to the bruised and maimed ones of his flock, he could not get her to acknowledge her maimed condition to him, or to do anything but listen to him with cold attention, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... labour;—the random notes, jotted down now and then, sometimes with long intervals between their dates, make such a mass of worthless literature. This diary-keeping is a very foolish habit, after all. Why do I keep this record of a most commonplace existence? For my own edification and improvement? Scarcely, since I very rarely read these uninteresting entries; and I very much doubt if posterity will care to know that I went to the office at ten o'clock on Wednesday morning; that I couldn't get a seat in the omnibus, ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... that sad and sordid little stage story, ye rising generation—it is not for nothing that the great stupid public of older days, ignorant alike of Teutonics and chromatics, but wise in pity and terror, as old Aristotle knew, took it to their commonplace hearts! Do not trouble yourselves to explain to me that Gretchen was but an episode in a great cosmic philosophy; I knew it once, when I was young like you. But I am nearly sixty now—worse luck!—and I see why the cosmic philosophy has been quietly buried and the episode ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... 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
... you a few pointers on game," Carr remarked at last. "He has the sporting instinct. It hasn't become a commonplace routine with him yet, a matter of getting meat, as it has to the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to the intellect that sometimes we must be dragged away from it to regard the softer lines of later art, with the ingratitude and reluctance of childhood when torn from its fairy tales to read of real people in the commonplace of ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... I am here in opposition to the popular as well as the scientific view. No commonplace is better received than that, "Eternal progress is the law of nature;" though by what process eternal laws are discovered is ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... dust-coloured beard, invited no attention. One seemed always to have known this face—thick-featured, immobile, undistinguished. Its accessories for the time being were even more than ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were ragged with neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes looked as if he had slept in them. The hands resting on his big knees were coarse in ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... not believe me, if I did. The reason for this trip is so simple and commonplace that if I were to confess its purpose to you, you would suppose I were attempting deceit. Oh, yes, you would, so I might just as well remain still. Besides it can make no difference anyway. When we reach Jonesboro this morning you will ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... walked into the office of Messrs. Round and Crook in Bedford Row. Messrs. Round and Crook stood high in the profession, and were men who in the ordinary way of business would have had no personal dealings with such a man as Mr. Dockwrath. Had any such intercourse become necessary on commonplace subjects Messrs. Round and Crook's confidential clerk might have seen Mr. Dockwrath, but even he would have looked down upon the Hamworth attorney as from a great moral height. But now, in the matter of the Orley Farm Case, Mr. Dockwrath had determined ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... candidate for admission entered the cave, he found himself vis-a-vis with fifty masks, of all shapes, forms and appearances; some horrible, some odd, some commonplace, and some fantastical, and altogether, a medley of strange, undecipherable, yet impressive combination of devices, well calculated to excite a feeling of awe, and, with the timid, of terror, in the mind of the beholder. ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... brought together and arranged the materials for an estimate of Bacon's character. In the result, in spite of the force and ingenuity of much of his pleading, I find myself most reluctantly obliged to differ from him; it seems to me to be a case where the French saying, cited by Bacon in one of his commonplace books, holds good—"Par trop se debattre, la verite se perd."[1] But this does not diminish the debt of gratitude which all who are interested about Bacon must owe to Mr. Spedding. I wish also to acknowledge the assistance which I have received from Mr. Gardiner's ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... was the same Scipio who had the dream—who, in truth, was not a Scipio at all, but a son of Paulus AEmilius, whom we remember in history as the younger Africanus. Cato rushes at once into his subject, and proves to us his point by insisting on all those commonplace arguments which were probably as well known before his time as they have been since. All men wish for old age, but none rejoice when it has come. The answer is that no man really wishes for old age, but simply wishes for a long life, of which old age is the necessary ending. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrars, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... forever picking up out of the dust, and with them achieving noble and brilliant successes. Men, alert and eager, are wanted, men with heroic heart and princely hand, to see and use the opportunities that lie everywhere in the most commonplace life. ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... What would our lives become, what we ourselves? Dreams or illusions, call them what you will, They lift us from the commonplace of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... choke. I am all of a flutter myself. Louise has had her father look over Kitty's papers, and it is almost too commonplace to tell, but it is just perfectly lovely, all the same. The name 'Schulkill' is on the deed to the property over at Luna Land, and the name Morehouse, that's the Aunt Hannah and Uncle Pete name, is only told of in Kitty's mother's ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... fairy-tale. If the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and hateful sanity can be, there would really be less point in the insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife—or the not much milder insanity of Mrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the sensational in the commonplace: and Jane Eyre remains the best of her books (better even than Villette) because while it is a human document written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... said Rowena, "to cease a language so commonly used by strolling minstrels, that it becomes not the mouth of knights or nobles. Certes, you constrain me to sit down, since you enter upon such commonplace terms, of which each vile crowder hath a stock that might last ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Her interest in the commonplace and (to his mind) unromantic irritated him; but an instinct of good manners, that was not the least of his charm, compelled him to humour her. Once she sat for a whole hour in a dark cellar that smelt of tallow where a couple ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... should the King of Prussia sacrifice his power and prerogative? The question is really as absurd as it would be to ask, why is not an English Parliament content with the power enjoyed by the Prussian Parliament? It was a commonplace of the time, that the continued conflict shewed a want of statesmanship; so it did, if it is statesmanship always to court popularity and always to surrender one's cause when one believes it to be right, ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... my spirit gets snow-blind; all things take on the same color, or no color; my thought loses its perspective; the inner world is a blank like the outer, and all my great ideals are wrapped in the same monotonous and expressionless commonplace. The blackest of black ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Glenfern. She had attained this eminence partly from having a little more understanding than her sisters, but principally from her dictatorial manner, and the pompous decisive tone in which she delivered the most commonplace truths. At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the whole neighbourhood. As sensible woman she regulated ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... one serviceable, safe, certain, remunerative, attainable quality in every study and in every pursuit is the quality of attention. My own invention or imagination, such as it is, I can most truthfully assure you, would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention. Genius, vivacity, quickness of penetration, brilliancy in association of ideas—such mental qualities, like the qualities of the apparition of the externally armed head in Macbeth, will not be commanded; ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... The commonplace statesmen who, in rash frivolity of mind and mistaken in all their calculations, set fire last July to the whole of Europe and even to their own hearths and homes, have now noticed their fresh colossal mistake, and in the Parliaments of Budapest and Berlin have poured forth ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... lovely, innocent eyes; and oh! it was a sweet, sweet mouth! But the eyes never wavered, and the mouth had no trace of weakness in its dainty curves. You have reckoned without your host, John Arthur. It is no commonplace school-girl with whom you have to deal. Madeline Payne possesses a nature all untried, yet strong for good or evil. Intense in love or hate, fearless to do and dare, she will meet the fate you bring upon her—but woe to those who have compassed her downfall! If your hand has shaped the ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... eh? Then, is one to assume that you are merely a band of ordinary, commonplace pirates, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... manufacturers from St. Louis, had made matters worse. Such wealth!—such careless, vulgar, easily gotten wealth!—heaped up by means that seemed to the outsider so facile, and were, in truth, for all but a small minority, so difficult. A commonplace man and a frivolous woman; yet possessed, through their mere money, of a power over life and its experiences, such as he, Faversham, might strive for all his days and never come near. It might be said of course—Herbert Ransom would probably say it—that all men are worth the wages they ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was a man of ignoble mind, and had always objected to marrying a woman so far beneath him. The sight of his bride, with her rustic air, and the ill-made commonplace-looking clothes in which she was dressed, made his face burn with shame, for he knew that a sneer was lurking on the face of everyone who had gathered to have ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the remoteness of the journey I had come if it were measured by my ignorance, replied, "The urn, stranger, the urn does that—what else? How it may be in that out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but here—'tis so commonplace I should have thought you must have known it—we put each new year the names of all womenkind into an urn and the men draw for them, each town, each village by itself, and those they draw are theirs; is it conceivable your race has ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... memories of her girlhood. This was Bath, where she appeared in the Assembly Rooms. The attitude of the press was distinctly inimical. "We must say," was one acid comment, "that a greater sell we have not met with for a very long time. All the audience got for their money were some remarks of the most commonplace and twaddling description. They lasted about an hour, and even this was an hour too much." Still, Brighton, where the tour finished, more than made up for Bath; and she was so successful there that "the Pavilion was crammed ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... trot, she played it with unaccountable spirit and taste, so that the sound did not jar me—but the inference hurt a little. I said nothing, however. Then she played "Smiles," and the sweet commonplace air said all sorts of things to me—Desire to live again, and dance, and enjoy foolish pleasures—How could this little iceberg of a girl put so much devilment into the way she touched the keys? If it had not been for the interest this problem caused me, the longing ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... on his descriptive powers he realized that he could not do his best work on minute canvases. We have already seen how he contrasted himself with Jane Austen. "The exquisite touch," he said, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... warm recollection of the 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... proceeding, and, as I pointed out, in Tannhaeuser there are no leit-motifs, though passages and parts of passages are repeated. In Lohengrin it is used rather for a dramatic than a musical purpose. By the time he wrote Tristan he had learnt the splendid artistic uses to which a rather commonplace device could be put. The differences between the leit-motif in Lohengrin and the leit-motif in Tristan are two: in Tristan they are more significant—indeed, they are pregnant to bursting—and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... animal bred for speed and grace, and for the easy movement which makes it comfortable to the equestrian. Between these extremes we may note minor differences which, though they may not strike those persons who take only a commonplace view of the creatures, are most marked to the initiated. The trotter, the coach horse, the strong but nimble animals which are used in fire-engines and other heavy carriages which have to be swiftly moved, mark the results of breeding designed to insure particular qualities, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... just when the parish minister was saying grace, and that many of the people from outside noticed it, and "they just looked at each other." I was myself in the room, but as we had just had a very physical and commonplace disturbance—the arrival of an uninvited and intoxicated guest, of which the other people did not know as I did—I ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... 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 idea that he may add a trifle to the general information of ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... it? Now, do you for a moment suppose that when a carefully-trained medical man of great experience is called in to a patient suffering from shock and a long immersion he would prescribe and exhibit such a commonplace remedy ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... introduced to her mother. She asked him to call. He came. He talked mostly to her mother, but it was clear that it was Henrietta he came to see. Another dance, another call, and meetings at friends' houses, and wherever she was he wanted to be beside her. It was an exquisitely happy month. He was a commonplace young man, but what did that matter? There was nothing in Henrietta to attract anyone very superior. And perhaps she loved him all the more because he was not soaring high above her, like all her previous divinities, but walking side by side with her. Yes, she loved him; by the time he had asked ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... see, the horse and armor was only a frame, an accidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date and practical and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thing with a gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we call machinery. But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le Duc Somebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor Comte Somebody-Else, with his wife or his mistress—I say, supposing it held—well, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... in good spirits. He sidled up to me, uttering aloud some merry commonplace, and then ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... means pretend to claim the merit of having made the above discovery. It has, in fact, long been secretly acted upon by certain enlightened cabinets, and is, together with divers other notable theories, privately copied out of the commonplace book of an illustrious gentleman who has been member of congress, and enjoyed the unlimited confidence of heads of departments. To this principle may be ascribed the wonderful ingenuity shown of late years in protracting and interrupting negotiations. Hence the cunning measure of appointing ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the chair ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of Mr. Anthony Trollope's novels. And they are generally very good. What can be more delicious than the "spooning" in Home, if it is not the billing and cooing in Ours? But what can be more commonplace or more objectionable than the frequent remarks about love and Cupid scattered through his plays? Tom Stylus says in Society, "Love is an awful swindler—always drawing upon Hope, who never honors his drafts—a sort of whining beggar, continually moved ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... "So, Tom, I hear you had company very late last night. Upon my soul you are a happy fellow, who have not been in town above a fortnight, and can keep chairs waiting at your door till two in the morning." He then ran on with much commonplace raillery of the same kind, till Jones at last interrupted him, saying, "I suppose you have received all this information from Mrs Miller, who hath been up here a little while ago to give me warning. The good woman is afraid, it seems, of the reputation of her daughters." "Oh! she is ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... seemingly listened with all cold serenity of countenance to Madame d'Alberg's commonplace remarks, she quietly stretched out her blue satin slipper and proceeded to impress her negligent cousin with the fact that she wanted him to fulfil an old promise of his; not heeding her first gentle ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... amid the many buffets and reverses common to all successful movements, has gained such notable ground in the sentiment of the British people and of their colonists. That immense practical difficulties have to be overcome, in order to realize the ends towards which such sentiments point, is but a commonplace of human experience in all ages and countries. They give rise to the ready sneer of impossible, just as any project of extending the sphere of the United States, by annexation or otherwise, is met by the constitutional lion in the path, which the unwilling ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... Nangis, now a very commonplace Marshal of France, was at that time in full bloom. He had an agreeable but not an uncommon face; was well made, without anything marvellous; and had been educated in intrigue by the Marechale de Rochefort, his grandmother, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... as in Pickaback. So strong is the dramatic effect conveyed by these pictures that the figures seem actually taken unaware in the very act of performance, as by a snapshot in modern photography. This quality of "momentariness," as Phillips calls it, so dangerous in the hands of a commonplace painter, lends a peculiar fascination to many of Reynolds's pictures. That he also appreciated the beauty of repose we see in such portraits as ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... to the "aruspices," he had defended Sextius—or Sestius, as he is frequently called—on a charge brought against him by Clodius in respect of violence. We at once think of the commonplace from Juvenal: ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... there was so much mischief in you, nor so keen and commonplace a desire for match-making. Look here. Read the first four lines; not more, if you please; the rest is private. Whose is the other judgement of whom your uncle speaks ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... though Mary accompanied him, because Bill became suddenly far more reticent than usual in his presence, if not altogether dumb, and when he did speak, merely described in a modest tone some very commonplace occurrences. I could not make it out. After some time, when Bill was out of ear-shot, I heard Captain Bland remark to father that he liked lads who did not speak about themselves. It was a pretty ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... these reasons, I said that the profile of the pure classic base had hardly been materially improved; but the various conditions of it are beautiful or commonplace, in proportion to the variety of proportion among their lines and the delicacy of their curvatures; that is to say, the expression of characters like those of the abstract lines in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... peculiar creature, that won't Be caught in a commonplace way. Do all that you know, and try all that you don't: Not a ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... abides in humble things:— How commonplace the precious ore! The shining vision sometimes springs The one man: From too much cheese ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... he looked up the road, and his glance fell upon a short, compactly built man, in a gray suit, who was walking towards them. He seemed a quiet, commonplace person, but there was something about him that attracted ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... not commonplace, he said to himself, while he was talking something else to her;—but it is more than being not commonplace. She is very pure; but I have seen other pure faces. It is not that she is a Madonna; this is ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... of many commonplace things, and my friend did not once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gaunt old tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, "I hope we will have a glass together next year." "No, no," was the answer, "I shall be dead next year." "I too ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... a human soul through its commonplace nervous perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations, there is danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject of such weakness. It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a young girl; but you who remember ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... boundary of Kansas. Looking across, they could see long lines of white-covered wagons, level plains dotted with tents, and the rising smoke of many fires, where people who had gone in ahead of them were cooking their suppers; for they entered Parkville late in the afternoon. It was a commonplace-looking view of Kansas, after all, and not at all like what the lads had fancied it would be. Sandy very ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... 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, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... surprised Tinkletownians, as with their eyes they proceeded to search the figure before them for blood stains. But no sooner had the chorused words escaped their lips than they realised how wretchedly commonplace was their blundering expression in comparison with the faultlessly professional phraseology of their leader; and, overwhelmed with mortification, the posse ached to recall them; for that the correct technical term had been applied by one for years trained to the vernacular of his calling was ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... royal blood and choice was of necessity restricted to a half-dozen or so. None of the girls he knew pleased his fancy, untrained though that fancy might be. Instinct told him that they were too tame, too commonplace to hold his interest for long. A breathless dance or two, a kiss stolen in a shadowy corner, and blushes and giggles and inane remonstrances that bored him because he knew they would come. Tom had reached the sere age of twenty-two when he began to wonder if he must go beyond ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... to apologise for talking such commonplace platitudes as these, but, brethren, the most commonplace truths are usually the most important and the most impotent. And no 'platitude' is a platitude until you have brought it so completely into your lives that there is no room for a fuller working of it out. So ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Church takes the critical points as settled, without special discussion. He appeared to receive impulse and direction, limit and colour, from his outer life. His importance was achieved by the force within. Circumstances only conspired to mould a giant of commonplace excellence and average ideas, and their influence on his view of history might long be traced. No man of like spirituality, of equal belief in the supreme dignity of conscience, systematically allowed as much as he did for the empire of chance surroundings ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... chief in Queensland send us back to my island. My island too faraway; gentleman on ship not find it out; so he land us in little boat on Boupari. Boupari people make temple slave of us." And that was all; to her quite a commonplace, everyday history. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... Compton's disappearance was a mysterious one, and under ordinary circumstances would have created intense excitement in the community; but at that particular time the most sensational event would have seemed tame and commonplace alongside the preparations ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... thought that occurred to her. Doctor Wybrow was not favourably impressed by her smile—there was something at once sad and cruel in it. It came slowly, and it went away suddenly. He began to doubt whether he had been wise in acting on his first impression. His mind reverted to the commonplace patients and the discoverable maladies that were waiting for him, ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... vanished at last. He gulped as though a wave had gone over him. But he remembered his father. Beyond doubt his father had heard. He glanced down to him, and what he saw was worth a year of commonplace experience. The father had heard, yet he sat at ease, his knees crossed and his gaze out forward on the boat's course. Watson—but what could Watson matter then? Hugh's eyes burned big on Hayle, his voice deepened, his words came slow. "We can't fight here and now. I can only ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... 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; and surely man can attain ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... 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 ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Grand Marche we turned into the Rue du Commerce, where on the Place de Beaune is the Hotel de la Crouzille, once the Hotel de la Valliere, with its double gables and the graceful, shell-like ornamentation which the restaurateur who occupies the house has wisely allowed to remain above his commonplace sign of to-day. In the same street is the famous Hotel Gouin, now a bank. This house, which dates back to the fifteenth century, has been carefully restored, and its whole stone facade, covered with charming arabesques, is a fine example of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... knowledge | (quotations in Briggs' text are from wherewith their conceits have not been | THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING): acquainted, should be too high an | elevation of man's wit, and a searching | A longstanding commonplace in Bacon and ravelling too far into God's secrets; | scholarship has been the notion that an opinion that ariseth either of envy | the Baconian advancement of learning (which is proud weakness and ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... in the crowded way, Where hurrying throngs rush by to seek for gold, And all is commonplace and workaday, As soon as love's young ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... than any spot near the metropolis, might be the making of Auber's reputation. The varied, moody tones of the marsh-land, forever blending in a pervasive atmosphere of desolate beauty, suited Auber's peculiar style. Here he would paint what passed in the popular eye for the dullest commonplace, and would interpret, at the same time, both this landscape and his ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... I crept into one of these tiny cabins, and sat with my hands upon a closed slate in order to receive a message from Lincoln or Caesar; I slipped beneath the shelter of a tent to have a sealed letter read by a commonplace person with an Indian accent; and I sat at night in dark little parlors to watch weak men and weeping women embrace very badly designed effigies ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... half-length portraits than by introducing mountains and rocks of as fantastic and jagged a form as possible, although the latter often contrast strangely enough beside a mild, calmly serene Madonna face, or even beside the likeness of a prosaically respectable commonplace citizen of some free Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty, while, a few centuries later, such forms were found much too unpolished and irregular to be ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of the household read, or sang, about ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... literary eulogies, moral essays and philanthropic pamphlets; his little lamp, lighted like hundreds of others of equal capacity at the focus of the new philosophy, would have burned moderately without doing harm to any one, and diffused over a provincial circle a dim, commonplace illumination proportionate to the little oil ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine |
