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More "Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the drawing-room, Mrs. Clifford rose from her seat, and took her hand in her own, and kissed her on one cheek as if nothing out of the common had happened in any way. The talk between them was obtrusively commonplace. But all that day long, Elma noticed her mother was far tenderer to her than usual; and when she went up to bed Mrs. Clifford held her fingers for a moment with a gentle pressure, and kissed her twice upon her eyes, and ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... he 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
... youth knows that, sooner or later, he must come to matrimony. No one could have more horror of this catastrophe than I felt; but it was in vain to oppose my destiny. My opinion of women had been formed from the commonplace jests of my companions, and from my own acquaintance with the worst part of the sex. I had never felt the passion of love, and, of course, believed it to be something that might have existed in former ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... clear now 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 ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... of leaping planets. He persuades himself that the common morality has not gripped people, and that they really don't believe in it at all. He aims at a way of thinking which will be so great as to be free from all commonplace and convention. Honesty is to be practically the only virtue in the new world. If you say what you mean, you will earn the right to do anything else that you please. Mr. Wells in this is the counterpart of those plain men in private life so well known to ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Pilmansey's, so far, remained untouched, and the two searchers saw that customers were going in and out, all unaware that before evening their favourite resort for a light mid-day meal would attain a fame and notoriety not at all promised by its very ordinary and commonplace exterior. ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... confidence that he had performed his obligations as an American gentleman should, even though the performance had created an extraordinary commotion. Chase was new to the Old World and its customs, especially those rigorous ones which surrounded royalty and denied it the right to venture into the commonplace. The ambassador at the capital of the Empire at first sought to excuse him on the ground of ignorance; but the Grand Duke insisted that even an American could not be such a fool as Chase had been; so, it must have been a wilful offence that ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... to eventual good out of the worst. Walton was not the hearty and thorough advocate of nature he is supposed to have been. There would have been something to say for him on that score, had he looked upon the sum of evil as a thing not to be diminished. But he shared the opinions of the most commonplace believers in sin and trouble, and only congratulated himself on being exempt from their consequences. The overweening old man found himself comfortably off somehow; and it is good that he did. It is a comfort to all of us, wise or foolish. But to reverence him is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... of the playground at Brienne Napoleon was master of the revels. His capacity for command had already been detected; but neither comrade nor teacher saw beneath the unpromising exterior of the West Point student a trace of aught save what was commonplace. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Rogers, who seemed tireless himself and expected every man and boy aboard to catch the inspiration of a sight that had now become terribly commonplace to us—a ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... the province during the next quarter of a century. His name was Louis Joseph Papineau. He was at that time only twenty-six years of age, but already his tall, well-built form, his fine features and commanding presence, marked him out as a born leader of men. He possessed an eloquence which, commonplace as it now appears on the printed page, apparently exerted a profound influence upon his contemporaries. 'Never within the memory of teacher or student,' wrote his college friend Aubert de Gaspe, 'had a voice so eloquent filled ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... husband had returned—and quick as thought was the daguerreotype concealed, while Mrs. Graham, forcing down her emotion, took up a book, which she seemed to be intently reading when her husband entered. After addressing to her a few commonplace remarks, all of which she answered civilly, he went to the wardrobe, and on pretense of looking for his knife, which, he said he believed he left in his vest pocket, he took out the key, and then carelessly proceeded to unlock his private drawer, his wife watching ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... her, a quick catching of the breath by a stout lady, a newcomer, who was seated on a divan, I should have judged this woman to be a rather commonplace person except that her deeply sunken eyes seemed to carry a far away expression as if she saw things that were invisible to others. Now her eyes were ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... The nearest approach to them preserved in that national collection of literature are some Lottery squibs, which imitated them; and Hone, writing in 1838, says: "It must be admitted, however, that the characters sold by the pastry cooks are either commonplace or gross; when genteel, they are inane; when humorous, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... is the Marriage Feast at Cana of Galilee. This is the best chapel as a work of art; indeed, it is the only one which can claim to be taken quite seriously. Not that all the figures are very good; those to the left of the composition are commonplace enough; nor are the Christ and the giver of the feast at all remarkable; but the ten or dozen figures of guests and attendants at the right-hand end of the work are as good as anything of their kind can be, and remind me so strongly of ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... rejoicing in the feeling of superiority and stoicism which accompanied the pang and pain of it. But in England, where everybody bathed—or at any rate had water in their rooms and splashed and said ah! ah! and oh! oh!—he regarded the morning bath as commonplace, and had often to ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... 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, cautious, persevering man, who certainly was free from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... who was a conceited and commonplace man, and even before him, were two men, stronger than he; one in thought and the other in execution. These two men were Letreaumont, a Norman gentleman, and Affinius Vanden-Enden, a Dutch philosopher; Letreaumont ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... because it marks the employment of a new medium, but because it shows how the letter has become a universal implement of trade; how a commonplace tool has been developed ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... was at the telephone. Her voice, hard and incisive, kept talking, stopping, talking again, repeating it to friend after friend, and making it hard, abrupt and real, stripping it of its mystery, making it naked and commonplace, like a newspaper item—Amy's death. And Ethel sat ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... evinces some shyness in showing strong emotion among each other: a trait frequent in rural households, and one which stands in curiously inverse relation to most of the peculiarities distinguishing villagers from the people of towns. Thus hiding their warmer feelings under commonplace talk all round, Grace's reception produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But that more was felt than was enacted appeared from the fact that her father, in taking her in-doors, quite forgot the presence of Giles without, as did also Grace herself. He said nothing, but ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... simple as can be. It was in nothing more or less than the excessive "familiarity" of ordinary married life, and the lack of personal freedom allowed both parties to the contract. Thus love grew commonplace, and the unhappy ones to weary of each other by excessive and enforced association. This was obvious enough, and the remedy as obvious,—separate bedrooms, and a month's holiday in each year to be ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... entrance 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 hot and she felt nervous and fluttered, partly ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the smoke of victory. "The radiant ensign of the Republic" was to him the living embodiment of her honor and her power. He had for it the pride and passion of the boy, with the prophetic hopes of the patriot. Men of genius are ever revivifying the commonplace expressions and visible signs of popular enthusiasm with the poetic and historic realities which gave them birth. He felt the glow and impulse of the great sentiments of race and nationality in all their natural simplicity and poetic force. It is not now the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,—the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,—was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... produced by some unknown impulse of Nature. Deriving her claims from such a source, she certainly has a better title to royalty than most of her sister queens, who, according to history, have been commonplace women, suggesting anything but nature. With the exception of the Philadelphians, perhaps, we as a people will not stand on the question of ancestry, and shall be more inclined to see how ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... 'apricot blossom' used for the name of the village, they would be too commonplace and unsuitable;" added Pao-y with a sardonic grin, "but there's another passage in the works of a poet of the T'ang era: 'By the wooden gate near the water the corn-flower emits its fragrance;' and why not make use of the motto 'corn fragrance village,' which ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Portland, the sharp-pointed form of Mount Hood came prominently into view. Portland would be only a commonplace city, the Willamette River being quite tame here, and the shores low and unattractive; but this grand old mountain, and the remnant of forest about it, give it an ancient, stately, and ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... safe to say that no further thought of school or message crossed his mind from the moment that the highest white steading of Craig Ronald sank out of view, until his compulsory return. Andra had shut out from his view so commonplace and ignominious facts ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... upon it, her fancy led her to exaggerate Drake into the likeness of some Egyptian god, that sits with huge hands resting upon massive knees, and works out its own schemes behind indifferent eyes. The sight of him, and the sound of commonplace words from his mouth, would at times make her laugh at the conception and restore her to her former familiarity with him. But the fancy returned to her, and, each time, added a fresh layer to the colour of her thoughts. She came now and again to betray a positive ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... give me back my dowry. He has told my brother so. But the state of his business, and the increased size of his factory do not permit him to return it as quickly as he would like. I can't help but feel sorry for the poor man . . . so honorable and so upright in every way. If he only were not so commonplace! ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... literature; of his own country, which ruled the world before he died, he did not attend. Hardened by his father's heartless severity he learnt to live without sympathy, to despise mankind, to rely on himself. He was the author of a commonplace treatise against Machiavelli, partly founded on Montesquieu's Grandeur et Decadence. This unamiable youth, with the aspirations and the vanity of a minor poet, was the most consummate practical genius that, in modern times, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... work you see the very spirit of Jesus, the spirit of the Christ incarnate. I find it everywhere, and it interprets life for me as nothing else can. Take up any work of fiction, no matter what, and you will find the author instinctively preaching this truth. Look into any commonplace, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will find it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has one tender spot in his nature, his affection for his child, and for the sake of that child he will deny himself as he has ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... of Sartor as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment—I won't say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... David than the busy, cheerful man apparently contented with the humdrum duties of an obscure, laborious life, and the few unexciting pleasures afforded by books, music, and much silent thought. She sometimes felt with a woman's instinct that under this composed, commonplace existence another life went on; for, now and then, in the interest of conversation, or the involuntary yielding to a confidential impulse, a word, a look, a gesture, betrayed an unexpected power and passion, a secret unrest, a bitter memory that would ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... face the dangers of sea and night and death; and the white-headed old man, who stood apart and calm, had received, as much as Elijah of old, a Divine word to speak in the wilderness, and the life in it would sustain him through death. But Mary Dickenson was only a gentle, commonplace woman, whose life had been spent on a quiet farm, whose highest ambition was to take care of her snug little house, and all of whose brighter thoughts or romance or passion began and ended in this staid Quaker and the baby that was a ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... my remark as a compliment. What I really meant to say was that a commonplace man might easily be brother to so clever a ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... about the miserable affair, and he said that I had done exactly right. I can't remember that he offered any actual solution, but it was something to be told that I had done exactly right. And then he spoke of his wife, and in such a faithful fashion, and so lovingly of his two commonplace little girls. Ned Temple is as good as he is brilliant. It is really rather astonishing that such a brilliant man can be so good. He told me that I had not changed at all, but all the time that look of ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... not look promising. Sergeant Madden did not look like the kind of genius who could carry it through. Dozing, with his chin tilted forward on his chest, he looked hopelessly commonplace. ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 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
... left nothing doubtful. His first impression of her was confirmed. She was a woman to whom Heaven had confided every grace and virtue. Such marvels had been before. He had heard of them in tradition, and always in a strain to lift those thus favored above the hardened commonplace of human life, creatures not exactly angels, yet moving in the same atmosphere with angels. The monasteries, even those into whose gates women are forbidden to look, all have stories of womanly excellence which the monks tell each other ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... of Sophisms too theoretical, scientific, and metaphysical. Very well. Let us try a trivial, commonplace, and, if necessary, coarse style. Convinced that the public is duped in the matter of protection, I have desired to prove it. But the public wishes to be shouted at. Then let ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the "Oxford University ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... what he wrote when he recounted the multiplied marvels of his holy patron's life? Doubtless he did—and why not! To the unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural. If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as composed ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... heavy cloud into portions which floated slowly along, separating more and more, the dull grey growing rapidly silvery, then golden, and the gold becoming suffused with soft light. So beautiful was the scene that, while Archie gazed thoughtfully at its beauty, even commonplace, powder-besmirched Peter sat with his lips apart, staring hard, and then, forgetting himself and their risky position, with its need for concealment, he clapped ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... 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
... nothing romantic about Crawfurd of the Ewes, or about the details of his deed, with one singular exception, and this was connected with his daughter Joanna. The rest of the family were commonplace, prosperous young people, honest enough hearts, but too shallow to be affected by the father's misfortune. The father's sour grapes had not set these children's teeth on edge. Joanna—Jack, or Joe, as they ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Bastard is trying to find out whether Hubert killed Arthur, whose little body lies close beside them. He says that he suspects Hubert "very grievously." Hubert protests. The Bastard tests the protest with one sentence: "Go bear him in thine arms." He utters the commonplace lines— ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... quickly away. To be dragged back to the commonplace at once was more than she could bear. First she must get alone with herself, must take stock of this new emotion that ran like wine through her blood. A pulse throbbed in her throat, for she was in a passionate glow ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... is the official language, though English is commonplace; inhabitants of the isolated southwestern islands ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... with these considerations on the diminution of death, disease, and suffering by improved sanitary arrangements, is the delicate subject of the propagation of hereditary disease. It is a commonplace that the most important of all the acts of life, is that on which men and women venture most thoughtlessly. But experience shews, unmistakably, that there are many forms of disease, both mental and bodily, which are transmitted from the parents to the children, and that, consequently, the marriage ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... in 1594. His portrait is that of a man who holds his head high and resolutely; he has, strange to say, a somewhat commonplace face, with its massive nose, full eye, short curly beard and hail. The forehead is not very broad, but the head is 'long,' as Scotch people say, and they count long-headedness not only an indication ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... rest of the meal Sir John devoted himself to Mary; her frank, commonplace face, her downright manners, her total absence of all self-consciousness pleased him. He found her a truly intelligent girl, and discovered in talking over her father that they knew ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... in his uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or less of a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt him, so that if he began with a commonplace "Let their celestial concerts all unite," before the end he was pouring forth glorious and living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he had to write in the intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or still more petulant ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole would not have understood him, but Rochefoucault would, and Pascal, too; and some of our old Englishmen would have understood him still better. He would have been worthy of hearing Shakspeare read one of his scenes to him, hot from the brain. Commonplace found a great comforter in him as long as it was good-natured; it was to the ill-natured or the dictatorial only that he was startling. Willing to see society go on as it did, because he despaired of seeing it otherwise, but not at all agreeing in his interior with the common notions ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... talented, Annita Ferrer was a beautiful soprano singer and sang in concert and church. She occupied the place as soloist in Calvary Church for a while when the choir was composed of Harry Gates, tenor, Fred Borneman, bass, M.R. Blake, contralto, G.A. Scott, organist. Prof. Ferrer was not a commonplace performer, but played operatic selections of his own arrangement for the guitar that no one else attempted as far as I can recollect. He had a severe time in the beginning as prices for lessons were so low, and he had all he ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... Captain Armytage did get hold of her, in what we must now call the Lover's Walk! Yes, she has yielded, to her father's great satisfaction and perhaps to her mother's, for she will be more comfortable in looking forward to a commonplace life for her than in the dread of modern aberrations. But Gillian is very funny, very much ashamed of having given in, and perfectly determined to go to her college and finish her education, which she may as well do while the Sparrow Hawk is at sea. ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 of advertisements ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... That is a new vocation struck out by the prolific ingenuity of the female mind. Commonplace doctors would simply call her "hysterical;" but she calls herself magnetic. She is stout and inclined to a large appetite, particularly affecting roast pork with plenty of seasoning; but she passes readily into "the superior condition" ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... written in black letters; another, who stood at one end, dwelt on the iron hoops that bound the box; a third gave prominence to the long nails studding a corner. Thus each, according to his view-point, saw that same commonplace packing-case in a different way. After this practical demonstration Robert Hart never in his life could grow impatient with a man who did not see exactly what he saw when both were standing on opposite ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... 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
... always in these great musical speculations) in the solo singers. These ever place themselves between you and good music; they choose to sing the music that best shows their powers, no matter how familiar, hackneyed, sentimental, commonplace, and trashy. If you call for "William Tell," for the "Nozzi di Figaro," to say nothing of "Fidelio," or "Oberon," or "Freischuetz," they have not the organization for it, have not the chorus, the secondary singers, the artists who know and love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... not poetical fairies, quite commonplace, and up to all sorts of work. So, while he talked, he was saddling and bridling Jess, she not objecting in the least. Finally, he jumped ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... effect was very curious; where, a few moments before, there had been ready repartee, interspersed with laughter, now there was low-toned commonplace conversation, or a dead silence. We were wrapped in a cloud; moisture began to form in tiny drops upon the stanchions and the deck, upon the beards and moustaches of the male part of the voyagers, upon the woolly texture of the garments of all, even upon the smoothly brushed ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... certain length towards recognising the main principle of a law which was a commonplace of German transcendental thought, and was developed later by his disciple E. Serres, the law that the higher animals repeat during their development the main features of the adult organisation of animals lower in the scale. Thus ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... upon it thus at its best; and I was glad that fate had driven me into my own land en automobile. Even though, in following Carmona to watch over the girl we both loved, I might have to keep often to the beaten track made commonplace by tourists, the way would never be really commonplace, as to sightseers who take ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... pure music as distinguished from airs—commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations, as, for instance, "Yankee Doodle," or "Partant pour ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... is so commonplace. I can tell it you in a few sentences. I married when I was seventeen at my father's command, to save him from ruin. My husband, like my father, was a city merchant. I did not love him, but then I did not know what love was. My girlhood was a miserable one. My father belonged to ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... different things were when they were young. There is no romance in the world now, and no heroism. The very winters and summers are nothing to what they used to be; in fact, life is altogether on a small, commonplace scale. Now that is a miserable sort of thing; it brings a sort of paralyzing chill over the life, and petrifies the natural spring of joy that should ever be leaping up to meet the fresh new mercies ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... 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 thing ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... and looking that way as if he would ever think of dancing with them. They swarmed around me, as a representative person. They forgot their own trivialities, and rendered me such homage as genius commands from commonplace minds. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... All was commonplace and normal, I thought, and I was surprised, for the Zards were not at all martially minded, a great contrast to their Canitaurian brethren. Of course, I had never actually met any of the Canitaurian commoners. It seems to me that the only ones who really are martially ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... feud between the brothers would probably have been forgotten had it not been for the lamentable fact that his eldest son, who had grown up into a faithful likeness of his worldly and commonplace mother, took it into his head at the time of his father's death to write to his uncle in a way which showed as much greed as ill-breeding. The foolish young man's letter might have been put into ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... bringing in a father of the usual play-house type,—a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play- house fathers were then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most commonplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which is this,—Mrs. Wilding, in order to ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... and not too condescending civility upon the party by passing them, when Michel was absent, the salt, the butter, the bread, and other commonplace condiments. Presently I withdrew, that my absence might make me desired. Before I did so, however, I took pains, by the exhibition of the "New York Herald" in my hands, to show that my political sentiments ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... will ye, nill ye, on your sharing it with me. I have a heart to open to somebody, and you are the very man. So, sit you down, and bear with my egotism, for I have a little tale to tell you, of who I am and how I came here. The story is not so commonplace but that your kindness will find, here and there, an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of our theory about his character. But it is evident that the world could never provide him with furniture corresponding to the texture of his mind; and hence he would instinctively lay hold of that which was most commonplace and non-committal. If he could realize nothing outside himself, he might at least remove whatever would distract him from inward contemplation. There is, however, one article in this little room which we must not omit to notice. It is a looking-glass; and it hangs, of all places in the world, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Tamara. She answered in a voice her old playmate had never dreamed she possessed—so concentrated and full of passion. In their English lives they were so accustomed to controlling every feeling into a level commonplace that if they had had time to think, both would have considered this ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... smiles, she soothes their cares, On that pure heart so like to theirs, Her spirit with such life is rife That in its golden rays we see, Touched into graceful poesy, The dull cold commonplace of life. ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... do—particularly in The Mountain Lovers. It seems passing strange to be here with her alone at last...." I confess that this strikes me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a "dual personality"—after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius are largely feminine—but it is another to dramatize one's consciousness in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... without being a bit shaken. And Carl was a bit shaken, not merely physically, but morally and spiritually. He could not deny to himself that he had after all done something rather wondrous, which ought to be celebrated in sounding verse. He felt that he was in an atmosphere far removed from the commonplace. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... dramatists. His plays have not the neat, concise construction that we prize to-day. Pages of dialogue sometimes serve no purpose except to make a trifle clearer the character of the actors, or perhaps slightly to heighten the impression of commonplace reality. Even in "Sin and Sorrow" and "A Protegee" whole passages merely illustrate the background against which the plot is set rather than help forward the action itself. Many plays, such as "A Family Affair," ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... this seeing came another needed conception: that intellectual arrogance is the true modern devil; that the ancient devil, desire of flesh, is obvious, banal, and commonplace, compared to this.... He dared to bring his realizations to a woman, and found that she had a crown for each and every one. And he learned to talk to her about things vital to men and women, and found that this was the strangest, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... time, and he was in trouble about money, for the family guardian had not proved a good manager. And now to this already overcharged heart something else was added. Keats fell in love. The lady he loved was young and beautiful, but commonplace. Keats himself describes her when he first met her as "beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange." Her beauty and strangeness won for her a way to the poet's heart. Love, however, brought to him no joyful rest, but rather passionate, jealous restlessness. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... about the building that would have thoroughly justified its better preservation. In any case the municipal authorities might have had some memory of the traditions of the old centre of their civic life, before they moved to the commonplace erections on the north side of the Abbey Church of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... him, with a look in his eyes that came back to me long afterward when I realized the full meaning of that apparently almost commonplace interview. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... to have known better," he said to himself with real penitence, "than to utter a stupid commonplace to such a girl when she was talking so earnestly." And he tried to make amends, and succeeded in winning back her attention and her slow unconscious smiles by talking to her of things a thousand miles away. The moon was silvering ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered. Thus a mild sort of apotheosis took place in his fancy, whilst she still lived and breathed within his own horizon, a ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... arms were folded, he was looking out of the hall window at the smoky vista of roofs and chimneys. From the soles of his ready-made boots to his ill-brushed hair, he was a commonplace young man. A hundred pounds was to him a vast sum of money. It represented a year's strenuous savings, perhaps more. The woman who watched him imagined that he was hesitating. Tavernake, however, had no such thought in his mind. He ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... father had gone to America! And what was left for me to do now?... Tell my mother everything, or conceal forever the very memory of that meeting? I was absolutely unable to reconcile myself to the thought that such a senseless, such a commonplace ending should be tacked on to such ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Chatterton was angrily pacing up and down the room. "What arrant nonsense a man can be capable of when he is headstrong to begin with! To think of the elegant Horatio King, a model for all men, surrounding himself with this commonplace family. Faugh! It is easy enough to see what they are all after. But I shall prevent it. Meanwhile, the only way to do it is to break the spirit of this Polly Pepper. Once do that, and I have the ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... but his words were calm to the point of commonplace. Which made the effect of his statement all ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... before noon on Sunday, and soon afterward Mr. Barnum, who went out with the health officer, was standing on the deck where, for the first time, he met the famous singer. After they had shaken hands and uttered a few commonplace words of greeting Miss Lind asked him when and where he had heard ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... qualifications of authors. One may admit at once the comparative worthlessness of the pamphlet as a contribution to criticism or critical theory. Defoe's comments upon specific writers are thoroughly conventional and commonplace, as may be seen from a glance at his remarks about Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... not crazy, and I am not joking," replied the girl, "and I think Rupert would suit me very well. You see, I think a great deal more of Rupert than I do of Mr. Hemphill, although the latter gentleman has excellent points. He is commonplace, and, above everything else, I want a commonplace husband. I want some one to soothe me, and quiet me, and to give me ballast. If there is anything out of the way to be done I want to do it myself. I am sure he is in love with me, for his anxious efforts to make ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... better writers than the champions of the gazettes, that I lay those down, to take up these, with great reluctance. And on the question you propose, whether we can, in any form, take a bolder attitude than formerly in favor of liberty, I can give you but commonplace ideas. They will be but the widow's mite, and offered only because requested. The matter which now embroils Europe, the presumption of dictating to an independent nation the form of its government, is so arrogant, so atrocious, that indignation, as well as moral sentiment, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... political, religious, or romantic reasons. But I was not interested. Apparently I was not romantic enough. Or was it that I was even more romantic than all those good people? The affair seemed to me commonplace. That man was attending to his business of ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... distinguished company of poets and scholars, all of whom were enthusiastic in singing her praise. Ariosto and the two Strozzi were there, likewise the Cardinal Bembo—who became a somewhat too ardent admirer—and Aldo Manuzio, and other men of distinction. Though of commonplace origin, Lucrezia had received the very best education possible, and she conducted herself with such propriety and showed such ready wit that she was the real centre of her literary coterie and gave little, if any, outward evidence of that immoral ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the 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)
... full of surprises, and the greatest of these almost always arise out of the most commonplace looking objects. No more striking instance of this can be found than that furnished by the story of the Jelly-fish. Most, if not all, of my readers have met with this creature, either in the shape of a lifeless lump of clear jelly lying on the sand by the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... fashion—she had seen some of them on Tuesdays—Raoul Wermant, the one who so distinguished himself as a leader in the 'german', or Yvonne's brother, the officer of chasseurs, who had gained the prize for horsemanship, and others besides these—seemed to her very commonplace by comparison. No!—he whom she loved was a man in the prime of life, well known to fame. She didn't care if he had ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... names on that long regimental roll, there should be duly entered those cabalistic symbols signifying to the initiated, "Killed in action." After all, that tells the story. In those old-time Indian days of continuous foray and skirmish such brief returns, concise and unheroic, were commonplace enough. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... examples of a brighter period. I shall not expatiate on the works of the Byzantine Greeks, who, by the assiduous study of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, who, from his horn of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... doubtful question, whether he might not be that happy man,—a question which fancy endeavoured to answer in the affirmative, by conjuring up all she had said in his praise, with the addition of a comment much more flattering than the text warranted. All that was commonplace, all that belonged to the every-day world, was melted away and obliterated in those dreams of imagination, which only remembered with advantage the points of grace and dignity that distinguished Flora from the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... comes and looks at him, asks a few questions and gives a few commonplace directions, but makes no comment. It would be idle his ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... his residence. Cut off by half a mile of water from Papeete, it had an isolation, yet propinquity, which would have persuaded me to make it my home were I a governor; but it was given over to quarantine purposes, with an old caretaker who came and went in a commonplace rowboat. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... "the greatest of her Captains" and reaped a full crop of failures as her reward. Too late there were flashing testimonials to his greatness. Too late it became a commonplace observation in Ireland, when the impotence of the sordid sections was apparent: "How different it would all be if Parnell were alive." Too late did we have tributes to Parnell's capacity from friend and foe which magnified his gifts of leadership beyond reach of the envious. Even the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... both of them knew, in their secret thoughts, that the balance of life and death was so fine that the least minor incident might cast them into darkness. It would not have to be a great disaster, a wide departure from the commonplace. They were traveling at a terrific rate of speed, and a sharp rock too close to the surface would rip the bottom from their craft. Any instant might bring the shock and shudder ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... also, the better the profession; the less restriction that might be laid on a man in his pleasurable enjoyment of the world, the better the profession. This was Sir Lionel's view of a profession, and it must be acknowledged that, though his view was commonplace, it was also common sense; that he looked at the matter as a great many people look at it; and that his ideas were at any rate sufficiently intelligible. But George Bertram's view was different, and much less easy of explanation. He had an idea that ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... pieces for the second grade are by a composer whose productions are never commonplace. They contain much attractiveness and educational value. Teachers of all ...
— Twelve Preludes for the Pianoforte Op. 25 - I. Prelude in F Major • N. Louise Wright
... began to listen with a determination to remember it in order, but it was without method, or order, or system. It was like a beam of light moving in the undulatory waves, meeting with occasional meteors in its path; it was exceedingly captivating. It surprised me that there was not only no commonplace thought, but there was no commonplace expression. If he quoted, he quoted from what we had not read; if he told an anecdote, it was one that had not reached us. At the outset he was very severe upon the science of the age. He said that inventors and discoverers helped themselves very much, but they ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... made. This was known as Gres de Flandres, gres meaning earthenware. The unique feature it possessed was not so much its orange-skin surface as the surprising method by which it was glazed. The ware itself was made on a potter's wheel often from the commonplace kinds of clay, such as are employed in making stone china; sometimes this was brown, sometimes gray, sometimes cream-colored. There was nothing original about the material employed. But afterward—then came the amazing thing! When the clay articles were put into the kiln to be fired ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... drive to such a scene, reader, may seem very commonplace to you, but what tongue can tell, or pen describe, what it was to Tottie Bones? That pretty little human flower had been born in the heart of London—in one of the dirtiest and most unsavoury parts of that heart. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... was shy. Coldness is often a cover for extreme shyness in women of her station, and I did my best to thaw her; but the soup and fish had been removed and we had arrived at the last entree before I made a remark that roused her in the least. I forget what I said exactly, but it was some stupid commonplace about the difficulties of the political situation ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... rather than a preacher. He left but few sermons, and these commonplace, without learning, or wit, or zeal,—ordinary exhortations to a virtuous life. The chief thing, outside of the reforms I have mentioned, was the publication of a few homilies for the use of the clergy,—too ignorant to write sermons,—which homilies ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress, of the learned company. His Roman is a remarkable study of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often animated, exact, effective in its satire; but the analysis of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable, and such relief ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... cast a doubt on the sagacity and prescience of one parent and the morality of the other, yet no doubt with equal injustice. But the fact remained that she was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy, commonplace father, and her faded, commonplace mother in the dining-room of the Boomville Hotel like some distinguished alien. The three partners, by virtue, perhaps, of their college education and refined manners, had been exceptionally noticed by Kitty. And for some occult ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... thoughts went wandering abroad over the universe of misery. For was not the world full of men and women who groaned, not merely under poverty and cruelty, weakness and sickness, but under dullness and stupidity, hugged in the paralyzing arms of that devil-fish, The Commonplace, or held fast to the rocks by the crab Custom, while the tide of moral indifference was fast rising to choke them? Was there no prophet, no redemption, no mediator for such as these? Were there not thousands of women, born with a trembling impulse towards the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... astonishingly true that people soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things—that a nation hardly ever ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... exchange for it, stipulating at the same time that the Dutch were not to meddle with Malayan affairs, or have any settlement on the Malay Peninsula. The ruined cathedral of Notre Dame del Monte is a far more interesting object than the dull, bald, commonplace, flat-faced, prosaic, Dutch meeting-house, albeit the latter is in excellent repair. Even this Stadthaus, with its stately solitudes, smells of trade, and suggests corpulent burgomasters and prim burgomasters' wives in wooden hoops and stiff brocades. The influence ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... The delightfully commonplace remark tranquillized Mrs. Dean at once, and, taking off the upper shawl with a fussy gesture, she ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... you neglect? Is there nothing you know you ought not to do? You would know your duty, if you thought in earnest about it, and were not ambitious of great things." "Ah, then," responded she, "I suppose it is something very commonplace, which will make life more dreary than ever. That cannot help me." "It will, if it be as dreary as reading the newspapers to an old deaf aunt. It will soon lead you to something more. Your duty will begin to comfort you ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... the same thing as to be picturesque; nor because the Old Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is curious how much description would apply commonly to either. The same sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain, and the same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to be observed in both. Thus, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the text, that men should not quarrel with their bread and butter. It is not an attempt to show what is right, but to palliate and find out plausible excuses for what is wrong. It is a work without the least value, except as a convenient commonplace book or vade mecum, for tyro politicians and young divines, to smooth their progress in the Church or the State. This work is a text-book in the University: its morality is the acknowledged morality of the House of Commons." See also Coleridge's ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the decadent school of France, particularly of Mallarme, and some of our own decadents. Walter Pater and Sir Thomas Browne. The existence of writers adopting an over-wrought technique, however, is not (and Mr. Balfour would repudiate the idea) a sign of decay as commonplace moralists would have us believe, but of realised perfection. Pater is the most perfect prose writer we ever produced. The Euphuists of the sixteenth century were of course decadents, and I think you will admit that they did not herald any decay ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... two incidents of camp life that were long remembered among Clinton's troops, the one a bit of comedy, the other a grim commonplace of martial law. The latter related to the discipline of deserters, to whom various degrees of punishment were meted out by court-martial. On July 20 two deserters were brought into camp, and on the next day three others. The more fortunate were sentenced to be whipped. Sergeant Spears, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... a solemn form of rationalizing current habits and standards. Reconstruction in Philosophy, lectures i-ii. It is certainly surprising how few philosophical writers have ever reached other than perfectly commonplace conclusions in ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... tavern, and had a private room; but after dinner the landlord, on the plea that the house was partly under repair, requested permission that a stranger might take a chop in the apartment, at a separate table. The company gave the required permission; and the stranger, a man of commonplace aspect, was brought in, ate his chop in silence, and then fell asleep—snoring so loudly and discordantly that the conversation could with difficulty be prosecuted. Some gentleman of the party made a noise; and ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... soul of music, clear, and sweet and as insistent as a bird-call, an unforgettable lyric in four letters! It is just the sort of name a fellow cannot possibly forget. Why couldn't you have been named Polly or Lena or Margaret, or something commonplace like that, Avis—dear?" ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... single question of any gossiping native. On that spot I wove delightful romances, and abandoned myself to little debauches of melancholy which enchanted me. If I had known the reason—perhaps quite commonplace—of this neglect, I should have lost the unwritten poetry which intoxicated me. To me this refuge represented the most various phases of human life, shadowed by misfortune; sometimes the peace of the graveyard without the dead, who speak in the language ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... paused opposite our door, turned up the leaf of his hat, and looked upward; we missed the family of white mice which usually crawled on the top of his organ: poor child, he had sheltered them in his bosom; it was nothing more than natural that he should do so, and the act was commonplace enough—but it pleased us—it diminished our gloom. And we thought, if the great ones of the land would but foster the talent that needs, and deserves, protection from the storms of life, as that lonely boy ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... fall victorious in Egypt. Two years after this he had stood beside another and still greater man at Copenhagen, 'mighty Nelson,' who there gave a striking instance of how a subordinate inspired by genius can win the day by disregarding the over-caution of a commonplace superior. We may be sure that when Nelson turned his blind eye on Parker's signal of recall the lesson was not ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... interest, Paul lived from one day to the next. His whole inner being was sacrificed to the commonplace cares about property and money, yet without his ever experiencing any joy at the success he attained. There was no longer anybody whom he could make happy, and he worked on without knowing why—as a cart-horse in the traces moves forward, ignorant of what the plough does, which it drags ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... decision may seem superficially a commonplace matter of course; that it was much more is a commonplace historical certainty. The merit of Rodney's action appears not only in the details of execution, but in its being undertaken at all; and in this case, as ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... by the painter Andrea de' Ceri, who was pleased with the air and the ways of Perino, and thought that he saw in him a certain lively spirit of intelligence from which it might be hoped that in time some good fruits would issue from him. Andrea was no great painter; quite commonplace, indeed, and one of those who stand openly and publicly in their workshops, executing any kind of work, however mean; and he was wont to paint every year for the festival of S. John certain wax tapers which were carried as offerings, as they still are, together with the other tributes of the city; ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... of everything earthly, was, as is naturally to be expected, applied in practice to nothing but valuable objects—for things common and ever recurring give no impulse to such speculations—the objects thus contemplated were ennobled, because they were raised above the multitude of the commonplace. At the same time the theory of original and copy could not fail to become a starting-point for new speculations, as soon as the contrast between the spiritual and material began to assume importance among the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at times blaze out in a surprising fashion—it is not to be thought that he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which heard it gladly. But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess; the personality behind ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... annoyed, ended by feeling that such high virtue was a yoke upon him. The goodness of his wife gave him no violent emotions, and violent emotions were what he wanted. What myriads of scenes are played in the depths of his souls, beneath the cold exterior of lives that are, apparently, commonplace! Among these dramas, lasting each but a short time, though they influence life so powerfully and are frequently the forerunners of the great misfortune doomed to fall on so many marriages, it is difficult to choose an example. There was a scene, however, which particularly marked ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... English paraphrases of two of the Davidic Psalms, and were done at the age of fifteen. That they were thought by himself worth printing in the same volume with Comus, is the most noteworthy thing about them. No words are so commonplace but that they can be made to yield inference by a biographer. And even in these school exercises we think we can discern that the future poet was already a diligent reader of Sylvester's Du Bartas ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... feel great respect for this overwhelming grief; at least he did not utter any commonplace consolations. He also leaned upon his desk, and his idle hands traced idle lines upon the ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... the top of the hill of life and starts down on the sunset side. The ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting down, and cannot fail to be interesting if he comes as near to telling the truth about himself as he can. And he will ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... charges and lectures, still remain; and it is impossible to conceive any thing more commonplace in style, weaker in conception, or more thoroughly marked with mediocrity of mind. And yet it is perfectly possible to conceive such a man popular. What the multitude call eloquence, in the pulpit, is palpably different from eloquence any where else. At the bar, or in the legislature, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... appeared, a very commonplace-looking man, full of his own praises, and always speaking himself in the third person. "Remenyi practiced ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the new conditions; many were arrested, but few lamented the incarceration, for the prison was the porch which led to fame, and through it all who were ambitious to rise from obscurity had to pass. Moreover, imprisonment (for mere trifles) was such a commonplace event in Spanish times that no native lost caste by the experience of it, unless it were for a heinous crime which shocked his fellows. Meanwhile, in the public ways and the cafes and saloons, altercations between ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... and Principal of the University of Edinburgh, was a delightful companion. He had always something new in his mind, and discussed with many flashes of wit and satire. He possessed an aristocratic contempt for anything commonplace, or self-evident, so that one had to be careful in conversing with him. But he was generous, and his laugh reconciled one to some of his sharp sallies. How little one anticipates the future greatness of one's ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... "there should be a dreadful duel, in which the hero is shot in his hyacinthine curls, falls mortally wounded, dripping all over with gory blood, and is borne to his ladye-love on a shutter! You have none of these fine points. Then the names of your characters are absurdly commonplace. Mortimer Walters should be Montaldo St. Clare: Daisy Snarle, (how plebeian!) should be Gertrude Flemming: John Flint, Clarence Lester, and so on to the end of the text. How Mrs. Mac Elegant will turn up her celestial nose at a book written ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so than those of Edinburgh; and it requires no small exertion to mount one or two without stopping to breathe at the top. Upon the whole, it is anything but a pretty town (at least in winter), the houses being high, and the streets very narrow. The buildings, too, are commonplace; and the monument to Wolfe and Montcalm is a very insignificant affair. In fact, Quebec can boast of little else than the magnificent views it commands from the ramparts, and the impregnable strength of its fortifications. Some of the suburban villas, however, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... the rough jostling of the streets, he felt himself yielding to wicked thoughts. His slain ambitions embittered him. It was long before he could bring himself to bow to his fate, and accept with equanimity the painful lot of a poor, plain, commonplace man. At last, to guard against the temptations of wickedness, he plunged into ideal goodness, and sought refuge in a self-created sphere of absolute truth and justice. It was then that he became a republican, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... new and varied surroundings it would be surprising indeed if the author, with his faculty of making even the commonplace attractive, did not tell an intensely interesting story of adventure, as well as give much information in regard to the distant countries through which our friends pass, and the strange peoples with whom they are brought to contact. This book, and indeed the whole ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... hero through a woman's love ... we take to be a mere commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen, though he satirised it, had by no means fully outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt. Peer's return to Solveig is (in the original) a passage of the most poignant lyric beauty, but it is surely a shirking, not a solution, of the ethical problem. It would be ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sailor's life 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 solemn ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... England with which mine had been connected in the past. For the Greeks and Romans I cared very little; they seemed too remote from my own country and race, and the English present, in which my lot was cast, seemed too dull and un-picturesque, too prosaic and commonplace. My imagination being saturated with Scott, I had naturally the same taste as my master. I soon learned all about heraldry, and in my leisure time drew and colored all the coats of arms that had been borne by the Hamertons in their ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... completely an open question. Tillotson ought to have known his old friend Nelson better, than to conceive it possible that a man of such deep religious feeling, and such sensitive honour, could be doubtful what to do, unless it might fairly be considered doubtful. His foolish commonplace appears indeed to have been sufficient to turn the scale. Nelson, almost immediately after receiving this opinion, decided on abandoning the national communion, though he took a different and a wiser ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... tapestries of coarse weave; and the ancient trees with their proud large crowns, pines and laurels, ashes, cypresses, and oaks. During all the period of their growth they were hated with the hatred which restless hearts feel for that which is commonplace, trivial, uneventful, for that which stands still ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... to bear it long alone, but the thought of returning to Switzerland so very soon is unpleasant to me. Tell me, dearest Franz, have you quite given up your idea of going to Paris? Our meeting there would be much pleasanter than at the commonplace Basle. Are you so much tied by time and space? Of course the hope of seeing you once more this year regulates all my plans; and if you offer me an opportunity for the end of September, I should be a precious fool not to make use of it. See ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... to the drawing-room, Mrs. Clifford rose from her seat, and took her hand in her own, and kissed her on one cheek as if nothing out of the common had happened in any way. The talk between them was obtrusively commonplace. But all that day long, Elma noticed her mother was far tenderer to her than usual; and when she went up to bed Mrs. Clifford held her fingers for a moment with a gentle pressure, and kissed her twice upon her eyes, and stifled ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... are like without looking in!' Charles yawned again, sighed, and moved wearily. 'Now, there came some life and freshness with you. You talk of Redclyffe, and your brute creation there, not like a book, and still less like a commonplace man; you are innocent and unsophisticated, and take new points of view; you are something to interest oneself about; your coming in is something to look forward to; you make the singing not such mere milk-and-water, your reading the Praelectiones is an additional landmark to time; besides the ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extreme seclusion from my kind that was so helpful to work during the day. I contrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was open and amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had been worried—it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear the slightest allusion to his experience in his presence, and that was by a cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him. Skelmersdale had run a break into double figures, which, by the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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
... eye. As she made the kindly intended, vague remarks customarily served out to unknown children, she was thinking: "How can any woman with a vestige of a woman's instinct dress that lovely child in ready-made, commonplace, dark-colored clothes? She would repay any amount of care and "thought." So you take music-lessons too, besides your school?" she asked mechanically. She explained to her sister, a stranger in La Chance: "Music is one of the things I starve for, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the remarks I've heard 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 what she is. Poor girl, her mother, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... conversation followed for a while, Mr Huntingdon having shut up his sister by a very curt reply to a question which she put on some commonplace subject, just for the sake of breaking through the oppressive stillness. At length, when the meal was half-way through, Mr Huntingdon ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... have our little romances, as you are pleased to call them!" "Yes, yes, all of us. Even I, unpretentious, plain Elizabeth Fairleigh,—but no matter." I mind me, reader, that I promised not to talk of my own experiences. Ah, there are no such phenomena in the world really, as "commonplace" lives, and "commonplace" persons! "Poor little old man!" I sighed again. "Did he tell you his story then of his own accord, or"—And I paused in some embarrassment, for I remembered that Dr. Peyton was a true gentleman, and ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... lesson in the Divine Life for us to learn here is the simple, almost vulgarly commonplace one, yet so greatly needing to be learnt, that "charity," which is but a synonym of the Divine Life, "begins ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... about the atmosphere of the Junta's offices; there were no war maps on the walls, no stands of arms nor recruiting officers in evidence—not even a hint of intrigue or conspiracy. The place was rather meanly furnished, and it was disappointingly commonplace. A business-like young ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... to see the girl. Nothing could be so bizarre in the world, that his cloudy, crotchety brain did not accept it, and make a commonplace matter out of it. It never occurred to him to wonder how she came there. He stood with folded arms, his bony shoulders bolstering up the board wall, watching her as she knelt, her hands on Palmer's pillow, but not touching him. Gaunt's lean face had a pitiful look, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... Sir," Mr. Murphy replied, and murmured some commonplace expression of regret. He was not particularly shocked for he had lost shipmates in a ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... politicians. Of the latter there was not an honest man among them, according to the reporter; of the former there were few who had not made the most ghastly mistakes. He looked on the world as a vast hoard of commonplace people, wherein the men of real genius were buried out of sight, if there were any men of genius, which he seemed to doubt, and those on the top were there either through their own intrigues or because they had been forced up by circumstances. His ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... her mind all that had passed, suffering the pain of it. And she had loved him once! Those mystic moonlight meetings, his young arms about her, his lips against hers—oh, she had loved him! And then had come the commonplace, the everyday, sordid side of it, he the accepted lover, high in Lady Linden's favour, which meant the gradual awakening from a dream, her ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... with an almost ludicrous return to the commonplace, "the first thing to be done is ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these were, they were sufficient to furnish a safe conduct of life even through the unsafest days of the most unsettled period of our nation's history. The wholesome, unsophisticated nature of our warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of commonplace and fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the highways and byways of ancient thought, and, stimulated by the demands of the age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of manhood. An acute French savant, M. de la Mazeliere, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... have laughed aloud at this sentimental tale invented by the man (whom I now believed had somehow contrived to steal the jewel) to account for the commonplace words it would have been difficult to erase. Had I laughed, however, my laughter would have been bitter indeed, ending in an even increased desire to save from him and his trickery the girl ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... but only brief fragments of it remain. In the "De Re Rustica," which has come down to us in form and substance as it was written, Cato maintains, in the introduction, the superiority of agriculture over other modes of gaining a livelihood. The work itself is a commonplace book of agriculture and domestic economy; its object is utility, not science: it serves the purpose of a farmer's and gardener's manual, a domestic medicine, herbal, and cookery book. Cato teaches his readers, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and in the idea that "she raises herself by the recognition of her motherhood." But the facts are capable of an entirely different interpretation. It will be my aim to give a quite simple, and even commonplace, explanation of the rise of mother-descent and mother-right in place of the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... generation. It is further recorded of many other philosophers that they were comely of countenance and added fresh charm to their personal beauty by their beauty of character. But such a defence is, as I have already said, far from me. Not only has nature given me but a commonplace appearance, but continued literary labour has swept away such charm as my person ever possessed, has reduced me to a lean habit of body, sucked away all the freshness of life, destroyed my complexion and impaired my vigour. As to my hair, which they with unblushing mendacity ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... educational and scientific value. They were, to use a mining expert's term, "hand specimens" of human welfare of the utmost value to promoters. They made factory legislation possible; they initiated the now immense co-operative movement; they stirred commonplace imaginations as only achievement can stir them; they set going a process of amelioration in industrial conditions that will never, I believe, cease again until ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... and that it had always been so since the days of King Alfred; not content with this antiquity, he also affirms that the round cap was given by God Himself to the doctors of the Mosaic Law. He adds the more commonplace but more trustworthy information that the cap was in those days fastened by a string behind, to prevent its ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... without—her husband had returned—and quick as thought was the daguerreotype concealed, while Mrs. Graham, forcing down her emotion, took up a book, which she seemed to be intently reading when her husband entered. After addressing to her a few commonplace remarks, all of which she answered civilly, he went to the wardrobe, and on pretense of looking for his knife, which, he said he believed he left in his vest pocket, he took out the key, and then carelessly proceeded to unlock his private ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... round piece of sandstone may be almost anywhere in the ground—in the first place—but, by our more or less discreditable habit of prying and snooping, we find that this object was rather more complex and of material less commonplace. In snooping through Knowledge, Oct. 9, 1885, we read that this "thunderstone" was in the possession of Mr. C. Carus-Wilson, who tells the story of the witness and his family—the sheep killed, the burial of something in the earth, the digging, and the finding. Mr. C. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... pictures to look at that huge, self-possessed man who did not seem to realize the curiosity that surrounded him. The ladies, as they went from canvas to canvas, looked out of the corner of their eyes at the celebrated artist whose portrait they had seen so often. They found him more ugly, more commonplace than he appeared in the engravings in the papers. It did not seem possible that that "porter" had talent and painted women so well. Some young fellows approached to look at him more closely, pretending to gaze at the same pictures as the master. They scrutinized him, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... many of his romances, as not worthy of him. "King's chaff is better than other folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace, he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was adamant: no man was less of an improviser, as, fortunately, Scott was; had he not been, there would not be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... people continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... 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 attenuated in what he said. Soaring easily, ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... with much demonstrative expression of public sympathy on the part of universal Manchester—the most important city in the island next after London. No men could have been found who were less fitted to act as champions in a duel on behalf of Christianity. Mr. H—— was dreadfully commonplace; dull, dreadfully dull; and, by the necessity of his nature, incapable of being in deadly earnest, which his splendid antagonist at all times was. His encounter, therefore, with Mrs. Lee presented the distressing spectacle ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... His heroes and heroines are apt to abuse the privilege which such personages have enjoyed, time out of mind, of being insipid. Nor can he catch and reproduce the easy grace and unconscious dignity of high-bred men and women. His gentlemen, whether young or old, are apt to be stiff, priggish, and commonplace; and his ladies, especially his young ladies, are as deficient in individuality as the figures and faces of a fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth with all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... epigrammatic expression of a commonplace truth, and the dullest remark on the worth of money is almost as sure of successful appreciation as the dullest remark on the worthlessness of women. Certainly I am a wit without ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... asserting that any who questioned its Mosaic authorship reduced it to the level of a pious fraud. But Biblical facts have at last triumphed over tradition, and the non-Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy is now a commonplace of criticism. It is still instructive, however, to note the successive phases through which scholarly opinion regarding the composition and date of his book ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... talked with their elbows on the table and their faces very close, exchanging those commonplace yet intimate scraps of philosophy which only two can share. Then the India-rubber Man fetched a pail of water from the river, and together ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... motherthe nature of her grief sufficiently indicated by the wringing of her hands, and the convulsive agitation of the bosom, which the covering could not conceal. Two of her gossips, officiously whispering into her ear the commonplace topic of resignation under irremediable misfortune, seemed as if they were endeavouring to stun the grief ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... assured his guest there was no hurry, offering to get up horses and show the stock the following day. Captain Stone yielded, and the next morning they started, but within a few miles met a neighbor, when all three dismounted in the shade of a tree. Commonplace chat of the country occupied the attention of the two Texans until hunger or some other warning caused one of them to look at his watch, when it was discovered to be three o'clock in the afternoon. It was then too late in the day to ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... has an individual manner so distinct that he can well afford to acknowledge his debt to Sir JAMES BARRIE. As in Mary Rose, so here (though there are no supernatural forces at work) we have the sharp contrast between commonplace life, as lived by the rest, and the life of Fairyland, as coming within the vision of one only. And we were reminded too of the Midsummer-madness that overtook the company in Dear Brutus. I won't say that it wasn't natural ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... tell you nothing of the village doings here, the little church sociables and a thousand commonplace details that go to make up the sum of existence amid such surroundings? It is because I do not really live among them. My mind is alien to these narrow margins of society and religion. But it is always of ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... poor could not afford to use unguents and keep their dead till the third day; they could not afford real cypress trees, but must use cheaper substitutes, if anything at all. They could not afford all the processionists and paraphernalia of the undertaker, but must be satisfied with four commonplace bearers, who hurried away the corpse in the evening, not on a couch but in a cheap box, and carried it out to the common necropolis beyond the Esquiline Gate. Seldom could they afford the fuel to burn the body, and in many cases it must simply be thrown into a pit roughly dug ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... was not so great an artist as Raphael I am aware. That Ingres' drawings show none of the dramatic inventiveness of Raphael's drawings is so obvious that I must apologise for such a commonplace. Raphael's drawings were done with a different intention from Ingres'; Raphael's drawings were no more than rough memoranda, and in no instance did he attempt to carry a drawing to the extreme limit that Ingres did. Ingres' drawing is one thing, Raphael's is another; ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... oppressed with a sense of danger. But his eyes fell on Jen, and the hesitation, for which he did not then try to account, passed. Jen, clear-faced and true, invited him to sit and eat, and he, starting half-abstractedly, responded to her "Draw nigh, Sergeant Tom," and sat down. Commonplace as the words were, they thrilled him, for he thought of a table of his own in a home of his own, and the same words spoken everyday, but without ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... commonplace at once clear out of one's life. There is no drudgery nor humdrum nor hardship, because everything is for Jesus, and seen through His eyes. Whatever comes in the pathway of his work is gladdest joy, whether ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... This had been a commonplace in the discussions at the end of the seventeenth century, in England and France, on the morality of ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... ruse to enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... its own for the capable and the strong, and this was still left to him. He, Orlando Brotherson, despair while his great work lay unfinished! That would be to lay stress on the inevitable pains and fears of commonplace humanity. He was not of that ilk. Intellect was his god; ambition his motive power. What would this casual blight upon his supreme contentment be to him, when with the wings of his air-car spread, he should spurn the earth and soar into the ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... should be to instruct in morals while it amuses. I cannot think but that every novelist who has thought much of his art will have realised as much as that for himself. Whether this may best be done by the transcendental or by the commonplace is the question which it more behoves the reader than the author to answer, because the author may be fairly sure that he who can do the one will not, probably cannot, do the other. If a lad be only five feet high he does not try to enlist ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... remedy—the necessity of taking more care for the future, and some gentle rebukes on account of the past, which acid he threw in to assist in subduing the patient's obstinacy, as Hannibal used vinegar in cutting his way through rocks. It was not in human nature to endure this flood of commonplace eloquence in silence; and Jin Vin, whether desirous of stopping the flow of words—crammed thus into his ear, "against the stomach of his sense," or whether confiding in Richie's protestations of friendship, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Beecher was a constant wonder. He never wrote a commonplace letter. There was always himself in it—in whatever mood ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... jostling of the streets, he felt himself yielding to wicked thoughts. His slain ambitions embittered him. It was long before he could bring himself to bow to his fate, and accept with equanimity the painful lot of a poor, plain, commonplace man. At last, to guard against the temptations of wickedness, he plunged into ideal goodness, and sought refuge in a self-created sphere of absolute truth and justice. It was then that he became a republican, entering into the republican idea even as heart-broken girls enter a convent. And not finding ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... when children, and the weak health which comes with them, and the cares of a household, and money difficulties were absorbing her little powers, Elsley Vavasour began to fancy that his wife was a very commonplace person, who was fast losing even her good looks and her good temper. So, on the whole, they were not happy. Elsley was an affectionate man, and honourable to a fantastic nicety; but he was vain, capricious, over-sensitive, craving for admiration and distinction; and it was not ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... a picturesque way of putting the most threadbare, bald, commonplace of religious teaching. The word faith, when it has any meaning at all in people's minds when they hear it from the pulpit, is extremely apt, I fear, to create a kind of, if not disgust, at least a revulsion ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at least, who are now in some out of the way parish, with wives and little children, burdened with the cares of life. How they are to struggle on in the future it is sad to think of. They will either give up the profession or die, or degenerate into very commonplace ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... sealed his tongue, forbidding him to utter Lightmark's name, greatly as he desired. He racked himself for delicate circumlocutions, and it was only at last, by a gigantic effort, when he realized that the afternoon waned, while he wasted an unique occasion in humorous commonplace, that he broke almost brutally into Eve's disquisitions on her various festivities to ask, blushing like a girl, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... chair and asked him to make a speech before the castle door. He did so, and there is a grand statuesque picture of the hero, naked to the waist, and standing on the chair as lofty pedestal. In the torn coat the artist could never have made him look like Apollo. Even the shirt would have been too commonplace; so off went the shirt. Three or four times attention is directed to the fact of the nakedness by the hero himself, while the pencil of the filial illustrator has rendered him immortal in this primitive costume. In his speech he 'abused them heartily and soundly.' ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... rise to that summit single-handed and alone would require unremitting effort through the very best years of his manhood. His brain, his strength, his ability, his ambitions, what were they all in the strife after place and power, compared to the money of some commonplace adversary? Preston Cheney, the native-born American directly descended from a Revolutionary soldier, would be handicapped in the race with some Michael Murphy whose father had made a fortune in the saloon business, or who had himself acquired a ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... His mother's voice flew along and past his ear, kissing it in gentle remonstrance as it went by. But baby was in eager pursuit of something, and the call, if heard, was unheeded. His eyes were opening world-ward, and every new phenomenon—commonplace and unheeded by us—that addressed itself to his senses, became a wonder and a delight. Some new object was drawing him away from the loving heart and ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... secret flights of her imagination, she pictured herself in some new country with Bertie. An adventurous, reckless nature such as his, she thought, turned every gift to evil in the commonplace life where his idiosyncrasy had no play; but detached from his idle mess-room habits, and launched into a new career, when to live at all involved exertion of mind and body, would metamorphosize her hero into all she ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... criticisms of his poetry hurt him at the same time, and he was in trouble about money, for the family guardian had not proved a good manager. And now to this already overcharged heart something else was added. Keats fell in love. The lady he loved was young and beautiful, but commonplace. Keats himself describes her when he first met her as "beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange." Her beauty and strangeness won for her a way to the poet's heart. Love, however, brought to him no joyful rest, but rather passionate, jealous restlessness. Yet in spite of all ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... with rusty fire-escapes. It was the fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me to turn back. Instinct told me that I was about to enter into no commonplace experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be lost in another moment ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Charlie," said Bertha. "Anything that he regarded as a slight I think would put an end to it. Rupert is not quite a commonplace man." ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... of it," Mrs. Beardsley said. "There is nothing in Lou's nature out of which you could make a heroine of tragedy. After the first shock of that night was over she was just the commonplace little body she was before, and could not help showing how fond she was of her old lover. But she quietly refused to ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... seem to have been added at the same time, but the windows and ceiling are still those of Dom Joao's time. The windows—there are now three, a fourth in the chancel having been turned into a royal pew—are of two or three lights, have commonplace tracery, and are only interesting as being one of the few wholly ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck pool were rock crystal, the gold dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite and the sky-blue beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favored by fortune, the job of explaining the world's mechanism, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... at that men, who boast of possessing supernatural intelligence, should be unwilling to yield the palm of knowledge to philosophers who have only their ordinary, faculties; still I should be surprised if I found them teaching any new speculative doctrine, which was not a commonplace to those Gentile philosophers whom, in spite of all, they stigmatize as blind; for, if one inquires what these mysteries lurking in Scripture may be, one is confronted with nothing but the reflections of Plato or ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... stand outside a restaurant in the rain, and note what time someone inside left it. In short, it is not 'Pifield Rice, Investigator. No. 1.—The Adventure of the Maharajah's Ruby' that I submit to your notice, but the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young man, variously known to his comrades at the Bureau as 'Fathead', 'That ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... he replied, stretching himself luxuriously in the long lounge chair, "the most commonplace life hovers on the edge of the bizarre. But those of us who overstep the border become preposterous in the eyes of those who have never done so. This is not because the unusual is necessarily the untrue, but because writers of fiction have claimed ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... lighten for her, and then she turned to the Altrurian and took his hand. "Oh!" she said, with a long, deep-drawn sigh, as if that were the supreme moment of her life. "And are you really from Altruria? It seems too good to be true!" Her devout look and her earnest tone gave the commonplace words a quality that did not inhere in them, but Mrs. Makely took them on ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... like the rapid whirr of wooden rattles and lasting continuously for a period of several minutes, and then ceasing abruptly, as though at a signal, to recommence as abruptly a few minutes later. These sounds were commonplace enough, and after an hour or two to allow the ear to become accustomed to them, would of themselves have been soothing and conducive to somnolence rather than the reverse, but they were constantly being ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... meant Dona Isolda—had not been able to find time to drop him so much as two or three lines to say that they had arrived safely, and were hoping to see him soon. Of course, as he told himself, there was no very particular reason why anyone should have written so very vapid and commonplace a piece of intelligence as that they had arrived home safely, for it might be taken for granted that they had done so: the trains in Cuba travelled too slowly, and the traffic was too meagre, to admit of the possibility of an accident—and, moreover, there had ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... two open colonnades with a central niche composition flanked on either hand by a sculptured frieze. Each is the work of a woman sculptor, and both, though very different, are far from the conventional or the commonplace. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... nobody likes to be bored, but I think it would be better to be bored to extinction than to mortify and pain people by rejecting their society because they are not intensely amusing or distinguished, or even because they are intensely tiresome and commonplace.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... She answered in a voice her old playmate had never dreamed she possessed—so concentrated and full of passion. In their English lives they were so accustomed to controlling every feeling into a level commonplace that if they had had time to think, both would ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... this Jack heard again from his father. It was a commonplace message enough. Sent merely to ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... no mind for dubious philosophies. The thing she wanted she knew she should never get and she knew as well that, in all likelihood, she should never stop wanting it. Only a passionate soul in a commonplace body could have squandered itself with such ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: "You are looking for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... my arms," went on Vane after a little pause, "and his last words were about you." He told her the few simple sentences, repeated to her the words which a man will say when the race is run and the tape is reached. God knows they are commonplace enough—those short disjointed phrases; but God knows also that it is the little things which count, when the heart is breaking. . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... again arrived in Switzerland. It is these bold and dramatic strokes that lift the German diplomat above the ranks of the commonplace. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... to realise the sudden change in my fortunes. Then only did I understand. I saw myself for a desolate moment, cast motherless, rudderless on the wide world where art and scholarship met with contumely and undergrown youth was buffeted and despised. My gorgeous dreams were at an end. The blighting commonplace ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... whole front of one side of the street was pulled down, and rebuilt in the flat, mean, unrelieved style of George the Third. The body of the houses was too solidly grand to submit to alteration; so people were occasionally surprised, after passing through a commonplace-looking shop, to find themselves at the foot of a grand carved oaken staircase, lighted by a window of stained glass, storied all ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is apt to stick out. How many wooden oaths could kicked chairs and slammed doors tell of! After all the home-life comes close to being the real test of power, does it not? It takes power to be gracious and strong, and patient and tender, and cheery, in the commonplace things, and the commonplace places, ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character. I suspect that in this comprehensive and (may I say) commonplace censure, you are not judging from yourself, but from prejudiced persons, whose opinions you have been in the habit of hearing. It is impossible that your own observation can have given you much knowledge of the clergy. You can have been personally acquainted with very few of a set of men ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... tickled at the man's enthusiastic admiration of my little twopenny-halfpenny feat of navigation, and—secretly—very proud of it myself; but, of course, in reality it was an exceedingly commonplace exploit, which any other navigator worthy of being so-called could have accomplished without the slightest difficulty, the only essentials to success being good instruments, clear skies, and correct arithmetic, all of which I fortunately possessed. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... return, in the studies for which he set out, that he fails in an examination as a surgeon's mate; and while figuring as a doctor of medicine, is outvied on a point of practice by his apothecary. Baffled in every regular pursuit, after trying in vain some of the humbler callings of commonplace life, he is driven almost by chance to the exercise of his pen, and here the fairy gifts come to his assistance. For a long time, however, he seems unaware of the magic properties of that pen; he uses it only as a makeshift until he can find a legitimate means of support. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Handicraftsmen. If like me you had known my Diotima, you would have learned, friend Betto, that she doth distinguish two sorts of men, on the one hand such as, being fruitful only by the body, strive but for that coarse and commonplace immortality that is won by the generation of children, on the other they whose soul conceives and engenders what is meet for the soul to produce, to wit the Good and Beautiful. My Diotima hath willed I should be of the second sort, and ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... of philosophy came from the poor, commonplace mind as a beautiful flash may come from a rough flint struck upon the roadside. Caius pondered upon it afterwards, for he never saw Neddy Morrison again. He did not happen to pass that place again that summer, and during the winter ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... dreamy and insecure of her destiny in the world, with her high aspirations and her high temper, there is a certain lapse to the handsome matron united with a man beneath her in mind and spirit, and assured of the commonplace fact that in her love and duty to him is her happiness; but as Love must often mate men and women unequally, it is perfectly natural that Love in her case should strive to keep his eyes shut when no longer blind. Great exigencies afterwards ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... Trimalchio. Now if the scene of the dinner is actually at Cumae this sounds very peculiar; it might even be a gloss added by some copyist whose knowledge was not equal to his industry. On the other hand, suppose Trimalchio is speaking of something so commonplace in his locality that the second term has become a generic, then the difficulty disappears. We today, even though standing upon the very spot in Melos where the Venus was unearthed, would still refer to her as the Venus de Melos. Friedlaender, in bracketing Cumis, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... his horse before the words were well uttered, and crying obsequiously 'that it was done,' flung his reins to one of the other riders and disappeared in the shed, as if the order given him were the most commonplace ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... face, Or painted eyes in Piccadilly; But bowler hats are commonplace, And thread-bare ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... and the pathetic letters ended with the declaration that, after its mother's death, the child Dorothy would be safely convoyed to its great-great-aunt's door and left to her to be 'fairly dealt with.' It was all quite simple and direct; the commonplace story of ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... Throw all your metaphors to the winds—your poetic raptures—your ideals—your romance of position and of circumstance: look at a fair, amiable, cultivated woman, as you meet her in the actual, commonplace scenes of life: she is literally, prosaically speaking, the last consummate result of the creative power of nature, and the gathered refinements of centuries of human civilization. The world can show nothing comparable to that light, graceful figure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... outside of memories and dreams, my prison life has also its joys. These consist in the letters I receive from Serge and Aunt Vera. The former are full of a forced gaiety, short and commonplace, for the prison regulations forbid prisoners to write on other subjects save their health, clothes, and books, and they are all read by a constabulary officer, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the horse and armor was only a frame, an accidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date and practical and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thing with a gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we call machinery. But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le Duc Somebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... unlike in appearance. The one nearest me, who had uttered the shrieks, was about twenty years of age, I should think, with aquiline features, and black eyes and hair; every detail of the face was perfect, but there was a bold, commonplace look out of the bright eyes. Her companion instantly arrested all my attention. It seemed to me I had never beheld a more beautiful. and striking countenance. She was younger, by two or three years, than her companion; her complexion was fairer; her long golden hair fell nearly to her waist, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... that," said his lordship slowly. "He related it... oh, just as a commonplace, an instance of ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... one brush-stroke that was commonplace in all your life," said Geraldine abruptly. "Even I ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the glass of his earliest reactions to an environment that was commonplace, unstimulating, dull—the little wooden town set among cornfields, "Wellsville" they called it, where he came from out of the Infinite to ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... obligations as an American gentleman should, even though the performance had created an extraordinary commotion. Chase was new to the Old World and its customs, especially those rigorous ones which surrounded royalty and denied it the right to venture into the commonplace. The ambassador at the capital of the Empire at first sought to excuse him on the ground of ignorance; but the Grand Duke insisted that even an American could not be such a fool as Chase had been; so, it must have been a wilful offence that led up ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... always a little uneasy in her presence. He felt not only that she was analyzing him, but that the results of the analysis seemed to her to be a very small residuum, of solid matter. Besides, he had been told that she had described him as a "commonplace young man," a thing nobody could be expected ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... she was looking up at him with her shining eyes; "to-morrow I shall be just a commonplace mother of a commonplace son; but to-night I am queen, and you are the crown prince on the eve of coronation. Oh, Hickory Dickory, I am such ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... permanent significance. Plenty of its other writing remains in the shape of religious prose—sermons, lives and legends of saints, biblical paraphrases, and similar work in which the monastic and priestly spirit took delight, but which is generally dull with the dulness of medieval commonplace didacticism and fantastic symbolism. The country, too, was still distracted with wars. Within fifty years after Alfred's death, to be sure, his descendants had won back the whole of England from 'Danish' rule (though the 'Danes,' then constituting half the population of the north ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Government, abstractedly considered, and speculations about what would be the best for this country; Charles's account of his own principles in that respect; his persuasion about mine; his Grace's lessons from Lord Chatham, and commonplace panegyric upon that unparalleled statesman, and the utility to the public derived from paying his debts and maintaining his posterity. The principal is, that hereafter people in employment will be indifferent about the emoluments of office, persuaded that a grateful country ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... given up to a new tenant, were, at any rate, to let, Harry did not feel very easy in his cousin's company, nor she possibly in his. He found either that he had nothing to say to her, or that what she had to say to him was rather dull and commonplace, and that the red lip of a white-necked pipe of Virginia was decidedly more agreeable to him now than Maria's softest accents and most melancholy moue. When George went to Kensington, then, Harry did not care much about going, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... half dreaded his arrival, had been wondering how they should meet after the strange revelation of the afternoon, had been thinking of the most trite and commonplace remark with which she might greet him. But when it actually came to the point, she could not say a word, only looked up at him with eyes full of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the idea of profiting by the anniversary. At first it was planned that "Lucia" should be given, with Brignoli as Edgardo, the part he had sung in the opera at Patti's dbut, but two months before the time the tenor died. Instead, "Martha" was performed, in a manner wholly commonplace in all respects except as to the titular rle, in which Mme. Patti appeared, as a matter of course. There was only a little perfunctory applause, but Colonel Mapleson had resolved that the scene should be enacted, of which we have often read, in which the devotees of the prima donna unhitch ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... when he entered stood awhile with his back to the fire in his usual way, merely uttering a few commonplace remarks about the beauty of the weather, while he plucked up courage for the more interesting converse. It cannot probably be said that he had resolved then and there to make an offer to Eleanor. Men we believe seldom make such resolve. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... judge him only by what others may narrate of him. What may be familiar to those who saw with their own eyes is not so to others, who can only take at second-hand those things which they had no opportunity of seeing for themselves. Besides, details omitted as frivolous or commonplace by history, which makes a profession of more gravity, are perfectly appropriate in simple memoirs, and often enable one to understand and judge the epoch more correctly. For instance, it seems to me that ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the confession I had resolved to make. But in the presence of my unexpected companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness, moreover he inspired me with a curiosity which was quite equal to my shyness. Any number of circumstances, from a telegram from a sick relative to the most commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure from the chateau where I had left him so comfortably installed the night before. But that the expression of his face should have changed ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... independence in our dealings with our fellows. But this is carried to the extreme of independence of every one, even—say it softly—of God Himself. Criticising God, ignoring Him, leaving Him severely out so far as we are concerned,—this has become the commonplace. If for a moment He ignored us, how quickly things would go to pieces! This has come to be the dominant spirit of the whole race to a degree more marked than ever ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... brought in, to give way a little and dream, letting all the tender fancies day suppresses rise up in out minds. Wherever it is spent, whether in the dusky room or walking home through the blue evening, all things grow strangely softened and united; the magic of the old world reappears. The commonplace streets take on something of the grandeur and solemnity of starlit avenues of Egyptian temples the public squares in the mingled glow and gloom grow beautiful as the Indian grove where Sakuntala wandered ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... or man driven mad is a much more alarming creature than the same individuality in a sober and commonplace condition. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... time before the excitement quieted down and they gave her a chance to say she would go. Even then she spoke the words with fear and trembling as one might step off a commonplace threshold into a fairy palace, not sure but it might be stepping ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... This was a commonplace of American writing at the time and long after. A Rev. C.B. Boynton published a book devoted to the thesis that England and France had united in a "policy" of repressing the development of America and Russia (English and French Neutrality and the Anglo-French Alliance in their relations to the ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... it until I dared gaze no longer. Was I losing my senses altogether? I—Ros Paine—the man whose very name was not his own? I must not think such thoughts. I scarcely dared trust myself to speak and yet I knew that I must. This silence was too dangerous. I took refuge in a commonplace. ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that in Yozhov's room they were all cleverer and better than they were in the street and in the hotels. They held peculiar conversations, words and gestures for use in the room, and all this was changed outside the room, into the most commonplace and human. Sometimes, in the room, they all blazed up like a huge woodpile, and Yozhov was the brightest firebrand among them; but the light of this bonfire illuminated but faintly the obscurity of ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... not in the least resemble her father, but took more after her mother, who was round and fat, and proportionately commonplace. Rosamund at first felt no degree of elation when her place was pointed out to her next to the Professor. But suddenly encountering Lucy's angry eyes, she began to take a naughty comfort to herself in her unexpected proximity. She drew a little closer to him on purpose to annoy ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Byzantine Greeks, who, by the assiduous study of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, who, from his horn of plenty, has poured the names and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... it, a commonplace one, almost vulgar, you might say. And yet what a change of view produced by it, what a dislocation of judgment! I was like a man riding through a strange country, in a storm, at night. It is dark, he cannot see, he has never seen the country, yet as he rides on he begins to picture ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... "You have no feeling for romance," she said. "Your horizon is most commonplace." Then, struck by a sudden fear, she added, "But you surely will not be unpleasant enough to tell Aunt Therese what I have confided to ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... bigger probability, is the insistence by America upon her right to a voice in the ultimate settlement and an initiative from the Western Hemisphere that will lead to a world congress. There are the two most hopeful sources of that great proposal. It is the tradition of British national conduct to be commonplace to the pitch of dullness, and all the stifled intelligence of Great Britain will beat in vain against the national passion for the ordinary. Britain, in the guise of Sir Edward Grey, will come to the congress like a family solicitor among the Gods. What is ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "good intention" even for inveterate idlers, and that the great Arranger of the world felt some kindness for such gipsy-hearts as ours? What law, human or divine, was there to prevent us from making this stream our symbol of deliverance from the conventional and commonplace, our guide to liberty ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... to the visitor from temperate climes that in such surroundings the cacao tree seems almost commonplace. It is in appearance as moderate and unpretentious as an apple tree, though somewhat taller, being, when full grown, about twenty feet high. It begins to bear in its fourth or fifth year. Smooth in its early youth, as it gets older ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... 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 ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... sincere sense of the lady's kindness. Her commonplace excuse was a true excuse—she had a headache; and she asked leave to ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... a bit sudden," he remarked in whimsical commonplace, "however—" His hands went into his pockets automatically. His eyes followed a seam on the paper overhead back and forth, before ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... British arms at the European front. Canada became more than ever an armed camp of determined patriots. The general sentiment was expressed by the Toronto Globe, which said: "If German agents see a way to injure Canada, they will stop at nothing to compass their ends. Arson to them is a commonplace and murder an incident in the day's work. The destruction of the Parliament Building may have been the result of an accident, but the general belief at Ottawa is that it was ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... put away the commonplace delights Of humbler folk to brood on things sublime; Rapt and aloof I ever tread the heights, Thinking great thoughts and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... advanced the revolutionary idea that insanity was not a sin, but a disease like all other diseases. This idea is now a commonplace, but in his time it revolutionized the world. It seemed as though this innovation inaugurated by Pinel would overthrow the world and the foundations of society. Well, two years before the storming ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... they found life worth living. As only people of humble fortune are likely to do, they lived the simple life. And they found it pleasant. They realized, as many people of humble fortune do not, that the sweetest pleasure can be derived from the cheerful performance of obvious and commonplace duties. Mat had always taken pride in his unpretentious calling, and his wife learned to love the blessed busy life of wife ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... or commonplace, such as a standard geometric figure, a familiar symbol, an emblem, or a motif, or another shape, pattern, or configuration which has become standard, common, prevalent, ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... the proud possessor of a pair of red shoes, which I carried rolled up in my 'kerchief while we walked the two miles. We stopped in the woods; my feet were denuded of their commonplace attire and arrayed in white hose, beautifully clocked, and those precious slices, and my poor conscience tortured about my vanity. The girls also exchanged theirs for morocco slippers. We concealed our walking shoes under a mossy log and ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... am." Joan appeared and sat down, looking as if she were doing the most commonplace thing in life. It was the old daring that ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... cab freed him from this torture. The hotel porter opened the door. Pierre stepped out mechanically. Without speaking a word he followed a waiter, who showed him to a room on the second floor. Left alone, he sat down. This room, with its commonplace furniture, chilled him. He saw in it a type of his future life: lonely and desolate. Formerly, when he used to come to Paris, he stayed with Madame Desvarennes, where he had the comforts of home, and every ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... beginning to beat rapidly, he advanced, with his lantern close to the rocky floor. Presently he saw two other pieces of gold, and then, a little farther on, the end of a candle, so small that it could scarcely have been held by the fingers. He picked up this and stared at it. It was a commonplace candle-end, but the sight of it sent a chill through him from head to foot. It must have been dropped by some one who could ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... as she gazed on this (to her) new specimen of humanity. What a dainty, fairy-like creature she seemed, and what a mischievous gleam was lurking in the depths of those great, shining eyes! Nellie felt quite awkward and commonplace in her presence; however, she managed to say shyly, "I am afraid it is I who have been rude staring at you so; but I did not mean any harm, only you are so ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... by. And his silent winter came. One day, in a December frost, he met the Canon, muffled up to the chin and on his way to see Miss Bigelow, who professed herself once again in extremis. They stopped in the snow and spoke a few commonplace words, but Maurice thought he observed a peculiar furtiveness in the old man's manner, a hint of some suppressed excitement in ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... ill-chosen and commonplace enough, and uttered in an accent indefinably strange to the bewildered listener, but the force of the man was tremendous, as he sent out his personality over the enormous crowd, on that high vibrant voice that controlled, it seemed, even those on the outskirts ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... be. No suburban villa could have been more commonplace and less disturbed than was their dwelling for twenty-seven nights of every month, but on the twenty-eighth they found a change of air desirable. Once it is true the stalwart Thomas, like Ajax, defied the lightning, or rather ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... over-sanguine and enthusiastic? Is it not a self-complacent dream? Are the tendencies adverted to so productive? Is any such genius really forming as is here claimed? Is it not, on the contrary, now fully understood that the Americans are a commonplace people, meagre-minded money-makers, destitute of originality? What have they done to demonstrate genius yet?—These skepticisms are somewhat prevalent nowadays, and are a natural enough reaction from Fourth-of-July ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... simple remark should have caused a halt in the conversation, but it did. Miss Preston said, "Oh, indeed!" rather hurriedly, and her next speech was concerning the height of a particularly big wave. Mr. Hazeltine answered this commonplace somewhat absent-mindedly. He acted like a man to whom a startling idea had suddenly occurred. Just then they heard Captain Eri ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... is so; but hush, dear boy! This is not the place to discuss Odalite. Besides, it is not polite to whisper in company," said Mrs. Force, with a smile at the quoted commonplace. ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... It has become a commonplace remark that fact is often stranger than fiction. It may be said, as a variant of this, that history is often more romantic than romance. The pages of the record of man's doings are frequently illustrated by entertaining and striking incidents, relief points ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... temperament? As I look back on the whole course of my relation to Louie, I am conscious only of a sickening sense of utter failure. Our father left her to me, and I have not been able to hold her back from—nay, I have helped to plunge her into the most obvious and commonplace ruin. Yet I am always asking myself, if it were to do again, could I do any better? Has any other force developed in me which would make it possible for me now to break through the barriers between her nature and mine, to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... leaves blank before the pages of forms for filling in anthropometric and physiological data, and the headings may be made to suggest a worthier way of viewing these things. For instance, there may be the indication 'Place and time of conception,' and a specimen entry may be of service to lead commonplace minds into a more reverent and poetical view than is now usual—such as the one I culled from the life-history of an American child: 'Our second child M—— was conceived on Midsummer Day, under the shade of a friendly sycamore, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... a brighter period. I shall not expatiate on the works of the Byzantine Greeks, who, by the assiduous study of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... And let me tell you that her flitting from each to each individual has been anything but a pleasure for me—certainly not a wanton game of my instigation. To see the creature who has hitherto been perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the divinity which has informed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasure for any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the functional beauty of the whole setup no longer impressed him as it had several years before. Just as a professional actor is not impressed by being allowed backstage, or as a multimillionaire considers expensive luxuries as commonplace, so Spencer Candron thought of nothing more than his own personal work as he climbed the five steps and pushed open the ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... who are paid for their presence, may plead other engagements, and their pleas will be considered; and if a witness be a lord, it may perhaps be thought very hard that he should be dragged away from his amusements. But the ordinary commonplace witness must simply listen and obey—at his peril. It was thus decided that Carry must be in Salisbury on the Wednesday, and remain there, hanging about the Court, till her services should be wanted. Fenwick, who had been in Salisbury, had seen ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... with its massive head. In voice and gesture and manner, Douglas was incomparably the superior, as he was, too, in the ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words, the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... was very curious; where, a few moments before, there had been ready repartee, interspersed with laughter, now there was low-toned commonplace conversation, or a dead silence. We were wrapped in a cloud; moisture began to form in tiny drops upon the stanchions and the deck, upon the beards and moustaches of the male part of the voyagers, upon the woolly texture of the garments of all, even ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... of bread is surely a sufficiently commonplace operation. Yet Jesus brake bread with his disciples in such way that that simple act has become the symbol of sublimely spiritual relations, the centre of the most august rite of the Christian Church. In like ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... was greatly amused, and noted down the incident and some of the remarks in his commonplace book, under the general head of "Bestiarium;" and the ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... nobleman may be original; a poor penniless wretch upon town must be humbly and insignificantly commonplace. What a pity for the success of the aristocratic monopolists that nature puts clever fellows and fools just in the reverse order! But then nature's ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... name and the subject of the discourse; it is the summum bonum of the Chinese. In opening this Book, compiled by a disciple of Confucius, and containing his doctrines, we might expect to find a work like Cicero's De Officiis; but we find a very different production, consisting of a few commonplace rules for the maintenance of a good government [1].' My readers will perhaps think, after reading the present section, that the truth lies between these two representations. 2. I believe that the Book should be styled ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... the success of both, following upon that of Hyde Parker a few weeks earlier, in his expedition to Tarrytown, confirmed Washington in the opinion which he expressed five years later to de Grasse, that batteries alone could not stop ships having a fair wind. This is now a commonplace of naval warfare; steam giving always a fair wind. On the 15th Howe's army crossed under cover of Parker's ships, Hotham again superintending the boat work. The garrison of New York slipped along the west shore of the island and joined ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... course, was an especially important occasion; and his Majesty, as well as all the people, was greatly interested in the workings and development of this trial. Never before had such a case occurred; never before had a subject dared to love the daughter of a king. In after-years such things became commonplace enough; but then they were, in no slight degree, novel ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... eyes that dreamed and wandered, and then suddenly sank into you like claws, Susy seemed to have found the key to all his years of dogged toil, his indifference to neglect, indifference to poverty, indifference to the needs of his growing family.... Yes: for the first time she saw that he looked commonplace enough to be a genius—was a genius, perhaps, even though it was Violet Melrose who affirmed it! Susy looked steadily at Fulmer, their eyes met, and he smiled at her faintly through ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... But that in which the Athenian excelled all men of all ages, that irresistible eloquence, which at the distance of more than two thousand years stirs our blood, and brings tears into our eyes, he passes by with a few phrases of commonplace commendation. The origin of the drama, the doctrines of the sophists, the course of Athenian education, the state of the arts and sciences, the whole domestic system of the Greeks, he has almost completely neglected. Yet these things will appear, to a reflecting ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... boat from keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed those Wavelets Blue, While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a commonplace type, like you— In their strength and in their science they were positively giants, through the gorgeous days of old, Still an Admirable Crichton in those lieben alten Zeiten was the oarsman brave ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... knowing now that Miss Lind was a commonplace amateur. He had been contrasting her with his sister, greatly to the disparagement of his home life; and he was disappointed to find the lady break down where the actress would have succeeded so well. Consoling ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... evidently her lover. Perhaps it was his imagination that had mixed the magic potion that lent an atmosphere of old-world pastoral charm to the story of the Valdes grant. Likely enough the girl would prove commonplace in a proud half-educated fashion that would be ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... majority in his profession always: consequently the moment his practice is tracked down to its source in human passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of the public, which sees that the average doctor is much too commonplace and decent a person to be capable of passionate wickedness of ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... 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, cautious, persevering man, who certainly was free from the rashness and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... 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 life's mysteries; diminishes the rights ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Snark's a 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 chance ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... restaurant in the rain, and note what time someone inside left it. In short, it is not 'Pifield Rice, Investigator. No. 1.—The Adventure of the Maharajah's Ruby' that I submit to your notice, but the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young man, variously known to his comrades at the Bureau as 'Fathead', 'That blighter ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment. There are more spells than your commonplace ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... be regarded as an ordinary woman, as a mere commonplace, shack-bred, pretty girl. Down through the years had come a strain of effectiveness which she inherited in its full strength; she was as inexplicable as Abraham Lincoln. Her stress of mind relieved, she regarded the ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... on the grass well toward the rear where he could see her at work. He thought it wonderful to be able thus to make a beautiful picture out of such a commonplace thing as a saleratus swamp. But then, he was beginning to think that this girl was capable of endless wonders. He had met no other girl just like her, so young and so beautiful, and yet so talented and so well-informed; so rich, ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... was learning something more weighty—the art of handling people, in the two aspects thereof—bluffing, and backing up the bluff with force and originality. He came to the commonplace people along the road as something novel and admirable, a man who had taken his wife and his poverty and gone seeing the world. When he smiled in a superior way and said nothing, people immediately believed that he must have been places, done brave things. He didn't so ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... collected, they must be processed and disseminated and then stored for future access. Enterprise data storage and retrieval systems that are capable of working with many terrabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of information are already commonplace. Since it is impossible for humans to comprehend such vast quantities of information without some assistance, data exploitation tools (filters, fusion, automatic target recognition, image understanding, ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... shaped my passion in such words as these! Malignant goddess! bane to my repose, Thou universal cause of all my woes; Say whence it comes that thou art grown of late A poor amusement for my scorn and hate; The malice thou inspirest I never fail On thee to wreak the tribute when I rail; Fool's commonplace thou art, their weak ensconcing fort, Th'appeal of dulness in the last resort: Heaven, with a parent's eye regarding earth, Deals out to man the planet of his birth: But sees thy meteor blaze about ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... feeling of superiority and stoicism which accompanied the pang and pain of it. But in England, where everybody bathed—or at any rate had water in their rooms and splashed and said ah! ah! and oh! oh!—he regarded the morning bath as commonplace, and had often to be bribed ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... supply ahead for the summer campaign. There must be fifteen dollars' worth of target in sight, say, for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had become as commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to take a letter ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... just as he had considered it,—with entire coldness. Yet both of them knew, in their secret thoughts, that the balance of life and death was so fine that the least minor incident might cast them into darkness. It would not have to be a great disaster, a wide departure from the commonplace. They were traveling at a terrific rate of speed, and a sharp rock too close to the surface would rip the bottom from their craft. Any instant might bring the shock ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... everybody might be expected to come to it. But as we have determined to dematerialize him, his disappearance would bring suspicion upon us, and we might get into trouble if he should be considered a mere commonplace person. So we decided to speak out plainly, say what we had done, and what we were going to do, and thus put ourselves at the head of the spirit operators of the world. But we are not yet ready to do anything or to make our announcements, and if ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... 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 ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... at gaze, uncomprehending, too astonished for speech. We had come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's imaginations coming ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... warfare of the playground at Brienne Napoleon was master of the revels. His capacity for command had already been detected; but neither comrade nor teacher saw beneath the unpromising exterior of the West Point student a trace of aught save what was commonplace. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... and military household who had to receive his direct orders or enjoyed the right of "paying their court at these privileged hours." At Saint Helena, Napoleon boasted that at the Tuileries he had suppressed in the matter of etiquette "all that was real and commonplace, and had substituted what was merely nominal and decorative." "A king," he said, "is not a natural product; he is a result of civilization. He does not exist nakedly, but only ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... be seen, and which represent different episodes in the history of Florence—combats, and captures of cities, the whole being a travesty of antiquity, an intermingling of allegories. These frescos, painted with an intrepid and learned mediocrity, display the commonplace tones, swelling muscles and anatomical tricks in use at that epoch ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... conceived of flying conversation. In all the literature of ancient days, there is not a line that will apply to the telephone, except possibly that expressive phrase in the Bible, "And there came a voice." In these more privileged days, the telephone has come to be regarded as a commonplace fact of everyday life; and we are apt to forget that the wonder of it has become greater and not less; and that there are still honor and profit, plenty of both, to be won by the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... not to trouble herself with such thoughts. "That's trash," said Miss Stanbury, angrily. "A person who has it is bound to trouble himself about it. You don't suppose I'm afraid of dying;—do you?" she added. Dorothy answered her with some commonplace,—declaring how strongly they all expected to see her as well as ever. "I'm not a bit afraid to die," said the old woman, wheezing, struggling with such voice as she possessed; "I'm not afraid of it, and I don't ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... To the Chinese such commonplace things as marriage, friendship, and home have an infinitely deeper meaning than can be attached to them by civilisation which practically lives abroad, in the hotels and restaurants and open houses of others, where there is no sanctity of the life within, no ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... in the grand old town, coming upon it thus at its best; and I was glad that fate had driven me into my own land en automobile. Even though, in following Carmona to watch over the girl we both loved, I might have to keep often to the beaten track made commonplace by tourists, the way would never be really commonplace, as to sightseers who take the ordinary ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... country, escaping from social overtures he did not feel prepared to meet. To all three men Mrs. Martha was at this time an object of silent wonder. Before the Adventist disturbance she had appeared a very commonplace person; now, as they saw her going about her daily work, grim in her complete reserve, questions which could hardly be put into words arose in their minds concerning her. She suggested to them such pictorial ideas as one gleans in childhood about the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... thought that here was plain sailing. A tender interview at the garden gate. She "sighed and looked down as Charles Thorndike took her hand"—unavoidable and not unacceptable subject. Lovers are all commonplace young men with large eyes, long legs, and small moustaches (villains' moustaches grow apace); moreover, lovers, I believe, generally take care to avoid observation; but no! it appears that "our subscribers" have a stern code which may not be lightly ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... narrow-minded fanatic and will write a piece for great ladies to perform when asked by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque"; and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new seriousness and beauty. The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one was "sincerely engaged on the side of liberal manners" while the other ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... he cried enthusiastically, "you are a great poet! You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... house in Attica) in twenty books consists of numerous extracts from Greek and Roman writers on subjects connected with history, philosophy, philology, natural science and antiquities, illustrated by abundant criticisms and discussions. It is, in fact, acommonplace book, and the arrangement of the contents is merely casual, following the course of his reading of Greek and Latin authors. The work is, however, of special value to us from the very numerous quotations from ancient authors ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... what are they before the instinctive affection we feel for beings that have proceeded from ourselves, and who perpetuate the infinite variety of our habits and thoughts? I abhor those wretches who, in order not to disturb the commonplace peace of matrimony, abandon the children they have outside the house. Paternity is the most noble of all animal functions, but the animals have more courage and dignity than man in fulfilling it. No animal of the higher sort abandons or disowns its cub, and yet there are many men who turn ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... soul till reached the sward of the hill; psyche, the soul that longed to be loose. I would write psyche always instead of soul to avoid meanings which have become attached to the word soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy inddeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself. Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... the table, she hid her face in them, and sobbed as though her heart would break. Curtis placed a hand on her shoulder, and strove to calm her with such commonplace phrases as his dazed brain could dictate, but she wept bitterly, just as a child might weep if disappointed about the non-fulfillment of some object on which its heart ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Lion 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 what he considered to be the difference between the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... err on the side of lucidity; but their meaning to contemporaries in this particular respect is ascertained, not only by fair inference from their contents, but by the practical commentary of numerous actions under commonplace commanders-in-chief. It further received authoritative formulation in the specific finding of the Court-Martial upon Admiral Byng, which was signed by thirteen experienced officers. "Admiral Byng should have caused ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... coherence in his mind; in all his thoughts nothing is certain or stable. If you watch your supposed prodigy attentively, you will sometimes find him a well-spring of energy, clear-sighted, penetrating the very marrow of things. Much oftener the same mind appears commonplace, dull, and as if enveloped in a dense fog. Sometimes he outruns you, and sometimes he stands still. At one moment you feel like saying, "He is a genius," and at another, "He is a fool." You are mistaken in either case: ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... they were alone. "You have been foolish; very foolish." He had a trick of repeating himself, conceiving, no doubt, that the commonplace achieves ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... little-known 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
... and he took it out and opened it now, reading and re-reading some of the lines most dear and familiar to him, when, as a boy, he had elected this poet, so wickedly done to death ere his prime by commonplace critics, as one of his chief favourites among the highest Singers. And his lips, half-murmuring, followed the verse ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... in the last analysis, but—that the legislation should not assume too exalted a level of ordinary morality. The utterances in the very unsatisfactory Deontology are of little value, and seem to imply a moral sentiment corresponding to a petty form of commonplace prudence.[476] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... he told himself that it was fancy that made him see in the faces of these people—people, it must be remembered, who were not commonplace, but rather enthusiasts for their cause, since they preferred exile to a life under the Christian system—that made him see a kind of blankness and heaviness corresponding to that which the aspect of their street presented. Many of the faces were intellectual, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... the intrigues which he feared 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them we owe, however, these noble lines, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort. It will give him a shock. You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is, until you bite into a layer of it in ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Tight in the Middle General Grant Good, Bright, Passable Lie His Parts Seemed to Be Raised by the Demands of Great Station House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand I Can't Spare That Man, He Fights! Idealization Which So Easily Runs into the Commonplace If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong Ignored the Insult, but Firmly Established His Superiority Inability to Say "No" as a Positive Weakness Leave Us to Take Care of Ourselves Let Us to the End Dare to Do Our Duty as We ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... glow filtered through the loom, softening the light on the happy faces—each scalp crowned with chaplets of laurel tied with red ribbons: an enchantment of color, form and light where but an hour before only the practical and the commonplace had held sway. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... in Europe, in one of the bloody charges of the Russian cavalry, there was an officer—a man who felt and who possessed sufficient confidence in the troops he commanded, and in the authority of his own voice and example—received that charge not in the ordinary, commonplace, and accustomed manner, by forming his troops into a hollow square, and thus arresting the charge, but by forming into two diverging lines, and thus receiving upon the rifles of his Highlandmen the charge of the Russian cavalry and repelling it. How all England rang with ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... was only more conspicuous than that of the Maharajah of Burdawan because the former wore the many-folded turban and brocaded dress of his Sikh ancestry, whereas the latter, like most Bengalees of the upper classes, has adopted the much more commonplace broadcloth of the West. The bold, hawk-like features of Malik Umar Hyat Khan of Tiwana in the Punjab were as characteristic of the fighting Pathan from the North as were the Rajah of Mahmudabad's more delicate features of the Mahomedan aristocracy of the erstwhile kingdom of Oudh. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... of his fortune. If I could make such folk understand how illusory is their belief, what a service I should render to art—if I could only make them understand that the original taste of man is always for the obvious and the commonplace, and that it is only by great labour and care that man learns to understand as beautiful that which the uneducated eye ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... tranquil; but his violet upper eye was sinister and adult. His skin was of the colour of yellow ivory. His long, curling hair matched his sorb—it was violet. The second man was standing erect before the other, a few feet away from him. He was short and muscular, his face was broad, bearded, and rather commonplace, but there was something terrible about his appearance. The features were distorted by a deep-seated look of pain, despair, ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... of Mr. Richardson of disjointed fragments, jotted down almost without any connexion. This was necessarily the case. Few incidents, save an occasional visit from thieves, or a dispute with that strange old gentleman, Sultan En-Noor, diversified this period. However, the simple commonplace book of a traveller in a totally new country can never be without its interest. No doubt Mr. Richardson would have attempted, had he survived, to throw all these observations into a picture; but any attempt to do so on my part would have probably resulted in the ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... day, when all looks sad and dismal without, my worthy friend and neighbour, PHORMIO, sometimes gives me a call—and we have a rare set-to at my old favourite volumes—the 'Lectiones Memorabiles et Reconditae' of WOLFIUS[172]—a commonplace book of as many curious, extraordinary, true and false occurrences, as ever were introduced into two ponderous folios. The number of strange cuts in it used to amuse my dear children—whose parent, from the remembrance of the past, still finds a pleasing recreation in ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, "She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice.... Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall?" Whatever we may surmise, there is nothing to prove that she was disappointed. She was the one star which brightened Swift's storm-tossed course; it is well that she was spared seeing ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... sat thoughtful—the Tunker, the Indian, the pioneer woman, and the merry, sad-faced boy. It was a commonplace scene in the Indiana timber, and that one lonely grave is all that is left to recall such scenes to-day—the grave ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... dignity. "You have no feeling for romance," she said. "Your horizon is most commonplace." Then, struck by a sudden fear, she added, "But you surely will not be unpleasant enough to tell Aunt Therese what I have confided ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs," occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... flying guests, littered the carpet, adding to the general confusion of overturned chairs and tables. Everywhere were evidences of the haste with which the place had been vacated as well as the superstitious dread which had prevented it being re-entered for the commonplace purpose of cleaning. Even the piano had not been shut, and under it lay some scattered sheets of music which had been left where they fell, to the probable loss of some poor musician. The clock occupying ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... whiskers and eyeglasses. The initials on his suit case were J. S. M., Boston, and they stood for John Spencer Morgan. If the bearer of the suit case had followed the fashion of the native princes of India and had emblazoned his titles upon his baggage, the commonplace name just quoted might have been followed by "M.D., LL.D., at Harvard and Oxford; vice president American Medical Society; corresponding secretary Associated Society of Surgeons; lecturer at Harvard Medical College; author of 'Diseases ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with money also. Now, as for myself, I confess I'm not nearly so magnanimous as my father, and, for Mad's sake, I do hope you will get rid of your vagaries. An income, I know, is a very commonplace sort of thing; but when a man has a family there are ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... supple, and living the ship seems upon the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare. If there were more people of his honesty, this would be about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... closely their credentials, though it is to be remembered that it kept its critical faculty sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while welcoming the Cubists. I cannot deny, however, that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace painters. We knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of Cezanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else—but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of Cezanne had made ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... then has happened, much has been achieved; Marvels, commonplace to-day, few then would have believed. Science, Liberty, Pure Manners, order, Peace, Goodwill, Punch for Fifty Years has ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... explicit, and may have been too little of a politician by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale" he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale" he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... great central 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... of engrossing a lover's admiration and affection, better than they love the virtue and honour of the man they may be brought to prefer. He that serves his religion, his prince, and his country, with ardour and devotion, need not plead his cause with the commonplace rant of romantic passion—the woman whom he honours with his love becomes his debtor, and her corresponding affection is engaged ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... 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. The "mode" in any class ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... wandering abroad over the universe of misery. For was not the world full of men and women who groaned, not merely under poverty and cruelty, weakness and sickness, but under dullness and stupidity, hugged in the paralyzing arms of that devil-fish, The Commonplace, or held fast to the rocks by the crab Custom, while the tide of moral indifference was fast rising to choke them? Was there no prophet, no redemption, no mediator for such as these? Were there not thousands of women, born with ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of his hearers this essential article of his faith—that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and form of celebration were "idolatry"—may have been quite a new idea. It was already, however, a commonplace with Anglican Protestants. Nothing of the sort was to be found in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI.; broken lights of various ways of regarding the Sacrament probably played, at this moment, over the ideas of Knox's ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... in silence for some time. Both hearts were too full for commonplace talk, and he did not dare venture out of safe lines. He could not pretend to fatherly love, even that cloaked by brotherliness would be but a sham, he knew. He had his own honor to satisfy, as ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Dolores had it in her by inheritance and by training to meddle with the lightning as safely as human being might; and Lady Merrifield owned with a sigh that she must accept as a fact that what even the heathens owned as a Divine mystery and awful attribute, had come to be treated as a commonplace business messenger and scientific toy, though (as Mrs. Gatty puts it) the mystery had only gone deeper. So much for the peril; and for the other scruple, it was set at rest by a hospitable letter from Mrs. Underwood, heartily inviting Miss ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... steep part of the incline, and Catherine suddenly quickened her steps and passed him, so making it impossible that he could see her face. She tried to speak, but the commonplace words she desired to say were strangled, at birth, ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... be thought of them, are, even to a superficial view, the extraordinary effluence of extraordinary lives. Here at length we gain a clearer conception of miracle. Life is the world's great magician,—life, so familiar, yet so mysterious; so commonplace, yet so transcendent. No miracle is more marvellous than its doings witnessed in the biological laboratory, or more inexplicable than its transformation of dead matter into living flesh, its development of a Shakespeare from a microscopic bit of protoplasm. But its mysterious processes ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... to a visitor, who gave him a commonplace account of some remarkable scenes, "do you know in what respect you differ from Don Quixote?"—"No," said the Abbe, not half liking the look of the question. "Why, M. l'Abbe, Don Quixote took the inns on the road for castles, but you have taken ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... 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
... yellow-flowering plant, the name of which I forget at the moment, also trained to the walls; and ivy. Altogether, six plants grow up the walls of the cottage; and over the wicket-gate there is a rude arch—a framework of tall sticks—from which droop thick bunches of hops. It is a very commonplace sort of cottage; nothing artistically picturesque about it, no effect of gable or timber-work; it stands by the roadside in the most commonplace way, and yet it pleases. They have called in Nature, that great genius, and let the artist have ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... know; but as soon as I got a little rest and peace, I began to think of what I had left and especially of Terry. It was not only my love for him that called, but what my life with him had been and would be if I returned—a life that was not a commonplace life, a life of intelligence and freedom. Already I was bored by the quiet goodness of the people I was with, and ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... SUSURRUS of the woodland, the tinkling of brooks, the throbbing of human hearts, the cries of all living creatures; all those groans of pain, stammers of desire, shrieks of despair, yawns even of languor, which are ever breaking out of the heart of things; and beside all this, the hearsay, commonplace, proverbial lore of the world. He turns these into melodies which shall be caught up by those who listen. In short, he converts by his alchemy the common stuff of pain and of joy into music. But he is optic as well as acoustic; that is, he calls up at the same time by his art a ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... bound together they again became resolved into the original waste. In the tea-room fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials. The eternal is to be found only in the spirit which, embodied in these simple surroundings, beautifies them with the subtle light of ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... themselves to be equal to this. A very simple instance occurred in the earliest experiences of the writer. After three or four sittings round a small table with two friends, at which there was meaningless tipping, and nothing better than commonplace sentences, the following was tipped out: "Try no more to move"—then this succession of letters—"a t a t a." It seemed useless to go on with nonsense, but one of the party suggested perseverance; when the following conclusion converted seeming nonsense ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... I felt little or no surprise at this, and when in the course of a few minutes I observed a pair of horns growing out of the creature's eyes and a bushy tail standing erect on the apex of its head, I ceased to be astonished at the sight altogether, and regarded it as quite natural and commonplace. The object afterwards assumed the appearance of a lion with a crocodile's bail, and a serpent with a monkey's head, and lastly of a gorilla, without producing in me any other feeling than that of profound indifference. Gradually the whole scene vanished, ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... avoid the blessing, still a secret, he resorts to a commonplace; literally, "For what generous man is not (in befriending ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... season Zizine consulted Francis with a look, and Francis seemed to take his ideas from Zizine's eyes. They frowned and smiled together, and seemingly took counsel of each other before making the simplest commonplace remark. ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... illustrious, famous, celebrated, renowned, noted; transcendent, extraordinary, supreme, consummate, conspicuous. Antonyms: undistinguished, obscure, commonplace, inconspicuous, humble. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... remark should have caused a halt in the conversation, but it did. Miss Preston said, "Oh, indeed!" rather hurriedly, and her next speech was concerning the height of a particularly big wave. Mr. Hazeltine answered this commonplace somewhat absent-mindedly. He acted like a man to whom a startling idea had suddenly occurred. Just then they heard ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Victoria, which is rather under a million; and then, observing that it is about the same as that of Liverpool and Manchester together, they infer that it is of no greater importance. There could not be a greater mistake. It is a commonplace to say that their importance is in the future, yet even commonplaces sometimes need repeating. There is no reason why, within the memory of men now living, this colony should not be as populous as England is now. At lunch, some few weeks ago—I remember ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... 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 ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... virtue of necessity" is idealization, is not symbolism also a form of "make believe." If the "ability to persuade oneself that what is necessary is noble or dignified or honorable or pleasant," is exhibited on Quaker Hill as a "most important psychic factor," so is also the idealization of the commonplace the "making believe" that peace and plainness, that simple, old-fashioned dress, and seventeenth century forms of speech are spiritual and are serviceable to the believing mind. The power of idealization is nowhere exhibited as a social force more clearly than in a Quaker community. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... belonging to the Malmaison company, considered that the acting at Neuilly was indecent, Lucien, who refused to act at Malmaison, naturally thought the Malmaison troupe was dull. "Hortense and Caroline filled the principal parts. They were very commonplace. In this they followed the unfortunate Marie Antoinette and her companions. Louis XVI., not naturally polite, when seeing them act, had said that it was royally badly acted" (see Madame Campan's Life of Marie Antoinette, tome i. p. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... admiration. She was struck by what seemed to her a nobleness of sentiment which elevated his theme above the level of commonplace polemics. She was pleased to notice, in the attentive silence of his intelligent listeners, that they shared the effect produced on herself. In fact, Graham Vane was a born orator, and his studies had been those of a political thinker. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the wrong vehicle when I strive to dash off whimsicalities, because frequently my very best efforts, as done in English, have fallen flat. But when in some remote village I, using French, uttered the simplest and most commonplace remark to a French tavern keeper, with absolutely no intent or desire whatsoever, mind you, to be humorous or facetious, invariably he would burst instantly ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... attended other aspects of the scene. Instead of fiery oratory and pipes of peace—the stone calumets of old—the vigorous arguments, the outbursts of passion, and close calls from threatened violence, here was a gathering of commonplace men smoking briar-roots, with treaty tobacco instead of "weed," and whose chiefs replied to Mr. Laird's explanations and offers in a few brief and sensible statements, varied by vigorous appeals to the common ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... to disarrange the system of cotton cloth distribution of the whole world. It is now a commonplace to say that the United States, by the cutting off of the usual sources of supply, succeeded for the first time in entering in force markets which hitherto had been closed. It would probably be truer to say that foreign buyers, finding it impossible to secure their customary ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... macadamized, and worn so firm and level, it reminded me, constantly, of the stone walks in a granite quarry. Among our party was a young man just returned from Europe surfeited with scenery and sight-seeing, but for the rest, we were commonplace Americans, eager to see everything, and ready to go into ecstasies over everything which we saw. It was in early July, and the foliage had not yet wilted from its moist, bright greenness; the atmosphere was a wave of light, and the earth seemed no longer dust, dross, and atoms of decay, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the great savage there was no such thing as peril in any of the objects of nature. Full of strength and calm matter-of-fact courage, climbing rocks or making his way into such a place as this was a very commonplace affair. His idea of danger was in the sight of enemies thirsting for his blood. Now that they were out of reach, and he believed that he had thrown them off the scent, he was perfectly content, and ready to smile at the perfection ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... in general as "the art of saying in a commonplace and inoffensive way what everybody knew long ago." There are a great many competent editorial writers, and the bittern carrying on his trade by the side of some swamp is about as influential as ten ordinary ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... 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. ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... were here most in evidence. What he says of Milton might appropriately be applied to himself, that he formed the most intense conception of things and then embodied them by a single stroke of his pen. In a phrase or in a sentence he stamped the character of an author indelibly, and, enemy to commonplace though he was, became a cause of commonplace in others. No matter how much might already have been written on a subject (and Hazlitt did not make a practice of celebrating neglected obscurity) his own view stood out fresh and clear, and yet his judgments were ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Certain things are true of all news stories; whether the story be the baldest recital of facts or the most sensational featuring of an imaginary thrill in a commonplace happening, certain characteristics are always present. And these characteristics can always be traced to one cause—the effort to catch and hold the reader's interest. When a busy American glances over his ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... The conditions imposed upon the game are strict, uniform, and mechanical. Yet those who have made of chess a life- long study are ready to confess their complete ignorance of the fundamental merits of particular moves; one game does not resemble another; and from the most commonplace of developments there may spring up, on the sudden, wild romantic possibilities and situations that are like miracles. If these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the chess- board, how shall we set a limit to the possibilities of human life, which is chess, with variety and uncertainty many ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... went on; 'several thousands of commonplace persons are saying that I have fallen in love with you. Do you think it's true, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... Forming Man the Final Earth Product Superstitions Self-Justice Symbolism Love Ideals of Love The Needs of Woman Man versus Woman Natural Cruelty of the Undeveloped The Worst Sin Reincarnation Processes of Reincarnation Education of Children Egotism Responsiveness Hell The Commonplace Petroleum Law Communism Happiness Pain Foes in the Household The Inner Life Root of Evils Rest in Change Miserliness Special Providence Human Destiny Ethical Law Human Life Animal Likeness Natural Superstition Adaptiveness of Man Devil Worship Fanaticism Truth Christs Hero Worship Reason Sympathy ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... general hunting-ground. England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, captured, bought, and sold slaves. Englishmen in Virginia bought without qualm, as Englishmen in England bought without qualm. The cargo of the Dutch ship was a commonplace. The only novelty was that it was the first shipload of Africans brought to English-America. Here, by the same waters, were the beginnings of popular government and the young upas-tree of slavery. A contradiction in terms was set to resolve itself, a riddle for unborn generations ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... literary graces, in its portrayal of characters that are never commonplace though genuinely human, and in its development of a singular social situation, the book is one to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... situated by a well-wooded hill and a fair flowing river. The college, with some fields that were cultivated for its use, was a little apart from most of the houses, placed, both as to physical and social position, between the commonplace village and the farms of the undulating land around it; for, by a curious drift of circumstances, the farms of this district were chiefly worked by English gentlemen, whose families, in lieu of all other worldly advantage, held the more stoutly by their family traditions. In doing so they were but ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... afraid, love, you would be disappointed. A man might seem a marvel of eloquence and wisdom to poor Theodore, while you would find him a very commonplace, perhaps obtrusive individual." ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... consciously loved him as she listened to him, sitting there on the homemade stool in her mother's cabin and talking of things beyond comprehension. But she could have loved him, and she did worship him. It was the personal fascination of Brother Friedsam and her own vigorous hatred of the commonplace that had led her three years before to join the sisterhood in the Sharon house. She did not know to what degree a desire for Beissels's companionship had drawn her to accept his speculations concerning the mystical Sophia and the Philadelphian fellowship. But the convent had ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... and I am not joking," replied the girl, "and I think Rupert would suit me very well. You see, I think a great deal more of Rupert than I do of Mr. Hemphill, although the latter gentleman has excellent points. He is commonplace, and, above everything else, I want a commonplace husband. I want some one to soothe me, and quiet me, and to give me ballast. If there is anything out of the way to be done I want to do it myself. I am sure he is in love with me, for ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... could have been, as history tells us; that such a strange world was a part of our world,—that such a strange life was a part of the life, which seems to us who are living it now, so passionless and commonplace. It is only when I stand amid ruined castles, that look at me so mournfully, and behold the heavy armour of old knights, hanging upon the wainscot of Gothic chambers; or when I walk amid the aisles of some dusky minster, whose walls are narrative ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... I would write psyche always instead of soul to avoid meanings which have become attached to the word soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy inddeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself. Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... instance I have no manuscript evidence. The name of "Jamie of the Fair Dodhead," the ballad, appears in a list of twenty-two ballads in Sir Walter's hand, written in a commonplace book about 1800-1801. Eleven are marked X. "Jamie" is one of that eleven. Kinmont Willie is among the eleven not marked X. We may conjecture that he had obtained the first eleven, and was hunting for the second eleven,—some of which he never got, ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... man can write, because there are papers enough to give employment to everybody. No reflection, no deliberation, no care; all is haste, fatal facility, stock phrases, commonplace ideas, and a ready pen that can turn itself to any task with equal ease, because supremely ignorant of ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... most important moral phenomena in War, and with all the care of a diligent professor try what we could impart about each, either good or bad. But as in such a method one slides too much into the commonplace and trite, whilst real mind quickly makes its escape in analysis, the end is that one gets imperceptibly to the relation of things which everybody knows. We prefer, therefore, to remain here more than usually incomplete and rhapsodical, content to have drawn attention to the importance ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... and upright, as useless and inconvenient rubbish of which I am half ashamed. I never felt more keenly or heavily the immeasurable distance between earth and heaven than now, when after the day has been spent in listening to the plausibilities of commonplace politicians, I open my Bible at night. It is going from darkness ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... shrugged his shoulders, and led the way into his own chamber, which was a plainly furnished and commonplace room. As we moved across it in the direction of the window, Holmes fell back until he and I were the last of the group. Near the foot of the bed was a small square table, on which stood a dish of oranges and a carafe of water. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... broke up the one dense, grey, heavy cloud into portions which floated slowly along, separating more and more, the dull grey growing rapidly silvery, then golden, and the gold becoming suffused with soft light. So beautiful was the scene that, while Archie gazed thoughtfully at its beauty, even commonplace, powder-besmirched Peter sat with his lips apart, staring hard, and then, forgetting himself and their risky position, with its need for concealment, ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... it seemed an ordinary, commonplace accident. A loud report like a pistol shot: a flat tire down on our car: that ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the solemnity of these historical meditations to the commonplace transactions of the journey, we had to carry on a considerable amount of wrangling with the muleteers, who were continually allowing their animals to stumble, and the ropes of the luggage to come loose, so that ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... length a little more original and a good deal more grotesque. They took to dancing at last, not by any means the least healthful mode of working off their excitement. It was, however, hardly more than a dull beating of time to the monotonous chanting of a few religious phrases, rendered painfully commonplace by ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... that from the sea, the restless and mysterious sea, came the final decision. Man seems so much the sport of circumstance that apparent trifles, remote from his consciousness, appear at times to determine his fate; it is a commonplace of romance that a pretty face or a stray bullet has altered the destiny not merely of families but of nations. And now, in the American Revolution, it was not forts on the Hudson, nor maneuvers in the South, that were to decide the issue, ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... chastened condition to town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two investigators into the springs of human conduct were able to resume their westward journey. They ran through scattered Twyford with its pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities of Reading, by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up long wooded slopes to Savernake forest, where they found the road heavy and dusty, still in its war-time state, and so down a ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... negative element. Without such an element to overcome, the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair. That any rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough. A preestablished harmony of foreseen happy issues—a fool's paradise—is scarcely our ideal of a rational world. Just as a game is not worth playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the opponent, so life without ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... me. Marriage is a lifelong business. Captain Connor may win through to a green old age. I hope to God the gallant fellow will. Your present motives are beautiful and heroic. But do you care for him sufficiently to pass a lifetime with him—after the war—an ordinary, commonplace lifetime?" ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... and commonplace that morning. Aaron had a headache, (that theologic thorn, I know,) and Sophie must go and sit beside him, and hold the thread of his Sunday's discourse to paper, whilst with wrapped brow and vision-seeing eyes he told her what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... uttered by those two young people in the noisy railway station, be taken by themselves and regarded, they will be found to consist of the dullest commonplace. No two strangers in all that crowd could have addressed each other in a more indifferent fashion. But the trivial nothings which the mouth utters may become possessed of awful import when accompanied by the language of the eyes; and the poor commonplace sentences may ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... offices, would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... true story, my love, be the actors who they may; there is no exaggerated incident in it to invest it with peculiar interest; but I want you to know that the subtle influences of affection are ever busy about us; and however tame and commonplace the routine of life may be, yet believe, Kate," added Aunt Mable, with a saddened smile, "each heart has its mystery, and who ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... "Keepsake" and "Friendship's Offering," in red silk, with Mrs. Hemans' and Mr. Montgomery's poetry. Into these she occasionally looked, and refreshed herself by comparing her intellect with that of the female kind generally. She desired above everything not to be considered commonplace, believed in love at first sight, was not altogether unfavourable to elopements, carefully repressed any tendency to unnecessary order, wore a loose dressing-gown all the morning, had her breakfast in bed, let her hair stray a little ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... through the aroma of sentimental patriotism, hardly strong enough in stamina to make the compositions national, or to maintain their high level of popularity after the lyrist himself has long been at rest; partly through the essentially commonplace sources and forms of inspiration which belong to his more elaborate and ambitious works. No poetical reader of the present day is the poorer for knowing absolutely nothing of Lalla Rookh or the Loves of the Angels. What then will be the hold ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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
... performed his obligations as an American gentleman should, even though the performance had created an extraordinary commotion. Chase was new to the Old World and its customs, especially those rigorous ones which surrounded royalty and denied it the right to venture into the commonplace. The ambassador at the capital of the Empire at first sought to excuse him on the ground of ignorance; but the Grand Duke insisted that even an American could not be such a fool as Chase had been; so, it must have been a wilful offence that ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... 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 ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... 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 ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the little Sydenham villa was barred and shuttered, the four children were sound asleep, Herbert and Albinia Minks both lost in the world of happy dreams that sometimes visit honest, simple folk whose consciences are clean and whose aims in life are commonplace but worthy. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... was not to be lost sight of. A week later Samarendra went to Calcutta and called on Mr. Bernardson at his chambers in the United Service Club. He was received, so to speak, with open arms, questioned about crops, crime, sport, and other commonplace topics, and again assured that Mr. Bernardson would serve him in any way within his power. The latter hint was promptly taken. On receiving permission to quit the great man's presence he timidly suggested that he would like to be an Honorary ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... still a realm of faery to her. It was an unending experience of miracles, commonplace to the men, but wonder-work to her. She had not known what "pneumatic" or "hydraulic" really meant. The acetylene flame-knife, the incomprehensible ability of levers to give out so much more power than was put in them, dazed her. Nothing in the Grimms' stories could ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... disarrange the system of cotton cloth distribution of the whole world. It is now a commonplace to say that the United States, by the cutting off of the usual sources of supply, succeeded for the first time in entering in force markets which hitherto had been closed. It would probably be truer to say that foreign buyers, finding it impossible to ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... without effect. To be pouted at because he had failed to attend the promenade of the Valentino was to Odo but a convenient pretext for excusing himself from the Queen's circle that evening. He had engaged with little ardour to join Alfieri in what he guessed to be a sufficiently commonplace adventure; but as he listened to the Countess's chatter about the last minuet-step, and the relative merits of sanspareil water and oil-of-lilies, of gloves from Blois and Vendome, his impatience ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... art, and before she left the shop she gave 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
... preached—or rather read his sermon. His was a much humbler effort than that of his locum tenens of the forenoon, but it left a more salutary and peaceful impression. None of the ideas were original, the illustrations were commonplace, and what passed for argument was rather threadbare. The fundamental axiom was there, but was not aggressively flaunted: it was rather implied than expressed. But in spite of all this, the hearers, or most of them, were the better ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... 'several thousands of commonplace persons are saying that I have fallen in love with you. Do you think it's true, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... "blooming virtue" in as if with reference to the personal appearance of the young lady; but in the margin he substitutes the present reading, "growing virtues."] Who the young lady was that so won upon Milton at this critical time, and seemed to him so superior to the more commonplace of her sex, we are left uninformed. There is a conjecture on the subject, which may afterwards appear. It is clear, meanwhile, that the poor absent Mary Powell may have suffered not only from her own defects, but also from the opportunity of ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... parvenus generally, is quite unknown among us, nobody could rely on those points of resemblance. But with regard to the other topics, would it not be fair to say, in answer to such an argument—All this is mere commonplace generality; such are the characters of every country where European institutions exist, or European habits are to be found? Something more tangible and specific is requisite to support your claim. You are to prove that the picture is a portrait ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... which treated of the possible perfection of marriage, the whole womanly nature of the writer asserted itself by virtue of the mere fact of humanity. After this came a number of juvenile stories, some commonplace, others infiltrated with that subtile charm which breathes, with a single exception, through all her larger books like the perfume of an exotic. Thus in the three novels mentioned we have all that can be had of Elizabeth Sheppard herself: in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... backs on the water fairies' domain, and went into the world again. In the long commonplace street of shops through which we had passed in coming, Aunt Fay stopped. She had torn a silk flounce on her petticoat, and would thank me to act as interpreter in buying a box of safety-pins. I made the demand, and could not ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... what was a distinct effort on the queer little figure hovering in front of him, and stared very hard. She wore an odd piece of red coral for a brooch, and by looking steadily at this he brought the rest of the figure into focus and saw, without surprise,—for every commonplace seemed strange to him now, and everything peculiar quite a matter of course,—that she was distinctly not an habituee of the place, and looked more like a lady's maid than an adventuress. She was French and pretty,—such ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... was still young enough to take pride in his picturesque regalia, to prefer the dramatic way of doing a commonplace thing. But, though he liked this girl's trick of laughing at him with a perfectly grave face out of those dark, long-lashed eyes, he would have liked it better if sometimes they had given back the applause he thought his little ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... to be that of a housekeeper on account of the shawl—a strange article of dress, difficult to associate with a romantic singer. All the same, Evelyn was very probable in this picture; her past and her future were in this disconcerting compound of the commonplace and the rare; and the confusion which this picture created in the minds of Owen's friends was aggravated by the strange elliptical execution. Owen admitted the drawing to be not altogether grammatical; ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... was of more than commonplace interest to him. Years ago he had seen it by a roadside in the White Mountains, and often since he had thought of it until the thought had taken deep root in his mind and become one of the pleasant dreams of his life. But Fate had further spurred his curiosity by a series of mischances ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... intention" even for inveterate idlers, and that the great Arranger of the world felt some kindness for such gipsy-hearts as ours? What law, human or divine, was there to prevent us from making this stream our symbol of deliverance from the conventional and commonplace, our guide to liberty and ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... on, and so on! First you say I love, and then you say I don't; that I am not master of my feelings. All these are commonplace, worn-out sentiments, with which you ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... general application, kept in stock for the cozening of such prey as myself, I repeated to him my favourite Hindu proverb[7], and gave him, in exchange for his benevolent cheque on the future, a more commonplace article of present value, which led to our parting on the most amicable terms. But I did him injustice, perhaps. Long afterwards, having occasion to consult an astronomical chart, with reference to this very story, all at once I ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... relations and circumstances, clearly showing whom the character was intended for. It is true that Shelley himself, after investing her with divinity to serve the purposes of art, speaks later of her as a very commonplace worldly-minded woman; but poets, like artists, seem at times to need lay figures to attire with their thoughts. Enough has been shown to prove that there is genuine subject of interest in this work of Mary's ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... flowed through all human history, deep and broad as it has passed through the darker ages, but dwindling down to a thread as it has entered days of enlightenment. The evidence was too hackneyed and commonplace to make any impression upon those before whom the Christian miracles are said to have been performed, and it altogether failed to convince the people to whom the Revelation was primarily addressed. The selection of such evidence for such a purpose ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... privacy. He never invited any one within that gate. Occasionally his father would saunter up with his evening pipe and sit in the little porch of his old home looking through the purple clematis flowers out to sea while he exchanged a few commonplace remarks with his son, who never broke his own silence unless he had something to say. But no other ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... of the country, and they sat together in the descending shadows of the day, quite like in garb and feature, their chins a little peakish, and the hairs of both turning gray. The man was commonplace, as he leaned upon a staff, and between their feet were paniers of purchases they had been making, which the woman regarded indifferently, as if her heart reached farther than her eyes, and met some soft departed scene which she would ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... fashion of the short story in this country. So Harry Anable Kniffin's "The Tribute" weaves in 1,700 words a legend about the Unknown Soldier and makes emotionally vivid the burial of Tommy Atkins. Commonplace types regarded in the past as insufficiently drab, on the one hand, and insufficiently picturesque on the other are reflected in this new romantic treatment. Sarah Addington's "Another Cactus Blooms" prophesies colour in that hard and prickly plant ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... But there are telegraph poles and the lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear in the empty horizon. And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The most commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on the quay of Assouan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its aspects of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard. Only in semblance was he superhuman for he gave some astonishing and spectacular exhibitions. But again, if I look at his commonplace physique, I, for one, cannot call him an angel. And everything whatsoever he wrought through some invisible power, he wrought through some word and a command. Some said of him, 'Our first law giver is risen again, and displays many healings and magic ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... scholars boldly asserting that any who questioned its Mosaic authorship reduced it to the level of a pious fraud. But Biblical facts have at last triumphed over tradition, and the non-Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy is now a commonplace of criticism. It is still instructive, however, to note the successive phases through which scholarly opinion regarding the composition and date of his book ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... pacing up and down the room. "What arrant nonsense a man can be capable of when he is headstrong to begin with! To think of the elegant Horatio King, a model for all men, surrounding himself with this commonplace family. Faugh! It is easy enough to see what they are all after. But I shall prevent it. Meanwhile, the only way to do it is to break the spirit of this Polly Pepper. Once do that, and I have the task easy to ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... of the circumambulations of science about us, in spite of the hardening of all the tissues of our imagination, in spite of the phenomenal development of the commonplace, this desire for a glimpse of the miraculous is still set deeply in our hearts. The old quest of Fairyland is as active now as ever it was. We still presume, in our unworthiness, to pass the barriers, and to walk upon those paths which lead to the enchanted forests and ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... too many coats—never exceeded six. The first used generally to be a pretty old coat that had lived to moralise over the mutability of human affairs—thread-bare—napless—and what ignorant people might have called shabby-genteel. It was followed by a plain, sensible, honest, unpretending, commonplace, everyday sort of a coat—and not, perhaps, of the very best merino. Over it was drawn, with some little difficulty, what had, in its prime of life, attracted universal admiration in Princes Street, as a blue surtout. Then came your regular olive-coloured great-coat—not ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... thing. The president's violence was the first intimation to reach him in the heart of his artificial consciousness that his action was at all in the line of those foolish peculators whose discovery and flight to Canada was the commonplace of every morning's paper; such a commonplace that he had been sensible of an effort in the papers to vary the tiresome repetition of the same old fact by some novel grace of wit, or some fresh picturesqueness in putting it. In the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... (1911), which with its daring situations and touches of drastic burlesque harks back to the spirit of the comedy of Moliere's time, though in its way it is also a product of the reaction against the puerile and commonplace inoffensiveness of mid-century letters inaugurated by Young Germany. Since his association with Richard Strauss has weaned Hofmannsthal from the somewhat effete estheticism and pessimism of his youth, it is a matter of interesting conjecture ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... she told the heartbreaking and commonplace story: her terrified awakening in the face of the man's infamy, her remorse, her madness; and she also described Alice's admirable conduct: the girl suspecting her mistress's despair, forcing a confession from her, writing to Lupin and contriving this story ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew Baines, Esq., a barrister, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... they are the voting-papers of infinity. And then you titillate yourself with your ideas of truth and justice; and this is so evidently the case that those ideas of yours cause just as much alarm to commonplace middle-class folks as my sketches do. Between ourselves, now, do you imagine that if you were Robine I should take any pleasure in your friendship? Ah, no, my friend, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... enjoyment of the occasion. The journey from Coreyville to the Cove, in the presence of the distinguished strangers, had assumed the nature of an adventure. Giving her imagination free rein, Miss Gusty, without apology, transported the commonplace group of business men at the card-table into the wildest realms of romance. The fact that their language, appearance, and manner spoke of the city, was for her a sufficient peg upon which to hang innumerable conjectures. So deep was she in her speculations that she did not hear the captain ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... even into the immaculate pages of our monthly elevators. I once found it so, and certainly I thought that here was plain sailing. A tender interview at the garden gate. She "sighed and looked down as Charles Thorndike took her hand"—unavoidable and not unacceptable subject. Lovers are all commonplace young men with large eyes, long legs, and small moustaches (villains' moustaches grow apace); moreover, lovers, I believe, generally take care to avoid observation; but no! it appears that "our subscribers" have a stern code which may not be lightly infringed. A letter from ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... to America! And what was left for me to do now?... Tell my mother everything, or conceal forever the very memory of that meeting? I was absolutely unable to reconcile myself to the thought that such a senseless, such a commonplace ending should be tacked on to ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... No. 2, little more than very equivocal sophisms, which savored strongly of commonplace opinions, were presented. It was pretended, for instance, that he who signed a bond was in equity bound to pay it; that, if he refused, the other party had the natural and legal remedy of compulsion; ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wistfully, in the commonplace. And when the meal was ready she strove to eat, though food had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wherein only one could create an impression of her sweetness, but in the objective terms of the police report. What was she wearing? A hat, and jacket, a skirt, shoes; of course she wore gloves; possibly she carried a muff. Impatient of such commonplace details, I described her fully. But the glory of her bronze hair, her great dark brown eyes, the quivering sensitiveness of her lips; her intoxicating compound of Botticelli and the Venusberg; the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Liszt always contrived to cover his most commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes a la Chopin; clever, I admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up into Twelve Etudes Transcendentales—listen to the big, boastful title!—is ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... only the crude, simple course for him to follow—to accept the commonplace, turn and face life as one turns from a grave that hides ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... public institution like mine, he was surrounded, of course, by multifarious types of character, by persons of both sexes, mostly very different from himself—commonplace people, in short, as the majority are everywhere, but like to him at least in this, that they were fellow- creatures and fellow-patients. And never was any one more genial, more considerate, more ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... mind is trifling, the consequences of the over-indulgence in passive impressions produced by light reading, or to make them understand the different effect produced by the highest order of works of imagination, and the trivial compositions which inundate the press, with no merit but some commonplace moral. Both are classed together as works of amusement; but the first enrich the mind with great and beautiful ideas, and, provided they be not indulged in to an extravagant excess, refine the feelings to generosity and tenderness. They counteract the sordid or the petty turn, which we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... have dwelt on these details, which are so commonplace and seem so slight," said the worthy man, looking at Godefroid, "it is not without good reason. I want to explain to you how I was led to act, as most men act, in defiance of the rules which savages observe in the smallest matters. Many persons would justify themselves by the opinion ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... not scruple to commit the theft, he was fully alive to the disgrace of being exposed. The good name, the worldly reputation of his family, seemed to be of more value than a conscience void of offence before Him who readeth all hearts. To speak of the sin of the act was but to utter trite and commonplace words, which could be found in any cheap catechism; but to mention the disgrace attending the exposure of that sin, was to touch him ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... to a man who is aware of the thousand emotions that are responsible for the blush of woman. I was again annoyed by the discovery that my pulses were not beating wildly, and that my heart was not throbbing tumultuously, and when I addressed a commonplace remark to her I was thoroughly ashamed and humiliated. It seemed like taking a mean ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... things. A sort of medium man; not at all like mamma, however, as far as I could see on such brief scrutiny, and as well as I remember; with fine eyes, however. Not as good-looking as Claude Bainrothe, by any means. Commonplace, very, with a seedy coat. By-the-way, Miriam, he will be back next week, I believe, and then you will see this phenomenon. You know Mr. Bainrothe and papa design you ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... case, he was a commonplace criminal, and his fate is of little interest to any one ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... and ungallant as it seems, we twentieth century fellows have to put business before pleasure." He smiled propitiatingly and therein lay the sting, that he did not even take the trouble to conceal that he was trying to appease her. Their parting sank to the level of the commonplace for he shook hands hastily, and her look of appeal flattened ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... authors. [Footnote: Notwithstanding this warning, Cumberland (who copied so much) copied these in his novel of Henry. On the other hand, Fielding's French and Polish translators omitted them as superfluous.] Naturally a great deal they contain is by this time commonplace, although it was unhackneyed enough when Fielding wrote. The absolute necessity in work of this kind for genius, learning, and knowledge of the world, the constant obligation to preserve character and probability—to regard variety and the law of contrast:—these ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... the other hand, Miss White was quite charmed with this shapely vessel and all its contents. If the frugal ways and commonplace duties and conversation of Castle Dare had somewhat disappointed her, and had seemed to her not quite in accordance with the heroic traditions of the clans, here, at least, was something which she could ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... said, "not in the long run. Of course," she went on with a smile, "to say a thing is not 'natural' is simply begging the question, and sounds as if one were dismissing a very complicated problem with a commonplace formula, but it has truth in it all the same. It is difficult enough to fashion existence in the right way, even with the help of others, but to do it single-handed is a task few people are qualified to achieve. I am quite sure that a woman has more chance of happiness if she marries than ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... Montana Live Stock Association in the endeavor to procure legislation from the Territorial Legislature of Dakota favorable to the interests of the cattlemen"; and the meeting was over. It was all most amiable and commonplace. There was no oratory and no defiance of anybody. What had been accomplished, however, was that, in the absence of organized government, the conservative elements in the county had formed an offensive and defensive league for mutual protection, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... such institutions, distinct original societies may come to be inside the great commonplace world. Here special personalities may find the only existence that suits them. If devout or laborious, not only do these afford an outlet for the deeper needs of conscience, of the imagination, of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a pursuit. The moralists, who utter their heathenish oracles in the commonplace complaints of a heathenish discontent, tell us, that we are born but to pursue, and pursue but to be deceived. They say, that man in his career after earthly honours, is like the child that chases the gaudy insect; the pursuit idle; the object worthless. They tell us, that it is but ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of his former mistresses. Some sensation, also, was excited by the circumstance of his poor wife (who soon afterwards died of a broken heart) coming to him in prison, and being with difficulty torn away; but then, conjugal affection is so very commonplace, and there was something so engrossingly pathetic in ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in its idea is the divinest of earthy employments has necessarily come to be also a profession, a line of life, with its routine, its commonplace, its poverty and deterioration of motive, its coarseness of feeling. It cannot but be so. It is part of the conditions of our mortality. Even earnest purpose, even zealous and laborious service, cannot alone ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... widely read to-day must perpetually halt, must perpetually hesitate at the words that arise in his mind; he must ask himself how many people will stick at this word altogether or miss the meaning it should carry; he must ransack his memory for a commonplace periphrase, an ingenious rearrangement of the familiar; he must omit or overaccentuate at every turn. Such simple and necessary words as "obsolescent," "deliquescent," "segregation," for example, must be abandoned by ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... such commonplace words, to which she had been accustomed for a long time; but they did not give adequate expression to all she had lived through ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... "Study of Prose Fiction," Professor Bliss Perry has devoted a chapter to realism and another to romance; but he has not succeeded in defining either term. He has, to be sure, essayed a negative definition of realism:—"Realistic fiction is that which does not shrink from the commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort to depict things as they are, life as it is." But we have seen that the effort of all fiction, whether realistic or romantic, is to depict life as it really (though not necessarily as it actually) is. Does not "The Brushwood Boy," although it suggests ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... disturbed and tearful than she had ever been since she grew to woman. "O cruel poverty!" she thought, "that such a man should be torn from his home, and thank me for doing it—all for a little money—and here are we poor commonplace ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... now spoken and in use," in Latin and English; and "Timber, or Discoveries" "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times." The "Discoveries," as it is usually called, is a commonplace book such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled, passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing opinions noted. Many passages of Jonson's "Discoveries" are literal translations from the authors he chanced ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... all. Let be." Then follow the courtesy, the grace, the fraud, the justice, of the swift, last scene; the curtain falls; and now the yearning sympathies of the hearers break out into sound, and the actor comes before the footlights to receive his meed of praise. How commonplace it is to read that such a one was called before the curtain and bowed his thanks! But sit there; listen to the applauding clamor of two thousand voices, be yourself lifted on the waves of that exultation, and for a moment you forget how soon all this will be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... carelessly gathered together, and deriving their greatest charm from their apparent spontaneity and artlessness. Many of them are, to be sure, unpleasantly cynical, and depict the baser side of human nature; others, in their realism, are essentially commonplace; but some are very prettily expressed, and show a brighter side to the picture of contemporary life. Those especially which are supposed to pass between Menander, the famous comic poet, and his mistress ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of madness," he said to himself. "It will pass. It must pass." And aloud,—meaning all the while to say something different and commonplace,—the real words in his mind broke through the crust of conventionality. ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... before the excitement quieted down and they gave her a chance to say she would go. Even then she spoke the words with fear and trembling as one might step off a commonplace threshold into a fairy palace, not sure but it might be stepping ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... said the elder, with commonplace indifference, as he crunched a lump of sugar in the bottom of the glass, dissolving the particles with a few ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... other writing remains in the shape of religious prose—sermons, lives and legends of saints, biblical paraphrases, and similar work in which the monastic and priestly spirit took delight, but which is generally dull with the dulness of medieval commonplace didacticism and fantastic symbolism. The country, too, was still distracted with wars. Within fifty years after Alfred's death, to be sure, his descendants had won back the whole of England from 'Danish' rule (though ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... by his style as the wearer by his clothes. Even if it be no native product of the author's mind, but a conscious imitation of carefully studied models,—what I may call a tailor-made style, fashioned in a vain endeavor to impart sublimity to commonplace thinking,—the poverty of the author is thereby revealed, much as the boor is most clearly disclosed when wearing ill-at-ease, unaccustomed broadcloth. Mr. Beecher's style was not artificial; its faults as well as its excellences were those of extreme naturalness. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 principal figure. In the Congress of Berlin, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum est in scholis, he says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur.—"It is a commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason, and the intelligence of angels, and ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... in a stound. It was either observing, or using observations. Of course he lost his way while walking, and destroyed commonplace things while musing; and the world hung just so much the less heavily upon his ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... discovered in due time, was a poetical way of expressing what in commonplace language would be called, "kicking up ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... condolence, for she had sympathized with her very much in the semi-indignity Nevil had forced her to undergo: and very little indeed had she been able to sympathize with Nevil, who had been guilty of the serious fault of allowing himself to appear moved by his own commonplace utterances; or, in other words, the theme being hostile to his audience, he had betrayed emotion over it without first evoking the spirit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... storm had spent its first fury. Every shade of anguish passed across his face meanwhile. But he strove to master his feelings, and to put a commonplace expression into his voice, as he said ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... age to Pamela, though so many years lay between them, a hundred petty cares fell on her girlish shoulders, and tried her patience greatly with their weight, sometimes. And in the hard family struggle for everyday necessities there was too much of commonplace reality to admit of much poetry. The wearisome battling with life's needs had left the mother, as it leaves thousands of women, haggard, careworn, and not too smooth in disposition. There was no romance about her. She had fairly forgotten her girlhood, it seemed ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... nature. On Hospital Earth, with the unparalleled medical facilities available there, and with well-trained teams of doctors, anaesthetists and nurses the technique of replacing an old worn-out damaged heart with a new and healthy one had become commonplace. It posed no more threat to a patient than a simple appendectomy had posed three ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... dressed, shopgirls perhaps, or artists' models or stenographers, who in dull and sordid lives grappled any chance to obtain a square meal, even if it had to be accessory to such companionship. The minority of men present was made up of honest, clean, commonplace citizens who were there for a good dinner in surroundings that offered a certain ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... like those of the Teutonic migrations. In this sense the historic Gunther and Attila are necessary to the Niblung story. The wars and fightings of generation on generation went to create the heroism, the loftiness of spirit, expressed in the Teutonic epic verse. The plots of the stories may be commonplace, the common property of all popular tales. The temper is such as is not found everywhere, but only in historical periods of great energy. The names of Ermanaric and Attila correspond to hardly anything of literal history in the heroic poems; but they are the sign of conquests and ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... always regarded Sir Timothy Crewys as a commonplace contradictory gentleman, beset by prejudices which belonged properly to an earlier generation, and of singularly narrow sympathies and interests. He believed him to be an upright man according to his lights, which were not perhaps ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... lives at Far End," she continued in reply to the Lavender Lady's smiling query. "Miles has been very irritating, and tried to smash all my suggested theories to bits. He insists that the Hermit is quite a commonplace, harmless young man—" ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... philosophy, and still less with his mechanical schemes and inventions. From the days of the Greeks, no one had had so keen an appreciation of what experiment meant in the development of human knowledge, and he was obsessed with the idea, so commonplace to us, that knowledge should have its utility and its practical bearing. "His chief merit is that he was one of the first to point the way to original research—as opposed to the acceptance of an authority—though he himself still lacked the means of pursuing this path consistently. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... belongings, indeed. Everything made for the soldier is commonplace, ugly, and of bad quality; from his cardboard boots, attached to the uppers by a criss-cross of worthless thread, to his badly cut, badly shaped, and badly sewn clothes, made of shoddy and transparent cloth—blotting-paper—that ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... ambitious woman, though one with definite limitations. Among different surroundings and in an atmosphere less sordidly striving and commonplace, she was fitted to have become, with some encouragement, an admirable and utterly inconspicuous wife and mother. But here, in this narrow, money-getting environment, many things prevented; among them, primarily, the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... alike in physiognomy, notwithstanding the difference in their years, but neither had anything at all remarkable either in his looks or general appearance: both were small, clumsy-limbed, somewhat simple-faced, rather ugly; and on the whole they were a very commonplace, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... about "training children." It was a curious affair. First a very long hymn; then two very long extempore prayers (not by Lord R—), which were strangely self-sufficient and wanting in reverence. Lord R—'s remarks were commonplace enough, though some of his theories were new, but, I think, not true—e.g., that encouraging emulation in schoolboys, or desiring that they should make a good position in life, was un-Christian. I escaped at the first opportunity after his speech, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... was tended, cultivated, and brought to maturity by Baldwin. The measure, as it became law in 1849, has proved to be of the greatest practical value; it has won the approval of competent critics; and it has served as a model for the organization of other provinces. Commonplace and humdrum as this measure may seem to Canadians in the actual domestic working of it, there are other parts of the Empire—Ireland, for example—which were to lag long behind. The lack of such privileges is a grievance elsewhere. Even to-day, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... you wonder whether the laws of gravitation will be complaisant enough to turn upside down for the accommodation of the hangman, whoever he may be. It is not without pain that you are forced at last to the commonplace belief that these remarkable mountings of the Public Buildings are neither masts nor booms, but simply derricks,—mechanical contrivances for the lifting of very heavy weights. It is some consolation, however, to be told that the weakness of these derricks ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... in a good hand. But it was a stiff, commonplace sort of letter, except that it asked me to wear a white rose. White roses happen to be the ones ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... stumbled to the street And drooled onto a kindly Cop: "Since moons have feathers on their feet, Why is your headgear perched on top? And if you scorn the Commonplace, Why wear a Nose upon your Face? And since Pythagoras is mute on Sex Hygiene and Cosmic Law, Is your Blonde Beast as Bland a Brute, As Blind a Brute, as Bernard Shaw? No doubt, when drilling through the parks, With Ibsen's Ghost and ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... shrink from an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of his enemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... best of men truly appreciate the value of a pure-minded woman," said Clemence, thoughtfully. "They are too gross and material, and I have met with very few whose society seemed to have a tendency to elevate. In the company of the majority of men I feel a constraint and like uttering the most commonplace remarks. Yet their idle curiosity leads them to seek to penetrate the very 'holy of holies' (if I may be allowed the expression) of the soul, and which they can neither ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... our conversation. It is, I have found, only in books that men use the last moment to advantage. Death has been my road- fellow all through life, and no man has yet died in my arms saying quite the right thing. Some of them made a joke, others were merely commonplace, as all men really are whether ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... 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 life's ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... partly correct, even if there was no liveried footman to meet me at the station. Mrs. Blythe is one of the social leaders of Riverville and has a lovely home. But this city isn't large enough to justify any one's keeping a social secretary. He said so. It's just a big, commonplace, hustling manufacturing town like a hundred others in the middle West. I didn't like to ask any personal questions about Mrs. Blythe of Orphant Annie. (That's the name I couldn't help giving the young reporter in my own mind. He was introduced as Mr. Sandford Berry.) He looks the character ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... to the monarch on his throne the plague-spot of credulity had spread and festered, until it presented a formidable feature in the history of the time. It is curious to remark that L'Etoile, the most commonplace and unimaginative of chroniclers, who might well have been expected in his realism to treat such phantasies as puerile and absurd, seems to justify to his own mind the extreme penalties of the scaffold and the stake as a fitting punishment for sorcerers and magicians: ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... 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
... painted face and eyes that strove, though sometimes in vain, to be false, he fascinated her. The new Claude, harder, more dominant, secretly unhappy, feverish with a burning excitement of soul and brain, appealed to this woman who loved all that was strange, exotic, who hated and despised the commonplace, and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... himself and the universe on the universe. He has the right key, only the miserable locks won't fit it. Having formed a very clear conception of the best possible world, he looks down patronizingly upon the commonplace people who are trying to make the best out of this imperfect world. Having large possessions in Utopia, he lives the care-free life of an absentee landlord. His praise is always for the dead, or for the yet unborn; when he looks on his contemporaries he takes a gloomy view. That any great man ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... true, George; and this proves that many 'traveller's wonders' cease to be wonderful when we examine into the circumstances and particulars, or compare their relations with the commonplace occurrences of everyday life. Now for the Bay of Bengal, which contains the fine islands of Andaman, Nicobar, and Ceylon; for the particulars of these islands I beg to refer ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... swampy fields of rank vegetation, exhaling a deadly miasma, were considered such an adequate defence against hostile attack, that forts were deemed unnecessary in a locality where 87,000 soldiers and sailors died in the Government Hospital during the space of twenty years. Batavia proper is a commonplace city of featureless streets, brick-walled canals, and ramshackle public buildings, but the residential town of Weltevreden, suggesting a glorified Holland, combines the quaint charm of the mother country with the Oriental grace and splendour of the tropics. The ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Individuality? The Directoire Gown The Mystery Of The Sex The Clothes Of Fiction The Broad A Chewing Gum Women In Congress Shall Women Propose? Frocks And The Stage Altruism Social Clearing-House Dinner-Table Talk Naturalization Art Of Governing Love Of Display Value Of The Commonplace The Burden Of Christmas The Responsibility Of Writers The Cap And Gown A Tendency Of The Age A ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... elaborately full in their equipment as to suggest repeatedly the similarity between the Roman Catholic organization, altars, vestments and ritual, and those of Buddhism, and remarks on this point seem almost commonplace. Almost everything in Roman Catholicism is found in Buddhism,[20] and one may even say, vice versa, at least in things exterior. We take the liberty of transcribing here a passage from the chapter entitled "Christianity and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... human nature, yet with equal candor he accuses himself of asinine stupidity, dulness, and want of talent. He was a disproportioned intellect, and so far a monster: and he must be added to the long list of original-minded men who have been looked down upon with pity and contempt by commonplace men of talent, whose powers of mind—though a thousand times inferior— were yet more manageable, and ran in channels more suited to ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... she had flung wide open the door to that sacred, inner chamber at which only the most intimate of her friends were privileged to knock. He had come into the field of her life in the most commonplace manner—through the natural incident of their meeting. He should have stopped there, or should have been halted by her. The hour should have been spent in conversation on such trivial and commonplace topics as ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Blodgett-Wild case is on the whole commonplace. Phinuit lied when he pretended to communicate with Hannah Wild's spirit; for there is no more reason here than elsewhere to suppose conscious fraud on Mrs Piper's part. But this is the point at which the case becomes interesting, ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... Yes. But the Suez Canal was a very great and splendid undertaking. It gave us our direct route to India. It had imperial value. It was necessary that we should have control. This Argentine scheme is a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle. ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... the scientific attitude toward educational problems appeals to me is simply because this attitude carries with it a respect for these seemingly trivial and commonplace problems; for just as the greatest triumph of the teaching art is to get our pupils to see in those things of life that are fleeting and transitory the operation of fundamental and eternal principles, so the glory of the scientific ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... what it was so important that he wanted to say to me, he evaded me and continued to chatter on about commonplace things. Finally I insisted upon knowing why he had wanted me to come, and he replied that the reason for it had already been fulfilled, that he had nothing more to say, and that I could go as soon as I wanted ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... very far from eight now. Let's wait here the few minutes! I'm in no hurry, if you can spare the time?" Rose spoke rather quickly and breathlessly. She was trying hard to behave as if this little adventure of theirs was a very conventional, commonplace happening. ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace of ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... smoothly covered and embossed with mosses, against which the white water shines out in showy relief, like a silver instrument in a velvet case. Hither come the San Gabriel lads and lassies, to gather ferns and dabble away their hot holidays in the cool water, glad to escape from their commonplace palm-gardens and orange-groves. The delicate maidenhair grows on fissured rocks within reach of the spray, while broad-leaved maples and sycamores cast soft, mellow shade over a rich profusion of bee-flowers, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... somewhat commonplace dissertation on 'The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor,' from Proverbs xxii. 2: 'The rich and poor meet together, the Lord is the Maker of them all.' It could not but be most irritating ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... this Ralph was fighting to regain his self mastery. He knew that he must force himself to sit opposite his father at the table, and exchange the daily, commonplace talk. No one must ever suspect that anything was amiss—it is this demand of Society which keeps the structure in place and draws the line between civilisation and barbarism. He knew that he never again could look his father straight ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... man, it is true, is a man of very limited capacity, who speaks at random upon all things, and only gives applause in the wrong place; but his money makes up for the errors of his judgment. He keeps his discernment in his purse, and his praises are golden. This ignorant, commonplace citizen is, as you see, better to us than that clever nobleman ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... present can bear no comparison with the past; will look through a whole gallery, and finally be captivated by some well-executed conceit—a sun shining through a hole—three different sorts of light, of fire, candle, and moon, mixed in with monstrous shadows and commonplace figures—some meaningless countenance surmounting a satin whose every shining thread is distinguishable, and the pattern of whose lace trimming could be copied for a fashion plate; he is, in short, a fussy, loud individual, with money ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... love, you would be disappointed. A man might seem a marvel of eloquence and wisdom to poor Theodore, while you would find him a very commonplace, ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... a suggestion to someone; if the unconscious of the latter does not accept the suggestion, if it has not, as it were, digested it, in order to transform it into autosuggestion, it produces no result. I have myself occasionally made a more or less commonplace suggestion to ordinarily very obedient subjects quite unsuccessfully. The reason is that the unconscious of the subject refused to accept it and did ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... slayers has been honestly and thoroughly carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural enlightenment has reacted against artificial education ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... days 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 days ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... There is no stream of logic running consistently through his writings. In "Characteristics" he seems to have had merely glimpses of great truths which he could not clearly express, and which won him the reputation of being a German transcendentalist. Its leading idea is the commonplace one of the progress of society, which no sane and Christian man has ever seriously questioned,—not an uninterrupted progress, but a general advance, brought about by Christian ideas. Any other view ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... without his attractive qualities. A man who is able to execute on a large scale and win the title Great is never commonplace. In giving Palestine the benefits of a strong and stable government he performed a real service. In his love for Mariamne and for the sons she bore him he was mastered by a passion that for a time ennobled him. Like every man, moreover, who fails to taste the joys of disinterested ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... expected to protect individuals in the exercise of activities which it regards as detrimental, or in the neglect of duties which it regards as essential, to the general well-being. It cannot restrain anyone's conscience; but it must control everyone's conduct. All this, of course, is the commonplace of political theory, and it is curious that at this late day one should have to repeat Burke's destructive criticism of metaphysic liberties, or Bentham's damning exposure of the "anarchic fallacy" of the Rights of Man, or Mr. D. L. Ritchie's quite recent dissipation of ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... rushes uselessly into the sea, might be led throughout the deserts of Nubia and Libya, to transform them into cotton fields that would render England independent of America. There is no fiction in this idea; it is merely the simple and commonplace fact, that with a fall of fifteen hundred feet in a thousand miles, with a river that supplies an unlimited quantity of water and mud at a particular season, a supply could be afforded to a prodigious area, that would be fertilized ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... allow herself to be 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 ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the hills of treasure, with their extravagant stories of adventure, but the professional man was anchored in the more prosy city, and buckled down to a commonplace existence. The exhilarating ozone from the ocean, the wind blowing over the vast area of sand, the red-flannel-shirted miner recklessly dumping out sacks of gold-dust with which to pay his board-bill or to buy a pair of boots, with maybe a nugget for Dr. Clappe when he eased a trivial pain,—all ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... co-operative authors, and may be left to interpolate the unsaid. A true book is the author, the book and the reader. And this is so not only as to what is left for the reader to fill in, but also has larger applications. All this may be commonplace enough, but naturally comes back to one who is making personal appeals without the aid ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... desperate chances taken by Northern captives to escape the lingering death of prison in the South. Since the war, volumes have been written of personal experience, amply attested, that would in romance receive the derisive mark of the critics. Danger daily met becomes a commonplace to men of resolution. Things which appall us when we read them become a simple part of our purpose when we live in an atmosphere of peril and put our hope ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... - God help me - and commonplace, commonplace like sin. I was honest once; I made a false step; I couldn't retrace it; and . . ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... brilliant Spring morning in London's City the seed of the Story was lightly sown. Within the directors' room of the Aasvogel Syndicate, Manchester House, New Broad Street, was done and hidden away a deed, simple and commonplace, which in due season was fated to yield a weighty crop of consequences complex ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... spite of the diversity of their effect, obtained from very scanty material, are distinguished by a sort of simplicity, and even by a solidity and conciseness, which one only meets with in Beethoven.... One may find here and there harmonies that are commonplace and trivial, and others that are incorrect—at least according to the old rules. In some places his harmonies have a fine effect, and in others their result is vague and indeterminate, or it sounds badly, or is too elaborate and far-fetched. Yet ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... walked home despondently. She climbed in at the acting-room window, and went to her own room. The sun was shining on the apple-blossom in the orchard opposite, and she looked for the charm of yesterday, but finding only the garish commonplace of fruit-trees in flower with the sun on them, she drew down the blind. Then she took off her hat and jacket, threw herself on her bed, and fell into a heavy sleep, with her brow puckered and the corners ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... He was commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true course, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... the bridge quite from my point of view; I looked on it as a child of mine, brought up through stress and danger and troubles of all kinds, but the ordinary traveller of course knows nothing of this and doubtless thinks it only a very commonplace ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... Postlethwayt, Aug. 1, 1697. Perhaps (earlier) Henry Price owned the book." The volume contains besides an English transcript of Ovid's "Arte Amandis" and some amatory poems.[g] The date of the Petyt text may be about.... It is written in a miscellaneous, folio, commonplace-book, and in the catalogue it is described as "an obscene poem, entitled 'The Choosing of Valentines,' by Thomas Nash. The first 17 lines are printed at p. lx. of the Preface to vol i. of Mr. Grosart's edition of Nash's works, as if they formed ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... "Quincy, you're a brick. I haven't enjoyed myself so much for years. I do so love anything that isn't commonplace, and your experience is both novel and interesting. What a dear old man Deacon Mason is, and Ezekiel Pettengill is a fine young fellow, honest and square. That Hiram and Mandy must be a team. Are they going ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... American royalty goes, the sole daughter, the sole child indeed of the house, a girl who had no idea of life except as a place in which to have a serenely good time, and teach everybody to do as she desired them to. Money was a commonplace matter-of-course article, neither to be particularly prized nor despised; it was convenient, of course, and must be an annoyance when one had to do without it; but of that, by practical experience, she knew nothing. Yet Ruth was by no means a "pink-and-white" ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... to say. And yet he might have had a companion less to his mind, for she was a decent young woman of a sober age, less inclined to giggle than many of the younger ones. But all the time that he was making commonplace remarks to her he was wondering if he had offended Sylvia, and why she would not shake hands with him, and this pre-occupation of his thoughts did not make him an agreeable companion. Nancy Pratt, who had been engaged for some years ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 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 chance must ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... over the deck of the sloop. The "ha'nt" had its back toward me, fumbling with the ends of the jib halyards. I could hear the creak of new ropes as it undid the knot, and the sound was certainly substantial and commonplace. I was so close by now that I could see every outline of the shape. It was precisely as it had appeared on the crosstrees of the Idaho, only, seen without perspective, and brought down to the level of the eye, it ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths of faith and the facts of human life—a discord which is felt in every age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana's book could hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these days of ours, in which the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Scotland Yard Detective Department. I propose to show that the motives of the prisoner were jealousy and revenge; jealousy, not only of his friend's superior influence over the working men he himself aspired to lead, but the more commonplace animosity engendered by the disturbing element of a woman having relations to both. If, before my case is complete, it will be my painful duty to show that the murdered man was not the saint the world has agreed to paint him, I shall not shrink from unveiling the truer picture, in the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... woman be at all sensitive to life, he must react to the commonplace much as Whitman did. Such a person may be hurrying along about his business with perhaps no time for reflection and yet in a flash, the miracle of life will come to ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... during the long days in which we two sailed through the gulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed such a bold and hazardous adventure. When one man leaves a town upon an unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundred leave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace. The danger in some way seems to be divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbers often multiply the danger. There was little danger for Henry and me on the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... verse of the elegiac couplet suggests the emotion of the writer. The verses are constructed with considerable regard for technique. Now and then there is a false quantity, an unpleasant sequence, or a heavy effect, but such blemishes are comparatively infrequent. There is much that is trivial, commonplace, and prosaic in these productions of the common people, but now and then one comes upon a phrase, a verse, or a whole poem which shows strength or grace or pathos. An orator of the late period, not without vigor, writes upon his tombstone:[56] "I have lived blessed ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... fancy grow confused. Her emotions, with all their intensity and all their exaggeration, retained the plain prosaic texture of everyday life. And it was fitting that her expression of them should be equally commonplace. She was, she told her Prime Minister, at the end of an official letter, "yours aff'ly V. R. and I." In such a phrase the deep reality of her feeling is instantly manifest. The Faery's feet were on the solid earth; it was the ruse cynic who was ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... 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 or the ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... admirable commonplace, too, which, from long habit of being introduced in such discourses, wishes to come in before I conclude—namely, that infelicities of various kinds belong to the state here below. Who are we that we should not take our share? See the slight amount of personal happiness ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... business letter is not written in a casual, commonplace way today. The writer tries to convey something he thinks the receiver will be interested to know. In this way he awakens a responsive spirit. Sometimes just the addition of a word or two will change a letter of the matter-of-fact ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... is full of faithfulness, that is brave and true. There is one word of Jesus that always comes back to me as about the noblest thing that human lips have ever said upon our earth, and the most comprehensive thing, that seems to sweep into itself all the commonplace experience of mankind. Do you remember when He was sitting with His disciples, at the last supper, how He lifted up His voice and prayed, and in the midst of His prayer there came these wondrous words: "For their sakes ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... hands gravely. As no remark seemed to be forthcoming from those who had summoned him, he observed that it was an unpleasant morning. This commonplace reminded him of one somewhat similar that he had made to a supposed Miss "Gusty" ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... in spite of oneself? "I hope you will be 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. A thrill ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... yellow ivory. His long, curling hair matched his sorb—it was violet. The second man was standing erect before the other, a few feet away from him. He was short and muscular, his face was broad, bearded, and rather commonplace, but there was something terrible about his appearance. The features were distorted by a deep-seated look ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... our dealings with our fellows. But this is carried to the extreme of independence of every one, even—say it softly—of God Himself. Criticising God, ignoring Him, leaving Him severely out so far as we are concerned,—this has become the commonplace. If for a moment He ignored us, how quickly things would go to pieces! This has come to be the dominant spirit of the whole race to a degree more marked than ever before, if ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... offered to the Master of Ravenswood, in particular, by their noble entertainers. The truth was, that Lord Bittlebrains had obtained his peerage by a good deal of plausibility, an art of building up a character for wisdom upon a very trite style of commonplace eloquence, a steady observation of the changes of the times, and the power of rendering certain political services to those who could best reward them. His lady and he, not feeling quite easy under their new honours, to which use had not adapted ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... my dead out of my sight—bid farewell to the old resplendent, stately, scarred, defiant Raglan, itself the grave of many an old story, and the cradle of the new, and alas! in contrast with the old, not merely the mechanical, but the unpoetic and commonplace, yes vulgar era of our island's history. Little did lord Herbert dream of the age he was initiating—of the irreverence and pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps, wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating, turning beauty into ashes, and worse! ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... frightful, nor the simple routine of life irksome. She was willing to tell everybody who cared to listen what she had seen of French pensions, Italian beggars, or Spanish bullfights. It astonished her to find that her experiences were unique, because she had always accepted them as comparatively commonplace; but her pity for the girls who had never been east of Cape Cod nor west of Harding,—there were two of them at the Belden,—was quite untinged ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... have fallen on the scaffold, a young and pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only pitiless to the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we raise ourselves above other people's heads? The common herd of humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person who can rise above it, and is not over-particular ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... to a 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 of the hospitality. ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... the summum bonum of the Chinese. In opening this Book, compiled by a disciple of Confucius, and containing his doctrines, we might expect to find a work like Cicero's De Officiis; but we find a very different production, consisting of a few commonplace rules for the maintenance of a good government [1].' My readers will perhaps think, after reading the present section, that the truth lies between these two representations. 2. I believe that the ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... and the most exquisite pathetic expression in her smile; and she held out her velvet paw to me, and said, 'Dear little mousiekie- pousie, you're the loveliest creature I ever met, quite unappreciated in these parts. That horrid old cock is terribly vulgar and commonplace; and never you believe your mother if she tells you he is better worth cultivating than one who has such a deep genuine love and appreciation of all the excellences of all mice, and of you in ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Crosby Records, the commonplace-books of William Blundell, there is an interesting comment, dated 1659, on the lack of advertising facilities at that period—It would be very expedient if each parish or village might have some place, as the church or smithy, wherein to publish (by papers posted up) the wants either of the buyer ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I'll set this affair straight also. I'll make the sleeves longer than they were before. They shall see Trishka is no mere commonplace fellow." ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... "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 Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to you how this class of nobles developed out of the most commonplace circumstances of everyday life and why it has maintained itself to this very day, ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... conjecture and unanswerable questions. The face of the younger began and ended perhaps in the attractions of youth and high spirits. It was a face of which, should the mind back of it prove wanting, you might tire, and learn to look upon as commonplace. ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... disappointments, but they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly trying to force upon them, in spite of their obvious unfitness. The higher the ideal, the less likely is the commonplace neighbor who has the great advantage of easy access, or the boarding-house acquaintance who can profit by those vacant hours when the least interesting of visitors is better than absolute loneliness,—the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption. There might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is not quite so sure of that. As a commonplace resounding in schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil by nature or by origin must be transient. But that may be because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil mixed with good; and the two natures, by their ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... if these words were a tremendous self-betrayal; to Vivian they were less than nothing—commonplace sentences enough; uttered in ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... it is not easy to tear ourselves away from a pleasant house. We chatted on, laughed, listened to stories and colony anecdotes that carried us back to the last war, and heard a great many eulogiums on beaux and belles, that we young people had, all our lives, considered as respectable, elderly, commonplace ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... By rights our host should have been a cool cynical villain, always in full uniform, and continually turning up at awkward moments to harass some innocent victim, instead of which he was rather a commonplace but benevolent individual devoted to his wife and child and consumed with a passion for photography, which was shared by many of the exiles under his charge. I once had occasion to go to his office and found Zuyeff in his ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... or exaggerate, but simply express our delight, just as a mother does not lie when she calls her child "my golden one." It is the feeling of beauty that speaks in us, and beauty cannot endure what is commonplace and trivial; it induces us to make comparisons which Volodya may, with his intellect, pull to pieces, but which he will understand with his heart. For instance, it is usual to compare black eyes with the night, blue with ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of his wife gave him no violent emotions, and violent emotions were what he wanted. What myriads of scenes are played in the depths of his souls, beneath the cold exterior of lives that are, apparently, commonplace! Among these dramas, lasting each but a short time, though they influence life so powerfully and are frequently the forerunners of the great misfortune doomed to fall on so many marriages, it is difficult to choose an example. There was a scene, however, which particularly ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... old fool's reason for hating you is so preposterously absurd that it cannot last long; and whether it appear to you at this moment nonsensical or not, I can hardly bear the thought of all ending in a tame commonplace wedding, so that the whole thing may be summed up in the few words,—Peter has wooed Grete,[11] and Peter and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... queer he was, even for the Orient, where queerness in men and things is commonplace and accepted as a part of the East's inseparable sense of mystery. With his big goggles of smoked glass he reminded one of some sea-monster, an illusion dispelled by his battered pith helmet with its faded sky-blue pugri bound ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... Lady Joan's heart gave a small beat of pleasure at sight of him, then lay quiet, sad, and apprehensive: the cold proper salute he gave her seemed, after the life she had of late been living, to belong rather to some sunless world than the realms of humanity. He uttered one commonplace concerning his father's death, and never alluded to it again; behaved in a dignified, recognizant manner to the laird, as to an inferior to whom he was under more obligation than he saw how to wipe out; and, after the snub with which he met the boy's friendly approach, took no farther notice of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... pictures, but of the many who called themselves artists few merit our attention; they practised but a feeble sort of imitative painting; their works of slight importance cannot now be named, while their lives were usually commonplace and void of incident. Of the few exceptions to this rule I have written in the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... would thank a man for doing him a service, however mistakenly. But something held him back from that folly. He wondered a little at her silence, and it was by way of breaking it before it should become embarrassing that he searched for something safe and commonplace to say ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... clergyman, became minister of Athelstaneford, Haddingtonshire. His sole work was The Grave, a poem in blank verse extending to 767 lines of very various merit, in some passages rising to great sublimity, and in others sinking to commonplace. It was illustrated by William Blake (q.v.) B.'s s., Robert, was a very distinguished Scottish judge and Lord President of the Court of Session; and his successor in his ministerial charge was Home, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... is described at great length in the narrative, is a variation from that of Leo Taxil; the doctor, in mercy to his readers, suppressing a part of the performance. Speaking generally, it was concerned, as we have previously seen, with an anti-Christian version of Gospel history and some commonplace outrages of the Eucharistic elements, during which proceedings our witness perspired freely. So, as he tells us, did one more Protestant pass over to the worship ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... their prototypes were hidden. Each terminates one of the two open colonnades with a central niche composition flanked on either hand by a sculptured frieze. Each is the work of a woman sculptor, and both, though very different, are far from the conventional or the commonplace. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the gaze of the youth, when first he lives in the marvel of loving, and being loved by, a woman, is the true vision—and the more likely to be the true one, that, when he gives way to selfishness, he loses faith in the vision, and sinks back into the commonplace unfaith of the beggarly world—a disappointed, sneering worshipper of power and money—with this remnant of the light yet in him, that he grumbles at the gloom its departure has left behind. He confesses by his soreness that ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... same repulsion for the consulate and the empire as does the present generation: he took Louis Napoleon for an inexperienced and somewhat narrow-minded man, whom he could easily restrain and direct, not guessing the determined obstinacy and prejudice hidden beneath his heavy and commonplace exterior." (Popular History of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... but which look taut and trim as they lie in the quiet harbour of bracket or slab amongst other choice ornaments. A rowing-boat, a yacht, a schooner, a man-of-war—all these varieties are somewhat commonplace. The construction of them requires skill and dexterity, I know, but you do not want a description from me of these, and I wish to tell you of something more uncommon than the boats we see ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... so astonishingly true that people soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things—that a nation hardly ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... they gave Henry was to stand outside a restaurant in the rain, and note what time someone inside left it. In short, it is not 'Pifield Rice, Investigator. No. 1.—The Adventure of the Maharajah's Ruby' that I submit to your notice, but the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young man, variously known to his comrades at the Bureau as 'Fathead', 'That blighter what's-his-name', and ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... and adorn a narrative with the stuff that makes travelers' tales attractive, it was here; yet in none of the journals is there to be found a departure from plain, simple truth-telling. Their matter-of-fact tone would render them almost commonplace, if the reader did not take pains to remember what it all meant. Nowhere is there anything like posing for effect; the nearest approach to it is in the initial entry in the diary of that excellent Irishman, Private Patrick Gass,—and parts of this have been branded as ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... young enough to take pride in his picturesque regalia, to prefer the dramatic way of doing a commonplace thing. But, though he liked this girl's trick of laughing at him with a perfectly grave face out of those dark, long-lashed eyes, he would have liked it better if sometimes they had given back the applause he thought his ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... Bracely," she said. "I am afraid I am much too commonplace and matter-of-fact to care about such things. It is a great loss I know, and deprives me of the pleasant society of Russian princesses. But we are all made differently; that is very lucky. I must get ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... with delightful thrills of anticipation. Miss Whimple smiled about it, and William laughed. Sally smiled, too, but, such a smile! She enjoyed William's visits immensely. He was seldom serious with her, and he always had funny stories to tell. In fact, he clothed the most commonplace incidents of the day with humour when he spoke of them, and shamelessly invented stories when he had no actual foundations on which to build them. And Sally always knew when he was spinning yarns, and William knew that she did. Miss Whimple was rather ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... laughingly opened her desk, while Hilda's dark eyes regarded her with sharp and eager watchfulness. "You must not make it too eloquent, dear," said she. "Remember the very commonplace epistles that you have been giving forth ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... administer and regulate all the affairs of the State. They alone were permitted to hear its voice; for the Statue never spoke in public save on rare occasions, and its sentences were then really so extremely commonplace that, had it not been for the deep wisdom of its general conduct, the Vraibleusians would have been almost tempted to believe that they really might exist without the services of the capital member. The twelve Managers surrounded the Statue ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... understood by me, there seemed to be a continued series of new developments at our home. I had supposed, when the events spoken of in the last chapter had settled down to their proper places in our little history, that our life would flow on in an even, commonplace way, with few or no incidents worthy of being recorded. But this did not prove to be the case. After a time, the uniformity and quiet of our ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... little party which gathered that night in Mrs. Bryant's dingy kitchen. The aggressive Nettie Dwight, two hopelessly commonplace sophomores, cousins, from a little town down the river, and Dora composed the Market Street contingent. They were all very much in awe of Eleanor's beauty, and of Beatrice's elaborate gown and more elaborate manner. ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... effect of taking a prompt initiative. I believe that the early success and reputation of Carlyle's French Revolution, were considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in the Review. Immediately on its publication, and before the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of judgment it set at defiance, had time to pre-occupy the public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and published a review of the book, hailing it as one of those productions of genius which are above all rules, and are a law ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew Baines, Esq., a barrister, became a member of the cabinet, and another ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... one of the commonplace accidents of travel, the whole scene was changed for this group of travellers. Philip Gaddesden would have taken small harm from his tumble into the lake, but for the fact that the effects of rheumatic fever were still upon him. As it was, a certain amount of fever, and some heart-symptoms ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fight; they would never dare to fight an English army; they did not possess any of the qualifications necessary to make good soldiers; and that a very slight force would be more than sufficient for their complete reduction. He repeated many of their commonplace expressions, ridiculed their enthusiasm in religion, and drew a disagreeable picture of their manners and ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... hands! Nor was this merely in theory. San Francisco at that time was undoubtedly the most corrupt and lawless city in the world. Street shootings, duels, robberies, ballot-box stuffing, bribery, all the crimes traceable to a supine police and venal or technical courts were actually so commonplace as to command but two or three lines in the daily papers. Justice was completely smothered under technicalities ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Constable of France by Queen Blanche in 1231; went on crusade in 1239; was captured by the infidels, taken to Babylon, ransomed, and in returning to France, died at Otranto in 1241. For that age Amaury was but a commonplace person, totally overshadowed by his brother Simon, who went to England, married King John's daughter Eleanor, and became almost king himself as Earl of Leicester. At your leisure you can read Matthew Paris's ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... all the illustrious artists of all literatures, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace. In her art she was unerring. Even Archilochus seems commonplace when compared with her exquisite rarity of phrase. Whether addressing the maidens whom, even in Elysium, as Horace says, Sappho could not forget, or embodying the profounder yearnings of an intense soul after beauty which has never on earth existed, but which ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... I was to carry out the same programme, once more I hesitated. I could obtain very little precise information as to the real difficulties, if any, that beset the way, but everyone agreed that it was not at all a commonplace journey—in other words, not a very easy one. The long drive across the solitary Causse to St. Eminie or Florac, the four relays of boatmen necessary for the descent of the Tarn, the doubtfulness of the accommodation at the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... this; yet the philosophical chapters for which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem commonplace. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the pages again ... did I understand? Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable. The story is surprisingly commonplace—the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as those of a ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It was a big confused world, I felt, for a man to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... saw that he was human in shape and attire. Indeed, both his appearance and his occupation were exceedingly commonplace. When we came upon him he was leaning on a hoe and watching a passing cloud. Had he smiled at me, I think I must have fallen to my knees and lifted my hands in pleading, but he gave no sign of pleasure that another victim had ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... important discovery, when Balzac wrote. He showed that, because we are ourselves ordinary men and women, it is really human interest, and not sensational circumstance which appeals to us, and that material for enthralling drama can be found in the life of the most commonplace person—of a middle-aged shopkeeper threatened with bankruptcy, or of an elderly musician with a weakness for good dinners. At one blow he destroyed the unreal ideal of the Romantic School, who degraded man by setting up in his place a fantastic and impossible hero as the only ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... hard-worked official, there remained nothing but to select the spot to which X.—his leave once granted—must go. It would never, of course, do that he should go to Penang, or even to Hong Kong or Japan, such an expedition would be too ordinary and commonplace. It was felt that X. should do something worthy of the occasion, and show his appreciation of the place he lived in by going to one as similar in respect of people and scenery as could be found, and so, when the person chiefly concerned, knowing what was expected of him, suggested ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... made to the disgarlanding of themselves thus far; yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abruptness of the transition from floweriness to commonplace affected them both, Laetitia chiefly, as she had broken the pause, and she remarked:—"I am really Constancy in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... excitement of the moment neither heard the outer door open, and neither heard David enter. He stood in his quiet way, looking from one to the other. Sanderson's angry question died away in some foolish commonplace, but David had heard and ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... visited her husband's chambers in the Middle Temple. Mr. Mattingford, who had been Mr. Holymead's clerk for nearly twenty years, seemed to realise that the visit was important, though as a married man he knew that a meeting between husband and wife in town was usually so commonplace as to verge on boredom for the husband. There were occasions when he had to meet Mrs. Mattingford, but these meetings were generally for the purpose of handing over to the lady her weekly dress allowance of ten shillings out of his salary, so that she might attend the ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... 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
... forgetfulness! murderer of memory!" spoke the spirit, sternly. "In this, the last rough resting place of the impecunious dead, do you dare to discuss commonplace topics with one of the departed? Look at me, uncle, clove-befogged, and shrink appalled from the dread sight, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... him leads him to faults more serious. You get gross commonplace and utterly false commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if indeed he was a man who read his own works) ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... I said "'William Wilson' by Edgar Poe," and declared that it would never do. But his "Brownies," in a vision of the night, showed him a central scene, and he wrote "Jekyll and Hyde." My "friend of these days and of all days," Mr. Charles Longman, sent me the manuscript. In a very commonplace London drawing-room, at 10.30 P.M., I began to read it. Arriving at the place where Utterson the lawyer, and the butler wait outside the Doctor's room, I threw down the manuscript and fled in a hurry. I had no taste for solitude any more. The story won ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... is evidence to show that it did not appreciate certain other weatherworn structures of great beauty. I have seen photographs of an old Baptist Church with a fine (and not at all Baptist-looking) portico and fluted columns, which was torn down to make room for the present stupidly commonplace Baptist church: and I have seen pictures of the beautiful old town hall which was recently supplanted by an ignorantly ordinary town building of yellow pressed brick. The destruction of these two early buildings represents an irreparable loss ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... there is much fine work being accomplished at present, which is buried in the ruck of the interminable commonplace. I regard it as my duty to chronicle this work, and thus render it ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... endowments, but is largely the result of an assiduous cultivation of the same, and of a severe, steady, and long-continued study and practice of each one of these instruments, in which occupation he has ever aimed at the classical, and avoided all that was coarse or commonplace, either in the compositions used, or in his execution ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... greater and grander than the marble men of Pheidias? Giotto's unfinished Campanile is nobler than the perfect zero he drew for the Pope. In our imperfect minds, housed in our over-fat, over-lean, and always commonplace bodies, exists the principle of development, for whose steady advance eternity is not too long. Statues belong ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... assent at once, and by our promptness make it appear that we meant to do so even before we were solicited. As in dealing with sick persons much depends upon when food is given, and plain water given at the right moment sometimes acts as a remedy, so a benefit, however slight and commonplace it may be, if it be promptly given without losing a moment of time, gains enormously in importance, and wins our gratitude more than a far more valuable present given after long waiting and deliberation. One who gives so readily must needs give with good will; ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... fresh from my dream, it had appeared as patent as Arithmetic; but somehow it did not seem to me quite so obvious now. Though my Wife entered the room opportunely at just that moment, I decided, after we had exchanged a few words of commonplace conversation, not to begin ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... written novel of 'Pride and Prejudice.' That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." This is high praise, but it is something more when we recur to the time at which Sir Walter writes this paragraph. It is amid the dreary entries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES—sometimes they wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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." ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... excessive in all his feelings and doings. He hurt his friends without malice, and made them happy for love of doing so. His home was broken up by his own unruly disposition; and when his good, commonplace wife left him, it was said that he neglected to take care of her, but this was not true. She, herself, denied it before she died. His second marriage was a happy one—to the daughter of ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... A commonplace-looking man was the Herr Pastor, short and fat and bald. But there had been other days, and these had left to him a voice that still was young; and the evening twilight screening the seared face, Ulrich heard but the pastor's voice, which was ...
— The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl • Jerome K. Jerome
... memorable day it was to be! Its every incident is etched on the curtain of the past with sharp and unfaded lines. The beginning was commonplace enough. I was too late for breakfast, and I sat quite alone over my coffee and fried fish. Flora I did not see. I exchanged a few words with Captain Rudstone and Christopher Burley and then went off to the clerks' quarters, where I assisted with ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... of his hand on hers. As moonlight that softens into beauty every angle on which it falls, seemed his presence,—as moonlight vanishes, and things assume their common aspect of the rugged and the mean, he receded from her eyes, and the outward scene was commonplace once more. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... used we may have become to buying Legislatures, however commonplace it may be, still, when a financially responsible man like yourself gives concrete instance, and is prepared with proofs, the fact is horribly startling to everybody that cares for his country. What is to be the end of this sort of thing—the purchase of the people's representatives ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... had said after, and she had gone away wondering if life seemed to everyone like a dream when they were forty, and if his life would have seemed more real to him if he had given it to the world instead of to God? Her subsequent confessions seemed trite and commonplace. Not that Father Railston failed to listen with kind interest to her; not that he failed to divine that she was passing through a physical and spiritual crisis. His admonitions were comforting in her weariness of mind and body; but notwithstanding ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... and a thick tangle of trees on which the autumn leaves showed yellow. Painted fingers and arrows pointing, and an electric sign, proclaimed to all who passed that this was Kessler's. In spite of its reputation, the house wore the aspect of the commonplace. In evidence nothing flaunted, nothing threatened. From a dozen other inns along the Pelham Parkway and the Boston Post Road it was in no way to ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... great a composer as Handel—or rather it would take as great a composer if he could be found—to be able to be as easily and triumphantly commonplace as Handel often is, just as it takes—or rather would take—as great a composer as Handel to write another Hallelujah chorus. It is only the man who can do the latter who can do the former as Handel has done it. Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... cultivation of the same, and of a severe, steady, and long-continued study and practice of each one of these instruments, in which occupation he has ever aimed at the classical, and avoided all that was coarse or commonplace, either in the compositions used, or in his execution ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... only stare at her in return for her counsels. The difference between his place at that moment in the human comedy and hers was too great to be explained; it called only for silence or a stammering commonplace or two. Yet for a few moments the neighbourhood of her and her child was pleasant to him. She had a good comely head, which was bare under the sun, a little shawl crossed upon her ample bust, and a market-basket on her arm. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... don't know about that. The originality of men is commonplace as it's most novel. This man is on a par with the rest, if you call it original for him to have a ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... sudden," he remarked in whimsical commonplace, "however—" His hands went into his pockets automatically. His eyes followed a seam on the paper overhead back and forth, before ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... shelter—for it could not be called a home. They had a living-room and two very small bedrooms in a brick tenement wedged in among others of like unredeemed angularity, and belonging to the semi-respectable, commonplace order. It was occupied by stolid working-people of various nationalities, and all engaged in an honest scramble for bread, with time and thought for little else. The house was simply a modern, cheap shelter, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... need," Mariana whispered, and suddenly threw her arms around his neck and pressed her head closely against his breast. They did not kiss—it would have seemed to them too commonplace and rather terrible—but instantly took leave of one another, tightly clasping each ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... annoyed him, used now whenever he wished to speak of him injuriously. Others soon fell into the habit of applying to him the offensive title, without malice indeed, and for no other reason, I suppose, than that nicknames are the fashion in the army. To call a man simply by his honest name seems commonplace; but to christen him the "Owl" if his eyes are big, or "Old Tongs" if his legs are long, or "Step-and-fetch-it" if he suffers himself to be made the underling and cats-paw of his comrades,—that ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... 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 the heat of the oven and your eyes lose ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... sound of it was more than he could well bear. This brightness of his mind communicated itself to all the objects round him, to the sluggish waters of the Ouse, to dull, fenny Huntingdon, and to its commonplace inhabitants. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... of Mr. Christian Curwen we hardly know what to say. He is bold and honest in his politics, a great enemy to abuses, vapid in his levity and pleasantry, and infinitely too much inclined to declaim upon commonplace topics of morality and benevolence. But, with these drawbacks, the book is not ill-written, and may be advantageously read by those who are desirous of information upon the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... are not strong in dealing with the Powers, they can maintain peace at home. China, however, is unlike these countries, for her standard of popular education is very low. Most of the Chinese soldiers declare as a commonplace; "We eat the imperial food and we must therefore serve the imperial master." But now the Imperial family is gone, and for it has been substituted an impersonal republic, of which they know nothing whatsoever. These soldiers ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... occurrence! Surprise was no longer possible; you might have certified that an amputated leg was growing again without astonishing anyone. Miracle-working became the actual state of nature, the usual thing, quite commonplace, such was its abundance. The most incredible stories seemed quite simple to those overheated imaginations, given what they expected from the Blessed Virgin. And you should have heard the tales that went about, the quiet affirmations, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... person who enters into conversation with them completely at fault. It was one of his whims to affect ignorance on many subjects with which he was very well acquainted. His ambition was to be considered a character; and in order to carry this idea out, he very frequently spoke on the most commonplace topics as a man might be supposed to do who had just dropped from the moon. He thought, also, that there was something aristocratic in this fictitious ignorance, and that it raised him above the common herd of those who could talk reasonably on ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... I admire the old-fashioned type of woman—the womanly woman,—and you will not suspect me of wishing you to start off "on some adventure strange and new," but I do want you not to be content to lead a commonplace life; you must, anyway, live your life: resolve that by God's grace you will live it nobly. You cannot alter the outward form of your life,—you will probably be surrounded by very commonplace household duties, and worries, and jars,—but ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... concert at the Philarmonie. He played like an angel. It was so strange, the fat, red, more than commonplace-looking little bald man, with his quite expressionless face, his wilfully stupid face—for I believe he does it on purpose, that blankness, that bulgy look of one who never thinks and only eats—and then the heavenly music. It was as strange and arresting as ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... I know that I have a special place in my heart for those poor little creatures who figure in circuses and shows, or elsewhere, as "infant prodigies." Heaven help such little folk! It was an unkind fate that did not make them commonplace, stupid, happy girls and boys like our own Fannys and Charleys and Harrys. Poor little waifs, that never know any babyhood or childhood—sad human midges, that flutter for a moment in the glare of the gaslights, and are gone. Pitiful little children, whose ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... home work, come the cold leaden grays with some, and the violent blues and greens with others, and the horizontal lines with the feeble, and the bright touches and sparkles with the dexterous, and everything that is shallow and commonplace with all. Now, the fact is, that there is hardly a roadside pond or pool which has not as much landscape in it as above it. It is not the brown, muddy, dull thing we suppose it to be; it has a heart like ourselves, and in the bottom of that there are the boughs ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... illustrated by many instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of hob-nobbing with all sorts and conditions of men, this desire of wide contact and intercourse has little show in his novels—the ordinary fibre of commonplace human beings not receiving much celebration from him there; another case in which his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in his novels. But the fact lies implicit in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... once famous, such as Spindler, Bulwer, Eugene Sue, and so on, serve this purpose. But what can be more miserable than the fate of a reading public of this kind, that feels always impelled to read the latest writings of extremely commonplace authors who write for money only, and therefore exist in numbers? And for the sake of this they merely know by name the works of the rare and superior writers, of all ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of his own impressions of biology as a commonplace magazine reader who had to get what he could from the monthly reviews, and was glad to meet with any information from nearer the fountainhead. In a little while he and she were talking quite easily and agreeably. They went on talking in the train—it seemed to her father ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... breathless interest. There are lights and lights. Some are the mere commonplace of domestic peace set on a round table in a cozy room with children intent on the Frontier Boys. Then there is the weird light of a lantern moving unevenly across a field, or revolving along a hidden lane, and there is something of the dramatic in its yellow ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... young men of fashion—she had seen some of them on Tuesdays—Raoul Wermant, the one who so distinguished himself as a leader in the 'german', or Yvonne's brother, the officer of chasseurs, who had gained the prize for horsemanship, and others besides these—seemed to her very commonplace by comparison. No!—he whom she loved was a man in the prime of life, well known to fame. She didn't care if he had ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... Magazine," says: "If we think it feeble, it will be because we cannot see strength where it has been brought to perfect poise and ease. If our verdict is 'banal,' it will be because we cannot tell the commonplace from the simply and exactly right, or we do not know how rare the latter is—because we long for eccentricity as a proof of personality, and need what the French call emphase to impress us; there is ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... simple-hearted shepherds of the valley a princess of the blood royal. Don Manuel was very evidently her lover. Perhaps it was his imagination that had mixed the magic potion that lent an atmosphere of old-world pastoral charm to the story of the Valdes grant. Likely enough the girl would prove commonplace in a proud half-educated fashion that would be intolerable for ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... Well, Captain Armytage did get hold of her, in what we must now call the Lover's Walk! Yes, she has yielded, to her father's great satisfaction and perhaps to her mother's, for she will be more comfortable in looking forward to a commonplace life for her than in the dread of modern aberrations. But Gillian is very funny, very much ashamed of having given in, and perfectly determined to go to her college and finish her education, which she may as well do while the Sparrow Hawk is at sea. He is off to-day, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not love her husband. He must be a genius or a very commonplace man. Marriage always is a failure with such men. Common men live so low that women are afraid some one may steal into their lives at night through a cellar window. Genius—well, genius lives on the top floor, up toward the clouds, and with so many gloomy steps ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... ludicrously unbecoming. The battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood, but how much harder and worthier battles are fought, not in shining armour, but amid filth and squalor physical as well as moral, on a field of wretched and wearisome commonplace! ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... their way slowly, amid soft pastures and yellowing cornfields, out at length into the dusty thoroughfares of the main road. That gained, their talk insensibly changed its tone: it became more commonplace; and Kenelm permitted himself the license of those crotchets by which he extracted a sort of quaint pleasantry out of commonplace itself; so that from time to time Tom was startled into the mirth of laughter. This big fellow had one very agreeable gift, which is only granted, I think, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... picture. Now whenever you make such a purchase, to please your taste, to make your parlor or your chamber more attractive, choose that which shows good handiwork. Such a choice will last. You will not tire of it as you will of that which has but a commonplace ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... fault of diction results in what is called "fine writing." This fault consists in the choice of high-sounding words to express commonplace ideas. It is the besetting vice of half-educated writers. In the hands of such persons a "fair lady" becomes a "female possessing considerable personal attractions," and "drinking liquor" turns into "ingurgitating spirituous stimulus." Except ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... confused. He had to steel himself not to decide flatly that all this was nonsense. Morgan and Gwenlyn took him away from what appeared like a sort of social hall for these externally commonplace persons. ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... neglect? Is there nothing you know you ought not to do? You would know your duty, if you thought in earnest about it, and were not ambitious of great things." "Ah, then," responded she, "I suppose it is something very commonplace, which will make life more dreary than ever. That cannot help me." "It will, if it be as dreary as reading the newspapers to an old deaf aunt. It will soon lead you to something more. Your duty will begin to comfort you at once, but will ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... book of Sophisms too theoretical, scientific, and metaphysical. Very well. Let us try a trivial, commonplace, and, if necessary, coarse style. Convinced that the public is duped in the matter of protection, I have desired to prove it. But the public wishes to be shouted at. Then let ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... thing. The protagonist of Carnival was lodged in a perfectly good Venetian palace, where there was every convenience for having the matter out with his wife and her lover. For the rest the plot was commonplace to the verge ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... smote him a little at that word "worthy," and muttered some commonplace civility in return. Valencia saw it, and attributing it to his usual awkwardness, drew off ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... you can call the inspired gait a walk! If there is a single spinster left in Scotland, it is because none of these ever asked her to marry him. Ah, how grateful I ought to be that I am free to say 'yes,' if a kilt ever asks me to be his! Poor Penelope, yoked to your commonplace trousered Beresford! (I wish the tram would go faster!) You must capture one of them, by fair means or foul, Penelope, and Salemina and I will hold him down while you paint him,—there they are, they are there ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... repeatedly throughout all history, this universal inner "hopelessness" of higher men, this eternal "too late!" in every sense—may perhaps one day be the cause of his "going to the dogs" himself. In almost every psychologist we may see a tell-tale predilection in favour of intercourse with commonplace and well-ordered men: and this betrays how constantly he requires healing, that he needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his insight and incisiveness—from what his "business"—has laid upon ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... and made his return visit to me yesterday. I confess I was not much impressed with either his appearance or general ability. He is, to say the truth, a wretched creature, prematurely aged, and having nothing whatever to say for himself. A few commonplace civilities was all the conversation which passed between us. I said everything I could think of to make a conversation, among other things messages of civility from yourself; but though he appeared pleased and expressed his satisfaction at our being here, I could not get him to enter into ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... in the circle of commonplace, and then to pop out of it like a tailed comet! Such is the history of many a man's life. I have a near friend who went away from town one fall, happy and contented with his lot. And what do you suppose he found when ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... experienced it when out alone in a great forest, or on an unknown lake, and it always meant 'ware danger' of some kind. But why should I feel it here? Yet I did, and I couldn't shake it off. I took to examining the room. It was a commonplace one of the usual type. But there was a work-basket on the table, a dainty thing, lined with blue satin. There was a bit of lace stretched over shiny blue linen, with the needle sticking in it; such fairy work, like cobwebs seen from below, spun from ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... vastly tickled at the man's enthusiastic admiration of my little twopenny-halfpenny feat of navigation, and—secretly—very proud of it myself; but, of course, in reality it was an exceedingly commonplace exploit, which any other navigator worthy of being so-called could have accomplished without the slightest difficulty, the only essentials to success being good instruments, clear skies, and correct arithmetic, all of which I fortunately possessed. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... patriotism, hardly strong enough in stamina to make the compositions national, or to maintain their high level of popularity after the lyrist himself has long been at rest; partly through the essentially commonplace sources and forms of inspiration which belong to his more elaborate and ambitious works. No poetical reader of the present day is the poorer for knowing absolutely nothing of Lalla Rookh or the Loves of the Angels. What then will be the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... this time in that state of exaltation in which the impossible looks quite natural and commonplace. His tears were still wet on his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of the court-yard by a little gate, and across to the huge Gothic porch of the church. From there he could watch unseen his father's house-door, at which ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... style is less perceptible. Scott was never a great stylist; he struck out at the very first a nervous, hurrying meter, and a strong though rather commonplace diction, upon which he never substantially improved. Abundant action, rapid transitions, stirring descriptions, common sentiments and ordinary language heightened by a dash of pomp and novelty, above all a pervading animation, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... habits and individual abundance, the history of many hoofed animals is preserved with especial clearness. So well known as to have become a commonplace, is the phylogeny of the horses, which, contrary to all that would have been expected, ran the greater part of its course in North America. So far as it has yet been traced, the line begins in the lower Eocene with the genus Eohippus, a little creature ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... provisions for the ceremonial. Many of the necessary articles were at Saint Denis in the hands of the English, and the treasury of the cathedral had to be ransacked to find the fitting vessels. Fortunately it was rich, more rich probably than it is now, when the commonplace silver of the beginning of this century has replaced the ancient vials. Through the short summer night everyone was at work in these preparations; and by the dawn of day visitors began to flow into the city, great personages ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... reached. Maisons-Laffitte. I kissed my old friend's hand. I had found nothing utter but the most commonplace remarks. I was too ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... and then I used to try to shape a tale which in a figure might leave an arresting or a restraining thought in their minds; or even touch with a light of romance some of the knightly virtues which are apt to be dulled into the aspect of commonplace and ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... street."[132] Despite the pomposity, Gibbon's style is correct, and the exact use of words is a marvel. It is rare, I think, that any substitution or change of words will improve upon the precision of the text. His compression and selection of salient points are remarkable. Amid some commonplace philosophy he frequently rises to a generalization as brilliant as it is truthful. Then, too, one is impressed with the dignity of history; one feels that Gibbon looked upon his work as very serious, and thought with Thucydides, "My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject.* Thus, we may say "a poet soars," or even, though rarely, "a nation soars to greatness," but you could not say "Consols soared to 94-1/2." Even commonplace subjects may be illustrated by metaphor: for it is a metaphor, and quite unobjectionable, to say "Consols mounted, or jumped to 94-1/2." But commonplace subjects must be illustrated ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... impressionable to its morning animation—the young men hurrying through the courts and cloisters, the picturesqueness of a wig and gown passing up a flight of steps. It seemed that the old hall, the buttresses and towers, the queer tunnels leading from court to court, turned the edge of the commonplace of life. Nor did the Temple ever lose for them its quaint and primitive air, and as they strolled about the cloisters talking of art or literature, they experienced a delight that cannot be quite put into words; and were strangely glad as they opened ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... selling things to people which would appeal to their love of the beautiful and their desire for adornment; in short, to their vanity; but he had no qualifications for selling to people on a purely commercial basis, and especially selling something which was so matter-of-fact and commonplace in its character as the saving of coal and the freedom from necessity ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... with the sea and his early studies of Doctor Johnson, "that one would in the more superior manner show his appreciation of all this by refraining from the obvious comment which must needs be recognized as comparatively commonplace and vulgar; but really this is so superb that I must express some of my emotion, even at the risk of lowering your opinion of my good taste, provided, of course, that you have any opinion on the one hand or any good taste ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... the envelope and read—an invitation to lunch from his uncle, Edward of England, and a request to bring his august colleagues with him to talk matters over. There was no hint of battle, victory or defeat. It was a quite commonplace letter, but all the same it was one of those triumphs of diplomacy which only the first diplomatist in Europe knew how to achieve. Then he too laughed as he folded up the letter and went ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly commonplace little document, of which the foregoing ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... duty left for us except to make our practice square exactly with them,—so fatal, I say, is this notion to the right knowledge and comprehension of the very words or standards we thus adopt, and to such strange distortions and perversions of them does it inevitably lead, that whenever we hear that commonplace which Hebraism, if we venture to inquire what a man knows, is so apt to bring out against us in disparagement of what we call culture, and in praise of a man's sticking to the one thing needful,—he ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... offender escapes. Then we are not touched with the sufferings of any sort of men so much as of lovers; and this was almost unknown to the ancients; so that they neither administered poetical justice, of which Mr. Rymer boasts, so well as we; neither knew they the best commonplace of pity, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... he continued. "It feeds on spirit, and spirit is evanescent. A truly great picture should be seen by the comparative few. What every one possesses is necessarily a commonplace. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... are 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... for fiction as now, and never larger opportunities for its usefulness. Nothing has such an attraction for life as life. But what the heart craves is not 'life as it is.' It is life as it ought to be. We want not the feeble but the forceful; not the commonplace but the transcendent. Nobody objects to the 'purpose novel' except those who object to the purpose. Dealing as it does in the hands of a great master, with the grandest passions, the most tender ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... wonder. He is a small man with a big head, and is very demonstrative with his hands. He abounds with pious (and other) ejaculations, and belongs to that popular class which is profuse in expressions of surprise and admiration. The most commonplace observation evokes a "D'ye see that, now?" a "D'ye tell me so, thin?" or a "Whillaloo! but that bates all!" As will be seen, Michael artistically suits his exclamations to the tone and matter of the principal narrator, mixing up Christianity ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the front line of the corridors. The monastery has been "restored," even as has the church, out of all resemblance to its own honest original self. The adobe walls are covered with painted wood, and the tiles have given way to shingles, just like any other modern and commonplace house. The building faces the southeast. The altar end is at the northwest. To the southwest are the remains of a building of boulders, brick, and cement, exactly of the same style as the asistencia building of Santa Margarita. It seems as if it might have been built by the same hands. Possibly ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... prose—sermons, lives and legends of saints, biblical paraphrases, and similar work in which the monastic and priestly spirit took delight, but which is generally dull with the dulness of medieval commonplace didacticism and fantastic symbolism. The country, too, was still distracted with wars. Within fifty years after Alfred's death, to be sure, his descendants had won back the whole of England from 'Danish' rule (though ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... pain underlay the commonplace words. The anguish on his face stirred the best and most womanly in her. She yearned to comfort him. But he drew a pace or two away, and held up both hands as if warding her off, and stared at her still, but with ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... aware of her status in Fairbridge, and she was not without a steady, plodding ambition of her own. That utterly commonplace, middle-aged face had some lines of strength. Mrs. Sturtevant was a member of the women's club of Fairbridge, which was poetically and cleverly ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... went on for half an hour and more, bandying about the question as to how far their late visitor's intemperance was real or no. Every now and then they would join in some charitable commonplace, and would pretend to be all of one mind that Mahaina was a person whose bodily health would be excellent if it were not for her unfortunate inability to refrain from excessive drinking; but as soon as this appeared to be fairly settled they began to be uncomfortable ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... I should succeed far better than Emily Nunn, for I have married off five nieces of my own. Now don't say that you have. You look as if it were on the tip of your tongue. All girls say it when there is no man in sight. I shall hate you if you are not as little commonplace as ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... smiled at our exploded superstitions, wondered how this man should be considered great, who is now clean forgotten (as copious Guthrie before mentioned); how this should have been thought a patriot who is but a knave spouting commonplace; or how that should have been dubbed a philosopher who is but a dull fool, blinking solemn, and pretending to see in the dark; when he shall have examined all these at his leisure, smiling in a pleasant contempt and good-humored superiority, and thanking heaven for his increased lights, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... HIGHEST IDEAL OF LIFE AND CHARACTER.—Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic. And though the abiding sense of duty upholds man in his highest attitudes, it also equally sustains him in the transaction ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... particular, by their noble entertainers. The truth was, that Lord Bittlebrains had obtained his peerage by a good deal of plausibility, an art of building up a character for wisdom upon a very trite style of commonplace eloquence, a steady observation of the changes of the times, and the power of rendering certain political services to those who could best reward them. His lady and he, not feeling quite easy under their ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... of the two open colonnades with a central niche composition flanked on either hand by a sculptured frieze. Each is the work of a woman sculptor, and both, though very different, are far from the conventional or the commonplace. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Luckily he had left a case nearly full of matches, and one after another of them dropped, charred and burned out, before she had finished reading. After she had read it, her first love letter, she must needs go over it again, to learn by heart the sweet phrases in which he had wooed her. It was a commonplace note enough, far more neutral than the strong, virile writer who had lacked the cunning to transmit his feeling to ink and paper. But, after all, it was from him, and it told the divine message, however ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... illustration 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 ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Big Tent farther by perspective if not by miles. I recognized the legal rights of her husband, but no ruffling Daniel should quash the undeniable rights of Yours Truly. I indeed felt virtuous and passing valorous, with that commonplace note in my pocket. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... giving Bencoolen, in Sumatra, in exchange for it, stipulating at the same time that the Dutch were not to meddle with Malayan affairs, or have any settlement on the Malay Peninsula. The ruined cathedral of Notre Dame del Monte is a far more interesting object than the dull, bald, commonplace, flat-faced, prosaic, Dutch meeting-house, albeit the latter is in excellent repair. Even this Stadthaus, with its stately solitudes, smells of trade, and suggests corpulent burgomasters and prim burgomasters' wives ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... alone seems capable. The great majority of successful leaders in war on both elements have not been considerably, or at all, superior in intellectual acuteness to numbers of their fellows; but they have had strength of character, and their minds were not squeezed in a mould into a commonplace and uniform pattern. ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... assumed an attitude that would indicate his utter indifference to such commonplace things as horses. Then, finding that it must have been a false alarm, he ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... almost an inspired, impetuous work, in which the painter, impelled by a thirst for truth, has not felt a moment of hesitation or weariness. Infinite criticisms were made on this "incredible stroke of audacity by a young man of twenty-four." The large size of the canvas was censured, the commonplace nature of the subject, the poverty of the light effects, for the light is equally diffused and everything is placed in relief without the contrast of shadow,—the stiffness of the legs of the bull, the crude coloring of the plants and animals in the background; the mediocrity of the shepherd's ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... man may be going a commonplace, treadmill sort of grind, in a small corner of some great manufacturing concern, and be at the same time carrying on a bigger enterprise than the president of his concern. For he may be planning and praying for a world, and actually lifting it up in the arms of his strong ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... nothing, but looked around. She saw nothing that was familiar. A neat wayside station, with the usual platform, was nearest; and beyond this arose trees which concealed the view on one side, while on the other there were fields and hedges, and one or two houses in the distance. It was a commonplace scene, in a level sort of country, and Lady Dudleigh, after one short survey, thought no more about it. It was just like any ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... latter was chafing at the prolonged absence of O'Yoshi. Some accident must have happened to her. Then he remembered. She had gone to Hacho[u]bori. Here lived a sister, whose delivery was daily expected. Doubtless this commonplace event, yet surpassing in interest to every woman, detained her. A confusion outside attracted his attention. There was a crowd, and some disturbance. Hatsu! The people were being kept back by yakunin. "The thoughts of Kuro[u]ji were those of the wicked." At once he ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... to sit down now before the desk he could, in a manner, write easily enough—he could produce a tale which would be formally well constructed and certain of favorable reception. And it would not be the utterly commonplace, entirely hopeless favorite of the circulating library; it would stand in those ranks where the real thing is skillfully counterfeited, amongst the books which give the reader his orgy of emotions, and yet contrive to be superior, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... landscape of bare brown fields and leafless trees, Gilbert Fenton travelled London-wards, to the city which was so little of a home for him, but in which his life had seemed pleasant enough in its own commonplace fashion until that fatal summer evening when he first saw Marian Nowell's radiant face in the quiet ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... was half pulling him toward the door. Moreover, there was much sense in what the Alsatian said. It was a commonplace that he could be of more service to Julie alive than dead, and the man's insistence deciding him, he crept with the Alsatian into the hall. They stood a few minutes in the dark, listening, but no sound came. Evidently the house ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... while to come to hear them, nor mine to speak them; but if we would lay them to heart, and realise how true it is about every step of our earthly course that 'ye have not passed this way heretofore,' we should complain less than we do of the weariness and prosaic character of our commonplace lives, and feel that all was mystical and great and awful; and yet most blessed in its possibilities ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... these formed a very small portion of the aggregate population, and from the peasant in his hovel to the monarch on his throne the plague-spot of credulity had spread and festered, until it presented a formidable feature in the history of the time. It is curious to remark that L'Etoile, the most commonplace and unimaginative of chroniclers, who might well have been expected in his realism to treat such phantasies as puerile and absurd, seems to justify to his own mind the extreme penalties of the scaffold and the stake as a fitting punishment for sorcerers ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Fiction The Broad A Chewing Gum Women In Congress Shall Women Propose? Frocks And The Stage Altruism Social Clearing-House Dinner-Table Talk Naturalization Art Of Governing Love Of Display Value Of The Commonplace The Burden Of Christmas The Responsibility Of Writers The Cap And Gown A Tendency Of The ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... art 'tis prepared, one should drink it with art. The mere commonplace drinks one absorbs with free heart; But this—once with care from the bright flame removed, And the lime set aside that its value has proved— Take it first in deep draughts, meditative and slow, Quit it now, now resume, thus imbibe with gusto; While charming the palate it burns ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the least resemble her father, but took more after her mother, who was round and fat, and proportionately commonplace. Rosamund at first felt no degree of elation when her place was pointed out to her next to the Professor. But suddenly encountering Lucy's angry eyes, she began to take a naughty comfort to herself in her unexpected proximity. She drew a little closer to him on purpose to ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... This is the holy commonplace of all life. It is the touch of God. It is everywhere about us, and beneath and above. The father-mother Spirit of God broods over all our common life. And when things go wrong, He broods a bit closer and tenderer. He meets every ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... one's success. Some people are attracted by such a task and are perfectly happy to follow this plan of study. The kind of mind that contents itself with such phonographic records, however, must be acknowledged to be a commonplace sort of affair. We recognize its limitations in ordinary life, invariably rating it lower than the mind that can reason to new conclusions and work independently. Accordingly, if we wish to possess minds of superior quality, we see that ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... 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 reminder, she turned her face with its eager listening ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... 36 a confession commonplace to burst the hearth the goal the treatise a shake of the hand I will do it by myself a ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... ill logic in his famous and admirable memoir on distribution, as it appears to me, now that I have got it up so as to give the heads in a page. Depend on it, my saying is a true one—viz. that a compiler is a great man, and an original man a commonplace man. Any fool can generalise and speculate; but oh, my heavens, to get up at second hand a New Zealand Flora, that ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... insensible of all animals not to like to see our sex's glory.' That she was a very extraordinary woman we have Johnson's word for it. (See post, May 15, 1784.) It is impossible, however, to discover anything that rises above commonplace in anything that she wrote, and, so far as I know, that she said, with the exception of her one saying about Voltaire. Johnson himself, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, has a laugh at her. He had mentioned Shakespeare, nature and friendship, and continues:—'Now, of whom shall ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... growing. Almost the tears came to her eyes, but she made a quick errand to the hearth for the teapot, busying herself there till they were under control again. When she returned to her place at the table she was able to ask David some commonplace question about the journey which kept her true feeling quite hidden ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... monstrous joke of publishing a Guide to Conversation in a language of which it is only too evident that every word is utterly strange to him. The Teutonic sage who evolved the ideal portrait of an elephant from his "inner consciousness" was a commonplace, matter-of fact person compared with the daring visionary who conjures up a complete system of language from the same fertile but untrustworthy source. The piquancy of Senhor Pedro Carolino's New Guide of the Conversation ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... whirr of wooden rattles and lasting continuously for a period of several minutes, and then ceasing abruptly, as though at a signal, to recommence as abruptly a few minutes later. These sounds were commonplace enough, and after an hour or two to allow the ear to become accustomed to them, would of themselves have been soothing and conducive to somnolence rather than the reverse, but they were constantly being broken into by others so strange, and in some cases so ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... all meant to Mary no one ever knew—she saw, now, no return to her hills, and her longing for them grew as the years passed, and her curiosity flattened in the dull round of duties and commonplace routine. Only one emotion largely controlled her thought and that was a dumb gratitude for what she believed she was receiving. She could not agree that her devoted service gave ample return. She was under obligation, and the feeling ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... the melancholy sight, but—but just then the lieutenant came to take him down to the commander, and he straightened up and set his lips firmly, as if this were a very commonplace affair and he were used to being sent to Siberia every day in the week. The cabin in which the commander sat was like a palace compared to the humble fittings of the Mary Thomas, and the commander himself, in gold lace and dignity, was a most august ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... 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 what ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... I dare say—no doubt," Poppy answered brokenly. "Only I can't rise to these philosophic heights. I'm right here, don't you see, my feet well on the floor, planted in brutal commonplace. I shall want you—just simply I shall want you, and you won't be there, and I shall be most cut-throat horribly lonely and sad. But, looking at you, still I don't believe it. I won't believe it. I shall keep you a ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... necessity becomes an invincible necessity. "The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be devoured in the streets." But when the necessity pleaded is not in the nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation; because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonourable existence, without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they aim at obtaining the dues ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... simply because they are so astonishingly true that people soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things—that a nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... in the commonplace tone of the tea table. "I want to apologize for my fit of temper, Mr. Secretary. I was very stupid and I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself. You may ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... parties and wear gorgeous clothes and eat mushrooms and terrapin—which she considered inexplicable taste—she will ask me countless questions; but outside of the house she becomes the teacher and I the taught. Just what I am learning she hardly understands. Much that is new to me is commonplace to her; and she does not dream that I often cannot sleep at night for remembering what the day has shown me. To-morrow we are going to see a Mrs. Gibbons, whose little boy, eleven years of age, is the head of his mother's house—the support of ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
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