"Commonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... picture. He is so dreadfully obsessed by the idea that the humanity of the mother and child is the important thing about them that he has insisted on it to the detriment of his art. Cimabue was incapable of such commonness. Therefore make the comparison—it is salutary and instructive; and then go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit that if the greatest name in European painting is not Cezanne it ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the present day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of which men see the most—that type of things which could never have been but that it might pass. The demand marks the commonness, narrowness, low-levelled satisfaction of the age. It loves its own—not that which might be, and ought to be its own—not its better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the sake of whose approach it exists. I do not think that the age is worse in this respect than those which ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... her out of her capable and mechanical indifference. It was a pity. Her consistent dullness had had a sort of dignity; but genial, she was merely ridiculous. Animation cruelly displayed her appalling commonness and physical shabbiness. Sophia's demeanour was not chilly; but it indicated that Sophia had no wish to be eyed over ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... his work may be, it is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high—to insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of sloppiness in others—especially of that airy sloppiness which so often nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing to find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... prayers, as a recognised expression of a religious life. The step from expression to ostentation is a short one, and the triple repetition here of almost the same words in regard to each of the three corruptions of religion, witnesses to our Lord's estimate of their commonness. We are exposed to them just as the Pharisees of His day were. If there is less fasting now than then, Christians still need to take care that they do not get up a certain 'sad countenance' for the sake of being seen of men, and because such is understood to be the proper thing for a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... been its sole recorder, we should have had a perfect representation of the soldiers, the crowds, the weather, the smells, the colours, and the three uplifted figures; so lively a record that it would be immortal for the fidelity and commonness of its physical experience. But we should never have known more about the central figure than that He was a cool and courageous rebel. Kipling can make a picture of an indifferent huddle of fishing boats in a stagnant harbour which is more ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... at the squalid little town of Janway's Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; but his was the asceticism ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shouldering his way successfully through the troubles of the universe. Strength may be combined with stupidity, but even then it is not to be trifled with. Macaulay's sympathy with these qualities led to some annoying peculiarities, to a certain brutal insularity, and to a commonness, sometimes a vulgarity, of style which is easily criticised. But, at least, we must confess that, to use an epithet which always comes up in speaking of him, he is a thoroughly manly writer. There is nothing silly or finical about him. He sticks to his colours ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... up with fallen soil, and waving with a wild growth of brambles and chance growths of all kinds. This was the oldest part of all. At a little distance were some very commonplace and disjointed fragments of building, one of them suggesting a certain pathos by its very commonness and the complete wreck which it showed. This was the end of a low gable, a bit of gray wall, all incrusted with lichens, in which was a common door-way. Probably it had been a servants' entrance, a backdoor, or opening into what are called "the offices" in Scotland. No offices remained ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... documents has not received much attention. The format of a municipal document, however, is in itself a delightful essay in unconscious self-characterisation. Those of the United States express a plain democratic people. They have, in fact, all the commonness of the job printer. "Printed at the Journal Office," is, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... 2: The commonness of a sin diminishes the shamefulness and disgrace of a sin in the opinion of men, but not as regards the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we have ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... which in consequence overtakes the poor little soul-starved heroine rises almost to the height of tragedy. It is an every-day tale, full of "deep and blood-veined humanity," and deriving its interest and significance from the very fact of its commonness. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... equally to much of Crabbe's poetry. But at least, if this incongruity is to exist, it is on the more hopeful side. The characteristic of so much poetry of our own day is that the manner is uncommon, and the commonness ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... better. That's the life that art, with Auberon's permission, gives us; that's the distinction it confers. This is why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgar fellow—the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand. Then what ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... gone—for only one person now wears "plain dress" on Quaker Hill—it was a true expression of the "make believe" of sanctity in plainness. The quiet colors, the prescribed unworldliness involved a daily discipline, and infused into the wearer an emotional experience which mere economy and real commonness would never ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... through the corridor from partition to partition, disclosing each set with its own scene and people—the whole studio full of blatant noise and ghastly faces or painted ones, Palla thought she had never before beheld such a concentration of every type of commonness in her entire existence. Faces, shapes, voices, language, all were essentially the properties of congenital vulgarity. The language, too, had to be sharply rebuked by Puma once or twice amid the wrangling of director, camera man ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... fists on provocation. I will merely say to you that it is a great thing to be a Man!—a Man as God meant him to be, brave, truthful, and self-reliant, with a firm faith in the Divine Ordainment of Life as Life should be lived. There is no disgrace in work;—no commonness,—no meanness. Disgrace, commonness, and meanness are with those who pretend to work and never do anything useful for the world they live in. The king who amuses himself at the expense and ruin of his subjects is the contemptible person,—not the labourer who digs the soil for the planting of corn ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Its first erections are often only the milk-teeth of a suburb, and as the district rises in dignity they are dislodged by those which are to endure. Slightness becomes supplanted by comparative solidity, commonness by novelty, lowness and ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... possibilities beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole volumes of romance. The novel-reader to whom Demos was the repetition of what he had seen and known, and what had planted sickness in his soul, found the New Arabian Nights a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance. To these ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper flowers from post to post, Because it is alone of all things happy. I am contented for I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons ...
— In The Seven Woods - Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age • William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
... part was unnatural and alarming; and there was further provocation in his appearing to shirk the responsibility of it by not having come up at such a moment with his accomplice. Delia was impatient to know what he wanted anyway. Did he want to drag them down again to such commonness—ah she felt the commonness now!—even though it COULD hustle? Did he want to put Mr. Flack forward, with a feeble flourish that didn't answer one of their questions, as a substitute for the alienated Gaston? If she hadn't been afraid ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... N. normality, normalcy, normalness^; familiarity, naturalness; commonness (frequency) 136; rule, standard (conformity) 82; customary (habit) 613; standard, pattern (prototype) 22. V. normalize, standardize. Adj. normal, natural, unexceptional; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to you, my dear, dear lady, whose I shall be always! But my words in telling you this will only injure my meaning instead of emphasize it. In expressing, even to myself, my thoughts of you, I find that I fall into phrases which, as a critic, I should hitherto have heartily despised for their commonness. What's the use of saying, for instance, as I have just said, that I give myself entirely to you, and shall be yours always,—that you have my devotion, my highest homage? Those words have been used so frequently in a flippant manner that honest use of them is not distinguishable from the unreal.' ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... cheap Americans with loud voices and provincial speech, and general commonness, whom one meets over here; but with all their faults they cannot approach the vulgarities at table which I have seen in Paris. In all America we have no such vulgar institution as their rince-bouche—an ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... other people." Poetry and philosophy formed in his thought an inseparable unit, forever joined, "though seldom together—like Castor and Pollux." His interest is in "Humanity," that is to say, a superior type of the species, with a corresponding contempt for "commonness," especially for the common man as a mere machine of "duty." On performances he set no great store: "Those countenances are most interesting to me in which Nature seems to have indicated a great design without taking time ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... shrinking or expanding. The faults will not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations? All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but then, they are the periphrases of a polite ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... illustrative painters. We turn to them with pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of landscape painters of all modern ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... against it while waiting for my friend, and taking note of its very sordid neighborhood. The street before it might have been a second-rate New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, except for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted yellow brick and harsh red brick shops and public-houses. There was a continual coming and going of trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all heedless, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... shrinks from originality lest it should be regarded as impertinent; the other lest, being new, it should be wrong. We detect the one in the sensitive discreetness of the style. We detect the other in the complacency of its platitudes and the stereotyped commonness of its metaphors. The writer who is afraid of originality feels himself in deep water when he launches into a commonplace. For him who is timid because weak, there is no advice, except suggesting the propriety of silence. For him who is timid because ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the lunch box, and for once Bess was too ravenously hungry to protest at the "commonness" of it, and they set to at its ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... within the scope of the book—like Longfellow's "Psalm of Life"—have been omitted because of their exceeding commonness and their accessibility. Many hymns of very high value—like "Jesus, Lover of my soul," "My faith looks up to thee," "Nearer, my God, to thee," "When all thy mercies, O my God," "How firm a foundation"—have also been omitted because they ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... others, and out in the open, Phoebe seemed to shed the commonness that had blighted her at that dreadful tea. She still coquetted, but it was with a fresh and dewy coquetry as of some innocent woodland creature that displays its charms as naturally as it breathes. Ishmael found himself pleased instead of irritated when he received her weight as he helped her over ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... schools which gives the keys of knowledge to the mass of the people. Our common schools are important in the same way as the common air, the common sunshine, the common rain,—invaluable for their commonness. They are the corner-stone of that municipal organization which is the characteristic feature of our social system; they are the fountain of that widespread intelligence which, like a ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... will be noticed that the remedies we recommend are in almost every case very cheap—even, like hot water, costing nothing, as they are in every house. This very simplicity and commonness has turned many against our treatment. We know, indeed, of one curious case where olive oil was derided and despised by a rheumatic patient, until his friends got it labelled "Poison, for external use only." It was then eagerly applied, and effected ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... herself against his advances there was no remedy but a complaint to his master, which would disturb the peace of the household. She was indeed able enough to take care of herself and to ward off any unseemly boldness on his part; but she felt her noble purity soiled by contact with that taint of commonness of which she was conscious in this young fellow's ways, and in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... leaf on much the same plan, formed of two leaves, stiff and strong, soldered at their bases. Sometimes the pillager meets prickles that sting him, as in the roses and briers; and if he is a little fellow he is sure to regard him with intense disgust, a bristly guard of wiry hair—hence the commonness of that kind of fortification. Against enemies of larger growth a tree or shrub will often aim sharp thorns—another piece of masquerade, for thorns are but branches checked in growth, and frowning with a barb in token of disappointment at not being able to ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... machinery—something between the stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The music very rarely rises above commonness—that commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act) odiously vulgar. "Aida" is more dramatic than ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... wasn't the "commonness" of Lady Emma Hamilton, child of the slums, impersonator of risque stage pictures, and mistress of the greatest naval hero of all times, that appealed primarily to Louise's grand-aunt, Queen Caroline of Naples, but the abandon of the beautiful Englishwoman, her reckless exposure ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... before,' says Lightfoot, 'of the commonness of Magick among them, one singular means whereby they kept their own in delusion, and whereby they affronted ours. The general expectation of the nation of Messias coming when he did had this double and contrary effect, ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... or uncleanness in consumable goods due to "commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production, has been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such goods. What is common ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Judith freed herself suddenly. "Nothing shall persuade me to go back to the commonness of marriage in ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... of Balmawhapple,—"a discreet young gentleman," said the Baron, "much given to field sports." Next came the Laird of Killancureit, who cultivated his own fields and cared for his own cattle—thereby (quoth the Baron) showing the commonness of his origin. Added to these were a "non-juring" Episcopal minister—that is, one who had refused to take the oaths of allegiance to King George's government, and, last of all, the "Baron-Bailie" or land-steward of Bradwardine, ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... redundant flesh before me, his large mottled cheeks inflated with laughter, his full red lips pursed into a gay and mocking expression. To me he personified success, happiness, achievement—the other shining extreme from my own obscurity and commonness; but the effect upon poor little Miss Matoaca was quite the opposite, I judged the next minute, from the one that he had intended. I watched her fragile shoulders straighten and a glow rather than a flash of spirit pass into ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow |
