"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the myths that have gathered around the name of Basil Valentine, because it has become a commonplace in philology, has probably made him more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use about half a century ago, in the chapter on antimony, there was a story that students, if I may judge ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... had progressed with her day. The third diner was an adored young actor with a low, veiled voice which, combining itself with almond eyes and a sentimental and emotional curve of cheek and chin, made the most commonplace "lines" sound yearningly impassioned. He was not impassioned at all—merely fond of his pleasures and comforts in a way which would end by his becoming stout. At present his figure was perfect—exactly the thing for the uniforms of royal persons of Ruritania ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... perfect. In season and out of 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
... was not a nice thing to cuddle up and hide; of a misery she must get rid, and if talking about it was any relief, why not talk? She soon found, however, that it was no relief to talk to Arthur or his sister; and from the commonplace governess, she recoiled. The bookbinder was different; he was a man; he was not what people called a gentleman; he was a man like the men in the Bible, who spoke out what they meant! The others were empty; Richard was full of man! As regarded her father and mother, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... 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 |
