"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one of those heads which Guido has often painted—mild, pale, penetrating, free from all commonplace ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth—it look'd forwards; but look'd as if it look'd at something ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... 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 ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... stick out. How many wooden oaths could kicked chairs and slammed doors tell of! After all the home-life comes close to being the real test of power, does it not? It takes power to be gracious and strong, and patient and tender, and cheery, in the commonplace things, and the commonplace places, does ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... necessity. "The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be devoured in the streets." But when the necessity pleaded is not in the nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation; because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonourable existence, without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they aim at obtaining the dues of labour without industry; and by ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... was bright, and the sermon perhaps a little commonplace, but sensible as it seemed to me in matter, and adequate in style. The peaceful evening hymn which followed, the short solemn pause of silent prayer at the end, soothed and refreshed my spirit. A hasty glance ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... himself extraordinary liberties with strangers, the guests of the margravine. I met him crossing an inner court next day. He interrupted me in the middle of a commonplace remark, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... would have been more bearable. I met you; I worshipped you; won you. Then, after a brief dream of joy, the cloud came down, and my evil genius was upon me. I don't think you were in love with me, my beloved, but it would have come even after you had found out what a commonplace fellow it was whom you thought a hero; it would have come. You must have loved me out of the full flow of your own nature if I had not been ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of struggle, which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one thing is the whole universe! Be not baffled by the appearance of transcendental mysticism in this maxim, as the ancient inquirer was by the appearance of commonplace in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had twelve thousand pounds in her own right; and Ireland was not such a California as to make a very pretty girl with twelve thousand pounds an everyday chance. She had numerous offers of marriage, and with the usual luck in such cases, there were commonplace unattractive men with good means, and there were clever and agreeable fellows without a sixpence, all alike ineligible. Matty had that infusion of romance in her nature that few, if any, Irish girls are free from, and which made her desire that ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... to the universal life, and will express itself again in some higher and better form. To think of God in this way is an inspiration and a help in the doing of the humblest tasks. It redeems life from the dominion of the sordid and commonplace. It supplies an incentive to endeavour, and fills the heart with hope and confidence. To put it in homely, everyday phraseology, God is getting at something and we must help Him. We must be His eyes and hands and feet; we must be labourers together with Him. This fits in with what science has to ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... twins did not kill themselves. Bars of iron had to be put on the upstairs windows to prevent them making ladders of the traveller's joy and wisteria, modes of egress which they very much preferred to commonplace doors; and Mr. Hamilton-Wells had been reluctantly obliged to have the moat, which was deep and full of fish, and had been the glory of Hamilton House for generations, drained for fear of accidents. Argument was unavailing with the twins as a means of repression, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... smote him a little at that word "worthy," and muttered some commonplace civility in return. Valencia saw it, and attributing it to his usual awkwardness, drew ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Hoxer said to himself, as once he paused, his hands in his pockets, his cap on the back of his red head, his freckled, commonplace, square face lifted into a sort of dignity by the light of expert capacity and intelligence in his bluff blue eyes. He had been muttering to himself the details of its construction: so many feet across the base in proportion to its height, the width of ...
— The Crucial Moment - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... is really talented, though a commonplace creature like myself can hardly give you an idea ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the conversation by asking after his wife, and when she had ascertained "that his missus wur pretty middlin," made some other commonplace remark, and relapsed into silence. By the help of Mary, however, a sort of disjointed dialogue was kept up till they came to the gate which led up to the school, into which the children were trooping by twos and threes. Here the ladies turned in, and were going up the walk towards the school ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the call of duty, only through the courageous attack and the giving of our utmost allegiance, can we keep a positive zest in living, exorcise the specter of aimlessness and depression, and lift ordinary commonplace life to the level of heroism. Blessed is the man whose DELIGHT is in the law ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... them from this innate tendency of the imaginative faculty. This "ell wide" horror is like something in a German story. The strange aversion, coupled with a sort of mysterious terror, for beautiful and agreeable or even quite commonplace objects, is one of the secrets of the profound impression which the German writers of fiction produce. It belongs peculiarly to their national genius, some of whose most striking and thrilling conceptions are pervaded with this peculiar ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Chrysostom ... Aristophanes. This had been a commonplace in the discussions at the end of the seventeenth century, in England and France, on the morality of ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Queen,' a battery on a hill above the town thundered out a royal salute, everybody cheered, and I was standing on British soil. I saw not a single native Dutchman about, only crowds of the khakied of all ranks and sorts. After this little bit of history-making I hurried back to the commonplace task of clipping my mare's heels, an operation requiring great agility on the part of ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... a ploughman's rugged face, Or painted eyes in Piccadilly; But bowler hats are commonplace, And ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... always, for that matter, the sensitive soul must learn to adjust itself to circumstances and conditions. This adjustment may in itself become a fine art. It is really the art by which the painter excludes the commonplace and irrelevant from his landscape. Sometimes we have to do this consciously; for the most part, it should be a ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... was far from apparent that she was painted. Her hair, at all events, was her own and was not dyed. And yet, though she possessed an abundance of it, such as many a girl might have envied, it remained utterly uninteresting and commonplace, for its faded straw-like colour was not attractive to the eye, and it grew so awkwardly and so straight as to put its possessor to much trouble in the arrangement of the youthful ringlets she thought so becoming to her style. These, however, she ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Shall one mount the Acropolis or enter the market place? Worship in the temple of the Virgin Athena, or descend to the Agora and the roar of its getters and spenders? For Athens has two faces—toward the ideal, toward the commonplace. Who can regard both at once? Let the Acropolis, its sculptures, its landscape, wait. It has waited for men three thousand years. And so ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... of new developments at our home. I had supposed, when the events spoken of in the last chapter had settled down to their proper places in our little history, that our life would flow on in an even, commonplace way, with few or no incidents worthy of being recorded. But this did not prove to be the case. After a time, the uniformity and quiet of our existence ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... was intense. It was as though the spirits of the dead, of the mother of both and of the father of each, were present in the commonplace chamber where sat their two sons, not knowing each other for brothers, though overwhelmed by the same calamity. It seemed as if the murdered woman and her dead murderers were standing silently in the midst of the small room, watching to see what should ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... attractive as a mass of light, is not really good. Its patterns are trivial, its paintings and statues commonplace; and I personally have the feeling that it would have been more fitting had Giotto's marble been supplied rather with a contrast than an imitation. As it is, it is not till Giotto's tower soars above the facade that one can rightly (from the front) appreciate its roseate delicacy, so ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... commonplace, mean-looking room, the wind blowing through it from open window to open door. The bed still unmade, but the square box of a ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... introduction of a paragraph showing the importance of the topic under consideration. Oftentimes the arguer can show that this particular phase of the subject is of wider significance than at first appears. Perhaps he can draw a picture that will turn a seemingly uninteresting and commonplace subject into one that is teeming with romance and wonderment. For example, consider the following extract from Burke's speech on Conciliation with the ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... general idea that genius and intellectual pursuits are inconsistent with the minute observations and cares that I have been recommending; and by nature perhaps they are so. The memoirs of great men are filled with anecdotes of their incompetency for commonplace duties, their want of observation, their indifference to details: you may observe, however, that such men were great in learning alone; they never exhibited that union of action and thought which is essential to constitute a ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... and soul. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire. We were curious to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten literature, of a vanished society, Tragedy, is definitely dead; if, in a country where castes no longer exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... is likewise planted with trees, and diversified by garden-plots and cottages, had more the air of the outbuildings of a homely English park, than of a palace which we must all have imagined to be the most stately in the world. The most commonplace water-carts were passing here and there; roads were being repaired in the Macadamite manner; and carpenters were mending the park-palings, just as they do in Hampshire. The next thing you might fancy would be the Sultan walking out with a spud and a couple ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said Rachel, impatiently. "I did think I should not have been a commonplace woman," and she ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it in her by inheritance and by training to meddle with the lightning as safely as human being might; and Lady Merrifield owned with a sigh that she must accept as a fact that what even the heathens owned as a Divine mystery and awful attribute, had come to be treated as a commonplace business messenger and scientific toy, though (as Mrs. Gatty puts it) the mystery had only gone deeper. So much for the peril; and for the other scruple, it was set at rest by a hospitable letter from Mrs. Underwood, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... he was not an untutored man when you view him from the standpoint of his nation. To be sure, he did not learn his lessons from books. This is second-hand information at best. All that he learned he verified for himself and put into daily practice. In personal appearance he was rather commonplace and made no immediate impression, but as he talked he seemed to take hold of his hearers more and more. He was bull-headed; quick to grasp a situation, and not readily induced to change his mind. He was not suspicious until he was forced to be ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed those Wavelets Blue, While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a commonplace type, like you— In their strength and in their science they were positively giants, through the gorgeous days of old, Still an Admirable Crichton in those lieben alten Zeiten was the ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... and an apparent honesty—the honesty of purpose that comes to people in lonely places. Her stories were all of the class that magazine editors call "homely, heart-interest stuff," not deep or clever or problematical— the commonplace doings of common people—but it found an entrance into the hearts of ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... 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
... the melody tone by supporting it with the chord which would most readily suggest itself, within the narrowest limitations in the concept of key; or, second, it is within his reach to impart to any tone, apparently most commonplace, a deeper and a subtler meaning, by making it a peculiarly expressive tone of some related key. Instances of this use of harmonic accompaniment are numerous in Wagner's works, and form the most obvious peculiarity of his style, and the chief reason why the hearers ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... would have chilled any liking I might have felt, I being a writer myself, and therefore critical; for writers are as apt to make much of the "how," rather than the "what," as painters, who, it is well known, prefer an exquisitely rendered representation of a commonplace theme to an imperfectly executed picture of even the most striking subject. But in this case, on the contrary, the scattered rays of splendor in Miss Grief's drama had made me forget the dark spots, which were numerous and disfiguring; ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... a very limited market for any but the most commonplace furniture. Our wealthy people bought the productions of French cabinet makers, either made in Paris or by Frenchmen who came over to England, and the middle classes were content with the most ordinary and useful articles. If they ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... day fixed beforehand, the expected offer was made to her parents, and accepted. All had passed very simply and easily. So it seemed, at least, to the princess. But over her own daughters she had felt how far from simple and easy is the business, apparently so commonplace, of marrying off one's daughters. The panics that had been lived through, the thoughts that had been brooded over, the money that had been wasted, and the disputes with her husband over marrying the two elder girls, Darya and Natalia! Now, since the youngest had ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Alcmena, and no Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creation. First you gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for five whole years. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium? What says the Precieuse about you in ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... of class environment upon men's beliefs and ideals is a subject which our most voluminous ethicists have scarcely touched upon as yet. It is a commonplace saying that each age has its own standards of right and wrong, but little effort has been made, if we except the Socialists, to trace this fact to its source, to the economic conditions prevailing in the different ages.[122] Still less effort has been made to account for the different standards ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... other that no one had time to reduce to the terms of experience the scenes depicted on these slides—for with the glamour of exaggerated colour, of unaccustomed presentation, and of skillful posing the most commonplace village street seems wonderful and attractive for the moment. The lecturer concluded by an alarming statement as to the rapidity with which this desirable ranching property was being snapped up. He urged early decisions as the only safe course; and, as usual with all real estate men, called attention ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... fascination, watched Julia's expression and posture take on those little changes that always seemed demanded of her by the approach of a young or youngish man, or a nicely dressed old one. By almost imperceptible processes the commonplace ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... eyes; and oh! it was a sweet, sweet mouth! But the eyes never wavered, and the mouth had no trace of weakness in its dainty curves. You have reckoned without your host, John Arthur. It is no commonplace school-girl with whom you have to deal. Madeline Payne possesses a nature all untried, yet strong for good or evil. Intense in love or hate, fearless to do and dare, she will meet the fate you bring ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... self-controlled, moved by one passion only, and that the finest of all—ambition. In surveying once more the great design of his career, he found it an effort to bring up—from the far recesses of his experience—the poor little sentimental episode, so insignificant and commonplace, which, in a kind of aberration, he had taken for an affair of the heart. He returned to England. He threw himself with vigour into the questions which were then disturbing Churchmen. He revived a touching acquaintance with Agnes Carillon, an acquaintance ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... about that. The originality of men is commonplace as it's most novel. This man is on a par with the rest, if you call it original for him to have a woman in ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... market-place a child is standing with her mother—a commonplace-looking, little girl of about twelve, blue-eyed, light-haired, with thin arms and legs, dressed, poorly enough, for her holiday. The mother, stoutish, in her best but much-worn black gown and a brown straw, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... son (in this age of commonplace events) going to Australia with five thousand pounds, as sheep farmer and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... letter-writer, Henry Ward Beecher was a constant wonder. He never wrote a commonplace letter. There was always himself in it—in whatever mood ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... and colour that, after hearing him many times, I came to the definite conclusion that Chamberlain's opponents were snowed under by his accumulated moderation. Whatever Dilke's native impulses were, no one could say that he controlled them. Besides a defective sense of humour, he was fundamentally commonplace and had no key to his mind, which makes every one ultimately dull. My father, being an ardent Radical, with a passion for any one that Gladstone patronised, had made elaborate preparations for Dilke's ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... offices; there were no war maps on the walls, no stands of arms nor recruiting officers in evidence—not even a hint of intrigue or conspiracy. The place was rather meanly furnished, and it was disappointingly commonplace. A business-like young ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... was exceedingly simple, a commonplace stratagem familiar to the provincial bailiff. Its success entirely depends upon circumstances, and in this case it was certain, so intimate was Cerizet's knowledge of the characters and hopes of those concerned. Cerizet ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... kind to me as you can, Jim, for I love you very much in my commonplace way. I'll admit, too, that I had rather have your fire than my refrigerator—oh, if you could only make some money—not a great deal, but enough for a little house of our own, and enough in the bank ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... "I am a society bird, and Nature has marked out for me a course beyond the range of the commonplace, and my wife must learn to accommodate. If she has a brilliant husband, whose success gratifies her ambition and places her in a distinguished public position, she must pay something for it. I'm sure Billy Wren's wife would give ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at the pier, and ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... children spoiled by schooling, of daughters educated away from their commonplace parents and rendered disdainful of them, but never for one instant did he fear that his girl was that sort. He just knew better. He could no more have doubted "Bob's" love for him than his for her, or-God's love for both of them. Such love is perfect, absolute. He took no thought, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... house-pride having grown calm, the Bolderos settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life tempered by the amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian worked, Doria read Dante and attended performances of the Intellectual Drama; when Adrian relaxed, she cooked dainties in a chafing dish and accompanied him to Musical Comedy. They entertained in a gracious modest way, and went ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee, with his pipe ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... born a full-grown genius of commonplace parents. Rather his fate threatened that he should always be known as the son of his father. And certainly it was asking much of a boy that he should live up to a father who was one of the most conspicuous, clever, and erratic statesmen of the later ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... On his way thither he had recoiled, shivering, from the empty desolation of the house. In the general disarray of the ticketed furniture and stripped walls, all artistic charm had disappeared. And he said to himself, with a grim twist of the mouth, that if the house had grown ugly and commonplace, that only made it a better setting for the ugly and commonplace thing which he was about ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should, even though the performance had created an extraordinary commotion. Chase was new to the Old World and its customs, especially those rigorous ones which surrounded royalty and denied it the right to venture into the commonplace. The ambassador at the capital of the Empire at first sought to excuse him on the ground of ignorance; but the Grand Duke insisted that even an American could not be such a fool as Chase had been; so, it must have been a wilful offence that led up ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... (300 acres), up to thirty years ago mentioned in travelers' journals as a rare beauty-spot, is to-day thick-set with cottages of factory hands and small villas, and commonplace; while smoky Bridgeport, opposite on the Ohio side, was from our vantage-point a mere smudge upon ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... implied that this union had a higher significance than could be grasped by a mere suckler of fools (nice fools, no doubt) and chronicler of small beer (however good the brew). She believed it, too. Love—great, solemn, immortal Love, passionate and suffering—was a thing unknown to comfortable, commonplace Rose, as doubtless to Peter also. They were dear, good people, and fortunate in their ignorance and in what it spared them; but it was annoying when ignorance assumed superior knowledge, and wanted to teach its grandmother ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... is a bit of comfort for us commonplace, humdrum people, to whom God has only given one or two talents, and who can never expect to make a figure before men. We may be little violets below a stone, if we cannot be flaunting hollyhocks and tiger lilies. We may have the beauty of goodness in us after ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... have said "as everybody is," but, with much sagacity, he stopped short and sneezed instead. He felt that a commonplace cough from a man with a sound chest would inevitably have betrayed him—so he sneezed. "A hyperkrite as usual!" ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... preceding one. The present John Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions. And one result of this belief was that his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather than upon ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of some stranger. He had that dislike of being stared at which comes on geniuses late in life, and never leaves the commonplace. Sibyl, however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing. Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. She was thinking of Prince Charming, and, that she might think of him all the more, she did not talk of him but prattled on ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... invoke such interest has, ever since, been maintained by Romance through all varieties of form and fancy,—from the majestic epopee of "Telemaque" to the graceful fantasies of "Undine," or the mighty mockeries of "Gulliver's Travels" down to such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet preserve from oblivion "The Castle of Otranto" ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have been glad to shine in that lively and amusing competition, but possessed no such desirable talents, and so when called upon contrived merely a commonplace toast which all applauded ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Captain Connor may win through to a green old age. I hope to God the gallant fellow will. Your present motives are beautiful and heroic. But do you care for him sufficiently to pass a lifetime with him—after the war—an ordinary, commonplace lifetime?" ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... stared motionless I do not know. Finally, I was aroused by my syce taking the Waler's bridle and asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to the commonplace is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, into Peliti's for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... seized with terror. He made a movement, and his head suddenly fell forward with his face on his plate. There was a muffled uproar, and the few women present surrounded the poor man. Stupid, commonplace, indifferent things were uttered in the same way that one mutters familiar prayers. His son was sent for, and then two of the waiters came and carried the body away, living but inert, and placed it ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... had thought of more ambitious things than songs, and had sketched the outlines of a tragedy; but it was only after meeting with Fergusson's Scotch Poems that he 'struck his wildly resounding lyre with rustic vigour.' In his commonplace book, begun in 1783, we have ever-recurring hints of his devoting himself to poetry. 'For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in love, and then Rhyme and Song were in a measure ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the younger members of the educated class of to-day is easily discoverable. The word God used in their English compositions or speeches, plainly implies a person. The commonplace of the anxious student is that the pass desired, the failure feared, is dependent upon the will of God—language manifestly not pantheistic. Religious expressions, we may remark, are natural to ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... impatient indignation that they did not do what they left her to do. But seeing they were a hopeless case, after another minute or two of pulling at her netting, she changed her seat for one on his side of the room. Winthrop gave her no help, and she followed up her duty move with a duty commonplace. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... she invite Miss Cameron out here for a little visit? If they are to meet, I know Miss Cameron, or any girl, would take it as more of a tribute to be received in your own home than merely to meet in a big commonplace hotel." ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... 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 ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... his life, at some time in his life, takes it upon itself to reduce his advantages to the average standard. Nature gave Byron clubbed feet, but with those feet she gave him a genius whose numbers charmed the world— a genius which multitudes of commonplace or weak men would have been glad to purchase at the price of almost any humiliating eccentricity of person. But they were obliged to content themselves with excellent feet, and brains of the common kind and calibre. Providence had withered the little boy's leg, but the loudest song I have ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... a mental vision as she spoke of the house in Dawson Place when George lived with his mother and sisters—a house in which furniture and everything else were commonplace and bourgeois to the last degree, and where nothing could have been altered since his boyhood; indeed she had often secretly pitied him for having to live in such surroundings, and admired the filial patience that had made ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... nothing very romantic nowadays in a voyage to Europe. It has become a commonplace, everyday journey. You step to the deck of the steamer with less fear and trembling of friends than was once bestowed on a passage down the Hudson, and before you are fairly recovered from the first shock of sea-sickness, you have reached the destined port. But, for ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... is the dramatic effect conveyed by these pictures that the figures seem actually taken unaware in the very act of performance, as by a snapshot in modern photography. This quality of "momentariness," as Phillips calls it, so dangerous in the hands of a commonplace painter, lends a peculiar fascination to many of Reynolds's pictures. That he also appreciated the beauty of repose we see in such portraits as Penelope Boothby and ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the second grade are by a composer whose productions are never commonplace. They contain much attractiveness and educational value. Teachers of all standards can ...
— Twelve Preludes for the Pianoforte Op. 25 - I. Prelude in F Major • N. Louise Wright
... Greece, and the Gaelic Western Islands. It does not occur in 'Lord Bateman,' where Mr. Thackeray suggests probable reasons for Lord Bateman's fickleness. But the world-wide incidents are found in older versions of 'Lord Bateman,' from which they have been expelled by the English genius for the commonplace. ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... conduction of sound—it is to be noted that sound is carried astonishingly far by means of compact bodies. The distance at which the trotting of horses, the thunder of cannons, etc., may be heard by laying the ear close to the ground is a commonplace in fiction. Therefore, if a witness testifies to have heard something at a great distance in this way, or by having laid his ear to the wall, it is well not to set the evidence aside. Although it will be difficult ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... be so great as to debar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; but his reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, a colour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace. Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in a measure left out of much of that conversation which helps to make ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... 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
... intelligence, that I may have some news to tell you: but, as you see, I am short of material. Accordingly, I return to Callisthenes and Philistus, in whom I see that you have been wallowing. Callisthenes is a commonplace and hackneyed piece of business, like a good many Greeks. The Sicilian is a first-rate writer, terse, sagacious, concise, almost a minor Thucydides;[589] but which of his two books you have—for these are two works—I don't know. That about Dionysius ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Philip, with his exquisite sensitiveness, found an unspeakable comfort in her presence; a soothing sense of rest and peace so blissful that it seemed almost wrong. There are even in this worldly age many women who hide under the covering of uneventful, commonplace lives existences full of spiritual richness,—women who find in religion not the mechanical acceptance of form, not a mere superstition which encrusts an outworn creed, but a vital, uplifting force; a power which fills their souls with imaginative warmth and fervor. The worth of an experience ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... in the saddle or in single harness, and he is scarcely less so when, with partially impaired vision, he sees things imperfectly, in a distorted form or in a wrong place, and when he shies or avoids objects which are commonplace or familiar. When we add to this that certain diseases of the eyes, like recurring inflammation (moon blindness), are habitually transmitted from parent to offspring, we can realize still more fully the importance of these maladies. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... condescended to the players in Hamlet—the sportive relief, which he threw into the darker shades of Richard—disappeared with him. Tragedy is become a uniform dead weight. They have fastened lead to her buskins. She never pulls them off for the ease of a moment. To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction. John had his sluggish moods, his torpors—but they were the halting stones and resting places of his tragedy—politic savings, and fetches of the breath—husbandry of the lungs, where ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... choicest heroes of Greece—young, brave, and strong. It has ever been thus. Youth has always been synonymous with adventure. It is a condition which seems inherent; nature instilling into the blood of her sons the very spirit of discontent—of longing to push out from the commonplace scenes of childhood into broader ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... no such commission, eh? Then, is one to assume that you are merely a band of ordinary, commonplace pirates, eh?" demanded ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... From the midst of the crowd the children thought they heard their mothers' voices saying how thoroughly blest they were. Satan was frightened nevertheless. He absented himself for four Sabbaths, sending a small commonplace devil in his stead. He did not show himself again till the 22nd July. When the wizards asked him the reason of his absence, he said, "I have been away, pleading your cause against Little John," the name by which he called Jesus. "I have won the suit, and they who ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business-table, and, nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea: the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commonplace to burst the hearth the goal the treatise a shake of the hand I will do it by myself a man's duty ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... on the shoulder reassuringly. "That's the proper thing for a lover to think!" she said with cheerful, commonplace inanity. She did not notice that he shrank from her hand, because she now sprang up, crying, "But ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... sward of the hill; psyche, the soul that longed to be loose. I would write psyche always instead of soul to avoid meanings which have become attached to the word soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy inddeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself. Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... in state with Sophia, and found it hard work to keep up a little commonplace conversation with her during the solemn meal—his heart being elsewhere all ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... subdivision and accession of processes on the one hand, and by an increased variety of products, and therefore of processes, upon the other hand. The constantly growing specialisation of fixed capital and of labour in our factories and workshops is a commonplace. Adam Smith's famous pin manufactory, with its ten separate processes, has been left far behind. In a modern shoe factory in the United States there are sixty-four distinct processes. Grain, in the elaborate machinery of a steam flour mill, passes through a score of different ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... his eyes. A stranger—an Americano from his dress and accent—was descending the rocks toward him. He was a slight-built man with a dark, smooth face, that would have been quite commonplace and inexpressive but for his left eye, in which all that was villainous in him apparently centered. Shut that eye, and you had the features and expression of an ordinary man; cover up those features, and the eye shone out like Eblis's own. Nature ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... understanding what a philosopher was, he had been able to see the amused expression in the eyes of those who heard his name, and had hated them for it. "Show a little intelligence, Plato." Why couldn't they have given him a name like the others? There were so many ordinary, commonplace, manly names from which they might have chosen. Jim, Jack, George, Tom, Bill—anything would have been better than Plato. And infinitely better than what he was sometimes called by his equals—"Plato, ...
— Runaway • William Morrison
... be commonplace," Mary declared, and as the bell rang and she went to the table, she felt that now nothing could daunt her—the hard things would be merely a part of a ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... and from Gavin Douglas to Burns and Scott and Stevenson, have gone for refreshment and new inspiration, when the world was weary and tame and sunk in the thraldom of the vulgar, the formal, and the commonplace; and never without receiving their rich reward and testifying their gratitude by fresh gifts of song and story, fresh harpings on the old lyre that moved the hearts of men to tears and laughter long before they knew of printed books. The ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... should succeed far better than Emily Nunn, for I have married off five nieces of my own. Now don't say that you have. You look as if it were on the tip of your tongue. All girls say it when there is no man in sight. I shall hate you if you are not as little commonplace as ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... single-handed and alone would require unremitting effort through the very best years of his manhood. His brain, his strength, his ability, his ambitions, what were they all in the strife after place and power, compared to the money of some commonplace adversary? Preston Cheney, the native-born American directly descended from a Revolutionary soldier, would be handicapped in the race with some Michael Murphy whose father had made a fortune in the saloon business, or who had himself acquired a ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a very commonplace story indeed. I don't believe the spirits of the departed trouble themselves to revisit the glimpses of the moon for the purpose of frightening honest mortals—or even for the sake of hanging around the favourite haunts of their existence in the flesh. If they ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... being exactly an incurable philanderer, was nevertheless insufficiently commonplace to contemplate marriage, in the Pauline sense, as a necessity. He was much more disposed, at least for the present, to regard it merely as a piquant possibility, towards which his very attitude of indecision lent him an extra weapon of power in his ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... it, you poor fellow! But it sounds an anachronism! I can't believe that anything so commonplace as a bungalow, with servants and tea and toast, exists within a hundred miles of this ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... of the room; it had touched her humor; it had been a joke on her brother; but she felt that the night had brought a crisis: she could not continue to shield a man of whom she knew nothing save that he was the object of a curious enmity. Her idle prayer that her own land's commonplace sordidness might be obscured by the glamour of Old World romance came back to her; she had been in touch with an adventure that was certainly proving fruitful of diversion. The coup de theatre by which Armitage ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... mother." There was a certain embarrassment in Harley's voice as he spoke; and, turning round abruptly, he exclaimed, "But you have shown poetry even here. I could not have conceived that so much beauty could be drawn from what appeared to me the most commonplace of all suburban gardens. Why, surely where that charming fountain now plays stood the rude bench in which I read ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... development of its actual historic characters. Those characters—Catherine de Medicis and the rest—Merimee, with significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside, preferring to think of them as essentially commonplace. For him the interest lies in the creatures of his own will, who carry in them, however, so lightly! a learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of Dumas. He knows with like completeness the mere fashions of the time—how courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the large movements ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... a great deal of life; and a man who has done so must be stupid indeed if he can't say something that shall be both interesting and profitable. As man to man the doctor felt every inch the earl's equal, and more, for he discovered that the earl was commonplace in intellect, and informed only in one or two beats; nor did it require strained attention to take in the meaning of his lordship's talk, so that Dr. Brunton could listen and at the same time think of the many instances—which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... were disappointed in the daughter of the "sugar king." Nettie Parsons was a very commonplace, kindly girl, not at all brilliant, and dressed more plainly than the majority of the girls at ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... less interested in what are usually regarded as the more practical affairs of life. He lost what little ambition he ever had for money-making, and permitted good business opportunities to pass unheeded. He ceased to write the somewhat interesting but altogether commonplace and respectable stories and verses which he had been in the habit of contributing to periodicals. He would take long trips into the country, no one knew where, and would spend more time in his favorite haunts about the city, or on the ferries, or the tops of omnibuses, at the ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he undoubtedly had technique, his posing was commonplace, his subject banal, his imagination hopelessly bourgeois; that he was a painter of the ugly and the ordinary, without inspiration or imagination; that the one pretty and delicate note in the whole canvas was the butterfly in the lower left-hand corner, and that that was obviously reminiscent ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... before the words would have seemed blasphemy to him, now they sounded like an ordinary commonplace. He put the glass to his lips and emptied it in quick, ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Sultan[31] received me at once on the day of arrival, and made his return visit to me yesterday. I confess I was not much impressed with either his appearance or general ability. He is, to say the truth, a wretched creature, prematurely aged, and having nothing whatever to say for himself. A few commonplace civilities was all the conversation which passed between us. I said everything I could think of to make a conversation, among other things messages of civility from yourself; but though he appeared pleased and expressed his satisfaction at our being here, I could not get him to ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... clasped arms on the table, she hid her face in them, and sobbed as though her heart would break. Curtis placed a hand on her shoulder, and strove to calm her with such commonplace phrases as his dazed brain could dictate, but she wept bitterly, just as a child might weep if disappointed about the non-fulfillment of some object on which ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... be familiar to those who saw with their own eyes is not so to others, who can only take at second-hand those things which they had no opportunity of seeing for themselves. Besides, details omitted as frivolous or commonplace by history, which makes a profession of more gravity, are perfectly appropriate in simple memoirs, and often enable one to understand and judge the epoch more correctly. For instance, it seems to me that the enthusiasm displayed by the entire population and all the local authorities ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew Baines, Esq., a barrister, became a member of the cabinet, and another son, Edward, became ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... purity, his apprehension of what was commonplace, were such that even in "Don Giovanni," even in this immortal chef-d'oeuvre, he discovered passages the presence of which we have heard him regret. His worship of Mozart was not thereby diminished, but ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... with the fierce moustache, and the trim, military young man with one that was close cropped and smart. Each wore a blue serge suit and affected a short visored cap of the same material, and each lazily puffed at a very commonplace briar pipe. They in turn were watching the sprightly parade with an interest that was calmly impersonal. They saw no one person who deserved more than a casual glance, and yet the motley crowd passed before them, apparently without ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Mr. President, Vice President Bush, Vice President Mondale, Senator Baker, Speaker O'Neill, Reverend Moomaw, and my fellow citizens: To a few of us here today, this is a solemn and most momentous occasion; and yet, in the history of our Nation, it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... told the heartbreaking and commonplace story: her terrified awakening in the face of the man's infamy, her remorse, her madness; and she also described Alice's admirable conduct: the girl suspecting her mistress's despair, forcing a confession from her, writing ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... preferring to remain and vex her husband with a thousand little teasing arts. Meanwhile Mr. Raleigh proceeded to take that office upon himself, by crossing the hall, exploring the parlors, examining the manuscript commonplace-books, and finally by sketching on a leaf of his pocket-book Mrs. Laudersdale, at the other end of the piazza, half-swinging in the vines through which broad sunbeams poured, while Helen Heath was singing and several other ladies ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... contains his famous Letter to Sir William Windham, with an admirable description of the Pretender and hi Court, and a very poor justification of his own treachery to that party; a flimsy unfinished State of the Nation, written at the end of his life, and the commonplace tautology of an old politician, who lives out of the world and writes from newspapers; and a superficial letter to Mr. Pope, as an introduction to his Essays, which are printed, but ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... tragedy—of Ambrumesy. In my opinion, this sort of work and the judgments which it entails, deductions, inductions, analyses and so on, are only interesting in a minor degree and, in any case, are highly commonplace. No, I shall content myself with setting forth the two leading ideas which I followed; and, if I do that, it will be seen that, in so setting them forth and in solving the two problems which they raise, I shall have told the story just as it happened, ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the synagogues. How much of Jewish history, how many of the many exciting incidents in that history, had transpired in caves! Yet further, these people were Jews of Bethlehem, with whom the idea was especially commonplace; for their locality abounded with caves great and small, some of which had been dwelling-places from the time of the Emim and Horites. No more was there offence to them in the fact that the cavern to which they were being taken ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... very graciously, and called everything beautiful and delightful; which rather disappointed me, as I had taken her to be a woman of some originality. She is rather a puzzle;—or is she, indeed, a very commonplace person, and the fault in me, who am forever taking women to mean a great deal more than their Maker intended? Regarding Miss Blunt I have collected a few facts. She is not twenty-four, but twenty-seven years old. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... wooden box covers in the closet," promptly responded Cyn. "That is right, and see, here is room also for the coffee—pardon me, I had almost said commonplace coffee-pot!" ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... conformity too often did duty for conviction among the people. It was a condition which could not endure in communities where religion was still the chief intellectual and emotional refuge from the daily routine of commonplace duties. Thus it happened that both in the older settlements, where for the unlettered the dull round of life was rarely broken either by real or fictitious adventure, and in those newer regions where primitive conditions ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... however lowly, with the dignity that belongs to it. He rewards merit, however obscure, with its due honour. Whatever is true or beautiful or good, finds from him an immediate sympathy. The true is never rejected by him because it is commonplace; nor the beautiful because it is everyday; nor the good because it is not also great. He calls nothing unclean but vice and crime, He sees meanness in nothing but in the sham, the affectation, and the spangles ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... kind rare in any world. It was scientific at times, but subdued to the necessities of the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such bounds that bishop or archbishop might have listened without offence; political even, and still not commonplace, and, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... behind his screen saw nothing of this play of the emotions. He returned nonchalantly to his station, and asked, in commonplace tones: ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... not find the consul, and I shared the table d'hote with three tearful old French ladies, each of whom had husband or son at the front. That would seem to have been enough without being shelled at home. It is a commonplace, but it is nevertheless true that in war it is the women who suffer. The proprietress walked around the table, still knitting, and told us tales of German officers who until the day before had occupied her hotel, and her anecdotes ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... any but a very good musician; they show real genius, and a taste imbued with the inspiration of the great masters, Handel and Beethoven. The only one of them that I could sing is the only one that is in the least commonplace, "The Bonnet Blue;" the others are beyond my powers, but I shall get my sister to sing them for me. They are very remarkable as the compositions of so young a woman. Did she write the words as well as the music of "The Spirit of Delight"? [The musical compositions here referred to were those of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... me, and I wanted to take her to my heart, and tell her how sorry I was for her; but to do that would have been to take advantage of her moment of weakness, and that I could not—must not do. So I let her go from me with merely a few commonplace expressions of regret that she had received disturbing news, while all the time my heart was aching in unison with hers, and I kept her with me in thought, ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... invasion of a powerful army. Twenty-five thousand men were landed in Egypt. The campaign was conducted with celerity and skill. The Egyptian armies were slaughtered or captured. Their patriotic but commonplace leader was sentenced to death and condemned to exile, and Great Britain assumed the direction ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... off them and we see the ship as she really is under the faintly diffused light of the clouded moon. She is a dirty commonplace hulk, packed with men in soiled clothes, no longer the radiant white ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... troops openly revolted, and fought against each other like deadly enemies. The nobles, divided in their views, arrogated to themselves in different places the titles and powers of command. Public faith and private probity seemed alike destroyed. Pillage, violence and ferocity were the commonplace characteristics of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... silent autumn passed by. And his silent winter came. One day, in a December frost, he met the Canon, muffled up to the chin and on his way to see Miss Bigelow, who professed herself once again in extremis. They stopped in the snow and spoke a few commonplace words, but Maurice thought he observed a peculiar furtiveness in the old man's manner, a hint of some ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... almost heretical at the time when it was made, is now little more than a commonplace. We have long recognized that Pope's Homer is not the real Homer; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, as does Mr. Andrew Lang, "It is almost as if he had taken Homer's theme and written the poem himself."[458] Yet it is surprising to see how nearly ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos |
