"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is surely a sufficiently commonplace operation. Yet Jesus brake bread with his disciples in such way that that simple act has become the symbol of sublimely spiritual relations, the centre of the most august rite of the Christian Church. In like manner the act of sitting down to an ordinary meal with ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... incessant tireless work. But there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a definite personality. One was resolved to cripple its power because one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent, the lovers of truth ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... was told that this jocular feature Of mine was a trick reprehensibly rude, And yet I was sold, like a commonplace creature, To work in a circus ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... campaigns of Philippicus, in the years A.D. 584 and 585, were of the most commonplace character. He avoided any general engagement, and contended himself with plundering inroads into the Persian territory on either side of the Upper Tigris, occasionally suffering considerably from want of water and provisions. The Persians on their part undertook no ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... while she stood to look at the pictures. What a pleasure it would be to him merely to watch this good little creature expanding under the splendours of Art and Nature! When she had got free from the commonplace atmosphere in which she had lived, she would, in a little while, become a charming companion. M. Roque's wealth, moreover, tempted him. And yet he shrank from taking this step, regarding it as a ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... be ere you forsake Your quarters on the minished Lake; For there, with splendid plumes and hues And ways that startle and amuse, You constantly refresh the eye And cheer the heart of passers-by, Untouched by years of shock and strain, Undeviatingly urbane, And lending London's commonplace A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows, never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners and language, which is embodied in the philological writings of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness. Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian, who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... His features were large and not particularly intelligent, his cheeks were puffy, and his gray beard ill-humored. He had the double neck of the Frenchman of the lower class who has not denied himself the joys of the cuisine, and his appearance would have been hopelessly commonplace but for the deep-set brilliant black eyes which lit up his whole face and gave it an ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... themselves at set times and in approved fashions: athletics, dramatics, school-politics and social ethics, all organized and co-ordinated. What you flatter yourself by putting forward as an amiable heresy has become a commonplace of orthodoxy, and your liberal theory of education and life is now one of ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Montagu. I truly said, I should be the most insensible of all animals not to like to see our sex's glory.' That she was a very extraordinary woman we have Johnson's word for it. (See post, May 15, 1784.) It is impossible, however, to discover anything that rises above commonplace in anything that she wrote, and, so far as I know, that she said, with the exception of her one saying about Voltaire. Johnson himself, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, has a laugh at her. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the Caesars, proudly certain of victory,—'t is the way of the Great, whose commonplace virtue, pusillanimous in reverses, overbearing in success, cannot bridle their cupidity,—designates to the Triumvirate what Kings are to be proscribed [Britannic George and me, Reich busy on us both even now], and those ungrateful ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... real conflict of wills, only of events, and the lover's conversion to a useful life by means of poverty is cheap, and the ending commonplace. On the whole, the stimulating exhortation to will and work is run into a mold not worthy ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... my arms," went on Vane after a little pause, "and his last words were about you." He told her the few simple sentences, repeated to her the words which a man will say when the race is run and the tape is reached. God knows they are commonplace enough—those short disjointed phrases; but God knows also that it is the little things which count, when the heart is breaking. . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... hush, dear boy! This is not the place to discuss Odalite. Besides, it is not polite to whisper in company," said Mrs. Force, with a smile at the quoted commonplace. ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... net-mender's cottage in the machine, and stared in at the old man plying his twine-shuttle in front of the door. The fact that he was Emmett's father and ignorant of the secret which Richard shared, made an object of intense interest out of an otherwise unattractive and commonplace old man. Now that interest grew vast and overshadowing as ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... people of the country, and they sat together in the descending shadows of the day, quite like in garb and feature, their chins a little peakish, and the hairs of both turning gray. The man was commonplace, as he leaned upon a staff, and between their feet were paniers of purchases they had been making, which the woman regarded indifferently, as if her heart reached farther than her eyes, and met some soft departed scene which she would ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... paradox of Heraclitus is, in effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a cautiously reasoned experience, and, in illustration of the very law of change which it asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a commonplace. Think of all that subtly disguised movement, latens processus, Bacon calls it (again as if by a kind of anticipation) which [20] modern research has detected, measured, hopes to reduce to minuter or ally to still larger currents, in what had seemed most substantial to the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... side, but it was also somewhat pathetic. These two good commonplace souls had travelled through life together side by side for over thirty years, and, despite age, infirmity, and "nearves", were still lovers at heart. Before the wife's eyes the figure of "Mr Macalister" loomed so large that it blocked out the entire world; to him, even in this hour of ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... as he collects himself before returning to her.) As you can hear, Miss Ernst, it is nothing much of a poem—not written by a real poet, that is to say; a real poet would have exalted his theme, but this is a commonplace— ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... answers, "I can't do it just yet. I can't bear the pitying tone. It would make me lose my grip, and I must not let go." And sometimes I go to his friends and explain the situation, and persuade them to call on their friend, take him out with them, talk to him of the ordinary, commonplace happenings, keeping their sympathy well disguised, or, rather, showing a comprehending sympathy, a sympathy that recognizes a brave man's effort to ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... hearing it read in one of the college clubs more than fifty years ago. He has Longfellow's style very happily, including the dropping from a bright and sometimes a sublime line to one which is flat and commonplace, as for instance in the ode on the death of the Duke ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... towards the speculative, Roosevelt felt an instinctive antagonism. One of his most characteristic utterances is the address delivered at the Sorbonne, April 30, 1910, "Citizenship in a Republic." Here, amidst a good deal of moral commonplace—wise and sensible for the most part, but sufficiently platitudinous—occurs a burst of angry eloquence. For he was always at his strongest when scolding somebody. His audience included the intellectual elite of France; and he warns it against the besetting sin of university dons and the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... but little, and that little was commonplace; but I was not especially disappointed: my opinion of him was made up long before, and time has but confirmed it. The more I have considered his doings as minister or parliamentarian, and the more I have read his works, whether his political pamphlet known ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... excitement, of intense mental strain, and of unremitting bodily exertion, after speech-making and parades, music and bonfires, it must be something of a trial to face at once the mortification of defeat, the weariness of intellectual and physical reaction, and the dull commonplace of daily routine. Letters written at this period show that under these conditions Mr. Lincoln remained composed, patient, and hopeful. Two weeks after election he wrote thus to Mr. Judd, a member of the Legislature and Chairman of the Republican State Central Committee: "I have the pleasure ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... peril haunting the next two hundred miles, but such danger was not wholly unwelcome to his peculiar temperament; rather it was an incentive to him, and, without a doubt, he would manage to pull through somehow, as he had done a hundred times before. Even Indian-scouting degenerates into a commonplace at last. So Murphy puffed contentedly at his old pipe. Whatever may have been his thoughts, they did not burst through his taciturnity, and he reclined there motionless, no sound breaking the silence, save the rippling waters of the Fourche, and the occasional stamping ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... 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; ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Talcott's easy manner when he had just dropped in from the club to talk of last night's dance and to-morrow's opera. He did not know, as I did, that the whole company from whom Penelope might choose a mate were to the outward eye just such commonplace men whose power of fascination lay in commonplace deeds and words. The Professor, whose whole life had been spent pursuing shadows, was naturally of a romantic turn of mind, and it was even difficult for him to conceive of Penelope marrying at all. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... with questions all the time. She told me plainly that it was a miscarriage, and that it was necessary to act with great discretion in order to save the reputation of my young friend; that after all she required nothing but plenty of linen, and that it would be nothing. Commonplace words of consolation, which did not allay the fearful anxiety under which I was labouring. I went out with Laura, called on a Jew from whom I bought a quantity of sheets and two hundred napkins, and, putting it all in a large ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... it is, with prints and plans, and a deep roseate binding—one of the most elegant volumes of the season, and yet purchasable for a crown. We did not expect a dull, unsatisfactory guidebook—a mere finger-post folio—nor has the author produced such a commonplace volume. Hence these "Sketches" have much of the neatness and polish, the patient investigation and research of an author who has delighted in attachment to his subject. The work contains a few of the scenes and objects of the road from London to the Wells in outline; a panoramic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... can imagine the platform creaking under the military tread of the tall lawyer who stepped into its lofty height to preach. But, old though it was, they say, a cold, gloomy, damp, dingy old box, it was a meeting house and the Colonel preached in it. That a lawyer should practice, was a commonplace, everyday truth; but that a lawyer should preach—that was indeed a novelty. The congregation of sixteen or seventeen at the first service grew the following Sabbath, to forty worshippers. Another week, ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... suppose the American fleet they knew well had left Hongkong was going south for? If Admiral Dewey had been a commonplace man he would have paused and held a council of war nigh the huge rock Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay. There is a channel on either side of that island, and both were reputed to be guarded by torpedoes. The Spaniards had an enormous stock of munitions ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... truth, and this is further developed in the parallel oration of Socrates. First, passionate love is overthrown by the sophistical or interested, and then both yield to that higher view of love which is afterwards revealed to us. The extreme of commonplace is contrasted with the most ideal and imaginative of speculations. Socrates, half in jest and to satisfy his own wild humour, takes the disguise of Lysias, but he is also in profound earnest and in a deeper vein of irony than usual. Having improvised his own speech, which is based upon the ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... how a commonplace bit of scenery can be made to look quite romantic," said Mr. Jally presently. "Let us walk over to the railroad embankment. Such an embankment is not pretty in itself, but I think we can get quite a ...
— Out with Gun and Camera • Ralph Bonehill
... drapery, but not always in the colour of the hair. On the other hand, the beauty and expression of the face and attitude, the mingled loveliness, dignity, and purity, are given with exquisite feeling; and we are never, as in his other representations of the Madonna, reminded of commonplace homely, often peasant, portraiture; here all is spotless grace, ethereal delicacy, benignity, refinement, repose,—the very apotheosis ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... you. There was not a ring of truth or a stamp of nobility about her words and manner, and I have been associating with a girl who is truth itself and twice as clever and accomplished. Miss Wildmere was growing commonplace in contrast. I learned to love Madge as a sister before she went away, and now no man ever admired and ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... death—nothing interested me—living the most commonplace, humdrum, unromantic existence imaginable. Teas and dances, dances and teas, clubs and theatres, theatres and clubs, motors and yachts, yachts and motors. It was horrible, and I can't help thinking it was all my dear old governor's fault. He ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... body for five years, and her father's house was a stately mansion, refurnished, with the exception of old colonial pieces, after the grand tour in Europe. This room, although clean and sufficiently equipped, was sordid and commonplace, and the bed was as hard as the horsehair furniture. Her body as well as her aesthetic sense had rebelled more ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... Mandeville, until half-way down the shed and the long box-car train they brought up on a pile of ordnance stores and clung like drift in a flood. And at every twist and stagger Anna said in her heart a speech she had been saying over and over ever since the start from Callender House; a poor commonplace speech that must be spoken though she perished for shame of it; that must be darted out just at the right last instant if such an instant Heaven would only send: "I take back what I said last night and I'm glad ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... question at once so foreign and domestic. But I talk like an old maid at a marriage, I don't know what I say.' But one might quote for ever. Witwoud, almost as much as Millamant herself, is an eternal type. His little exclamations, his assurance of sympathy, his terror of the commonplace—surely one knows them well? His tolerance of any impertinence, lest he should be thought to have misunderstood a jest, is a great distinction. But Congreve's gibe in the dedication at the critics, who failed 'to distinguish ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... the terse brevity with which picture after picture is not only sketched but finished—and in the great thought at the close. Still it is not one of Schiller's best ballads. His additions to the original story are not happy. The incident of the robbers is commonplace and poor. The delay occasioned by the thirst of Moerus is clearly open to Goethe's objection (an objection showing very nice perception of nature)—that extreme thirst was not likely to happen to a man who had lately passed through a stream on a rainy day, and whose clothes must have been ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... you like America?" said the elder, with commonplace indifference, as he crunched a lump of sugar in the bottom of the glass, dissolving the particles with a ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... constantly-moving caravan. And what a fine way of escape from his persecutors! So there and then the dwarf was enrolled as a regular member of the Satellite Circus Company. His real name—plain Jimmy Green—was scornfully cast aside. Mr. Harris voted it slow and commonplace. After a good deal of thought and much indecision, he substituted the more catchy one of Bambo as being both novel and appropriate to the profession—Bambo, the musical dwarf; though why he was dubbed musical was always a puzzle to the poor little man, because nobody had ever ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for 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 ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... frame of the Kuvar Sahib of Patiala was only more conspicuous than that of the Maharajah of Burdawan because the former wore the many-folded turban and brocaded dress of his Sikh ancestry, whereas the latter, like most Bengalees of the upper classes, has adopted the much more commonplace broadcloth of the West. The bold, hawk-like features of Malik Umar Hyat Khan of Tiwana in the Punjab were as characteristic of the fighting Pathan from the North as were the Rajah of Mahmudabad's more delicate features of the Mahomedan aristocracy of the erstwhile kingdom of Oudh. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... nocturnal emissions are quite normal, when not too frequent, and indicate not lost manhood or the danger of it, but merely the fact that the sexual glands are now for the first time all developed and active. This is one of the simplest and most commonplace facts in the whole range of sex knowledge, yet, through ignorance of it, unknown multitudes of boys have suffered anxiety sometimes amounting to terror, have become moody and dejected, lost interest in work and studies; and finally thousands ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... pleasant information but it is simply commonplace, every-day fact. Sausage, hamburger steak and "game" with a high flavor, are little if any better than carrion, and the poisons which such foods introduce into the body must all be detoxicated by the liver and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... Belief was prepared for those winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural. Ginguene has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante's angels. Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison. In the eighth canto of the Inferno, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an entrance into the city of Dis:—an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian lake to enforce it; the noise ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... stream of wit, of which he was profuse, as if he knew the source to be inexhaustible. He never kept it for display, or for company, or for those only who knew its value: wit was, indeed, as natural to him as commonplace to commonplace characters. It was not only in puns, in repartees, in lively retorts, in sparkling sentences, in brilliant illustrations, or in apt or exciting anecdote, that this faculty was developed. I have known him string together a number of graceful verses, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... been the chief events of my life, Caesar," he concluded, "and since you have condescended to hear, I have ventured to tell; but why need I ask if such a commonplace tale of a young man who has yet his life ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... A commonplace series of Preces dia, with miniatures, were first sold off at mediocre prices. Needless to say, the illuminations of these ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... rejoiced over all his successes, I shut my eyes to his faults, and wondered, not that he had them, but that they had not crushed or dwarfed his soul. But in spite of Macaulay's brilliancy and his admirable faculty of making the commonplace seem fresh and picturesque, his positiveness wearied me at times, and his frequent sacrifices of truth to effect kept me in a questioning attitude very unlike the attitude of reverence in which I had listened to the Demosthenes of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... starting into view; with out drawing a picture from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of travellers, however widely they may have travelled. From my dull and commonplace and "respectable" surroundings, the Jinn bore me at once to the land of my pre-direction, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by gone metem-psychic life in the distant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the truth, my dear, I was first thinking of my own very happy, but at the same time very commonplace and unromantic married life with Mr. Parmigan, who, as you know, was in the Bank of England, and came home as regularly as the clock struck half-past five; but then I was trying to recall what Mrs. Schwartz the cooper's wife was telling you that day when we went into ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... me close by pointing out that the study of this commonplace matter of eating and drinking opens out to us the conception of the grand unity of nature; since we see that the body of man differs in no way essentially from other natural combinations, but is subject to the same universal physical laws, in which there is no blindness, no variableness, no mere ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... man who was eager to obey God, and to be led by the Spirit, but who had the mistaken idea that the Holy Spirit sets aside human judgment and common sense, and speaks directly upon the most minute and commonplace matters. He wanted the Holy Spirit to direct him just how much to eat at each meal, and he has been known to take food out of his mouth at what he supposed to be the Holy Spirit's notification that he had eaten enough, and that if he swallowed that mouthful, it would be in violation of the ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even than they were before. No story could be more commonplace or more detestable. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... changed his seat, and the sound of a fresh chair creaking under his comfortable weight was a touch of commonplace welcomed by his wife with her usual laugh, half amused and ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... school or college, but it is more than a chance that boys brought up together under like conditions have nothing to give each other. The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but little disposed ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... removed from us by time, so that we can attribute to the men and women who composed it the same feelings and sensibilities as our own. And yet they were very far removed from us in their surroundings, for many of the things that are to us commonplace would have been to them miraculous, so that they seem more different from us of a hundred years later than from those who preceded them by many hundreds of years. It is this mingling of a life we can understand, with circumstances so different, that gives the eighteenth century ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the last noteworthy representative of the German metaphysical school. His works are gigantic in size and appear formidable. But if one be not afraid of giants and venture to approach near, one finds nothing but a big Morgante, full of the most commonplace prejudices, quite easily killed with the bite of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... least resemble her father, but took more after her mother, who was round and fat, and proportionately commonplace. Rosamund at first felt no degree of elation when her place was pointed out to her next to the Professor. But suddenly encountering Lucy's angry eyes, she began to take a naughty comfort to herself in her unexpected proximity. She drew a little closer to him on purpose to annoy Lucy; ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... article which I wrote for McClure's, I made comment on the essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing land, a country without a hill, a river or a lake; a commonplace country, flat, unkempt and without a line ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... homes, the razing of villages, mere pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that bill which France expects to present some day. The old chateaux that were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... himself in vain what possible connection could exist between this murder in an obscure quarter of London and the man at his side who, he knew, held in his firm hands lines that stretched to the uttermost ends of the earth? What kind of an affair was this, seemingly so commonplace that could take the Chief's attention from the hundred urgent matters of national ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... It is a commonplace to say that sculpture in relief is only one branch of painting. Conze[56] publishes a sepulchral monument which seems to him to mark the first stage of growth. The surface of the figure and that of the surrounding ground remain ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... 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 ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... reserves of which he knew nothing, that he, who in his blind complacency had imagined himself to have sucked the orange and thrown away the skin, had really, in point of fact, had a strange lovely fruit snatched from him before his blunt teeth had done more than nibble at its seemingly commonplace rind. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... character novelists of the latter half of the past century. The style of Captain Marryatt is fresh, vigorous, and racy—"native and to the manner born,"—abounding in lively anecdote, but never straying into caricature—with just enough of the romance of life to keep the incidents afloat from commonplace, and probability above-board. This and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... such glorious things happen in one's family! Nothing like that ever happened in our family. My people did nothing more exciting than write charters and fight Indians. I think we were very commonplace. It is the French people who have the romantic blood. Tell me some more, Helen. You have no ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... steep, much more 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, are very beautiful; and ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... proceeded until midnight. Just as Cinderella left the ball when the clock struck 12, so do the holders of the Creole revels stop dancing immediately that Lent has commenced. The next day all is over. Men who the night before were the leaders in the masquerade, resume their commonplace existence, and are seen at the ordinary seats of custom, buying and selling and conducting themselves like Eastern rather ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... is of the commonplace book. Well, have you ever kept one, or, to be more accurate, tried to keep one? Personally, I believe in the commonplace book so long as we don't expect too much from it. Its two dangers are (1) that one is apt to make far too many and too minute entries, and (2) that one is ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... lived as long as I have and seen as much of men, you would cease to be surprised at the reputations men of essentially commonplace powers—aided by circumstances and some ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... something of the art of France; he was more eager for the applause that stimulated him to write romances and to paint panoramic landscape, after brief training in academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin—to begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained refinement and can save ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... former had visibly aged. Many silver threads were noticeable in her hair; her complexion, always pale, had lost its freshness; then her desire and taste for dress had palled, and she had gone on taking the tone of the ordinary commonplace society surrounding her, and so had become more and more careless of her appearance. A bitter smile wreathed her lips, as she exchanged the necessary greetings with Fernanda, who enjoyed her triumph with ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... country of hierarchies. The captain of a romantic, adventurous life would be converted into a real estate proprietor, knowing no other struggles than those which he might sustain with his tenants. Perhaps, in order to avoid a commonplace existence, he might invest his capital in navigation, the only business that he knew well. He might become a ship-owner acquiring new vessels and, little by little, because of the necessity of keeping a sharp watch over them, would eventually renew his voyages.... Well, then, why should ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to be tinged with the ashen hue of the commonplace, though the scenes they attempt to depict are all ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... conversed with Mrs. Gerrit Ammidon in the family carriage in front of the countinghouse of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone on Liberty Street. Nettie was surprised that his concern was caused by such a commonplace event. "The women of China—." Words failing him, he waved a thin dry hand. His father frowned heavily. Then, abruptly, as if he had been snatched out of his chair by an invisible powerful clutch, he ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... there nothing you know you ought not to do? You would know your duty, if you thought in earnest about it, and were not ambitious of great things." "Ah, then," responded she, "I suppose it is something very commonplace, which will make life more dreary than ever. That cannot help me." "It will, if it be as dreary as reading the newspapers to an old deaf aunt. It will soon lead you to something more. Your duty will begin to comfort you at once, but will at length open ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... born and brought up in Algeria. All that was strange to the Heaths was commonplace to him. But he had an original and forcible mind and a keen sense of the workings of environment and circumstance upon humanity. At first he was very polite and formal, a mere bundle of good manners. But under Charmian's carefully calculated influence, he changed. He ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... his conscience, there is a sort of comfort in making out that the crime has features of more striking depravity than an unbiased observer would detect; the inclination in this direction is increased when it is a question of impressing others. Sin seems commonplace if we give it no pomp and circumstance. No man was more free than Stafford from any conscious hypocrisy or posing, or from the inverted pride in immorality that is often an affectation, but also, more often than we are willing to allow, a real disease of the mind. ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... point of view vitalize our teaching for the pupils, but it will also save it from becoming commonplace and routine for ourselves. This truth is brought out in a conversation that occurred between an old schoolmaster and ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... the sky without would thicken and gray, and a few still flakes of snow would come drifting down to whiten the brown fields,—with no chilly thought of winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more quiet. Whatever honest, commonplace affection was in the man came out in a simple way to this Lois, who ruled his sick whims and crotchets in such a quiet, sturdy fashion. Not because she had risked her life to save his; even when he understood that, he recalled it with an uneasy, heavy gratitude; ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... long about it, and I could see the face of the priest behind the curtain of the confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin. When her confession was over the woman came and sat down on the same bench with me, where her broad-brimmed ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a shock to see Weary like that. Not because it is unusual for a man of the range to get in that condition—for on the contrary, it is rather commonplace. And the Happy Family had lived the life too long to judge a man harshly because of an occasional indiscreet departure from the path virtuous; they knew that the man might be a good fellow, after ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... incredible; it is as if I had suddenly waked to find this lake dried up and sunk into the earth. You say you are too simple to understand me; but, oh, what is there to understand? You disliked my play, you have no faith in my powers, you already think of me as commonplace and worthless, as many are. [Stamping his foot] How well I can understand your feelings! And that understanding is to me like a dagger in the brain. May it be accursed, together with my stupidity, which sucks my life-blood like a snake! [He sees TRIGORIN, ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... envelope and read—an invitation to lunch from his uncle, Edward of England, and a request to bring his august colleagues with him to talk matters over. There was no hint of battle, victory or defeat. It was a quite commonplace letter, but all the same it was one of those triumphs of diplomacy which only the first diplomatist in Europe knew how to achieve. Then he too laughed as he folded up the letter and went ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... ever-beckoning to the hills of treasure, with their extravagant stories of adventure, but the professional man was anchored in the more prosy city, and buckled down to a commonplace existence. The exhilarating ozone from the ocean, the wind blowing over the vast area of sand, the red-flannel-shirted miner recklessly dumping out sacks of gold-dust with which to pay his board-bill or to buy a pair of ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... asleep, and kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the Holy Ghost would take possession there." It was perhaps because the son inherited an aptitude for a like profound kindling of sentiment in the taking of his life, that, uneventful as it was, [130] commonplace as it seemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and so stimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day. "What influence," says Johnson again, "learning has had on its possessors may be doubtful." ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... of ingenuity, various acquirements, and agreeable manners, Mr Skinner was held in much estimation among his contemporaries. Whatever he read, with the assistance of a commonplace-book, he accurately remembered, and could readily turn to account; and, though his library was contained in a closet of five feet square, he was abundantly well informed on every ordinary topic of conversation. He was fond of controversial discussion, and wielded both argument and wit with ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... keenly as she wanted to hear David Eby tell her that he loved her, that her face would be with him in whatever circumstances the future should place him. But David could not read the heart of his old playmate, and while his own heart cried out for its mate his words were commonplace. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... big hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and drew out of me my story. I forget what he said, it was brief and perhaps commonplace, but I went out to walk the streets that night, full of hope and courage. Before leaving that night I approached the little man at the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... known America in 1492; the Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had not been completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace delights—a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of reflection, even a well-cooked meal—make up for the suffering of not wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he received ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... it might have seemed that the battle was about over; but as a matter of fact it had scarcely begun. To chronicle on paper that a certain person on a certain day rode a certain bronco for the first time sounds commonplace; but to one who has seen the deviltry lurking in those wild prairie ponies' eyes, who knows their dogged fighting disposition, the reality ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... Ben Jonson's Alchemist having taken gold from Abel Drugger, the Tobacco Man, for the device of a sign—'a good lucky one, a thriving sign'—will give him nothing so commonplace as a sign copied from the constellation he was ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... almost only topic was that of Government, abstractedly considered, and speculations about what would be the best for this country; Charles's account of his own principles in that respect; his persuasion about mine; his Grace's lessons from Lord Chatham, and commonplace panegyric upon that unparalleled statesman, and the utility to the public derived from paying his debts and maintaining his posterity. The principal is, that hereafter people in employment will be indifferent about the emoluments ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... than English, and all court favours were bestowed as fast as possible upon their countrymen. They had neither the bearing nor manner which men associate with royalty, nor the graces and power of attraction which distinguished the Stuarts. Commonplace and homely in manner, in figure, and in bearing, they were not men whom their fellows could look up to or respect; their very vices were coarse, and the Hanoverian men and women they gathered round them were hated by ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... real reason why this simple remark should have caused a halt in the conversation, but it did. Miss Preston said, "Oh, indeed!" rather hurriedly, and her next speech was concerning the height of a particularly big wave. Mr. Hazeltine answered this commonplace somewhat absent-mindedly. He acted like a man to whom a startling idea had suddenly occurred. Just then they heard Captain ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to his guests, Count Malagaski had made his garden-party as deadly dull as possible. Little groups of bored people drifted about under the trees and exchanged the usual commonplace observations. Tea and cakes were served under a canopy tent and the local ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... Miss White was quite charmed with this shapely vessel and all its contents. If the frugal ways and commonplace duties and conversation of Castle Dare had somewhat disappointed her, and had seemed to her not quite in accordance with the heroic traditions of the clans, here, at least, was something which she could recognize as befitting her notion of the name and position of Sir Keith Macleod. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... her cheek glowed in the night-beams that, as Clinton said, made her their focus, so brightly were they reflected from her face. What Clinton said, it is unnecessary to repeat, for the language of passion is commonplace, unless it flows from lips as fresh and ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the "story of his life" had anything to do with his hesitancy in coming to see her. Surely he would have no commonplace notions about "different spheres," though he had mentioned them, and with bitterness. He was especially hostile to the army, had more than once hurt her in his hostility. She would not have resented his attacking it as an institution, ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... eyes, she might try to recall the objects of the past, that stubble would always appear to her like a shroud of yellowish drugget spread over the soil, in which her youth lay buried. In the presence of that unfamiliar commonplace scene her heart died, as it were, a second time. Now all was completely, finally ended. She was robbed even of her dreams of the past. Then she began to regret that she had yielded to the attraction of that white opening, of that doorway gaping upon the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... am now saying amounts to this, that an educated intelligence is good, but an educated sympathy is better. I recall certain lines written by the late Lord Carlisle on being told that a lady was plain and commonplace:— ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... 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 ...
— Runaway • William Morrison
... to induct into office or to set in motion with formality and serious ceremony. Pompous writers too often employ the word in referring to commonplace events. A new business is established. A new hall or library is opened. A new pastor is installed. A new order of procedure is adopted. In general, the word begin or commence would be more ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Nan was oblivious to everything, but the mere delight of what she was doing, and he did not think it worth while to remind her that this was not the Steamer, and that if she wished to be inconspicuous, as she had suggested, she would better limit herself strictly to a commonplace gait. Instead he bent toward her, and said in a quick, low undertone, "I'll bet a quarter you've forgotten ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... demonstrative expression of public sympathy on the part of universal Manchester—the most important city in the island next after London. No men could have been found who were less fitted to act as champions in a duel on behalf of Christianity. Mr. H—— was dreadfully commonplace; dull, dreadfully dull; and, by the necessity of his nature, incapable of being in deadly earnest, which his splendid antagonist at all times was. His encounter, therefore, with Mrs. Lee presented the distressing spectacle of an old, toothless, mumbling mastiff, fighting for the household to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Also his Commonplace Book proves that, like many other hardworking men, he amused his leisure hours with what was light and fantastic. Moreover, he speaks in some places of the advantage of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... tones, during one of these skirmishes, "but I think it would be much more to your profit to attend the meetings of our society than to find fault with me. If you would study Shakespeare more, it might freshen up your sermons somewhat, and lift them from the commonplace. I cannot but think you are degenerating. The first discourse I heard you preach was filled with poetical fancies and literary allusions, and the language was flowery and beautiful. Your preaching seems to have changed of late; last Sabbath, for example, it was ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... were here most in evidence. What he says of Milton might appropriately be applied to himself, that he formed the most intense conception of things and then embodied them by a single stroke of his pen. In a phrase or in a sentence he stamped the character of an author indelibly, and, enemy to commonplace though he was, became a cause of commonplace in others. No matter how much might already have been written on a subject (and Hazlitt did not make a practice of celebrating neglected obscurity) his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Richardson of disjointed fragments, jotted down almost without any connexion. This was necessarily the case. Few incidents, save an occasional visit from thieves, or a dispute with that strange old gentleman, Sultan En-Noor, diversified this period. However, the simple commonplace book of a traveller in a totally new country can never be without its interest. No doubt Mr. Richardson would have attempted, had he survived, to throw all these observations into a picture; but any attempt to do so on my part would have probably resulted in the omission ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... our coming to know the external world which we shall never be able fully to understand. We have come by this knowledge so gradually and unconsciously that it now appears to us as commonplace, and we take for granted many things that it would ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... The Directoire Gown The Mystery Of The Sex The Clothes Of Fiction The Broad A Chewing Gum Women In Congress Shall Women Propose? Frocks And The Stage Altruism Social Clearing-House Dinner-Table Talk Naturalization Art Of Governing Love Of Display Value Of The Commonplace The Burden Of Christmas The Responsibility Of Writers The Cap And Gown A Tendency Of The Age ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... however, he was half so much disappointed as my colleagues were when I returned to them and dictated a dozen lines of severe catalogue as the only "description" I was capable of giving of the furniture of two commonplace bedrooms. I never met the Great Man in after life without seeing him, in my mind's eye, flourishing a chair upside down, or lovingly patting with his ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... and still we survive. My faith, what a couple! Sublimity would have none of us. The glacier rejected souls so commonplace as not to be properly impressed ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... more than usual to keep up the glow. But it faded more and more for all that. He set his teeth at the commonplace, to which he would not submit. It resolved itself starkly before ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... pamphlet is not a piece of elegant writing, and it is introduced by superficial theorizing; but the practical value is great. Thoughts which have so entered into our political consciousness as to be trite and commonplace are presented as the new possession of a young man lately from college, and it is fair to judge of the current speculation of his time by the results here gathered into logical order. Webster, as I said before, may be taken in this pamphlet as an admirable example of the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... is represented by a series of phrases which seem to have been transplanted from copy-books. They speak of "the bounding main," "the raging billows," "seas mountains high," "the breath of the gale," "the seething breakers," and so on; but regarding the commonplace, quiet everyday life at sea they know nothing. Strangely enough, only Mr. Clark Russell has attempted to give in literary form a vivid, veracious account of sea-life, and his thrice-noble books are far too little known, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... was gone, and only one cookie left for politeness, Mrs. Purdy took them into the sitting-room where a delicate-looking man sat in a wheel-chair, carving something from a piece of wood. Nance's quick eyes took in every detail of the bright, commonplace room; its gay, flowered carpet and chintz curtains, its "fruit pieces" in wide, gold frames, and its crocheted tidies presented a new ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... than natural that such a strange, unattractive-looking child should be made fun of by the prosaic, commonplace people of his neighborhood, and this was untold pain to the sensitive boy. There were, however, in the town, people of a higher class, who perceived in the boy something beyond the ordinary, and who interested themselves in his behalf. They had him sent to school, but he preferred to dream away ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... is little disturbed by the modern accretions to the town. On the east side, it is true, there are new streets of dull and commonplace terraces, which one day an awakened England will wipe out; there are other elements of ugly sordidness, which the lack of a guiding and controlling authority, and the use of distressingly hideous white ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... replied, and murmured some commonplace expression of regret. He was not particularly shocked for he had lost shipmates in a hurry ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... the conversation between men and women filled exclusively with twaddle? You would think so, from reading these books; and why? They are written by married people, most of them, people who don't dare step over the line of the commonplace any more than a woman would dare order her dressmaker to put pockets ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... a surprisingly retentive memory, her maternal reminiscences would have filled volumes,—to all of which James listened with the most earnest attention, not on account of the adventures, for they were commonplace enough, but for the mere pleasure of hearing Mrs. Waddel talk broad Scotch, from which he seemed to derive the most ludicrous enjoyment. Mrs. Waddel had two daughters, to whom nature had been less bountiful than even to herself. Tall, awkward, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... HIGHEST IDEAL OF LIFE AND CHARACTER.—Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic. And though the abiding sense of duty upholds man in his highest attitudes, it also equally sustains him in ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... perfectly contemptible, in the glaring defect that it exhibits the man who was 30 years on that desert island with no visible effect made on his character by that experience. De Foe's women too—Robinson Crusoe's wife for instance—are terrible dull commonplace fellows without breeches; and I have no doubt he was a precious dry and disagreeable article himself—I mean De Foe: not Robinson. Poor dear Goldsmith (I remember as I write) derived ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Sophie seemed stupid and commonplace that morning. Aaron had a headache, (that theologic thorn, I know,) and Sophie must go and sit beside him, and hold the thread of his Sunday's discourse to paper, whilst with wrapped brow and vision-seeing eyes he told her what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... always a little uneasy in her presence. He felt not only that she was analyzing him, but that the results of the analysis seemed to her to be a very small residuum, of solid matter. Besides, he had been told that she had described him as a "commonplace young man," a thing nobody could be expected ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... Will has ever made'—her 'Will' is an architect, you know—'these seem to me most likely to suit you and Jack, although they are by no means, adapted to conventional, commonplace housekeepers. In the centre of the first floor the large hall, opening freely to the outside world, is a sort of common ground, hospitable and cheerful, where the stranger guest and the old friend meet; where the children play, where the entire household are free to come and go without ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... conversation;—but he could not but look and he could not but listen. Not that he really heard a sentence. Emily's voice hardly reached him, and Lopez understood the game he was playing much too well to allow his voice to travel. And he looked as though his position were the most commonplace in the world, and as though he had nothing of more than ordinary interest to say to his neighbour. Mr. Wharton, as he sat there, almost made up his mind that he would leave his practice, give up his chambers, abandon even his club, and take his ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... though in terms it authorized murder, yet in effect powerfully restrained the violence of that rude age, and gave a chance for the development of that idea of the sacredness of life which to us is a moral commonplace, but which had scarcely dawned upon the minds of those old Hebrews. Thus the history shows a people moving steadily forward under moral leadership, out of barbarism into higher civilization, and we can ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... God in His Providence has seen fit to put upon us we cannot tell, for every moment the horizon is receding, and our outlook becoming larger, though some still find it difficult to bring their eyesight to the focus consequently required. The marvellous of to-day is the commonplace of to-morrow: "our notion of what is natural grows ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... the struggle which is here described in a few commonplace sentences is manifest from the subsequent appearance of ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... with him among strangers, received it as his due. If he were asked why he considered himself above the majority of people he would not be able to answer, as there was nothing in his life transcending the commonplace. The fact that he spoke English, French and German fluently; that his linen, clothing, scarf and cuff-buttons were of superior make would not be sufficient reason for assuming his superiority, as he himself well understood. And yet he doubtless acknowledged in himself this ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and who were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he could take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows enough—noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward their elders; but a few of them—one now and then, at long intervals—he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... asked himself, "was my theory stupider than others that have swarmed and clashed from the beginning of the world? One has only to look at the thing quite independently, broadly, and uninfluenced by commonplace ideas, and my idea will by no means seem so... strange. Oh, sceptics and halfpenny philosophers, why ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... honour of resembling the portraits of Shakespeare in this respect—compared with one another, it is not possible to discover that they present the same person. As for the evidence offered by the loving memory of her friends, it is sure to be contradictory in the last degree. She had a charming face, a commonplace face, an intelligent face—a poor complexion, a delicate complexion, no complexion at all—eyes that were expressive of a hot temper, of a bright intellect, of a firm character, of an affectionate disposition, of a truthful nature, of hysterical sensibility, of inveterate obstinacy—a figure ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... or, if you will, satirist—THE SCRIBLERO-MASTIX. He must attack individuals. A heavily-resounding lash should scourge the immoral and the profane. Light stripes may suffice for quelling the less nocent dunces. In commonplace prose criticism, whatever form it may take, this can be done without supposed personal ill-will; for the Mastix is then only doing a duty plainly prescribed. The theologian must censure, and trample as mire, the railing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... went with me to see an ordinary melodrama at the Queen's Theatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the company could by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of their voices hold your attention on a play where everything was commonplace. He enjoyed seeing the contrite villain of the piece come up from the bottom of the gulch, hurled there by the adventuress, and flash his sweating blood-stained face up against the footlights; and, though he told us he had but a few short moments to live, roar his contrition ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... reader, that we are about to fall into the philosophical commonplace of anathematizing gold? You ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... of the lively sister Henriette, who years afterward, in the generous hope of saving her early friend, proposed to exchange clothes and take her place in the cells of Sainte-Pelagie. In the long and commonplace procession of suitors that files before us, one only touches her heart. La Blancherie has a literary and philosophic turn, and the young girl's imagination drapes him in its own glowing colors. The opposition of her father separates ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... reasons, the face was of more than commonplace interest to him. Years ago he had seen it by a roadside in the White Mountains, and often since he had thought of it until the thought had taken deep root in his mind and become one of the pleasant dreams of his life. But Fate had further spurred his curiosity by a series ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... music as distinguished from airs—commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations, as, for instance, "Yankee Doodle," or "Partant ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... lady, or merely a school-girl?" was Haldane's query concerning the stranger sitting opposite to him; and he addressed to her a few commonplace but exploring remarks. Regarding himself as well acquainted with society in general, and young ladies in particular, he expected to solve the question at once, and was perplexed that he could not. He had ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... me—as they did presently, for we could not fall again into commonplace talk—I bade Pablo be off to bed, and so sat there for a while alone. What I had planned to do that night was to revise an address that I was shortly to deliver before the Archaeological Institute; but the pen that I had taken into my hand lay idle there, while my thoughts went backward through ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... door of the main office bore the sign "Edwin James, Counselor-at-Law and Register in Bankruptcy." He was one of the four. He had failed lamentably in his efforts to secure a practice. The effects of O'Gorman's eloquence had in the gray light of commonplace day faded away, the more so when the ideal his magic had created in the minds of men was in hourly contrast with the man himself and his history. His professional brethren looked upon him with suspicion, and there was a general ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell |
