"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the glory and glow and grace Which lent a splendor to night and day Are surely fading, and showing the gray And dull groundwork of the commonplace; ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Accident, and went to the Hospital to offer Condolence. When they found him he was so Clean and Commonplace that they lost all ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... in the various shifts, and by his keen perception and insight, was able to form a very correct estimate of their character and standing in that little community. Though no words had been exchanged between himself and Jack beyond those of the most commonplace greetings, yet his respect for the man, and confidence in him, increased with each day, and was plainly indicated by his manner ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... reply. "If there are such men, I have never met them. But I would far rather wait for the dim ideal than try the commonplace reality." ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... Trimalchio. Now if the scene of the dinner is actually at Cumae this sounds very peculiar; it might even be a gloss added by some copyist whose knowledge was not equal to his industry. On the other hand, suppose Trimalchio is speaking of something so commonplace in his locality that the second term has become a generic, then the difficulty disappears. We today, even though standing upon the very spot in Melos where the Venus was unearthed, would still refer to her as the Venus de Melos. Friedlaender, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... of us, Diana obeyed, her head bent low. I suppose she could find nothing to say, since "Thank you" would be commonplace: and Di ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... afraid. The thought of his stubby uninteresting figure came to him; and a deep sense of his unworthiness. What could she, accustomed to brilliant creatures of the wonderful city, of whom Gerald was probably but a mild sample, find in commonplace little Bobby Orde? He walked meekly home; and took a scolding ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... a young 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. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... 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 ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... from his pen, namely the Hunting of Cupid, known to us unfortunately from a few fragments only. This is the more tantalizing on account of the freshness of the passages preserved in England's Helicon and England's Parnassus, and in a commonplace-book belonging to Drummond of Hawthornden, and also from the fact that there is good reason to suppose that the work was actually printed[212]. So far as can be judged from the extracts we possess, and from Drummond's jottings, it appears ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and the likeness vanished in the added distance. The veil of the past was dropped again. He could see nothing now but the commonplace whiskered face of an elderly Cornish doctor bending over the inanimate form on the couch. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the pen of writers who were once famous, such as Spindler, Bulwer, Eugene Sue, and so on, serve this purpose. But what can be more miserable than the fate of a reading public of this kind, that feels always impelled to read the latest writings of extremely commonplace authors who write for money only, and therefore exist in numbers? And for the sake of this they merely know by name the works of the rare and superior writers, of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... own era, as one full of life and activity, full of hurry and bustle, and as existing under the spell of high electrical tension. But too many of us know to our cost that this present whirl of daily life has one most serious drawback, summed up in the commonplace, but not the less ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... me! Anything you suggest is sure to be right. You know far more about these things than I do. But Maidenhead—isn't it just a little commonplace? A little noisy ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... forth barely and sparely, but there is a pleasure and a profit in using the subtler arts of language, in placing a word here or a phrase there that shall give a touch of beauty or a flash of suggestiveness and so save our descriptions from the commonplace. It is to these less easily demonstrated methods of giving strength and beauty that we wish now to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... introduce myself," he said, trying to speak in a very commonplace tone. "I'm just a lawyer that your friend Miss Jane Carson sent out to see if I could be of any service to you. It may possibly make things a little easier for you if I explain that while I never had heard of you before, and have no possible connection with your family or friends, I happened ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... this), and, by degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." It is a commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer. Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured Spence that he had read the "Faerie Queene" with delight when he was a boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... never before been seen at Hanney's—that was freely admitted by all. Men pitied absent miners all over the State, and wondered why this delightful lingering, long-drawn-out system of slaughter was not more popular than the brief and commonplace method of the revolver. The Webfoot rapturously and softly quoted the ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... little book of Sophisms too theoretical, scientific, and metaphysical. Very well. Let us try a trivial, commonplace, and, if necessary, coarse style. Convinced that the public is duped in the matter of protection, I have desired to prove it. But the public wishes to be shouted at. Then let ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... blue eyes, with their gay and conquering look, the firm red brown of his cheek, and even the bluish shadow encircling his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said enchanting things, she could not read the trivial and commonplace quality of his soul—for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was adventure, he was the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... summons that aroused even Mrs. Galland's serenity to haste. For the first time they were seeing the new wonder in all the fascination of novelty to us moderns, who soon make our new wonders commonplace and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... breast pocket. I was not in any imaginary city but in London,—city of tragedies, indeed, but tragedies of a homelier sort. It was not possible that such things could be happening here, in an atmosphere which, through familiarity, had become almost commonplace. Was I to believe that Louis, my favorite maitre d'hotel, my fellow schemer in many luncheon and dinner parties, my authority upon vintages, my gastronomic good angel, was one of a band of conspirators, who played with ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... This document he forwarded to his proposed antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the "Oxford University and City Herald". It was not, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and beautiful of experiences with little more than the ideas which have come to her from the confidences of evil-minded servants, inquisitive and imaginative playmates, or the gossip she overhears in her mother's society. Every other matter of her life, serious and commonplace, has received careful attention, but here she has been obliged to feel her way and, worst of abominations, to feel it with an inner fear that she ought not to know or seek ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... of school literature to compare the following selection, which I have written myself with great care, and arranged with special reference to the matter of choice and difficult words, with the flippant and commonplace terms used in the ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... August I received.—So I find you fall into the commonplace notion of the English, that manufactories are forming here, which will in a short time render all importation of british goods unnecessary. Take my word for it, you have nothing of that kind to fear, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... wish I could throw away all that is honest and pure and upright, as useless and inconvenient rubbish of which I am half ashamed. I never felt more keenly or heavily the immeasurable distance between earth and heaven than now, when after the day has been spent in listening to the plausibilities of commonplace politicians, I open my Bible at night. It is ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... equalled by his deep knowledge of human nature. . . . The theological students and others who wish to acquire the art of speaking to the heart, and preachers who realize that they themselves are becoming stale and commonplace, cannot do better than read and inwardly digest this ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... all doubts were settled. The gift might be a blessing or a curse—let every one decide that for himself, according to his style of thinking—but it was there. She possessed the power which put her out of the category of commonplace, and had the most melodious "Open, Sesame!" with which to besiege the doors of the courts in which dwell artists—creative ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... chastened condition to town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two investigators into the springs of human conduct were able to resume their westward journey. They ran through scattered Twyford with its pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities of Reading, by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up long wooded slopes to Savernake forest, where they found the road heavy and dusty, still in its war-time state, and so down a steep hill to the wide market street which is Marlborough. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... soothes their cares, On that pure heart so like to theirs, Her spirit with such life is rife That in its golden rays we see, Touched into graceful poesy, The dull cold commonplace of life. ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... fellow in Aux Italiens, you know; you are not bothered by the faint, sweet smell of any foolish jasmine-flower, you understand, or by any equally foolish hankerings after your lost youth. You are simply a commonplace, every-day sort of man, not thoroughly hardened as yet to being engaged, and you are feeling a bit pulled down to-night, because your liver or something is ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and gentlemen—soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books, common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... selected, gayly dressed in fancy habits of green and pink, surrounded a throne decorated in the same colors; Among pennons and flags, bearing wounded hearts, burning hearts, bleeding hearts, bows and quivers, and all the commonplace emblems of the triumphs of Cupid, a blazoned inscription informed the spectators that this seat of honor was designed for La Royne de la Beaute et des Amours. But who was to represent the Queen of Beauty and of Love on the present occasion no one ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... they look so well, and are so much more obedient. You have managed them very well, and we are very grateful," and Mrs. Somerset bent forward and kissed her. "Now, dear, we want you to accept a small present from us—it is very commonplace—but there is little variety ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... was a middle-aged, commonplace, and very cautious general, who faithfully plodded through the war without defeat or victory. He looked so long before he leaped that he never leaped at all—not even on retreating enemies. Good for the regular ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... one or two commonplace adventures in Italy, in which probably the climate accounted for his success, no woman had ever smiled upon Pons. Plenty of men are doomed to this fate. Pons was an abnormal birth; the child of parents well stricken in years, he bore the stigma ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... girlhood. This was Bath, where she appeared in the Assembly Rooms. The attitude of the press was distinctly inimical. "We must say," was one acid comment, "that a greater sell we have not met with for a very long time. All the audience got for their money were some remarks of the most commonplace and twaddling description. They lasted about an hour, and even this was an hour too much." Still, Brighton, where the tour finished, more than made up for Bath; and she was so successful there that "the Pavilion was crammed to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... forget—under the general impressions—about his striking and standing-out figures ("The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall"), about the individual impression they leave on our minds. Apparently they are commonplace, every-day people, but the author's talent puts on them an original individuality, a particular stamp, which makes one remember them forever and afterward apply them to the individuals which one meets in life. No matter how insignificant socially is the figure ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... four years later, in 1594. His portrait is that of a man who holds his head high and resolutely; he has, strange to say, a somewhat commonplace face, with its massive nose, full eye, short curly beard and hail. The forehead is not very broad, but the head is 'long,' as Scotch people say, and they count long-headedness not only an indication of self-esteem, but of practical shrewdness. Tintoret's power was native, and had ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... of miracles are indeed over, ma'am," said the black sheep, "but then that is no reason why things which are in themselves commonplace should not appear miraculous to the uninstructed mind. When I inform you that our laws compel cabmen under heavy penalties to convey left umbrellas and parcels to the police-office, the miracle may not seem quite ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... all generations talk in the same fashion about the stern morality which rebukes their vice. They call it weak, commonplace, fit for children, and they pretend that they despise it. They are much too enlightened for such antiquated teaching. Old women and children may take it in, but men of the world, who have seen life, and know what is what, are not to be fooled so. 'What will this babbler say?' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Trumpet sounding"). It is followed by a choral response from the Philistines ("Speed us on to fight"), which is in the same robust and stirring style, though the general effect is theatrical and somewhat commonplace. Combined with it is a choral response by the priests of Dagon, of an Oriental character. After this clash of sound follows an air of a sombre style by Eli ("Hear my Prayer, O Lord"), the introduction and accompaniment of which are very striking. The "Man of ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy even for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly commonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. "I must admit," her husband continued, "that I looked for some small display of concern. I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut you out ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price, simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... therefore, to see an odalisque, a houri, an ideal toy or the remains of an ideal toy; I had not expected any kind of obvious brilliancy, nor a subtle charm that would haunt my memory for evermore. On the other hand, I had not expected the banal, the perfectly commonplace. And I think that Miss Annie Brett was the most banal person that it has pleased Fate to send into my life. I knew that instantly. She was a condemnation of Simon Fuge. SHE, one of the 'wonderful creatures who had ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... uttered at the commencement of the conversation. Suffice it to say that Will and Flora stammered and blushed, and grew hot and cold, and tried to look cool and failed, signally, and then, feeling how very awkward their position was, made a desperate effort to be commonplace, and so began to talk with intense solicitude about "the weather!" Will soon perceived, however, that in the circumstances this was utterly ridiculous, so he made another effort and asked about Flora's father and mother, and then, happy thought, he suddenly remembered Buckawanga, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... this Book, compiled by a disciple of Confucius, and containing his doctrines, we might expect to find a work like Cicero's De Officiis; but we find a very different production, consisting of a few commonplace rules for the maintenance of a good government [1].' My readers will perhaps think, after reading the present section, that the truth lies between these two representations. 2. I believe that the Book should be styled T'ai Hsio [2], and not Ta Hsio, and that it was so named as setting ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... people continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... passionate instinct of unanimity prevailed. To all appearance it was a gathering of commonplace, commercialised and bourgeois, easy-living men, but the touch of the spirit was there. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and the virtual seizure of coal mines were by no means the only accomplishments of the Vanderbilt family in the years under consideration. Colorless as was the third generation, undistinguished by any marked characteristic, extremely commonplace in its conventions, it yet proved itself a worthy successor of Commodore Vanderbilt. The lessons he had taught of how to appropriate wealth were duly followed by his descendants, and all of the ancestral methods were closely adhered to by the third ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... colourless.136 For a hundred years the character of Zinzendorf lay hidden beneath a pile of pious phrases, and only the recent researches of scholars have enabled us to see him as he was. He was no mere commonplace Pietist. He was no mere pious German nobleman, converted by looking at a picture. His faults and his virtues stood out in glaring relief. His very appearance told the dual tale. As he strolled the streets of Berlin or London, the wayfarers instinctively moved to let him pass, and all men admired ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... usual,' said Hubert; and glancing through half a column of hysterical commonplace, he ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... the rest—a commonplace story of engagements, of failures, until she found herself touring the West with a wretched theatrical troupe. "We were booked for a little town off there beyond your woods, and the train was stalled in a snowstorm. ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... prototypes were hidden. Each terminates one of the two open colonnades with a central niche composition flanked on either hand by a sculptured frieze. Each is the work of a woman sculptor, and both, though very different, are far from the conventional or the commonplace. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... of rationalistic doctrines was the "prosaism" into which it led many minor versifiers. These poetasters, afraid of overstepping the limits of good sense, tabooed all imagination and described in deliberately prosy lines the most commonplace events. The movement reached its height at the beginning of the reign of Charles IV (1788-1808) and produced such efforts as a poem to the gout, a nature-poem depicting barn-yard sounds, and even Iriarte's La musica (1780), in which one may read in carefully constructed ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... that it is only reasonable to suppose that I shall continue to live here, and make horseshoes—though, really," I broke off, letting my eyes wander from my companion's upturned face back to the glowing sky, once more, "there is little I could tell you about so commonplace a person as myself that is likely to ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... place like this it would be absurd, and you would not like it—I am mentally on my knees, willing to accept whatever you may choose to give me—love, if possible; but if your heart is otherwise engaged, or if you cannot love such a commonplace fellow as myself, then I will TRY to be contented with friendship. Which shall it ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... happy when at work, although he effected very little; but, after all, the great stylists always worked slowly. His style was, it is true, somewhat commonplace; but his rather minute output allowed him to rank, in his own estimation, with Pater and Omar Khayyam, and disdain the voluminous facility of Thackeray and Dickens. He was, he felt, one of the "precious" writers, and so long as no one saw his work he ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... blood vengeance, 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 trace the very process by which the moral maxims which to us are almost axioms ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... something choice and superior. He had the happy knack of being bourgeois with the air of an artist. If one could picture one's grocer weighing out sugar in a Spanish cloak and brigand's hat, it would afford an excellent symbol of his spiritual estate. To be perfectly commonplace in a brilliantly original way, is to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman's first thought—with the conventional 'Neptune,' and the vague 'armee,' and the commonplace 'vents.' And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce—the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and vastness ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the French side celebrated the unexpected victories of Charles and the Maid as best they knew how, in a commonplace fashion, by some stiff poem but scantily clothing a thin ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... middle watch and a hand for the wheel come aft to relieve their companions, the illusion has passed, and you go below to turn in, feeling uncomfortably sure that your pretty thoughts will appear foolish and commonplace enough when regarded in the matter-of-fact light of the ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... question of the power of the drum on simple and primitive natures. Something in Jim responded to it at once. The commonplace words of the commonplace leader were without power to move, and the droning hymn was soporific rather than inspiring; but the rhythmic thump, thump, thump, seemed to strike the chords of his being; and a hypnotic tensity began. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... offers the commonplace to Electra,—and here is a parallel! Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof. Greece agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... to "egg" Bud on. By the time the crowd had reached the course, and the first, more commonplace races were over, the other half of his money was in the hands of the stake-holder, who happened on this day to be Jerry. And the odds varied from four to one up to Jeff Hall's ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... useful to mark his limitations. It is a forecast of the future, and proves, as nothing else could so well do, the utter absence in Bulwer of the creative imagination. It is an invention, cleverly conceived, mechanically and rather tediously worked out, and written in a style astonishingly commonplace. The man who wrote that book (one would say) had no heaven in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to soar heavenward. Yet it is full of thought and ingenuity, and the central conception of "vrii" has been much commended. But the whole concoction is tainted ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... news: Niagara is no noisier. By stealth Our eyes dart scrutinizing snakes. She's glad I'm happy, says her quivering under-lip. 'And are not you?' 'How can I be?' 'Take ship! For happiness is somewhere to be had.' 'Nowhere for me!' Her voice is barely heard. I am not melted, and make no pretence. With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for a public who study life in the subtle and highly wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... sought Sylvie as a lover only, he had been able to write the most passionate love phrases, full of ardour and poetry, and now, when he was about to make her the offer of his whole life, his sentences were commonplace and almost cold. And presently he tore up what he had been writing, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... ever. Gerhardt came in the front-room, after he had been there a few minutes, and shook hands with him, as did also Mrs. Gerhardt, but Lester paid little attention to them. The old German appeared to him to be merely commonplace—the sort of man who was hired by hundreds in common capacities in his father's factory. After some desultory conversation Lester suggested to Jennie that they should go for a drive. Jennie put on her hat, and together they departed. As a matter of fact, they went to an apartment which ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... women whose love had run its course and turned cold, or been cast back at them. After all, there were so few people who were really happy, why should she complain because her love could not come to rice and old shoes, instead of being a beautiful secret thing, the more perfect, perhaps, because Commonplace, that ogre whose girth increases from year to year, and who sits remorseless in the dwellings of the united, could ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... expression, however, are natural and even graceful, bearing thus the divine impress. The echoes of Weber should be noted. Of two mazurkas, in G and B flat major, of the year 1825, the first is, especially in its last part, rather commonplace; the second is more interesting, because more suggestive of better things, which the first is only to an inconsiderable extent. In No. 2 we meet already with harmonic piquancies which charmed musicians and lovers ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... feel tired—terribly tired; but she wouldn't have admitted it, for fear of being asked the reason. Did mother, perhaps, know? Missy had a teasing sense that, under the placid, commonplace conversation, there was something unspoken. A curious and uncomfortable feeling. But, then, as one ascertains increasingly with every year one lives, Life is filled with curious and often uncomfortable feelings. Which, however, one would hardly change if one ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... riche, and indeed of parvenus generally, is quite unknown among us, nobody could rely on those points of resemblance. But with regard to the other topics, would it not be fair to say, in answer to such an argument—All this is mere commonplace generality; such are the characters of every country where European institutions exist, or European habits are to be found? Something more tangible and specific is requisite to support your claim. You are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... it was to be effected; but the former would scarcely have been a Cecil had he not also read his royal master. His Majesty must have the matter so communicated to him that he should be able to believe that his own supernatural sagacity had solved a mystery impenetrable to the commonplace brains of the Lords of the Council. It might be reasonably anticipated that such a warning should be no mystery to the son of Lord Darnley—that his thoughts would fly rapidly to that house in the Kirk o' Field, where his own father had received his ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... relief for the King. All his resource was in the commonplace talk of the Comte de Toulouse, who was not amusing, although ignorant of the plot, and the stories of his valets, who lost tongue as soon as they perceived that they were not seconded by the Duc du Maine in his usual manner. Marechal and all ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... suggested whereby memory may be assisted and the assimilation of our reading proceed without indigestion. A reader is often pictured with note-book in hand, supposed to be memorising what he is reading. There is no doubt that note-books are very useful, but no note-book or commonplace-book should take the place of the natural memory—and every one has a ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... from a forceful figure to an absurd figure is so short that a debater has to be on his guard against using expressions that will impress his audience as ridiculous or even funny. A mixture of highly figurative language with literal language and commonplace ideas, and a mixture of several figures are especially to be guarded against. As an example of the extent to which figures may be mixed the ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... muscular. Her attractive face was both defiant and uneasy. Behind her strode a wiry man of forty. His chief claim to notice lay in an outrageously fancy waistcoat, which was ill-matched with his sober, commonplace, "pepper-and-salt" suit. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in her long blue cloak and small blue bonnet. Hilda made no mistakes in the matter of clothes. She realized the glamour which her nurse's uniform cast over her. In evening dress she was slightly commonplace. In ordinary street garb not an eye would have been turned upon her, but the nun's blue and white of her uniform added the required spiritual effect to her ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... There was a long, long look, eye to eye, face to face,—a look, in which were gathered and summed up all the years since they were young, together,—and then the two old friends sat down side by side. Agatha thought it strange that they should meet in such a calm, commonplace way—but then she was young. She did not know how quietly flows the outward surface of a tide that has flowed on, deep, solemn, and changeless, for ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... but at the end, after a pause, she said her name and repeated it again and again and again, lingering over it as if it were the most exquisite music and this her dying song. And yet it was a very commonplace name. ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... to describe what a flat and commonplace affair the helping Mrs Varden out afterwards was, but Joe did it, and did it too with the best grace in the world. Then old John, who, entertaining a dull and foggy sort of idea that Mrs Varden wasn't fond of him, had been in some doubt whether she might not have come for purposes of assault and ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... bewilderment. What had happened? Only the moment before she had been as cold and as magnificently composed as ever she had been, and now! Now she was like other people. She had come down to the level of the utterly commonplace. She was just a plain, ordinary ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... a discovery, and an important discovery, when Balzac wrote. He showed that, because we are ourselves ordinary men and women, it is really human interest, and not sensational circumstance which appeals to us, and that material for enthralling drama can be found in the life of the most commonplace person—of a middle-aged shopkeeper threatened with bankruptcy, or of an elderly musician with a weakness for good dinners. At one blow he destroyed the unreal ideal of the Romantic School, who degraded man by setting up in his place a fantastic and impossible ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... The commonplace statesmen who, in rash frivolity of mind and mistaken in all their calculations, set fire last July to the whole of Europe and even to their own hearths and homes, have now noticed their fresh colossal mistake, and in the Parliaments of Budapest and Berlin have poured forth brutal ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... beauty of idea. But for the most part the style is simple and prosaic, rather than ornate or poetical. It produces its effects by the most straightforward means, and strikes a modern reader as lacking distinction in form. The dead level of commonplace expression is, however, brightened by brilliant passages of frequent occurrence. Prayers, proverbs, parables, and fables, dot the pages of Talmud and Midrash alike. The ancient proverbs of the Jews were more than mere chips from the block of experience. They ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... Leave that to commonplace women and plain everyday fellows like me. You can't expect that of her sort, Jim. She can be very nice when she pleases. I suppose she has a heart; it has never waked up yet. When it does, it will be a big one. We don't expect the plebeian ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... draw for language work. A double purpose is thus served. Interesting subjects are secured and pupils are given a start in acquiring a knowledge of the beautiful that fortifies them for the sorrows and cares of life; and, what is even better, prevents their own life from being commonplace. ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... Medici raised a tiny cup and bent slightly toward him. He felt that he was losing control of himself, and, averting his eyes, he stooped and smelled the orchid in his buttonhole. Then, accepting the cup, he was about to utter some light commonplace when the faintness returned overwhelmingly, and, hurriedly replacing the cup upon the tray, he fell back among the cushions. The stifling perfume of the place seemed ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... his second cruise. The six lieutenants who came from England were now no longer living, and out of eighteen midshipmen only another and myself were in existence. The lieutenants who had superseded those who died were rather commonplace characters. The discipline of the ship was totally changed. The first lieutenant was a disappointed officer and a complete old woman, and the ship ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... a justification of the murder of the King against Salmasius, and made it good too thus: that murder was an action meritorious compared with your superior wickedness? 'Tis there (as I remember) that you commonplace yourself into set forms of railing, two pages thick; and, lest your infamy should not extend itself enough within the course and usage of your mother-tongue, the thing is dressed up in a travelling garb and language, to blast the English nation to the universe, and give every man a horror for mankind ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... only other buildings of note are the numerous churches, which are mostly small, and offer nothing that is likely to interest the student of architecture. Altogether this part of the town is unquestionably commonplace. The learned archaeologist may detect in it some traces of the distant past, but the ordinary traveller will find little ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... before the castle door. He did so, and there is a grand statuesque picture of the hero, naked to the waist, and standing on the chair as lofty pedestal. In the torn coat the artist could never have made him look like Apollo. Even the shirt would have been too commonplace; so off went the shirt. Three or four times attention is directed to the fact of the nakedness by the hero himself, while the pencil of the filial illustrator has rendered him immortal in this primitive costume. In his speech he 'abused them heartily ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... white trainees than black he would soon be forced to integrate his two black training regiments as well by the unprecedented assignment of white soldiers to black units with black officers and noncommissioned officers.[17-23] Actually, such reverse integration was becoming commonplace in Korea, and in the case of Fort Dix the Army G-1 solved the commander's dilemma by simply removing the asterisk, which meant black, from the names of the 364th ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... final defeat with philosophic calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In any political romance of the Victorian ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... crazy angles of the tiled roof. But the ivy which covered portions of the brickwork hid some of the ravages of age, and helped the moat-house to show a brave front to the world, a well-preserved survivor of an ornamental period in a commonplace and ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... There are servants who think that their masters cannot do without them; and the public also may occasionally have some such servant. What if this too successful minister were one of them! And then a discreet, commonplace, zealous member of the Lower House does not like to be jeered at, when he does his duty by his constituents and asks a few questions. An all-successful minister who cannot keep his triumph to himself, but must needs drive about ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... commonplace in London is the aristocracy of wealth; of Mrs Grub, who, in a provincial town, keeps her carriage, and is at once the envy and the scandal of all the Ladies who have to proceed upon their ten toes, we wot not the existence. Mr Bill Wright, the banker, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... fold her in his arms, but before he had taken the first step he yielded, as always, to his strange reserve, and he realised that if he entered it would be but to assume his customary unconcern, from the shelter of which he would probably make a few commonplace remarks on trivial subjects. The emotional situation would be ignored by them all, he knew; they would treat it absolutely as if it had no existence, as if its voice was not speaking to them in the silence, and they ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... who from door to door recount histories, of which they are by turns the historians and the heroes? Is it, then, in the nature of thought to become a crime in becoming public? A thought, vulgar, critical, skeptical, dogmatic, may, according to you, be unvailed innocently: a sentiment, commonplace, cold, not intimate, awaking no palpitation within you, no response in others, may be revealed without violation of modesty; but a thought that is pious, ardent, lighted at the fire of the heart or of heaven, a sentiment burning, cast forth by an explosion of the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... a man of commonplace appearance, with dull, expressionless eyes, sluggish movements, and slow, affected manner of speech. His technique is not astonishing, but he has a full, penetrating, sympathetic tone. There is no charlatanism or trickery in his playing, nor any virtuoso effects, but the charm of it rests ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... replying in 1597, in his "Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman" (written in the name of Richard Litchfield, the barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge), also alludes to this commonplace: "The virtuous riches wherewith (as broad-spread fame reporteth) you are endued, though fama malum (as saith the poet) which I confirm," &c. Perhaps this was because Nash had previously employed it, or it might be supposed ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... by your own experience. You never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you. Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Every detail of the scene was of breathless interest to me, and as I watched to see if the captain took offence, I noticed that (though they were far less remarkable from being buried in a fat and commonplace countenance) his eyes, like Alister's, were of that bright, cold, sea-blue common among Scotchmen. He did not take offence, and I believe I was right in thinking that the boy's wasted hands struck him much as they ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... make such a purchase, to please your taste, to make your parlor or your chamber more attractive, choose that which shows good handiwork. Such a choice will last. You will not tire of it as you will of that which has but a commonplace form or pattern. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... virtue, and the consequent wrath of her father, a peasant of stern principles, in the vicinity of Chalons on the Marne—it was not, I say, until after this was over, and I had once more cleared my throat for the attack, and once more dropped aside into some commonplace about the picture, that Myner himself brought me suddenly and vigorously ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when it is beneath the beautiful—through the thick air of indolence masquerading as toleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the scorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just from the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the commonplace. What matter if his "division" is not our "division," his "formula" our "formula"? It is good for us to be confronted with such Disdain. It brings us back once more to "Values"; and whether our "Values" are values ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the psychological laws which govern national development, says, "Dans toutes manifestations de la vie d'une nation, nous retrouvons toujours l'ame immuable de la race tissant son propre destin." The commonplace method of stating the same proposition is to say that every nation gets the government it deserves. This, in fact, is the gospel which Taine had to preach. He thought, in Lady Blennerhassett's words, that it was "the underlying characteristics of a people; and not their ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... was ever commonplace; Of genius never had a trace; My thoughts the world have never fed, Mere echoes of the book ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... part, when an American tells me that he wants to fight with me, I regard his offense, as compared with that of a Frenchman under the same circumstances, as I would compare the offense of a parricide or a fratricide with that of a mere commonplace murderer. Such a war would be plus quam civile bellum. Which of us two could take a thrashing from the other and afterward go about ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... your love affair—how you first saw her; how you felt; how she treated you; how you were tormented by the pangs of jealousy, agitated by hope and fear, until you knew that she was yours. And you have the heart to skip all this and go on to the stupid, commonplace end of it!" ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... well-constructed residence had probably cost only three thousand more than he himself planned to spend. Its suggestion of originality had been all but submerged by carpenters spoiled through constant work on commonplace buildings. But to Martin it was a marvellous mansion. He told himself that with such a place moved out to his quarter-section, he could have stood on his door-step and chosen whomever ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... cheating the gallows of its due are of a quality which shows that the power of this man over a jury lay much in his manner. His delivery, which "bears absolute sway in oratory," was bewitching and irresistible, and gave to quite commonplace wit and very questionable sentiment an amazing ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... does not rise above the commonplace, in an extensive building hastily constructed. And Portugal is shining in all the glory of wedding-cake ornamentation that the plaster ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... are honest men in her. Here is a telegram from Gloria which came this morning. It was sent, of course, as usual, to our City friends, who sent it on here immediately.' He handed the despatch to his chief, who seized it and read it eagerly. It seemed a commonplace message enough—the communication of one commercial gentleman in Gloria with another commercial gentleman in Farringdon Street. But to the eyes of Hamilton and of Ericson it meant a great deal. It was a secret communication from one of the most influential ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... to say or to write what they have thought and felt. And, indeed, a great poet is nothing more than the one man in a million who has the gift to express that which has been in the mind and heart of multitudes. If even the most commonplace of human beings could write all the poetry he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... to hand, and left the readers looking very gravely at one another. Julia was quite pale and horror-stricken. All were too deeply moved, and even shocked, to make any commonplace comment; for it looked and read like a cry from ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... which accompanied the pang and pain of it. But in England, where everybody bathed—or at any rate had water in their rooms and splashed and said ah! ah! and oh! oh!—he regarded the morning bath as commonplace, and had often to be ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... exceptional plantation as New England, a colony peopled not by the commonplace and average Englishmen of the day, but by men of special intelligence, and almost universally of good education, it was inevitable that early and profound attention should be paid to the establishment ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... held off while twilight faded, but now the sky was cloud-curtained, and the night fell inky black and silent save for sounds from the herd. The soft thudding of hoofs, the occasional low-voiced note, possibly of a cow to its young, seemed to blend into a murmur, strange and fascinating to Whitey, commonplace and tiresome to the ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... galop was fashionable at that period; it ran to rather ordinary musical motives and mine were no exception to the rule. Liszt had to show by his Galop Chromatique the distinction that genius can give to the most commonplace themes. My waltzes were better. As has always been the case with me, I was already composing the music directly on paper without working it out on the piano. The waltzes were too difficult for my hands, so a friend of the family, a sister of the ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... a stately embassy[521] by the Provincials of Dalmatia to our grandfather; and there, not in commonplace words but with a torrent of eloquence, you so set forth their needs and the measures which would be for the advantage of the public, that Theodoric, a man of cautious temperament, listened to your flow of words without weariness, and all men ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... five hundred years ago and dressed in chain-mail and led out his lances to plunder and foray. As it is he does his best even in the nineteenth century. Picturesque is the word that best describes him. He makes every one else look hopelessly commonplace. His men admire him immensely, like him a good deal, and fear him a little. Generals in command sometimes find him, I fancy, a bit of a handful, that is, if their policy is at all a backward one. But most people watch ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... to approach the shore just below Belgrade, there followed a period during which the citizens of the city had their full share in experiencing the horrors of warfare. The booming of heavy siege artillery and the screaming of shells at first startled them, then became so commonplace as barely to attract their attention. The attacks and counterattacks on mid-river islands became incidents of daily occurrence. Ruined buildings, wrecked houses and dead bodies in the streets became an unmarked portion of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... 'There is this admirable commonplace, too, which, from long habit of being introduced in such discourses, wishes to come in before I conclude—namely, that infelicities of various kinds belong to the state here below. Who are we that we should not take our share? See the slight amount of personal happiness requisite ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... The commonplace I sing; How cheap is health! how cheap nobility! Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust; The open air I sing, freedom, toleration, (Take here the mainest lesson—less from books—less from the schools,) The common day and night—the common earth and waters, Your farm—your ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman |
