Top 40 Commonplaces Quotes
#1. Art just consists in making us swallow the commonplaces by charming us eternally ...
Marie Bashkirtseff
#2. Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative. We find that it is not a new scene which is needed, but a new viewpoint.
Norman Rockwell
#3. When the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplaces of the moral judgement are better left unmade.
Lytton Strachey
#4. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.
John Dewey
#5. He felt he was a pin in the hinge of power. Saw the commonplaces of life as newspaper headlines. Man Walks Across Parking Lot at Moderate Pace. Women Talk of Rain. Phone Rings in Empty Room.
Annie Proulx
#6. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#7. The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
Hannah Arendt
#8. An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
William Hazlitt
#9. My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.
Harry Houdini
#10. They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
Henry James
#11. Repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.
Plato
#12. Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.
Felix Frankfurter
#13. Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
Eric Hoffer
#14. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#15. The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.
Gertrude Atherton
#17. One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.
Lewis Mumford
#18. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug.
Remy De Gourmont
#20. Truths that startled the generation in which they were first announced become in the next age the commonplaces of conversation; as the famous airs of operas which thrilled the first audiences come to be played on hand-organs in the streets.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#22. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
Thorstein Veblen
#23. Moral commonplaces are amazingly useful when we can find little in ourselves with which to justify our actions.
Alexander Pushkin
#24. If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#25. It was over, the awkward moment, the dreaded moment, sliding past in a ripple of commonplaces, the easy mechanical politenesses that are so much more than empty convention; they are the greaves and cuirasses that arm the naked nerve.
Mary Stewart
#26. The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
John Stuart Mill
#27. The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#28. I would miss the horse. I've never liked walking. If God had meant man to walk he wouldn't have given us horses. Wonderful animals. I think of them as the word escape, covered in hair and with a leg at each corner.
Mark Lawrence
#29. The predominance of moral factors in all military decisions. On them constantly turns the issue of war and battle. In the history of war they form the more constant factors, changing only in degree, whereas the physical factors are different in almost every war and every military situation.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#30. I turned my attention back to Kaitlin, who now appeared to be very conscientiously stalking my shoelace.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#31. I was a caddy once and I lost the golfer's clubs. Plus I don't know how to golf, so I was the worst caddy ever. Then I was a mortgage brokers assistant, so that was just carrying around a lot of files - pretty meaningless, mind-numbing work.
Bryan Greenberg
#32. In France this does not happen,' he began. 'We are careful in our passions. When people are angry they drink some wine and they find another woman.
James Runcie
#33. The gentle waters poured from the heavens, baptizing the two angels in a healing shower that washed away their differences, lifting the veil from their sight, and they knew they were the same.
C.J. Sullivan
#34. I didn't understand that playing roles in any relationship is false and will inevitably lead to the relationship's collapse. No one can be any one thing all the time.
Portia De Rossi
#35. I need to have something else going on. I'm able to write a lot if I have an episode of 'Friday Night Lights' going on my computer.
Hannibal Buress
#36. We've been the foolish country for so long with this free trade, but it's not free trade because it's - you know, just doesn't work. I mean, it's not working. You look at the deficits we have.
Donald Trump
#37. Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
#38. You can arrest me, but you can't arrest my ideas.
Julius Malema
#39. My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's 'More Than Words' at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while, I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.
Ed Helms
#40. Looking beyond the silhouette and reading between the lines are the same thing; just different art forms.
Nanette L. Avery
