Top 100 Quotes About Commonplace
#1. For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
David Antin
#2. It's alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.
Vladimir Putin
#3. Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren't commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.
Ann Voskamp
#4. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages.
William Hurrell Mallock
#5. The stairs were certainly steep; and in those days, when they could rarely see their own feet, women were always falling; it was a commonplace of domestic life.
John Fowles
#6. In a world plagued with commonplace tragedies, only one thing exists that truly has the power to save lives, and that is love.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#7. Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life.
Arthur C. Clarke
#8. Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it: it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius.
Thomas Love Peacock
#9. We look for visions of heaven," Oswald Chambers had written, "and we never dream that all the time God is in the commonplace things and people around us." He
Jan Karon
#10. The final secret is that there is no secret. Devote yourself to your leader. Work hard. Be grateful. Act boldly. Some may deride such suggestions as commonplace, and they'd be right: They are common. But to see them successfully enacted in this world is rare indeed.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
#11. If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people
Mark Twain
#12. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#13. I always admired Ray Kroc, the man who invented McDonald's. Ray had a vision of the most commonplace thing - a hamburger and fries to go - but to him it was just the greatest thing ever, and he was going to make it the greatest thing ever for everybody else, and he did.
David Lee Roth
#14. For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#15. If one makes himself master of one vital book, he shall never become a commonplace man.
James Lowell
#16. My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention
Charles Dickens
#17. To be original is to discover the commonplace of a thousand years
to face at first the sneer that no one would have thought of it, and at last the indifference because any one would.
Gerald Stanley Lee
#18. It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.
Christian Lous Lange
#19. The principles of Buddhism have become more commonplace, which is a good thing.
Sakyong Mipham
#20. It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
Pablo Picasso
#21. I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.
Christopher Hampton
#22. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#23. It is the simple, dreary day, with its commonplace duties and people that smothers the burning heart--unless we have learned the secret of abiding in Jesus.
Oswald Chambers
#24. In proportion as our own mind is enlarged we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man and another.
Blaise Pascal
#25. Remarkable work is always not on the list, because if it was, it would be commonplace, not remarkable.
Seth Godin
#26. Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
Phillips Brooks
#27. Culturally, it is commonplace for African women to work.
Richard Attias
#28. There is not a single person who cannot easily reach the highest degree of perfection by performing every duty, no matter how commonplace, with eager love.
Jean-Pierre De Caussade
#29. The commonplace needs no defence,Dullness is in the critic's eyes,Without a licence life evolvesFrom some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms,Behind these hedges trimly shorn,As in a stable once, so hereIt may be born, it may be born.
William Plomer
#30. If a man took a lover it would be accounted commonplace. Why shouldn't you? Your virtue lies in your mind, not in what lies between your legs.
Lauren Willig
#31. The man who puts life into an idea is acclaimed a genius, because he does the right thing at the right time. Therein lies the difference between the genius and a commonplace man.
Douglas Fairbanks
#32. If a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn.
Haruki Murakami
#33. A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Ian McEwan
#34. By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape's sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 - Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded.
Jane Leavy
#35. A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#36. Beauty and power was commonplace to the dragons as mud and manure to a stable boy.
Susan Scott
#37. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
Vladimir Nabokov
#38. If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.
Richard Eyre
#39. The child, mystified by the commonplace, moves effortlessly into the strange..
Patti Smith
#40. That won't do with a girl like Princess. It is too commonplace, too devoid of interest and uncertainty.
Mary Greenway McClelland
#41. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious...How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy.
Oscar Wilde
#42. A science or an art may be said to be "useful" if its development increases, even indirectly, the material well-being and comfort of men, it promotes happiness, using that word in a crude and commonplace way.
G.H. Hardy
#43. It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.
Jonathan Kozol
#44. I have been in teen shows for years, so doing that stuff - kissing - is kind of commonplace and not a big deal. It was way more cool just because it was Meg Ryan.
Adam Brody
#45. Dai Tregarron had called her Olwen, had spoken to her as if she were a creature capable of escape from the commonplace, not the pedestrian, middle-aged woman everyone else saw, incapable of imagination, even less of passion. He had seen who she wanted to be and given the dream a moment's life.
Anne Perry
#46. Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty;
Thomas Hardy
#48. We do not hug our miracles close. We put them hastily away, preferring the commonplace to live with.
Fulton Oursler
#49. To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
Jorge Luis Borges
#50. Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it's easier to get used to it than carve it out.
Steven Erikson
#51. The awful catastrophe of their quarrel had evaporated in a commonplace. He
Winston Graham
#52. The only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. Allen
Jack Kerouac
#53. Someday hopefully it won't be necessary to allocate a special evening to celebrate where we are and how far we've come ... someday women writers, producers and crew members will be so commonplace, and roles and salaries for actresses will outstrip those for men, and pigs will fly.
Sigourney Weaver
#54. They decided to allow their baby to be born. What they did not realize is that they themselves were the ones who would be 'born,' infants in a new world where magic is commonplace, Harvard professors are the slow learners, and retarded babies are the master teachers.
Martha N. Beck
#55. It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.
John Dewey
#56. Dreams or illusions, call them what you will, they lift us from the commonplace of life to better things.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#57. Nature is another name for the miracles that are so commonplace in our lives that we take for granted and have grown used to seeing them.
Shalom Arush
#58. But the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young
P.G. Wodehouse
#59. You on the cutting edge of technology have already made yesterday's impossibilities the commonplace realities of today.
Ronald Reagan
#60. Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it's commonplace for users to create 'throwaway' accounts to reveal sensitive information.
Ethan Zuckerman
#61. We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.
Oswald Chambers
#62. There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
John Ruskin
#63. When I chose you, I didn't want the commonplace - I didn't want a 'partner' - I wanted a shrine ...
John Geddes
#64. Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace over the fine outlines of life.
John Dos Passos
#66. Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.
Arthur Machen
#67. 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.
Samuel Smiles
#68. Cars will talk to each other and the world around them to make driving both safer and more efficient. 'Vehicle-to-vehicle' and 'vehicle-to-infrastructure' connectivity will become commonplace.
William Clay Ford Jr.
#69. Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations.
Gary Saul Morson
#70. We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by the direction of the people. And this is the simple magic which makes a commonplace routine a near miracle to many of the world
Ronald Reagan
#71. There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.
Judith Shulevitz
#72. I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away.
David Hanson
#73.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creative.
Charles Mingus
#74. To live in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm.
Salman Rushdie
#75. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
Aldous Huxley
#76. Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous - who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?
John Keats
#77. I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! Current appreciation of my work is a bit highbrow, I've always considered myself a popular artist.
Maxfield Parrish
#78. Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.
Chuck Jones
#79. Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he'd once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#80. It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.
Loren Eiseley
#81. We live in an age of miracles so commonplace that it can be difficult to see them as anything other than part of the daily texture of living
Tom Chatfield
#82. I wonder how many parents realize that by the so-called education they are giving their children, they are only driving them into the commonplace, and depriving them of any chance of doing anything beautiful or original.
Isadora Duncan
#83. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a commonplace dauber, so I don't intend to try any more.
Louisa May Alcott
#84. The problem with dragons is that everyone uses them. All the time. When that happens, they become commonplace. A lot of people think you can just throw them into a story and suddenly whatever you're writing is 28% cooler. But that doesn't work. All that does is make dragons into some boring cliche.
Patrick Rothfuss
#85. My advice to new actors is: Don't be lazy. Go after what you desire. Don't heed the commonplace advice that is meant to discourage you. If you want it, go and get it. Be willing to work hard, and be patient. Be kind to yourself.
Judith Hoag
#86. When you love something, whether it's jam and cheese sandwiches or wearing your pyjamas as pants, you forget that it was ever anything other than commonplace.
Elisha Lim
#87. I think that the way of bringing realism into fantasy is to treat it as the commonplace.
Grant Bowler
#88. What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?
Vladimir Nabokov
#89. Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
Tim O'Brien
#90. It's become relatively commonplace to find corners of Africa that have good cell coverage but no electrical power.
Ethan Zuckerman
#91. It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same.
Don DeLillo
#92. If God does not enter your kitchen, there is something wrong with your kitchen. If you can't take God into your recreation, there is something wrong with your play. We all believe in the God of the heroic. What we need most these days is the God of the humdrum, the commonplace, the everyday.
Peter Marshall
#93. We have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we never can frame any laws ... They are powers which are imperfectly developed in this life, but one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#94. The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.
Ralph Nader
#95. I could not for my soul distinguish ever the distinction between "religious anger" and "commonplace anger", "religious killing" and "commonplace killing", "religious slandering and irreligious", and so forth.
Swami Vivekananda
#96. It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody.
George Orwell
#97. Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the new year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#98. They were upon their great theme: "When I get to be a man!" Being human, though boys, they considered their present estate too commonplace to be dwelt upon. So, when the old men gather, they say: "When I was a boy!" It really is the land of nowadays that we never discover.
Booth Tarkington
#99. No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#100. Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee?
Anna Katharine Green
