Top 100 Quotes About Commonplace
#1. It is a commonplace executive observation that businesses exist to make money, and the observation is usually allowed to go unchallenged. It is, however, a very limited statement about the purposes of business
Daniel Katz
#2. The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand.
Bill Buford
#3. Be not content with the common place in character anymore than with the commonplace in ambition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect that you will make any lasting or very strong impression on the world through intellectual power without the use of an equal amount of conscience and heart.
William Jewett Tucker
#4. Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.
Edward Weston
#6. In this climate - with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace - making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall.
Wendy Kaminer
#7. Those stories helped me realize that, although tragedy and loss are regrettably commonplace, we aren't measured by what happens to us but rather by how we respond to it.
Steve Pemberton
#8. I hope I reach the point where epiphanies become so commonplace that I scarcely bother to register them: Oh look, another epiphany - as we acquire knowledge we become mired in the ignorance of the educated, delivered from the wisdom of innocence by a corrupted midwife. Now what's on telly?
Anonymous
#10. Often thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine who lives in Mortimer Street
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#11. We risk becoming so commonplace to the men we've thrown our lots in with who can't see us anymore, and who pat the sofa when they mean to pat our knee.
Helen Oyeyemi
#12. Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
William Hazlitt
#14. Beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
Ellen Glasgow
#15. John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during
Steven Johnson
#16. No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
H.P. Lovecraft
#17. The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#18. Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
Charles Scribner Jr.
#19. It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.
Ruth Rendell
#20. Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.
John Masefield
#21. Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#22. Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world ... unless it had been a first-class circus.
Edward Eggleston
#23. One rare and exceptional deed is worth far more than a thousand commonplace ones.
Saint Ignatius
#24. I think the main reason is that people binge watch because they can. We're like dogs, really. If we like something, we tend to gorge ourselves on it until there's no more left. And as bingeing becomes possible and commonplace, it's only natural that shows should start to take it into account.
D. B. Weiss
#25. The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.
Elizabeth Drew
#26. It is no easy matter to say commonplace things in an original way.
Horace
#27. He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn't make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.
John Connolly
#28. In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.
G.K. Chesterton
#29. The territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.
Gail Caldwell
#30. I hate the word 'ought' - it always implies something dull, cold, and commonplace. The 'ought nots' of life are its pleasantest things.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#31. It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power.
Jean-Francois Millet
#32. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
#33. Surely she'd heard voices like his, so low-pitched as to make every commonplace utterance seem of the deepest intimacy, every cliche a delicious secret.
Loretta Chase
#34. I believe that in the future meditation could be as commonplace in schools and society as eco-awareness is now. It interests me that an ancient cure may be the solution to a modern problem.
Paul McCartney
#35. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. Commonplace," said Holmes, though I thought from his expression that he was pleased at my evident surprise and admiration.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#37. The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page.
Peter De Vries
#39. Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.
Robert H. Goddard
#40. Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.
Mason Cooley
#41. Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.
George Carlin
#42. Like an old person, the Old Soul is easily tired by pressure, tension and conflict. To them, the matters of everyday life are unsurprising, commonplace and inconsequential in the greater scheme of things.
Aletheia Luna
#43. Art just consists in making us swallow the commonplaces by charming us eternally ...
Marie Bashkirtseff
#44. A dim consciousness of infinite mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the commonplace of life . There is an awfulness and a majesty around us, in all our little worldliness .
Albert Pike
#45. No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#46. Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
Willa Cather
#47. Life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.
Christian De Duve
#48. I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]
Kim Edwards
#49. In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.
William, Saroyan
#50. We look for visions of heaven and we never dream that all the time God is in the commonplace things and people around us.
Oswald Chambers
#51. Originality is never embraced as quickly as the commonplace.
Franklyn Ajaye
#52. The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#53. In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.
Christopher Fry
#54. There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which soon exhausts itself by flowing!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#55. There have always been men of all background and ethnicities on my father's job sites. And long before it was commonplace, you also saw women.
Ivanka Trump
#56. God never intended His people to be ordinary or commonplace. His intentions were that they should be on fire for Him, conscious of His divine power, realizing the glory of the cross that foreshadows the crown.
Smith Wigglesworth
#57. It seems to be a general rule that sciences begin their development with the unusual. They have to develop considerable sophistication before they interest themselves in the commonplace.
Ralph Linton
#58. I invent by analogy. I thought, 'It's commonplace that you can mix colors, smear them together to get new emerging colors. Likewise, you can mix radio waves to get new frequencies.' So, I wondered, 'Why can't you mix sound to get new sounds?'
Woody Norris
#59. Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished.
William Merritt Chase
#61. I ask the reader to remember that what is most obvious may be most worthy of analysis. Fertile vistas may open out when commonplace facts are examined from a fresh point of view.
Lancelot Law Whyte
#62. The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly.
Dorothy Denning
#63. Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
Gertrude Stein
#64. A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.
E. Norman Torry
#65. (Ah, lovely adolescence - when the "talented" are officially shunted off from the herd, thus putting the total burden of society's creative dreams on the thin shoulders of a few select souls, while condemning everyone else to live a more commonplace, inspiration-free existence! What a system . . . )
Elizabeth Gilbert
#66. NBC's pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the birth of both 'Friends' and 'ER'. While 'ER' came essentially out of the blue, we'd been casting around for a 'Friends'-like show for some time at the network.
Warren Littlefield
#67. If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet
a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences.
William Dean Howells
#68. We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time.
Lewis Thomas
#69. No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.
Bill Brandt
#70. ...Newspapers, popular fiction, and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings....
Lachman Gary Larkin Steve
#71. This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#72. The commonplace becomes exceptional when God is involved.
Judy Baer
#73. Dying is one of the few experiences we'll eventually all enjoy firsthand, and like most shit that's commonplace, it's boring to dwell on.
Brian K. Vaughan
#74. The Haunted Wood was a harmless, pretty spruce grove in the field below the orchard. We considered that all our haunts were too commonplace, so we invented this for our own amusement.
L.M. Montgomery
#75. Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#76. Do not be fooled by its commonplace appearance. Like so many things, it is not what outside, but what is inside that counts.
Walt Disney Company
#77. Perhaps men like the Everseas were commonplace here in England. Perhaps finding a beautiful titled husband would be as simple as shaking an apple from a tree.
Julie Anne Long
#78. What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be drawn where enemy holds sway? Is the concept "enemy" the enemy of clear thought, therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost?
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#79. Security is a component of everyday life that one spending time in Washington, D.C., gets accustomed to. Metal detectors, police vehicle barriers and heavily-armed police officers become strangely commonplace after awhile.
Mike Crapo
#80. Look up ... and see them.
The teaching stars,
beyond worship
and commonplace tongues.
Dorothy Dunnett
#81. It is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.
Margery Sharp
#82. Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace
Marquis De Sade
#83. That our pains and longings are thousandfold and can be anesthetized in a thousand different ways is as commonplace a truth as that, in the end, they are all one, and can only be overcome in one way. What you most need is to feel ...
Dag Hammarskjold
#84. John Quincy Adams strove to escape commonplace thoughts.
Paul C. Nagel
#85. I found it really astonishing that undocumented migrants were kidnapped so routinely, that it was such a commonplace part of the journey for people trying to reach the US, and that we hear almost nothing about it here.
Sarah Stillman
#86. A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
Vladimir Nabokov
#87. Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of
the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A
great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace
or probing authoritatively the unknown.
::: Brett Whiteley :::
Brett Whiteley
#88. In this commonplace world every one is said to be romantic who either admires a fine thing or does one.
Alexander Pope
#89. It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.
Alice Munro
#90. I always find it kind of embarrassing, kind of funny, and kind of exciting. In New York I'm recognized a lot, although nobody says anything. You know, they stare at you just a second too long. But in Paris it's not as commonplace to be recognized.
Marc Jacobs
#91. The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
Thomas Hardy
#92. He supposed he was fascinated by that commonplace sense of history that anyone can feel glancing through the fresh news of ten or twenty years ago.
Stephen King
#93. It had barely registered, the lament was so commonplace. But I felt it now.
Gillian Flynn
#94. Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#95. Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. (104)
Matt Ridley
#96. There is a certain artificial polish, a commonplace vivacity acquired by perpetually mingling in the beau monde; which, in the commerce of world, supplies the place of natural suavity and good-humour, but is purchased at the expense of all original and sterling traits of character.
Washington Irving
#97. Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs.
William Osler
#98. The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
William Osler
#99. In today's interconnected and globalized world, it is now commonplace for people of dissimilar world views, faiths and races to live side by side. It is a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect.
Dalai Lama
#100. One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace.
Yoshida Shoin
