"Commonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wondrous affinity exists between it and a man's imagination! For this room of mine, as I behold it in the glass, is the same, and yet not the same. It is not the mere representation of the room I live in, but it looks just as if I were reading about it in a story I like. All its commonness has disappeared. The mirror has lifted it out of the region of fact into the realm of art; and the very representing of it to me has clothed with interest that which was otherwise hard and bare; just as one sees with delight upon the ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to Lady Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman of the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the imitation. As it was, her many friends in the house ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... pleasure had, so to speak, carried every woman off her feet, and there was no limit to their abuses. Mademoiselle de l'Enclos, while devoting herself to a life of pleasure, followed certain philosophical rules and regulations which removed from the unrestrained freedom of the times the stigma of commonness and conferred something of respectability upon practices that nowadays would be considered horribly immoral, but which then were regarded as nothing uncommon, nay, were legitimate and proper. The cavaliers cut one another's ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... able to recognize the superiority of a woman who lived in a cottage, the young ladies felt and disliked it; and the matron felt the commonness of the girls, without knowing what exactly it was. The girls, on the other hand, were interested in the young man: he looked like a gentleman! Ian was interested in the young women: he thought they were shy, when they were only "put out," and wished to make them comfortable—in which he quickly ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... sea relieves everything about or near it, from the humiliation of commonness. The stamp of distinction rests on its printless waves. It was the first surface of the earth, and its primal regency has never been lost or forfeited;" a suspicion crossed my mind: "How was it your father spoke of Devonshire. I never knew before that you came from that pearl ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... gardens. Instinctive happiness, or joy of life, is one of the most important widespread popular goods that we have lost through industrialism and the high pressure at which most of us live; its commonness in China is a strong reason for thinking well of ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... like some old remembered psalm, Or sweet, familiar face, Not less because of commonness You ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... be true, in the modern phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest natural is the highest supernatural, it is not everybody that is able to see that; natural facts permit us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working miracles, but they worked miracles because ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... The commonness of fraud of this kind among the Virginia planters of the earlier period does not necessarily stamp them as being conspicuously dishonest. They were subjected to great and unusual temptations. Their vast power and their immunity from punishment, made it easy for them to enrich ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... though the feeling was only half defined. It seemed to her as if Hobert were some visitor coming,—not her husband. A shadowy feeling of insecurity had touched her; the commonness of custom was gone, and she looked from the window often, as the preparation for supper went on, with all the sweetness of solicitude with which she used to watch for his coming from under the grape-vines. Little Jenny was ready ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... errors." Byron, though he thought him "the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare," he roundly accused of "vulgarity and effrontery," "coarseness and commonness," "affectation and brutal selfishness." In the case of Goethe, he said that "the moralist and the man of the world may unite in condemning" his laxity of life; and even in Faust, which he esteemed the "most wonderful work of poetry in our century," the fact ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... shrinks from originality lest it should be regarded as impertinent; the other lest, being new, it should be wrong. We detect the one in the sensitive discreetness of the style. We detect the other in the complacency of its platitudes and the stereotyped commonness of its metaphors. The writer who is afraid of originality feels himself in deep water when he launches into a commonplace. For him who is timid because weak, there is no advice, except suggesting the propriety of silence. For him who is timid because fastidious, there is this advice: ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Mr. Lowell said, that he knew of, or that occurred to his memory, with which Pepys's Diary could fairly be compared, except the journal of L'Estoile, who had the same anxious curiosity and the same commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself. Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... their talents, or to bring suspicion upon their fitness for their own vocation, by the failures which they risk in deviating into others. Besides, in poetry, the temptation of distinction no longer exists—the commonness of that talent in the market, at present, being such as to reduce the value of an elegant copy of verses very far below the price it was at, when Mr. Hayley enjoyed an almost exclusive monopoly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... format of a municipal document, however, is in itself a delightful essay in unconscious self-characterisation. Those of the United States express a plain democratic people. They have, in fact, all the commonness of the job printer. "Printed at the Journal Office," is, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... schools which gives the keys of knowledge to the mass of the people. Our common schools are important in the same way as the common air, the common sunshine, the common rain,—invaluable for their commonness. They are the corner-stone of that municipal organization which is the characteristic feature of our social system; they are the fountain of that widespread intelligence which, like a ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... him pretty well, too," I replied. "His incurable commonness is the secret of his success. He 'voices,' as he would say himself, the opinion of the average man on every subject. He might be a leader-writer on the Mail or Times. What do you know of the average man or of his opinions? But the man in the street, as he is called to-day, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... birth; it is then only beginning. And the pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is simply left to take its course for the further establishing and confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did not leave the real school to make a play school, setting up a box for one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... had the same round knobby face as he has to-day, the same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment, the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all things became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell of love, but only after its barbs were already sticking in my heart. He was, I know now the bastard of that great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart; he brought the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the commonness of the name of Brown proves its owners to be unromantic, we hold that this is a distinct evidence of the deep-seated romance of the family. In the first place, it is probable that their multitudinosity is the result of romance, which, as every one knows, ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... cotton was oozing; brought out the wash-boiler, did a washing, had dinner, sang about the fire; granther and the youngest baby gamboling together, while the limousinvalids, insulated from life by plate glass, preserved by their steady forty an hour from the commonness of seeing anything along the road, looked out at the campers for a second, sniffed, rolled on, wearily wondering whether they would find a good hotel that night—and why the deuce ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the present day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of which men see the most—that type of things which could never have been but that it might pass. The demand marks the commonness, narrowness, low-levelled satisfaction of the age. It loves its own—not that which might be, and ought to be its own—not its better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the sake of whose approach it exists. I do not think that the age is worse in this respect than ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... various crested fowls {226} as sub-breeds under the Polish fowl; but I have great doubts whether this is a natural arrangement, showing true affinity or blood relationship. It is scarcely possible to avoid laying stress on the commonness of a breed; and if certain foreign sub-breeds had been largely kept in this country they would perhaps have been raised to the rank of main-breeds. Several breeds are abnormal in character; that is, they differ in certain points from all wild Gallinaceous birds. At first I made a division ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... people, the common people, and always gave out their quality and atmosphere. His commonness, his nearness, as of the things you have always known,—the day, the sky, the soil, your own parents,—were in no way veiled, or kept in abeyance, by his culture or poetic gifts. He was redolent of the human and the familiar. Though capable, on occasions, of great pride and hauteur, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole volumes of romance. The novel-reader to whom Demos was the repetition of what he had seen and known, and what had planted sickness in his soul, found the New Arabian Nights a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had discovered that modern ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the trail. She called the insult down to him over her shoulder. But before she had gone a half-mile her eyes were blind with tears. Why did she get so angry? Why did she say such things? Other girls were ladylike and soft-spoken. Was there a streak of commonness in her that made possible such a scene as she had just gone through? In her heart she longed to be a lady—gentle, refined, sweet of spirit. Instead of which she was a bad-tempered tomboy. "Miss Spitfire" her brothers sometimes called ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... marvel in itself than any that it explains, and beats the spooks hollower than they are. Just consider the phenomena of dreams, what things we do, what sights we see. It is only the commonness of dreams that blinds us to the fact that they are more marvellous than ghost-stories. Mr. Lang thinks the theory of the sub-conscious self that uses our muscles for its own ends is "the most startling thing ever offered ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... rough and scrubby), with dark grey eyes (I knew at once they were grey because the light struck into them) rimmed with black lashes, so long you couldn't help noticing them; black eyebrows and hair short and sleek like Stan's, or any other well-groomed man one knows. Besides, commonness shows in people's mouths more than anywhere else; it's hard to define, but it's there; and this man's mouth is the best part of his face—unless it's the chin; or perhaps the nose, I'm not quite sure which, though ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... others, and out in the open, Phoebe seemed to shed the commonness that had blighted her at that dreadful tea. She still coquetted, but it was with a fresh and dewy coquetry as of some innocent woodland creature that displays its charms as naturally as it breathes. Ishmael found himself pleased instead of irritated when he received her weight as he helped ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... for the cheap Americans with loud voices and provincial speech, and general commonness, whom one meets over here; but with all their faults they cannot approach the vulgarities at table which I have seen in Paris. In all America we have no such vulgar institution as their rince-bouche—an affair resembling a two-part finger-bowl, with the water in a cup in the middle. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... honour—that is, in other words, to lay the foundations of that empire which Augustus was to govern. This is the noble invention of our author, but it hath been copied by so many sign-post daubers that now it is grown fulsome, rather by their want of skill than by the commonness. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... it be Aminta and Matthew. Brother and sister they were in the spirit's world, but in this world the titles had a sound of imposture. And with a great longing to call her by some allying name, he rejected 'friend' for its insufficiency and commonness, notwithstanding the entirely friendly nature of the burden to be spoken. Friend, was a title that ran on quicksands: an excuse that tried for an excuse. He distinguished in himself simultaneously, that the hesitation and beating about ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations? All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but then, they are the periphrases of a polite ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... once, and four years had altered him but little in that respect. He had not yet grown stout, but it was evident that Nature had that injury in reserve for him. To grow stout is not necessarily to look common, but if there is an element of inherent commonness in man or woman, a very little additional surface will make it manifest, as an enlarged photograph magnifies its own defects. The "little more and how much it is" had come upon the unhappy Tristram, once the slimmest of ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... her type. No. As long as the world stands, a rose just open will remain the fairest similitude for a perfect woman. It's commonness cannot hinder that. She is not an unearthly Dendrobium, ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... hypercritical, while on this subject, the misapplication of terms, I must question the correctness of the phrase "Under the circumstance." A thing must be in or amidst its circum-stances; it cannot be under them. I admit the commonness of the expression, but it is not the less a solecism. Can you inform me when it was introduced? I hope it is not old enough to be considered inveterate. The best authors write "in the circumstances;" and yet so prevalent is the anomaly, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... apparently for the same reason. The cruel disillusion which in consequence overtakes the poor little soul-starved heroine rises almost to the height of tragedy. It is an every-day tale, full of "deep and blood-veined humanity," and deriving its interest and significance from the very fact of its commonness. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... day—or any day. There was an inborn fineness or sensitiveness in Lincoln, a touch of the artist (he even wrote verses) which contrasts with the phlegm of his illustrious contemporary, General Grant. The latter had a vein of coarseness, of commonness rather, in his nature; evidenced by his choice of associates and his entire indifference to "the things of the mind." He was almost illiterate and only just a gentleman. Yet by reason of his dignified modesty and simplicity, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... it by custom, were not ashamed to read their lesson off a concealed book, or copy a date from a furtive piece of paper. They would have been ashamed of it before they came to Roslyn School, but the commonness of the habit had now made them blind or indifferent to its meanness. It was peculiarly bad in the fourth-form, because the master treated them with implicit confidence, and being scrupulously honourable himself, was ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... have always been so fond of him. And things are prettier there, somehow. There is a great difference in the way people live, and I mean to change some things. It isn't because one is ashamed to be old-fashioned; some of the old ways are lovely. It is only when you tack hardness and commonness on them and think ugliness has a real virtue in it. We will have both sides to talk about. But if you were going back to England, it would break my ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... elder lady turned round. "Mr. Winterbourne," said Miss Daisy Miller, introducing the young man very frankly and prettily. "Common," she was, as Mrs. Costello had pronounced her; yet it was a wonder to Winterbourne that, with her commonness, she had ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... our own generation, largely increased. It is not simply that its average duration is extended. This, in a large degree, is due to the diminished amount of infant mortality. The improvement is shown more conclusively in the increased commonness of vigorous and active old age, in the multitude of new contrivances for economising and therefore increasing time, in the far greater intensity of life both in the forms of work and in the forms of pleasure. 'Life at high pressure' is not without its ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... nothing repulsive in the humility of these. She had been rather fastidiously worldly, she had been even aggressively worldly, in her preference for a luxurious and tasteful setting, and her mother now found it hard to bear her contented acceptance of the pervading commonness of things at Mrs. Maxwell's. Either her senses were holden by her fondness for Maxwell, or else she was trying to hoodwink her mother by an effect of indifference; but Mrs. Hilary herself was certainly not obtuse to that commonness. If she ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... medicine in Egypt, see Baas, pp. 16, 22. For the fame of Egyptian medicine at Rome, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. ii, pp. 151, 184. For Assyria, see especially George Smith in Delitzsch's German translation, p. 34, and F. Delitzsch's appendix, p. 27. On the cheapness and commonness of miracles of healing in antiquity, see Sharpe, quoting St. Jerome, vol. ii, pp. 276, 277. As to the influence of Chaldean ideas of magic and disease, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... fountain, displayed a part of him strangely different from that which had selected the almost miraculously beautiful rugs, and the embroideries on the divans. Exquisite taste was married with a commonness that ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the ball, the cry of the victim; he saw the blood flow. And this building up of circumstance was like a consecration of the man, till he seemed to walk in sacrificial fillets. Next he considered Davis, with his thick-fingered, coarse-grained, oat-bread commonness of nature, his indomitable valour and mirth in the old days of their starvation, the endearing blend of his faults and virtues, the sudden shining forth of a tenderness that lay too deep for tears; his children, Ada and her bowel complaint, and Ada's doll. No, death ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shelter a ghastly load of dead. Every hour at least one new body is uncovered and borne on a rough stretcher to some one of the many morgues. The sight loses none of its sadness and pathos by its commonness; only the horror is gone, giving place to apathy and stupor. Stalwart men, in mud-stained, working clothes, bring up the body, the face covered with a cloth. The crowds part and gaze at the burned corpse as it passes. At the morgue ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity or flat commonness. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... against these thrushes, whose extreme commonness renders them less highly esteemed than they would otherwise be, that they find their voices too early in the morning. But I am not myself prepared to second the criticism. They are not often at their ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense Of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... will be noticed that the remedies we recommend are in almost every case very cheap—even, like hot water, costing nothing, as they are in every house. This very simplicity and commonness has turned many against our treatment. We know, indeed, of one curious case where olive oil was derided and despised by a rheumatic patient, until his friends got it labelled "Poison, for external use only." It was then eagerly applied, and effected a cure. We warn ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... watched her in shamed silence he remembered with astonishment that it had taken him almost ten years to find out that Connie was vulgar. Now at last his eyes were opened—he had achieved a standard of comparison and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct, quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... others of Domenico Veneziano's following. They probably belong to the years 1460-1465. In the later of his preserved works, while there is no abatement of precise and laborious finish, we find beginning to prevail a certain harshness and commonness of type, and a lack of care for beauty in composition, the technical and scientific searcher seeming more and more ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... It is the commonness, the constant repetition of such stupidity and such lack of action that so much injures the reputation for intelligence of the army in the minds of those who have served in it; so that those who know it best, like it least—and put up with it only because it is the poor instrument ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... in making them, as he said, "in basketsful;" and also his description of the modus operandi, which was curious enough. They were of different sizes and prices, and their extreme rarity at present, considering the number formerly in use, is only less surprising than the commonness of pocket-watches which have superseded them. I never saw but one of these cheapest and most nearly forgotten horologia, and which the old brass-turner, as I recollect, boasted of as "telling the time true to a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... seems as though it had petered out altogether. But when once the plunge has been taken, and the strangeness and wonder and glory of the new life have become ordinary and commonplace with the sweet commonness of dear, familiar, daily things, then the old friendship comes stealing back—deeper and more understanding, perhaps, than in the days before one of the two friends had come into ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... concrete, obscure, and unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling actions, of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the condensation of a multitude of truths and thoughts, and that the wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more active, the deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pictured it coming with pomp and display that would at once have attracted all eyes; but God orders that it shall come without observation, unfolding its quiet beauty like the wayside flower, which there are few to see and very few to love. Commonness: that is the great note of the incarnation and the purposed ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... Reply Obj. 2: The commonness of a sin diminishes the shamefulness and disgrace of a sin in the opinion of men, but not as regards the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... its power in presenting these types, in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the simple effect upon us of the supreme types of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the salient points of its indecency, and blends the whole into a wild whirl that dizzies and dazes one; but the uncompromising afternoon, pouring in through manifold windows, tears away every illusion, and reveals the whole coarseness and commonness and all the repulsive details of this most alien and unmaidenly revel. The very POSE of the dance is profanity. Attitudes which are the instinctive expression of intimate emotions, glowing rosy-red in the auroral time of tenderness, and justified in unabashed freedom only by a long and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... read Goethe for years, before we come to see wherein the distinguishing peculiarity of his understanding, of his disposition, even of his way of writing, consists. It seems quite a simple style that of his; remarkable chiefly for its calmness, its perspicuity, in short its commonness; and yet it is the most uncommon of all styles: we feel as if every one might imitate it, and yet it is inimitable. As hard is it to discover in his writings,—though there also, as in every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded,—what sort of spiritual construction he has, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... it was. She despised them for their commonness, his people. They did not know what ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Science of Politics," these words: "Herbert Spencer's contributions to political and historical science seem to us mere commonplaces, sometimes false, sometimes true, but in both cases trying to disguise their essential flatness and commonness in a garb of dogmatic formalism."[212] Such an opinion, evidencing a conflict between two intellectual guides, staggered me, and it was with some curiosity that I looked subsequently, when the Index to Periodicals came out, to see who had the temerity ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... of Balmawhapple,—"a discreet young gentleman," said the Baron, "much given to field sports." Next came the Laird of Killancureit, who cultivated his own fields and cared for his own cattle—thereby (quoth the Baron) showing the commonness of his origin. Added to these were a "non-juring" Episcopal minister—that is, one who had refused to take the oaths of allegiance to King George's government, and, last of all, the "Baron-Bailie" or land-steward of Bradwardine, ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... most common, that is abound most in individuals, and the species which are most widely diffused within their own country (and this is a different consideration from wide range, and to a certain extent from commonness), often give rise to varieties sufficiently well-marked to have been recorded in botanical works. Hence it is the most flourishing, or, as they may be called, the dominant species,—those {54} which range widely over the world, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... leaf on much the same plan, formed of two leaves, stiff and strong, soldered at their bases. Sometimes the pillager meets prickles that sting him, as in the roses and briers; and if he is a little fellow he is sure to regard him with intense disgust, a bristly guard of wiry hair—hence the commonness of that kind of fortification. Against enemies of larger growth a tree or shrub will often aim sharp thorns—another piece of masquerade, for thorns are but branches checked in growth, and frowning with a barb in token of disappointment at not being able to smile in a blossom. In every jot and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... but a complaint to his master, which would disturb the peace of the household. She was indeed able enough to take care of herself and to ward off any unseemly boldness on his part; but she felt her noble purity soiled by contact with that taint of commonness of which she was conscious in this young fellow's ways, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... whose commonness alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the faults of democratic government in the United States—and Professor Bryce, we must remember, is on the whole most hopeful of its future—he detects as amongst its characteristics "a certain commonness of mind and tone, a want of dignity and elevation in and about the conduct of public affairs, and insensibility to the nobler aspects and finer responsibilities of national life." Then he goes on to say[37] that representative and ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... more—mingling faint regrets over past indulgences —the extra half pint of beer she drank on Saturday—the bit of cheese she bought on Monday. Of this face of care, revealing a spirit which Satan had bound, the schoolmaster caught sight,— caught from its commonness, its grimness, its defeature, inspiration and uplifting, for there he beheld the oppressed, down trodden, mire fouled humanity which the man in whom he believed had loved because it was his father's humanity divided ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... which to add to their income) the sight of his Victoire, who should have been a duchess, doing any menial work so distracted him, that my grandmother had to devise some method to secure herself from his observation when she washed certain bits of priceless lace which redeemed her old dresses from commonness, or cooked some delicacy for Mons. le Duc's dinner, or mended his honourable clothes. Thus Jeanette's old fable came into use; first in jest, and then as an adopted form for getting rid of my great-grandfather when he was in the way. ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... him if secured by a real plunge. There was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat and the colour of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement, above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing he appreciated his commonness could present him as ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... the nearly eight hundred species of North American birds, the robin is without question the one most generally known. Its great commonness and wide distribution have something to do with this fact, but can hardly be said to account for it altogether. The red-eyed vireo has almost as extensive a range, and at least in New England is possibly more numerous; but ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... N. normality, normalcy, normalness[obs3]; familiarity, naturalness; commonness (frequency) 136; rule, standard (conformity) 82; customary (habit) 613; standard, pattern (prototype) 22. V. normalize, standardize. Adj. normal, natural, unexceptional; common, usual ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... men a sense of quality, a power of divination in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be baffled by the delusive disguises in which men sometimes present themselves, but as a rule a chance word, an artless gesture, or even a glance, quickly corrects the initial error of the eye, and in ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... historic associations needs no explanation of the charm that such associations possess. There are streets and houses in London which, for pilgrims of this class, are haunted with memories and hallowed with an imperishable light that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life can quench or dim. Almost every great author in English literature has here left some personal trace, some relic that brings you at once into his living presence. In the time of Shakespeare,—of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Ellen's lameness had been a sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible, that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his entry with it. ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... duller than the future of this second-hand and multiplying world. Men need not be common merely because they are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what dullness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth—that the vulgarized are not un-civilized, and that there is no growth for them—it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... in his time. Now I have had my fill of fighting to-day, and you, doubtless through no fault of your own, have had none; you also are clad in mail and I, a common fellow, have none. Deign then to descend from that horse and take a turn with me though I be tired, and thus prove my commonness upon my body. Of your nobility do this, seeing that after all ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... of reaction when in the representation of beauty we try to avoid everything that is obviously pleasing and that has been crowned by the sanction of convention. We are then tempted in defiance to exaggerate the commonness of commonplace things, thereby making them aggressively uncommon. To restore harmony we create the discords which are a feature of all reactions. We already see in the present age the sign of this aesthetic reaction, which proves that ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... pictures in cheap gilt frames, the heavily gilded wall-paper, and the throws of thin silk over the picture corners must prove to him the standing of her family. She felt an ignoble satisfaction in it, for a certain measure of commonness clung to the girl like a cobweb. She was as yet too young to bloom free of her environment, her head was not yet over the barrier of her daily lot; her heart never would be, and that was her glory. Young Lloyd handed her the roll of valedictory ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... time; with the arrival of the Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him—that safety in doubt was not action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very commonness. In his case there was nothing of that—in no case in his life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and his breakfast, in the sense ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric in his ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons |
