"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the "cherisher of infancy," and one must fall on these occasions into reflections which it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, "of chance and change, and fate in human life." Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... away by it, and passed from sight. Ayrault stood musing and regretting the necessity of such general death. "But," he thought, "I would rather die than lose my love; for then I should have had the taste of bliss without its fulfilment, and should be worse off than dead. Love gilds the commonplace, and deifies all it touches. Love survives the winter, and in my present frame of mind I should prefer earth and cold with it to heaven and spring. Oh, why is my soul so clogged by ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... for it, but to be always "on the watch." I must treat everybody as though everybody was the Christ. And I must treat every commonplace moment as though it were the home of ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... most interesting sights of the city, a dramatic performance at the Swan. Later he communicated a description of the building to his friend Arend van Buchell,[248] who recorded the description in his commonplace-book, along with a crude and inexact drawing of the interior (see page 169), showing the stage, the three galleries, and the pit.[249] The description is headed: "Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt." After a brief ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... trying to find out whether Hubert killed Arthur, whose little body lies close beside them. He says that he suspects Hubert "very grievously." Hubert protests. The Bastard tests the protest with one sentence: "Go bear him in thine arms." He utters the commonplace lines— ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... nothing but the usual commonplace talk, while the soup and fish were disposed of; when they reached the champagne and the entrees, things become more homelike and conversation flowed. A bushman, especially when primed with champagne, is always ready to give his tongue a run—and when he has two open-mouthed new chums for audience, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... he exclaimed delightfully. "Where did you find a voice like that? I realise now that we've been entertaining genius unawares all this time. Joan, my dear, henceforth two commonplace bodies like you and me must resign ourselves to taking ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... can judge him only by what others may narrate of him. What may be familiar to those who saw with their own eyes is not so to others, who can only take at second-hand those things which they had no opportunity of seeing for themselves. Besides, details omitted as frivolous or commonplace by history, which makes a profession of more gravity, are perfectly appropriate in simple memoirs, and often enable one to understand and judge the epoch more correctly. For instance, it seems to me that the enthusiasm displayed by the entire ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for the external. We think, however, that it will be found, in most cases where the plea is set up, that the humanity for which the sacrifice has been made is equally external with that which has been disregarded, and much more commonplace and conventional; being in fact, only the outer life of existing society. We are met, of course, by the triumphant answer that Shakspeare wrote Roman plays with a very slender knowledge of the classics. It would be sufficient to reply, that we are speaking of cases where ignorance of antiquity ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... point of view; I looked on it as a child of mine, brought up through stress and danger and troubles of all kinds, but the ordinary traveller of course knows nothing of this and doubtless thinks it only a very commonplace and ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... confidants revised his work. He even lacked, it seems to us, the uniform rhetorical spirit, that style which in Voltaire's time was the first mark of a born poet. The effect of beautiful and noble sentiments, in splendid phraseology, is spoiled by trivial thoughts and commonplace expressions in the next line. Nor was the development of his taste sufficiently assured and independent. In his esthetic judgment he was quick, both to admire and to condemn; in reality, he was much more dependent upon the opinion of his French acquaintances than his pride would have admitted. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... And as no one in particular was looking after Anne and her affairs, as a girl in her teens she had focused her heart upon the gangling youth, and there grew into life one of those matter-of-fact, unromantic love affairs that encompass the whole heart. For they are as commonplace as light and air and are equally vital. Because their course is smooth, such affairs seem shallow. But let unhappy circumstance break the even surface, and behold, from their depths comes all the beauty of a great force diverted, all ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was a commonplace of American writing at the time and long after. A Rev. C.B. Boynton published a book devoted to the thesis that England and France had united in a "policy" of repressing the development of America and Russia (English and French Neutrality and the Anglo-French Alliance in their relations ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... rather than to Logic; and the foregoing is a commonplace account of a subject upon every point of which there ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... eyes. What did he care about commonplace declarations of friendship such as Silvey was making? His head was a-riot with the thrilling words of the latest love passage between the hero and a heroine so perfect that her like never existed beyond the covers of a novel, ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... commonplace enough, they carried a sincere message, and Cortlandt saw by the faces about him that the others were pleased. His own gaunt features turned more sallow than ever. The memory of what he had heard on the porch of his own house a few afternoons ago, of what he had seen at other times, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... miraculous and the commonplace intermixed. Following this bird, the invading force pushed on into Yamato, receiving the allegiance of a body of men who fished with cormorants in the Yoshino River and who doubtless supplied the army with food, and the allegiance of fabulous beings with tails, who came out of wells or through ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... said my father quietly; and, intimate as I was with Bigley, school-fellows and companions as we were, I could not help noticing the difference, and how thoroughly my father was the gentleman and Jonas Uggleston the commonplace ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... mother, Robin and Rosamund, in Queen Anne's Mansions and Little Market Street. He had stayed with his mother for nearly two hours. She had a very bad cold, unbecoming, complicated with fits of sneezing, a cold in the "three handkerchiefs an hour" stage. And this commonplace malady had made him feel very tender about her, and oddly pitiful about all humanity, including, of course, himself. While they talked he had thought several times, "It's hard to see mother in such a state when perhaps I shall never see her again. I don't ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a commonplace remark that fact is often stranger than fiction. It may be said, as a variant of this, that history is often more romantic than romance. The pages of the record of man's doings are frequently illustrated by entertaining and striking incidents, relief ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and least observed of all lights, is, however, daylight; and his talk was commonplace, just as sunshine is, which gilds the most indifferent objects, and adds brilliancy to the brightest. As for the old-world anecdotes which these clever persons were condescending enough to laugh at as pleasant ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... by no means commonplace. To me, I own, there was some excitement in talking quietly across a dinner-table with a man whose venomous pen-stabs had sapped the vitality of at least one monarchy. That much was a matter of public knowledge. But I knew more. I knew of him—from my friend—as a certainty what the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... we least expect it the Ideal meets us in the street of the Commonplace and locks arms with us. Nevermore shall we choose our paths uninfluenced. A new leaven has entered our personality to ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it is, shows a sense of the evil, but gives no indication of the remedy. Its contents are commonplace, and in no sense characteristic of the Society. The men who were to make its reputation had not yet found it out, and at this stage our chief characteristic was a lack of self-confidence unusual amongst revolutionaries. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... ugliness, the dreariness of life, but its ardours, its passions, its transporting emotions, its beauties. That was a task for a lifetime. Whatever was doubtful, this was certain, that one was set in a mysterious, attractive, complex place; if one regarded it carelessly, it seemed a commonplace affair enough, full of material activities, dull necessities, foolish stirrings, low purposes; but if one looked a little closer, there were strange, dim, beautiful figures moving in and out, evanescent and shadowy, behind the nearer and more distracting ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with regard to Hawbury. For Minnie and her sister the indefatigable priest had already concocted a plan before leaving home. This was the very commonplace plan of a disguise. It was to be an old woman's apparel, and he trusted to the chapter of accidents to make the plan a success. He noticed with pleasure that some women were at the place, and thought that the prisoners might be ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Patteson had so faithfully loved from early childhood, and whose years of suffering he had done his best to cheer. 'At rest at last.' In the same letter, in answer to some complaint from his sister of want of detail in the reports, he says: 'Am I trying to make my life commonplace? Well, really so it is more or less to me. Things go on in a kind of routine. Two voyages a year, five months in New Zealand, though certainly two-thirds of my flock fresh every year. I suppose it still sounds strange to you sometimes, and to ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time before the excitement quieted down and they gave her a chance to say she would go. Even then she spoke the words with fear and trembling as one might step off a commonplace threshold into a fairy palace, not sure but it might be ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... complete seriousness. It was this boy's way to infuse into all his actions an enthusiasm that deprived the most trifling of the commonplace element. He was the gayest passenger on board—the very life of the boat. Yet he had few accomplishments to recommend him, his abundant spirits alone attaining for him the popularity he ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... wholesome way with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambition," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... people other than dealers had drifted in to wait for the sale to begin—something for which the weather was largely to blame, for the day was dismal with a clammy drizzle settling from a low and leaden sky—and with a solitary exception these few were commonplace folk. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... acquainted with an ethical view-point which was already fairly familiar to nearly every resident in and about Chickaloosa. Reading the narrative, one living at a distance got an accurate picture of a personality elevated above the commonplace solely by the role which its owner filled; a picture of an old man thoroughly sincere and thoroughly conscientious; a man dull, earnest, and capable to his limits; a man who was neither morbid nor imaginative, but filled with rather a stupid gravity; a man canny about the pennies and affectionately ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... shook his head. "That night was the one night for me. I was in paradise. It's commonplace with you, I know. But it wasn't to me. I shall never live at such a pitch again. I'm done with philosophy. I want never to hear another word ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to someone; if the unconscious of the latter does not accept the suggestion, if it has not, as it were, digested it, in order to transform it into autosuggestion, it produces no result. I have myself occasionally made a more or less commonplace suggestion to ordinarily very obedient subjects quite unsuccessfully. The reason is that the unconscious of the subject refused to accept it and did ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... stood deferentially by her side, looking down on her, on her beautiful head. She half crouched, expecting to hear something banteringly complimentary; bold, commonplace—to feel even the touch of his sensual hand on her hair, on her cheek and My ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... f. was a clergyman, became minister of Athelstaneford, Haddingtonshire. His sole work was The Grave, a poem in blank verse extending to 767 lines of very various merit, in some passages rising to great sublimity, and in others sinking to commonplace. It was illustrated by William Blake (q.v.) B.'s s., Robert, was a very distinguished Scottish judge and Lord President of the Court of Session; and his successor in his ministerial charge was Home, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... most marked attention was offered to the Master of Ravenswood, in particular, by their noble entertainers. The truth was, that Lord Bittlebrains had obtained his peerage by a good deal of plausibility, an art of building up a character for wisdom upon a very trite style of commonplace eloquence, a steady observation of the changes of the times, and the power of rendering certain political services to those who could best reward them. His lady and he, not feeling quite easy under their new honours, to which use had not adapted their ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... "Q.E.D." 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) ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... said for it," replied Bertie musingly. "You see, until one has broken one's neck, the excitement of the thing isn't totally worn out; can't be, naturally, because the—what-do-you-call-it?—consummation isn't attained till then. The worst of it is, it's getting commonplace, getting vulgar; such a number break their necks, doing Alps and that sort of thing, that we shall have nothing at all ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of coarse weave; and the ancient trees with their proud large crowns, pines and laurels, ashes, cypresses, and oaks. During all the period of their growth they were hated with the hatred which restless hearts feel for that which is commonplace, trivial, uneventful, for that which stands still and ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... Well, Bracy, you quite startled me, my lad; I was taken by surprise, and I looked at it from the commonplace point of view. I've had time to think of it now from the scientific side. Tell me, can you control yourself when those fits come on? I mean, this involuntary nerve and ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... than half dreaded his arrival, had been wondering how they should meet after the strange revelation of the afternoon, had been thinking of the most trite and commonplace remark with which she might greet him. But when it actually came to the point, she could not say a word, only looked up at him with eyes full of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... handicraft. It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the grain and transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth century drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplace by achievements of the era ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... materials for an exhaustive biography of him. And the strange thing was that I could not, with the best will in the world, believe that he was lying to me. I had never heard a man telling so obviously the truth. And the truth about any one, however commonplace, must always be interesting. Indeed, it is the commonplace truth—the truth of widest application—that is the most interesting of ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... all these things about Miss Aiken, which seem to describe her, I have told only the commonplace, the expected or predictable details. Often and often I pause when I see an interesting man or woman and ask myself: "How, after all, does this person live?" For we all know it is not chiefly by the clothes we wear or the house we occupy or the friends we touch. There is something ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... which I wrote for McClure's, I made comment on the essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing land, a country without a hill, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... attempt class drill on petty town and county offices, would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, while it is perpetually dealing with ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... shall not expatiate on the works of the Byzantine Greeks, who, by the assiduous study of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, who, from his horn of plenty, has poured the names ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... life unbearable for many Iraqis. Robberies, kidnappings, and murder are commonplace in much of the country. Organized criminal rackets thrive, particularly in unstable areas like Anbar province. Some criminal gangs cooperate with, finance, or purport to be part of the Sunni insurgency or ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... the young ones, and naturally enough; since it must be an extraordinary vigor and venerability of life that can overcome the rusty sloth of age, and keep the senior flexible enough to take an interest in new things; whereas, hundreds of commonplace young men come hither to stare with eyes of vacant wonder, and with vague hopes of finding out what they are fit for. And this war (we may say so much in its favor) has been the means of discovering that important secret to not ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... Chinese. In opening 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 ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... whole setup no longer impressed him as it had several years before. Just as a professional actor is not impressed by being allowed backstage, or as a multimillionaire considers expensive luxuries as commonplace, so Spencer Candron thought of nothing more than his own personal work as he climbed the five steps and ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is commonplace; grey tints predominate. Towards the end of the larval period, after a few moultings, it begins to give a glimpse of the adult's richer livery and becomes striped, still very faintly, with pale-green, white and pink. Already the two sexes are distinguished by their antennae. Those of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Sartor as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... between her nurse and the keeper of her children, and her own wailings behind the scene, depicted with most touching effect. As soon, however, as she makes her appearance, the poet takes care to cool our emotion by the number of general and commonplace reflections which he puts into her mouth. Lower does she sink in the scene with Aegeus, where, meditating a terrible revenge on Jason, she first secures a place of refuge, and seems almost on the point of bespeaking ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... amused at this critical moment of my career by another observation that I overheard from the adjoining room. My grandfather, Jared, who was with my father at the time looking out of the window made the somewhat commonplace observation— ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... 'The commonplace injustice of a by-word,' Otto cried. 'The partiality of sex. She is a demirep; what then is Gondremark? Were she a ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... experience of the ages. The ordinary tasks and interests of boys, as well as daily conduct, can be made great channels for life's best achievement only in proportion to the dynamic throb of the Word that has inspired men to heroism amid the commonplace and the uncommon, to self-sacrifice ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... associated with the birth of the nation. Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the combatants in that war—who are obviously but commonplace men—for the figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... am now saying amounts to this, that an educated intelligence is good, but an educated sympathy is better. I recall certain lines written by the late Lord Carlisle on being told that a lady was plain and commonplace:— ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... ingenuity, various acquirements, and agreeable manners, Mr Skinner was held in much estimation among his contemporaries. Whatever he read, with the assistance of a commonplace-book, he accurately remembered, and could readily turn to account; and, though his library was contained in a closet of five feet square, he was abundantly well informed on every ordinary topic of conversation. He ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... worrying your head, young lady, though, with any notion of his having had enemies, or anything of that sort. The poor fellow was no hero of romance. I don't fancy even your halfpenny papers could drag any out of his life. It was just a commonplace robbery, with a bad ending for poor Fynes. Good evening, miss! Good night, sir! Glad to have met you, ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... up "God Save the King." Three commonplace enough young men, seated at a table near to her, laid down their napkins and stood up. Yes, there was something to be said for war, she felt, as she looked at their boyish faces, transfigured. Not for them Business as usual, the Capture of German Trade. Other ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... took place the Captain was conscious of an absurd feeling of disappointment. He could not understand why he felt any anxiety to see Mrs. Errington refuse a beggar alms. Yet he would gladly have followed, like a spy, to behold a commonplace and dingy event. Despite the apparent reluctance of the beggar to ply his trade, Hindford felt convinced that presently the man would approach Mrs. Errington and be promptly sent about his business. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... meant little to the young Rainhams. But they knew that Cecilia held it as a commonplace of decent behaviour that people did not tell lies. They had, indeed, often marvelled that she preferred to "take her gruel" rather than use any ready untruth that would have shielded her from their mother's wrath. Avice and Wilfred had no such scruples on their own account: ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... if you can to obtain for me a gifted and elegant princess. Of all things in the world I would hate to have a dull and commonplace wife." ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... and there will always be more lovers in the world for such as you while your sweet youth lasts, whether I live to woo you or not. That thought saddens me. Yet should I not feel it enough to have known and loved you? Suppose you had never been in the world, and I had loved some commonplace pretty girl instead of little Allison, with eyes like an autumn ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... perfect exaltation, that I knew not the slightest prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I was making my body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole task. I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I regarded the work as just about as commonplace as would a brick-mason ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... arrived with Celestine, Crevel's daughter, who was nursing the infant Hulot, he was delightful to his daughter-in-law, loading her with compliments—a treat to which Celestine's vanity was little accustomed for no moneyed bride more commonplace or more utterly insignificant was ever seen. The grandfather took the baby from her, kissed it, declared it was a beauty and a darling; he spoke to it in baby language, prophesied that it would grow to be taller than himself, insinuated compliments for his son's benefit, and restored ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the recurrent pulses of a slow working order, and the wonder of a year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... gave color so completely to her life, that it would have been as absurd for her as for them to have looked at the probabilities of the case. Never once did she say to herself, that to one in her circumstances, life would most likely be full of disappointments and commonplace incidents. But time, the great revealer, soon opened to her those pages which her wisest friend would not have dared to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with the objection that such a truth is only apparently a truth; i.e., on the plane of embodied appearances, and naturally the question arises, where (if at all) is the real truth of the mythos? That truth which is beyond the mere metaphysical thinker and commonplace philosopher; the truth which the Initiates recognize—where is it? That truth lies far beyond the purview of Astro-Mythology. It is connected with the center of angelic life. Sufficient here to say that, as there are seven races of humanity, seven divisions to the human constitution, seven ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... robin and starwort in the hedges like an unbroken collie. It is safe to say that no further thought of school or message crossed his mind from the moment that the highest white steading of Craig Ronald sank out of view, until his compulsory return. Andra had shut out from his view so commonplace and ignominious facts as home ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... songs of birds and a soft, shy wind that ruffled the short hair about her forehead, little Meg was supremely happy. To be tired, to be made to rest, to be kissed and tucked in and sternly commanded to stay where she was till she was fetched—all this, so commonplace to cherished, cared-for folk, seemed quite wonderful to Meg, and she snuggled down among the ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... Gros-Cassaud Florimond, Sep.19, 1799.) "Among the corruptible and corrupting agents there are only too many public functionaries."—Mollien, "Memoires," I., 222. (In 1800, he had just been appointed director of the sinking-fund.) "The commonplace compliment which was everywhere paid to me (and even by statesmen who affected the sternest morality) was as follows—you are very fortunate to have an office in which one may legitimately accumulate the largest fortune in France. "—Cf. Rocquain, "Etat de la ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... desperate estrangement of the world. Arthur and his lady-love vanished from my thoughts. No one could put into a rather hackneyed old hymn-tune such an appeal who had never known the meaning of the words. Their meaning, anyhow, isn't commonplace. I turned very cautiously and glanced at the musician. She was leaning forward a little over the keys, so that at the approach of my cautious glance she had but to turn her face into the thin flood of moonlight for every feature to become distinctly ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... the way we read of in Mr. Glaisher's own accounts. This part is in most cases approximately indicated in that most attractive volume of his entitled, "Travels in the Air," by diagrams giving a sectional presentment of his more important voyages; but a little commonplace consideration may take the ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... angrily pacing up and down the room. "What arrant nonsense a man can be capable of when he is headstrong to begin with! To think of the elegant Horatio King, a model for all men, surrounding himself with this commonplace family. Faugh! It is easy enough to see what they are all after. But I shall prevent it. Meanwhile, the only way to do it is to break the spirit of this Polly Pepper. Once do that, and I have the task ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... pearl set in the richest casket! This commonplace, flourishing centre of cotton spinning, woollen, and cretonne manufacture, built in red brick, lies in the narrow, beautiful valley of the Liepvrette, as it is called from the babbling river of that name. But there is really no valley at all. The congeries of red-roofed houses, factory chimneys ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from *several* big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... relapsed into a deferential silence. His daughter smiled and questioned very graciously, and called everything beautiful and delightful; which rather disappointed me, as I had taken her to be a woman of some originality. She is rather a puzzle;—or is she, indeed, a very commonplace person, and the fault in me, who am forever taking women to mean a great deal more than their Maker intended? Regarding Miss Blunt I have collected a few facts. She is not twenty-four, but twenty-seven years old. She has taught music ever since she was twenty, in a large boarding-school just ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... box, Riatt at once seated himself behind Christine. There is no place like the opera for public devotion. Christine was resplendent in black and gold with a huge black and gold fan that made the fans of the temple dancers—the opera was "Aida"—look commonplace and ineffective. ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... were instantly on their hind-feet, propping themselves against her waist. Lennan held the black horse—a bizarre little beast, all fire and whipcord, with a skin like satin, liquid eyes, very straight hocks, and a thin bang-tail reaching down to them. The little creature had none of those commonplace good looks so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... She was a commonplace, narrow, selfish woman, whose character is not worth sketching. Tom stood a little in fear of her, and was usually careful not to impose extra tasks, but since she helped him to save and get ahead, he regarded her ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... so, and the carpenter doesn't think so, and the band doesn't think so. But he is. Many of the music-hall favourites, such as La Milo and La Loie Fuller, would have no existence but for him. Skilful lighting effects and changes of colour are often all that carries a commonplace turn to popularity; and just think of the power in that man's hands! He could ruin any young turn he liked simply by "blacking her out"; and, if he feels good, he can help many beginners with expert advice. The young girl new to the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Archie's room was the one his mother had occupied ever since his remembrance, and miserable and empty as it was, to him there was an atmosphere of the purest delight. All other spots were trivial and commonplace compared to the one where the maternal blessing had been pronounced, and the maternal breath had ceased; and hardened indeed must the heart have been that could resist his desire that this one sacred spot might be consecrated alone to him. Here were the books from which her thin and tremulous fingers ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... his guest appear this morning. His dreams would have been pleasanter had he been perfectly sure that she would not in her youthful horror and despair evade him in the one way possible. He bade her good-morning with an inoffensive commonplace. He had shot his bolt; now his policy must be soothing and unexacting until her fear of him had abated and custom had reconciled her to her new life. She was silent at breakfast, speaking only when spoken to, and observant of his mother's ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... easily happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things—about the new kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica's ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... discovered in due time, was a poetical way of expressing what in commonplace language would be called, "kicking ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... a commonplace beauty about "Orchard House"—a kind of spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness—a kind of common triad of the New England homestead, whose overtones tell us that there must have been something aesthetic fibered in the Puritan severity—the ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... study, maintained an unnatural reserve, in which there was silent antagonism. Dora relieved the situation by a commonplace. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... duped leads them to reaction against the entire effort, the whole work of the century. Disgust with liberty, distrust of science, denial of the future, that is what they now profess. And they have such a horror of the commonplace that they would rather believe in nothing or the incredible. It may of course be commonplace to say that two and two make four, yet it's true enough; and it is far less foolish for a man to say and repeat it than to believe, for instance, in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... also; doesn't it?' said the banker petulantly. He was almost angry because she was introducing a commonplace as to the world's condition into a particular argument as to their daughter's future life,—which he felt to be ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... measure of his uncompromising chagrin, and as he was the central figure of the little group, as he held its heart-strings all in his own hand, it reflected faithfully the eclipse of his own genius. No one had ventured upon the cheerful commonplace of saying that the change of air and of scene would restore his spirits; this would have had, under the circumstances, altogether too silly a sound. The change in question had done nothing of the sort, and his companions had, at least, the comfort of their perspicacity. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... one fact about employers, in all cities which I know, which may seem commonplace to you, but which to me is very significant. Whatsoever business they may do in the city, they take good care, if possible, not to live in it. As soon as a man gets wealthy nowadays, his first act is to take to himself a villa in the country. Do I blame him? Certainly ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of a type radically different from the first. There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial cosmopolitanism sat upon his features. He was several years older than the first arrival, his hair being slightly frosted, his eyebrows bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was rather full and flabby, and yet it was not ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... now. Nor will I believe, though you were to tell me so yourself, that you are leagued with any obscure, fanatic sect who desire Rome's downfall. Consider what Rome is;" and now he had got into the magnificent commonplace, out of his last panegyrical oration with which he had primed himself before he set out. "I am a Greek," he said, "I love Greece, but I love truth better; and I look at facts. I grasp them, and I confess to them. The wide earth, through untold ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... groomsmen, and how much six times seven is. Meanwhile, you are not the 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 ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the honour of God. No Catholic could dream that blessed Mary would be in any wise honoured by the attribution to her of what belongs to her Son. These are no doubt commonplaces, but it is better to be commonplace than to be misunderstood. The intercession that is asked of the blessed Mother is the intercession of one who by God's election is more closely associated with God than any other human being is or can be. Her power of prayer is felt to proceed from the depth of her ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Mose's beefsteak; that yearling we beefed this morning is going to make some fine eating, if you ask me." His tone was absolutely devoid of anything approaching persuasion; it simply took a certain improbable thing as a commonplace fact, and it tilted the ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... an occasional commonplace remark both the driver and the passenger were allowed to use the time ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... have struck them as the least remarkable, and some things even which would in another have disgusted them altogether. Impertinent and rude things done by THEIR child they thought SO clever! laughing at them as something quite marvellous; her commonplace speeches were said over again as if they had been the finest poetry; and the pretty ways which every moderately good child has were extolled as if the result of her excellent taste, and the choice of her judgment and will. They would even say sometimes ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... flat 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 ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... at once overwhelmed with anxiety lest he go too far, lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... clad in the height of the fashion, and his gay apparel, with its lace trimmings and jewelled ornaments, bespoke him no commonplace adventurer. But the most striking feature in his appearance was his hair, which fell in sunny locks upon his shoulders from under his velvet hat with its spreading plume. In truth he looked more like a Norse Viking of old than a cavalier of the ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... 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 the household read, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Sumner was in no mood to appreciate the divine precept, "Servants, obey your masters." Having declared fugitive slaves to be "the heroes of the age," he had not, as we may suppose, any very decided taste for the commonplace Scriptural duties of submission and obedience. Nay, he spurns at and rejects such duties as utterly inconsistent with the "inalienable rights of man." He appeals from the oracles of eternal truth to "the testimony of the times." He appeals from Christ ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... none else in modern literature could fill. His new book, Incredible Adventures (MACMILLAN), is a combination of both methods. Four of the five adventures are of the mystically gruesome kind, removed however from being commonplace ghost-stories by a certain dignity of conception. It is to be admitted that but for this dignity two at least would fall into some peril of bathos. Take the first, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, in which a young tutor, bear-leading a spiritless scion ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... "The clothes are commonplace," remarked Holmes, "save only the overcoat, which is full of suggestive touches." He held it tenderly towards the light. "Here, as you perceive, is the inner pocket prolonged into the lining in such fashion as to give ample space for the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for fifteen francs,—12s. 6d.,—is nothing for a rich man to give for a couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on the same day are ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... floating through his brain, the General leaned back in his chair more discomposed than usual by his late interview, for though his reflections were all worldly and commonplace, they had a deeper and unexpressed importance hardly recognized ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of AEsop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Mozart, one of the immortal names in music, contradicts the rule that extraordinary youthful talent is apt to be followed by a sluggish and commonplace maturity. His father entered the room one day with a friend, and found the child bending over a music score. The little Mozart, not yet five years old, told his father he was writing a concerto for the piano. The latter examined it, and tears of joy and astonishment rolled down his face on ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... life, and everything else merely accidental or accessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in the trough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers the essential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. And so, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be very differently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded critic will see it with eyes very different from those with which it may be viewed by the fair voter with no beard ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... misapplication. Hence arises a species of satire, or, if you will, satirist—THE SCRIBLERO-MASTIX. He must attack individuals. A heavily-resounding lash should scourge the immoral and the profane. Light stripes may suffice for quelling the less nocent dunces. In commonplace prose criticism, whatever form it may take, this can be done without supposed personal ill-will; for the Mastix is then only doing a duty plainly prescribed. The theologian must censure, and trample as mire, the railing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... but it is more than a chance that boys brought up together under like conditions have nothing to give each other. The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... one else. She said nothing, and he sat down upon the other side of the fireplace. There was an air of embarrassment about their meetings, until one or the other had made some remark which led to a commonplace conversation. On the present occasion neither seemed inclined to be the first speaker and for some minutes they sat opposite to each other in silence. Giovanni glanced at his wife from time to time, and once she turned her head and met his eyes. Her expression was cold and grave ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... ascribed to him, and a prose Epistle apparently written to commend himself to Mecaenas, have been handed down to us; but I believe that neither of them are genuine works of his; for the Elegies are commonplace, and the Epistle is wanting in perspicuity, a fault which cannot be imputed to his style. He was born on the sixth of the ides of December [27th December], in the consulship of Lucius Cotta [973] and Lucius ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from the inescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have cured him of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearly three years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace after a man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believe that it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not that strange mixture of grief and protest which ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his friend with surprise, and replied, with a laugh—"Why, Hans, you are displaying a new phase of character. Your remark is undoubtedly true—so true indeed that, although I object to that commonplace retort,—'You're another,'—I cannot help pointing out that it applies equally ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... commonplace personality, she encountered a handsome, well-groomed gentleman—one who won confidence by his intellectual face, and retained it by invisibly establishing a social equality. Fortunately, there is yet in Britain an ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... from Brighton, it was absolutely commonplace, and written upon note-paper which the detective, with Machiavellian cunning, traced to a stationer's shop in West Street. But the trade at that particular shop was a very brisk one; scores of people had bought ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... the presence of my unexpected companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness, moreover he inspired me with a curiosity which was quite equal to my shyness. Any number of circumstances, from a telegram from a sick relative to the most commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure from the chateau where I had left him so comfortably installed the night before. But that the expression of his face should have changed as it had, that in eighteen ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... become our slaves. The Lord meant to have Christianity planted at Malta, and therefore Euroclydon must drive the wreck to that shore, but still en route to Rome. Take the so-called misfortunes out of the history of religion, and you put it back into commonplace. Persecution has pushed on the cause it has striven to hinder, and heroes are made by hindrances. "Why do the heathen rage? The Lord shall have them in derision." This was never so true as it was when the time came for Jesus to die. It seems as ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... woman of wealth to practice any great self-denial, that few have independence of mind and Christian principle sufficient to overcome such an influence. The more a mind has its powers developed, the more does it aspire and pine after some object worthy of its energies and affections; and they are commonplace and phlegmatic characters who are most free from such deep-seated wants. Many a young woman, of fine genius and elevated sentiment, finds a charm in Lord Byron's writings, because they present a glowing picture ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the "Hymn of Life," despite the commonplace and the navrante vulgarite which characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same has been done to the words of Isa (Jesus); for the author, who is well-read in the Ingil (Evangel), evidently intended the allusion. Mansur el-Hallaj (the Cotton-Cleaner) ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... were very simple and commonplace; but the tone, the look, and the gesture that accompanied them spoke more than volumes, and completely won the heart of the passionate and despairing creature before her for ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and small, that came in the train of the years, drove them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most pressing material needs died down, but the dreams and ambitions had died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... what I had been told to expect, I was surprised at the prettiness of the little house, when I stepped out of the cab and looked about me. It was stuck on like a swallow's nest to the end of a great row of commonplace houses, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, but itself was not the work of one of those wretched builders who care no more for beauty in what they build than a scavenger in the heap of mud he scrapes from the street. It had been built by a painter for himself, in the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... feel as though they have known them all their lives; and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things—that a nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner or by some observer from within. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... number of failures will be greater for the failing pupils who remain in school the longer time may seem rather commonplace. But it will not seem trite to state that the percentage of the total failures on the total subject enrollments increases by school semesters up to the seventh; that the percentage of possible failures for all graduating pupils increases likewise; or that the failures ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... portions which floated slowly along, separating more and more, the dull grey growing rapidly silvery, then golden, and the gold becoming suffused with soft light. So beautiful was the scene that, while Archie gazed thoughtfully at its beauty, even commonplace, powder-besmirched Peter sat with his lips apart, staring hard, and then, forgetting himself and their risky position, with its need for concealment, he ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... of them, that little floating chip broken off from home, and every silent, ungainly step of the camels was carrying them more hopelessly away from it. That very morning how beneficent Providence had appeared, how pleasant was life!—a little commonplace, perhaps, but so soothing and ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Glass lamps of many simple shapes shared popularity for a long time with the pewter lamps; and as pewter gradually disappeared from household use, these glass lamps monopolized the field. They were rarely of cut or colored glass, but were pressed glass of commonplace form and quality. A group of them is here given which were all used in old New England houses in the early ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... 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; ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... progressed with her day. The third diner was an adored young actor with a low, veiled voice which, combining itself with almond eyes and a sentimental and emotional curve of cheek and chin, made the most commonplace "lines" sound yearningly impassioned. He was not impassioned at all—merely fond of his pleasures and comforts in a way which would end by his becoming stout. At present his figure was perfect—exactly the thing for the uniforms of royal persons ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ... Aristophanes. This had been a commonplace in the discussions at the end of the seventeenth century, in England and France, on the morality ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... original form was practically done away with. No one reads it now but professed students of the literature of Queen Anne's time. And so artfully has the new matter been woven into the old that if the recasting of 'The Rape of the Lock' were not a commonplace even in school histories of English literature, not one reader in a hundred would suspect that the original sketch had been revised and enlarged to more than twice its length. It would be an interesting task for the student to compare the two forms printed ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... hell! And yet one would not at first sight think that such triumphs and such toasts, such medals, and clasps, and garters were to be won on earth or in hell just by saying such simple- sounding and such commonplace things as those are for which Ill-pause receives his decorations. 'Take time,' he says. 'Yes,' he admits, 'but there is no such hurry; to-morrow will do; next year will do; after you are old will do quite as well. The darkness shall cover you, and your sin will not find you out. Christ ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born. They ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... physique, grand voice, the highest finish of musical execution, and the actor's faculty. What more unique triumph can be fancied than such a one violating all the laws of probability? Ronconi's low stature and commonplace features could express a tragic passion which could not be exceeded, or an exuberance of the wildest, quaintest, most spontaneous comedy ever born of mirth's most airy and tameless humor. Those who saw Ronconi's acting in this country saw the great artist as a broken man, his powers ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with 'the prince of the devils'! And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... her enough to understand the sort of meeting, and the sort of pain it was creating. She had seen only Mrs. Martin and the two girls. They had received her doubtingly, if not coolly; and nothing beyond the merest commonplace had been talked almost all the time—till just at last, when Mrs. Martin's saying, all of a sudden, that she thought Miss Smith was grown, had brought on a more interesting subject, and a warmer manner. In that very room she had been measured last September, with her two friends. There were the pencilled ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... remind Von Barwig of his presence, he touched him gently on the arm. Von Barwig started. A look of recognition came into his eye, and with it a smile that metamorphosed his homely, almost ugly face into something beyond mere beauty; a smile that transformed a somewhat commonplace personality into an appealing and compelling individuality. There is no need to describe the delicate, sensitive, rugged countenance, which, when he smiled, radiated love and sympathy for his fellow-beings and made him what is ordinarily ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... the industry, good sense, and benevolence of its author. Of the "Travels" of Mr. Christian Curwen we hardly know what to say. He is bold and honest in his politics, a great enemy to abuses, vapid in his levity and pleasantry, and infinitely too much inclined to declaim upon commonplace topics of morality and benevolence. But, with these drawbacks, the book is not ill-written, and may be advantageously read by those who are desirous of information upon the present ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... began to talk about spring coming, about horses and cattle, and feed, about commonplace ranch matters not interesting to them, but which seemed to make conversation and hide their true thoughts. Wade listened, and it seemed to him that ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... elapsed since Charles Osborne ought to have received his father's letter, and yet no communication had reached either of the families. Indeed the gradual falling off of his correspondence with Jane, and the commonplace character of his few last letters left little room to hope that his affection for her stood the severe test of time and absence. One morning about this period she brought William into the garden, and after ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... heard her called by the pupils—had not been aware, owing to the noise, of a stranger's entrance, and Waymark on his side was so struck with the face presented to him. He had expected, at the most, a pretty girl of the commonplace kind: he saw a countenance in which refinement was as conspicuous as beauty. She was probably not more than eighteen or nineteen. In speaking with the children she rarely if ever smiled, but exhibited a gentle forbearance which had something touching ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... of the town have been described already. The Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... times, and how different things were when they were young. There is no romance in the world now, and no heroism. The very winters and summers are nothing to what they used to be; in fact, life is altogether on a small, commonplace scale. Now that is a miserable sort of thing; it brings a sort of paralyzing chill over the life, and petrifies the natural spring of joy that should ever be leaping up to meet the fresh new mercies ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... Mary. She longed to ask what they were, but the woman and the girl seemed absorbed in their books and papers. Mary thought they must be dull and stupid; but suddenly it came to her that to many people, these among others, maybe, this journey was a commonplace, everyday affair. Even going to France or Italy might not be to them a high adventure. Extraordinary to reflect that all over the world men and women were travelling, going to wonderful new places, seeing wonderful new things, and taking it as a ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... door. But had she been proof against the other folly? Had she been able to walk heart-whole by his side, while he chatted his commonplaces about love? Yes, they are commonplaces when we read of them in novels; common enough, too, to some of us when we write them; but they are by no means commonplace when first heard by a young girl in the rich, balmy fragrance ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... information but it is simply commonplace, every-day fact. Sausage, hamburger steak and "game" with a high flavor, are little if any better than carrion, and the poisons which such foods introduce into the body must all be detoxicated by the liver ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... house many treasures, once part of its adornment, are now missed; and while books, pictures, and gems have disappeared, modern ideas of comfort have suggested the insertion of electric lights and telephones. To regret the treasures of the past is a commonplace; it would seem fitter to make the best of the advantages of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... capitalist stepped from the elevator on his way to breakfast he found himself face to face with the man who so desperately needed financial assistance. "Why, how do you do, Mr. Worth. When did you land in San Felipe?" Cartwright's tone seemed to subtly change his commonplace question into—"Why are you in ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... neck, however, to see Mr. and Mrs. Pouch depart. They were too commonplace entirely. He played the march with such doleful indifference that Eddie found the aisle as long as the distance from Marathon to Athens. Also he was trying to walk so that his pinching ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the castle was completely destroyed and Italianised. The beautiful and picturesque irregularities of the walls were removed, the towers shaved off, the windows transformed into commonplace circular-headed apertures. And so the castle remained for ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth |
