"Commonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is an enemy,—a hideous, hateful thing. The longer one looks at it, the more one hates it. The more often one sees it, the less one grows accustomed to it. Its very commonness makes it all the more shocking. We may not be so much shocked at seeing the old die. We say, 'They have done their work, why should they not go?' That is not true. They have not done their work. There is more work in plenty for them to do, if they could but live; and ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... all in at a glance, saw the sign-manual of commonness on every detail, from the cast-iron stove to the household utensils, and his gorge rose as he said to himself, "And this is virtue!—What am I here for?" said he aloud. "You are far too cunning not to guess, and I had better tell you plainly," cried he, sitting down and looking out across ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... 2: The commonness of a sin diminishes the shamefulness and disgrace of a sin in the opinion of men, but not as regards the nature ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the 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 ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... it. My sister Mary has an art of taming, and will help her. I prefer her indifference to an undue elation: that would argue a commonness of mind from which I imagine ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... was Ida alone who worked these marvels, and whose all-sufficient reward for her hardest exertions was a chance word of kindness from her sister's lips. Rosamond was not unaffectionate, and not ungrateful; but she inherited much of her father's commonness and frivolity of character. She became so accustomed to owe everything to her sister—to resign all her most trifling difficulties to Ida's ever-ready care—to have all her tastes consulted by Ida's ever-watchful kindness—that she never appreciated, as ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... significance of her work. Comparing her with two other contemporaries, he wrote: "Miss Fannie Hurst shows the same artistic quality, the same instinct for reality, the same confident recognition of the superficial cheapness and commonness of the stuff she handles; but in her stories she also attests the right to be named with them for the gift of penetrating to the heart of life. No one with the love of the grotesque which is the American portion of the human tastes or passions, can fail of his joy in the play of the obvious traits ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... simplest of night-gear by Miss Alcott, and was wearing besides a blue cotton overall or wrapper in which the Rector's sister was often accustomed to do her morning's work. There was a marked incongruity between the commonness of the dress, and a certain cosmopolitan stamp, a touch of the grand air, which was evident in its wearer. The face, even in its mortal pallor and distress, was remarkable both for its intellect and its force. Buntingford stood a few paces from her, his sad eyes meeting hers. She motioned ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... stick fast to the memory, and do more than pages to express the author's meaning. He has little command of expression. His imagery is common; and his manner of arranging a trite figure in a rich suit of verbiage, only makes its essential commonness and poverty more apparent. His style is not dotted over with any of those shining points, either of imagery or epigram, which illumine works ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... charge at the squalid little town of Janway's Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to you," I said, "that children in a theatre at Christmas time are entitled to have a little fun that is not wholly connected with sordid domestic affairs and pothouse commonness?" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... not shift my ground like Moab's king, But from this spot whereon I stand, I pray— From this same barren rock to thee I say, "Lord, in my commonness, in this very thing That haunts my soul with folly—through the clay Of this my pitcher, see the lamp's dim flake; And hear the blow that would the ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... still 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 it is examined for identification, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... curtains, the olive-and-crimson furniture, the 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 as ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... particular questions about faith and repentance, &c. And in the mean time the most weighty points of religion, which have been the subject of the meditation and admiration of saints in all ages, are wholly laid aside through a misapprehension of their commonness as if a man would despise the sun and the air, and prefer some rare piece of stone or timber to them. Certainly, as in the disposal of the world, the Lord hath in great wisdom and goodness made the most needful and useful things most common—those ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close, making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His was the caricature ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... 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 matins, I think, until the eastern sky begins ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... 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 thus to belittle Spencer—the greatest political ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... redundant flesh before me, his large mottled cheeks inflated with laughter, his full red lips pursed into a gay and mocking expression. To me he personified success, happiness, achievement—the other shining extreme from my own obscurity and commonness; but the effect upon poor little Miss Matoaca was quite the opposite, I judged the next minute, from the one that he had intended. I watched her fragile shoulders straighten and a glow rather than a flash of spirit pass into ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... child, now you are talking absolute nonsense. Common? Well, to me commonness consists in common behaviour, mean tempers, a nasty, spiteful attitude of mind, a discontent with one's surroundings, a petty jealousy of others—oh, I hate a common mind as much as anyone in the world—but to use the word ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... scope of the book—like Longfellow's "Psalm of Life"—have been omitted because of their exceeding commonness and their accessibility. Many hymns of very high value—like "Jesus, Lover of my soul," "My faith looks up to thee," "Nearer, my God, to thee," "When all thy mercies, O my God," "How firm a foundation"—have also been omitted because they are found in all the hymnals, and to include ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... plan, on Mr. Dosson's part was unnatural and alarming; and there was further provocation in his appearing to shirk the responsibility of it by not having come up at such a moment with his accomplice. Delia was impatient to know what he wanted anyway. Did he want to drag them down again to such commonness—ah she felt the commonness now!—even though it COULD hustle? Did he want to put Mr. Flack forward, with a feeble flourish that didn't answer one of their questions, as a substitute for the alienated Gaston? If ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... some time doing them. The obligation of the mortgage and 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. Now ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... 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 ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... 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 ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the "commonness" of Lady Emma Hamilton, child of the slums, impersonator of risque stage pictures, and mistress of the greatest naval hero of all times, that appealed primarily to Louise's grand-aunt, Queen Caroline of Naples, but the abandon ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... things in the world, miss, I've wanted to go to London!" said Milly, flushing all over her face through the clear white skin which was one of her especial beauties. There was very little trace of commonness in Milly's good looks. Three years of life at the Rectory had refined her appearance, as also her manners and ways of speech; and Lettice thought that it would be far pleasanter to keep Milly about her than to go through the agonies of a succession of pert London girls. Yet something in Milly's ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... 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 ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... inane as if he had quoted it from a play. After a moment, as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater assurance, "I dare say they have a quality that the older generation missed. It isn't just commonness. The modern spirit means, I suppose, a breathless vitality. We are more intensely alive than our ancestors, perhaps, more restless, more inclined ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 I've thought a good deal about them all, because ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... extraordinary thing was the marvellous 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 noticed it, and during the short progress ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... book, 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 his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive in comparison with him. The very fact of that sincerity ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... after dinner; the commonness of the name has its disadvantages now. Poor Geoffrey!—I dare say there are fifty tombs, to the memory of fifty Clarkes, between this and York. But come, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... applies equally to much of Crabbe's poetry. But at least, if this incongruity is to exist, it is on the more hopeful side. The characteristic of so much poetry of our own day is that the manner is uncommon, and the commonness resides in ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... else in it to engage one. Aida is alive, but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery—something between the stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The music very rarely rises above commonness—that commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... broken after several years of effort; and that in like manner all the early schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true; but in my brother's case there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could have foreseen his after-emancipation. Yet in the course of time he was indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... something under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on, although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 her, and she ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... 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, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the tendency can hardly do other than continue. Nothing can look 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 dulness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth—that the vulgarised are not uncivilised, and that there is no growth for them—it does not look like a future at ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... and for once Bess was too ravenously hungry to protest at the "commonness" of it, and they set to at its ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid the strange, repellent grossness of him, the slight sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... suffer patiently, without scandal, a similar experience with vice. The woman's task was to keep fresh and unspotted herself, her home, her rooms, like some cool temple hidden away from summer heats and noisy commonness. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... 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
... further show that, in any limited country, the species which are 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, are the most ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments of human activity—this ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... very hard that Milly Ridge should be condemned to such a state of life as the West Side of Chicago afforded. After the cultivated, mildly luxurious atmosphere of the Kemps, she realized acutely the commonness of her home.... ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... described as marvellous, brilliant, astonishing, superb, but no one has described it as beautiful. Whether because of the commonness of the epithet, or because every one felt that beautiful was not the adjective that expressed the sensation the picture awoke in him, I know not. It is essentially a picture of the hour; it fixes the idea of the moment and reminds one somewhat of a premiere at the Vaudeville ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... a quilt from which the 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 they ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... like some fierce animal scenting freedom. The sentences she dropped were shallow, impatient, even stupid. And yet there was Rufus Cosgrave with his hungry eyes fixed on her, trapped by the nameless force that lay behind her triviality, her daring commonness. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... but now, she had voluntarily made it hers. She had wilfully entangled herself in its toils; they seemed to trip her steps, and make her stumble on the stairs as if they were tangible things. She had knowingly suffered such a man as that, whose commonness of soul she had always instinctively felt, to come back into her life, and she could never banish him again. She could never even tell any one; she was the captive of her shabby secret till he should come again and openly claim her. He would come again; there ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... 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
... 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 Pater
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;—a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color of its sands. In these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground. It has ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... save the interloper's life. That is a moment with all romance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick of time, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphant soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in Freya of the Seven Isles and elsewhere, is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin—tragic ruin against which no high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather than otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often maleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... ignorant and idle crowd. But those who are conscious of the weight of centuries of past literature, whom nothing satisfies, whom everything disgusts because they dream of something better, to whom the bloom is off everything, and who always are impressed with the uselessness, the commonness of their own achievements—these come to regard literary art as a thing unattainable and mysterious, scarcely to be detected save in a few pages ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... arms are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection, education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the spermatozoa, so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according to their comparative commonness. They are the central fact in our existence, the point towards which all ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D. |
