Commonplace Quotes

The more intelligence one has, the more people one finds original. Commonplace people see no difference between men. (Blaise Pascal)
Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace. View quote
Elbert Hubbard
I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! ... Current appreciation of my work is a bit "highbrow", I've always considered myself a popular artist. View quote
Maxfield Parrish
There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation. View quote
John Ruskin
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves. View quote
Willa Cather
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. View quote
Jean Cocteau
It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be. View quote
Hjalmar Branting
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. View quote
Charles Mingus
No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare . View quote
George Bernard Shaw
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities. View quote
Don DeLillo
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions. (Samuel Butler (novelist))
As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify. View quote
Arthur Conan Doyle
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting. View quote
David Antin
But at the same time, the commonplace statement about them is true: every character is the hero of his own story. Each has a justification for his actions that is convincing to him. It's fun to give these people voices. View quote
Thomas Perry
Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup - if any. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
[I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. (H. P. Lovecraft)
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. View quote
Ian McEwan
In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so. View quote
William Saroyan
Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart. View quote
Peter Medawar
Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention. View quote
Eugène Delacroix