Commonplace Quotes - page 2

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable. (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.
Gene Wolfe
A dim consciousness of infinite mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the commonplace of life. There is an awfulness and a majesty around us, in all our little worldliness.
Albert Pike
I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have broken the glass of the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Arthur C. Clarke
Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.
Arthur Machen
One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace.
Yoshida Shoin
Be commonplace and creeping, and you attain all things.
Pierre Beaumarchais
A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.
Sydney J. Harris
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
Mark Forsyth
We live in an age of miracles so commonplace that it can be difficult to see them as anything other than part of the daily texture of living. (Tom Chatfield)
The Drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candlesticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense nor myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on its roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.
Sean O`Casey
The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
Graham Joyce
It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.
Christian Lous Lange
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.
Loren Eiseley
Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.
Alan Cumming
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Anne Sullivan Macy
Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
Charles Scribner IV
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly. (Dorothy E. Denning)
The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.
Goldwin Smith
We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.
Raoul Vaneigem
The Old Man's unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily with the commonplace. Not much, eh? Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; "I-just-can't-believe-it” is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike.
Robert A. Heinlein
To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things-but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood?
Robert A. Heinlein