Commonplace Quotes

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.

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.

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

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.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

I have been in teen shows for years, so doing that stuff - kissing - is kind of commonplace and not a big deal. It was way more cool just because it was Meg Ryan.

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.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

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.

We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

I always find it kind of embarrassing, kind of funny, and kind of exciting. In New York I'm recognized a lot, although nobody says anything. You know, they stare at you just a second too long. But in Paris it's not as commonplace to be recognized.

What people sometimes interpret as quirky is my attempt to subvert the concept of luxury by introducing elements that are considered ordinary or commonplace.

In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.

I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.

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.

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.

Space is going to be commonplace.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

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.

Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.