Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Commonplace   /kˈɑmənplˌeɪs/   Listen
Commonplace

noun
1.
A trite or obvious remark.  Synonyms: banality, bromide, cliche, platitude.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books



... the Gesta Pontificum proposes to fill up the outline of Faritius, using the church records, the traditions of Aldhelm's miracles preserved by the monks of Malmesbury, and the lost "Handboc'' or commonplace book of King Alfred. His narrative is divided into four parts: the birth and attainments of Aldhelm, the religious houses he had established and endowed, the miracles recorded of him, and the history of the abbey down to the writer's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... sick of Chinese art and architecture and furniture that one must approximate a home like those of one's own country. Therefore there are a certain number of these "foreign-style" houses to be found, furnished with golden oak furniture, ugly and commonplace to a degree. I don't know how a long residence in Peking would affect us. At present we are too newly arrived, too enthusiastic, to feel any sympathy with this point of view. Let me add that when a foreign-style house is furnished with a few Chinese articles tucked in a background ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... oblivious to everything, but the mere delight of what she was doing, and he did not think it worth while to remind her that this was not the Steamer, and that if she wished to be inconspicuous, as she had suggested, she would better limit herself strictly to a commonplace gait. Instead he bent toward her, and said in a quick, low undertone, "I'll bet a quarter you've forgotten how to ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... deep ones, too, I fear. Our coming here has given you a wonderful experience, Miss Baron. No matter; you've met it like a soldier and will have much to remember in after years. You can never become a commonplace woman now and there are such a lot of 'em in the world. When I remember all you have done for us it makes me ill to think of some in our town—giggling, silly little flirts, with no higher ambition than to strut down the street in a ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... devote space to "Correspondence." The writers, like Dawson, can probably talk vividly and forcibly, using strong nervous vernacular English, but the moment they take the pen all thought and individual character become swamped in a flood of turgid, commonplace jargon. I was disappointed with Dawson's letters, and I am sure that he will be even more disappointed when he finds none of them made immortal in this book. His purpose in sending them to me will have ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone

... the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of the usual play-house type,—a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play- house fathers were then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most commonplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which is this,—Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband's ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... a musician, with all the temperament that might be expected from such a combination, and she had let it go at that, pushing his love aside with the careless hand of a woman to whom the incense of men's devotion has been so freely offered as to have become commonplace. But now the new ring of determination, of something unexpectedly dogged in his voice, poignantly recalled the warning uttered by Lady Arabella earlier ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... hospitality; and the 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, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... it will sound rather commonplace to you," said Dick, humbly, "but it means everything to me. I—I'm engaged to Madge Preston. I've known her for a year, and been engaged half of it, and I ought to know my own mind by now. But father has simply set his forefeet and won't hear of it. Won't ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... sorrowing wife at Ischia, a production which the learned Paolo Giovio, the historian and bishop of Nocera, pronounced as being "summae jucunditatis," though in reality it seems to have been feeble enough. But however halting and commonplace the warrior's verses, Pescara's composition had the immediate effect of opening the flood-gates of his wife's poetic temperament, for she replied at once to her spouse's effort with an epistle conceived in the terza ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... since become almost a commonplace occurrence to Keith, yet now he shrank for an instant as his eyes perceived the figure of a man lying motionless across the broken wagon tongue. The grizzled hair and beard were streaked with blood, the face almost unrecognizable, while the hands yet grasped a bent and shattered ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... estimated to contain 22,000 acres, was purchased from the Indians for $24, paid in beads, buttons and trinkets, and the Block House was built, with cedar palisades, on the site of the Battery, it is, of course, commonplace to say that they who had come hither could scarcely have had the least conception of what a career they thus were commencing for two great cities. But it is not so wholly commonplace to say that those who saw this now wealthy and splendid New York a hundred years since, less conspicuous ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... that they will spend hours improving a pickle jar, mediaevalizing their furniture, or decorating the dinner service, will shirk everything that pertains to the preparation of food as dirty, disagreeable drudgery, and sit down to a commonplace, ill-prepared meal, served on those artistic plates, as complacently as if dainty food were not a refinement; as if heavy rolls and poor bread, burnt or greasy steak, and wilted potatoes did not smack of the shanty, just as loudly as coarse crockery ...
— Culture and Cooking - Art in the Kitchen • Catherine Owen

... monks, as though they ought all to be off at work somewhere, —I will not say "earning money," for they do that as it is in such great monasteries as that of Kieff, but lightening the burden of the peasants, impossible as that is under present conditions, or making themselves of some commonplace, practical use in ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... for the commonplace," she replied. "If I had lived in Pizarro's time, I'd have gone to Peru with him, the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... have dealt microscopically with commonplace situations would revel in this one, and give you a curious volume of small incidents like the above, and vivisect the father's heart with patient skill. But we poor dramatists, taught by impatient audiences to move on, and taught by those great professors of verbosity, our female novelists and ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade

... Malignant goddess! bane to my repose, Thou universal cause of all my woes; Say whence it comes that thou art grown of late A poor amusement for my scorn and hate; The malice thou inspirest I never fail On thee to wreak the tribute when I rail; Fool's commonplace thou art, their weak ensconcing fort, Th'appeal of dulness in the last resort: Heaven, with a parent's eye regarding earth, Deals out to man the planet of his birth: But sees thy meteor blaze about me shine, And passing o'er, mistakes thee ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... is the aim served by bad novels, produced by writers who were once celebrated, as Spindler, Bulwer Lytton, Eugene Sue. What can be more miserable than the lot of a reading public like this, always bound to peruse the latest works of extremely commonplace persons who write for money only, and who are therefore never few in number? and for this advantage they are content to know by name only the works of the few superior minds of all ages and all countries. Literary newspapers, too, are a singularly cunning device for robbing ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... commonplace to say that sculpture in relief is only one branch of painting. Conze[56] publishes a sepulchral monument which seems to him to mark the first stage of growth. The surface of the figure and that of the surrounding ground remain the same; they are separated ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... secret flights of her imagination, she pictured herself in some new country with Bertie. An adventurous, reckless nature such as his, she thought, turned every gift to evil in the commonplace life where his idiosyncrasy had no play; but detached from his idle mess-room habits, and launched into a new career, when to live at all involved exertion of mind and body, would metamorphosize her hero into all ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... change would not be beneficial to a hard-worked official, there remained nothing but to select the spot to which X.—his leave once granted—must go. It would never, of course, do that he should go to Penang, or even to Hong Kong or Japan, such an expedition would be too ordinary and commonplace. It was felt that X. should do something worthy of the occasion, and show his appreciation of the place he lived in by going to one as similar in respect of people and scenery as could be found, and so, when ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... that a true critic is a sort of mechanic set up with a stock and tools for his trade, at as little expense as a tailor; and that there is much analogy between the utensils and abilities of both. That the "Tailor's Hell" is the type of a critic's commonplace-book, and his wit and learning held forth by the goose. That it requires at least as many of these to the making up of one scholar as of the others to the composition of a man. That the valour of both is equal, and ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift

... But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrers, Mr. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... intellectual judgment purely (Clarke, &c.), or those that treat it as a feeling purely (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume). His remarks on the sense of Merit and Demerit in the agent are trivial or commonplace. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... thicken, the footpath to narrow, and the House Beautiful on the hill's summit to draw further and further away. We learn, indeed, to use our means; but only to learn, along with it, the paralysing knowledge that these means are only applicable to two or three poor commonplace motives. Eight years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can now, I should have thought myself well on the road after Shakespeare; and now - I find I have only got a pair of walking- shoes and not yet begun to travel. And art is still away there on the mountain summit. But I need not ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... commonplace observer, its superb harbour, studded with gilded boats; its powerful fortifications, where art towers over nature, and where the eye looks up a rock, and catches a bristling battery; the glare of its scenery, ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... apparently belongs to the previous account of Omar's death-bed; but I have left it as it stands in the text, as it would be a hopeless task to endeavour to restore this chaos of insipid anecdote and devotional commonplace to anything like symmetry. ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous

... he said to me, in the politest manner, in our own tongue, the others thinking it some commonplace, and I knew by his voice that the meeting was as surprising and as exasperating ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington

... the maltreatment which had plunged me into darkness. Now the Deer Men traded with the Sea Men, and the Sea Men with the whites, especially the whalers. So later I discovered a deck of cards in the possession of one of the women, and I proceeded to mystify the Chow Chuen with a few commonplace tricks. Likewise, with fitting solemnity, I perpetrated upon them the little I knew of parlor legerdemain. Result: I was appreciated at once, and was better fed and ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... himself taking notice in a way he had not done before through all his years in Delafield. As might be expected, he had come home from college with new ideas and new standards. The town looked rather more sordid and commonplace than was his boy's remembrance of it. Of late it had taken to growing, and a large part of its development had come during his college years. So he must needs learn his own ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... novelists to the effects of the male voice I may refer to George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, probably the most intimate and personal of George Eliot's works. In Book VI of this novel the influence of Stephen Guest (a somewhat commonplace young man) over Maggie Tulliver is ascribed almost exclusively to the effect of his base voice in singing. We are definitely told of Maggie Tulliver's "sensibility to the supreme excitement of music." Thus, on one occasion, "all her intentions were lost in the vague state of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... pipe back to his lips—keenly alive to the fact that the exigency of the moment demanded a little polite exchange of commonplace. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... embarrassment in Harley's voice as he spoke; and, turning round abruptly, he exclaimed, "But you have shown poetry even here. I could not have conceived that so much beauty could be drawn from what appeared to me the most commonplace of all suburban gardens. Why, surely where that charming fountain now plays stood the rude bench in which I ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... to be married—fades one's ribbons and makes one look old. An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy. A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace! The brutality of marriage creates definite situations; suppresses the will; kills choice; has a syntax, like grammar; replaces inspiration by orthography; makes a dictation of love; disperses all life's mysteries; diminishes ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... have it examined in the "bureau." The first few weeks of W.'s ministry were very trying to me—I went to see so many people,—so many people came to see me,—all strangers with whom I had nothing in common. Such dreary conversations, never getting beyond the most ordinary commonplace phrases,—such an absolutely different world from any ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... the melancholy sight, but—but just then the lieutenant came to take him down to the commander, and he straightened up and set his lips firmly, as if this were a very commonplace affair and he were used to being sent to Siberia every day in the week. The cabin in which the commander sat was like a palace compared to the humble fittings of the Mary Thomas, and the commander himself, in gold lace and dignity, was a most august ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London

... her room and disappears. Before I went to the war we slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else. (Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas. For man and wife—to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate ourselves with a wall. This sincerity that I have brought back in my eyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality, more ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... enthusiast; for without enthusiasm what was ever achieved but commonplace? But again: consider the poor in London. To that mob of misery, what is a joint here and a loaf there? I am for voting to them twenty thousand bullocks and one hundred thousand barrels of flour to begin with. They are then comforted, and no more hunger for one while among the poor ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... unheard of sacrifices and privations she succeeded in sending the boys to college and the girls to a boarding-school. When they came home, pretty, refined girls and strong young men, abreast with all the new ideas and tastes of their times, she was a worn-out, commonplace old woman. They had their own pursuits and companions. She lingered unappreciated among them for two or three years, and then died, of some sudden failure of the brain. The shock of her fatal illness woke them to consciousness of the truth. They hung over her, as she lay prostrate, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... to hear sermons on every hand. She was sick of it. They had been great men of whom she had heard, and she admired them all; she wanted the secret of their power, but she didn't want it to be made out of such commonplace material as was in the hands of every child. She did not know what she wanted—only that she had come out to be entertained and to revel in her love of heroes, and she had been pinned down to the one thought that real men were made of those who found their power ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... new curiosity of what the morrow might hold for him. This sensation was in connection with the girl. Apart from her, his old plans and ambitions stood. He felt no uncertainty and no curiosity concerning the morrow's dealings with the men. He considered it a commonplace subject. He would act upon Bill Brennen's advice and visit the mutineers at an early hour; and as to the wreck?—well, if conditions proved favorable he would break out the cargo and see what could be ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts

... new and varied surroundings it would be surprising indeed if the author, with his faculty of making even the commonplace attractive, did not tell an intensely interesting story of adventure, as well as give much information in regard to the distant countries through which our friends pass, and the strange peoples with whom they are brought in contact. This book, and indeed the whole series, is admirably adapted to ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic

... which I might have dwelt and illustrated by many instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of hob-nobbing with all sorts and conditions of men, this desire of wide contact and intercourse has little show in his novels—the ordinary fibre of commonplace human beings not receiving much celebration from him there; another case in which his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in his novels. But the fact lies implicit in much ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... as I got a little rest and peace, I began to think of what I had left and especially of Terry. It was not only my love for him that called, but what my life with him had been and would be if I returned—a life that was not a commonplace life, a life of intelligence and freedom. Already I was bored by the quiet goodness of the people I was with, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... themselves from the Church of Rome in the sixteenth century carried with them much of the intolerant spirit of the original body. It is one of the commonplace sneers of the unreflecting to say that religious toleration has always been the dogma of the weaker party. The saying, if it were true, which it is not, yet would not be especially sagacious. Toleration, like other things, has been most ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... down, knowing now that Miss Lind was a commonplace amateur. He had been contrasting her with his sister, greatly to the disparagement of his home life; and he was disappointed to find the lady break down where the actress would have succeeded so well. Consoling himself with the reflexion that if Miss Lind could not rap out ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... Ulick O'More, who was playing with the little Awk in the window, 'that the feminine mind loves expedients? It would be less commonplace to confide the parcel to the conductor, than merely let him receive it as guard of the mail bag and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... ordinary fire can still be a thing of wonder to the man whose mind is open to receive impressions even from the commonplace. How illusive it is!—dancing, darting, flickering, flashing—appearing, disappearing—unsubstantial yet active and almost miraculously potent. The effect upon the mind of primitive man must have been keen and vivid ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... to us; though to see through a window is just as marvellous as to see through a brick wall. For if nil admirari be the motto of the sage, omne admirari is that of the poet, and the poetry which wafts from the past to the soul of the most commonplace person is seen in the present by him who hath eyes. The pathos of that which must pass away is no less great than the pathos of that which has passed away. And what produces the art-feeling in both cases is the same—the fresh, intense perception ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... marking the course of a stream—no group of Scotch firs with their trunks reddening in the level sunbeams—nothing to break the flowerless monotony of grass and hedgerow but an occasional oak or elm, and a few cows sprinkled here and there. A very commonplace scene, indeed. But what scene was ever commonplace in the descending sunlight, when colour has awakened from its noonday sleep, and the long shadows awe us like a disclosed presence? Above all, what scene is commonplace to the ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... as towards the speculative, Roosevelt felt an instinctive antagonism. One of his most characteristic utterances is the address delivered at the Sorbonne, April 30, 1910, "Citizenship in a Republic." Here, amidst a good deal of moral commonplace—wise and sensible for the most part, but sufficiently platitudinous—occurs a burst of angry eloquence. For he was always at his strongest when scolding somebody. His audience included the intellectual elite of France; and he warns it against the besetting sin ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers

... Netty, in the study, maintained an unnatural reserve, in which there was silent antagonism. Dora relieved the situation by a commonplace. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... ass in the lion's skin a quack trying to terrify, by assuming the appearance of a forest monarch (does the writer, writhing under merited castigation, mean to sneer at critics in this character? We laugh at the impertinent comparison); the ox, a stupid commonplace; the only innocent being in the writer's (stolen) apologue is a fool—the idiotic lamb, who does not know his own mother!" And then the critic, if in a virtuous mood, may indulge in some fine writing regarding the holy beauteousness of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of an exciting or dramatic character in the circumstances connected with our discovery; it was all absolutely commonplace; we were not even molested by natives, of whom we saw no sign from first to last. Having thoroughly searched, without result, the entire area of the flat country for a space of eight or nine square miles immediately opposite the spot where the brigantine was first anchored, we got under way again ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood

... not hurt very much," said Ruth, anxious to be sympathetic, but succeeding only in being commonplace. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... volumes; and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those classics common to all languages—dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... appear frivolous to those who have read with unwavering credulity the olden tales of the prowess and achievements of knights errant in the days of chivalry, that one should stop to relate such a commonplace incident as the shooting of a wolf, and above all, that the hero of this narrative, should betray, even to his horse, such a decided emotion of self admiration for having performed the feat. Such a trifle would not indeed be worth mentioning in company with the marvellous deeds and mysterious ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... Frank! But, don't get angry—" she continued, as I slightly withdrew from her side, in momentary pique at hearing the curate's part taken.—"I like to hear you talk of such things, Frank, far better than if you only spoke to me of commonplace matters, as most gentlemen do, or dosed me ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... ("Nascose eran la le crudeli "), in which she laments her sad fate. The scene abruptly changes to the square in front of the cathedral, where the soldiers, Valentin among them, are returning, to the jubilant though somewhat commonplace strains of the march, "Deponiam il branda." As the soldiers retire and Valentin goes in quest of Marguerite, Faust and Mephistopheles appear before the house, and the latter sings a grotesque and literally infernal serenade ("Tu, che fai l' addormentata"). ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton

... part to my own idiosyncrasy, if such indeed there be existing in my empty breast. You look straight onwards as I do, but in you each idea is transfigured, for in your soul invisible shaping powers are at work, which set the crooked straight, clothe the commonplace with charm, the repulsive with beauty. You are a poet, an artist; I only seek ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights to offer. Between these passionate moments there were long intervals of commonplace, of gaiety, of brooding melancholy, during which, except that I detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me, at times I might have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... 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 than the passing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... from the very simplest, most commonplace point of view, that it is madness to remain under the roof of a building which cannot support its weight, and that we must leave it. And indeed it is difficult to imagine a position more wretched than that ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... thereabouts—a tall, slender, stone-built house of many stories, towering high above any of the surrounding gables. And save for a very faint, dull glow which shone through the transom window of the front door, there was not a vestige of light in a single window of the seven stories. Cornmarket was a gloomy commonplace, thought Starmidge, but the little oil lamps in the cottages were riotously cheery in comparison with the darkness of the tall, gaunt Chestermarke mansion. It looked like the ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... The girls around me—always forward, and so silly—began twittering together, and looking that way as if he would ever think of dancing with them. They swarmed around me, as a representative person. They forgot their own trivialities, and rendered me such homage as genius commands from commonplace minds. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... the stonemason, the carving of statues, the customs of pouring out libations or burning incense, are such simple and obvious procedures that any people might adopt them without prompting or contact of any kind with other populations who do the same sort of things. But if such apparently commonplace acts be investigated they will be found to have a long and complex history. None of these things that seem so obvious to us was attempted until a multitude of diverse circumstances became focussed in some particular community, and constrained some individual ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... springs, but it requires a divine impulse to flow up from the valley in the nether springs. There is nothing that tells more of Christ than to see a Christian rejoicing and cheerful in the humdrum and routine of commonplace work, like the sailors that stand on the dock loading the vessel and singing as they swing their loads, keeping time with the spirit of praise to the footsteps and movements of labor and duty. No one has ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... up to town, where I shall remain for a week—I cannot stay longer, as business affairs demand my presence here. I think, however, that a week in the rush of busy London, surrounded with multitudes of commonplace people, will help to soften—I cannot expect total obliteration—the terrible images of the bygone night. When I can sleep easily—which will be, I hope, after a day or two—I shall be fit to return home and take ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... the headings may be made to suggest a worthier way of viewing these things. For instance, there may be the indication 'Place and time of conception,' and a specimen entry may be of service to lead commonplace minds into a more reverent and poetical view than is now usual—such as the one I culled from the life-history of an American child: 'Our second child M—— was conceived on Midsummer Day, under the shade of a friendly sycamore, beneath the cloudless blue of Southern ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... refinement of face and figure were so remarkable and original as to cast a doubt on the sagacity and prescience of one parent and the morality of the other, yet no doubt with equal injustice. But the fact remained that she was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy, commonplace father, and her faded, commonplace mother in the dining-room of the Boomville Hotel like some distinguished alien. The three partners, by virtue, perhaps, of their college education and refined manners, had been exceptionally noticed by Kitty. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... emphasize the importance of finding out what you can do best rather than what either you or your parents wish you could do best. For it seems to me that this is getting very close to the truth of life. The thoughtless commonplace that "every boy may be President" has worked mischief, sown unhappiness, and robbed humanity ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... It was a commonplace ceremony, and at its conclusion the bridegroom trudged off up the village street behind his mail-bags. The Mule, it must be admitted, was a deadly dull person—y nada mas—and nothing more, as his fond father-in-law observed at the ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman

... the Queen's Theatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the company could by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of their voices hold your attention on a play where everything was commonplace. He enjoyed seeing the contrite villain of the piece come up from the bottom of the gulch, hurled there by the adventuress, and flash his sweating blood-stained face up against the footlights; and, though he told us he had but a few short moments to live, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats

... as they do in monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes Sorel, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... was needed. Nobody wanted anything but the sensible commonplace, kindly spoken, about the advantages of good opportunities, the conscientiousness of doing one's best. And after all, the inferiority of mere attainments in themselves to the discipline and dutifulness of responding ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in costume are disappearing, and ere long our American peasantry may become commonplace and uninteresting. Let us hope that they may never lose the sweet simplicity, frankness, honesty, thrift, and other pleasing characteristics which they ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... a suggestion 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 not transform ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue

... with its tail in its mouth, carved upon an exhibited monument as an emblem of Eternity, and a very commonplace one, he said to the sculptor, "It won't do, I tell you; you must have something new." The something new startled a man whose imagination was none of the brightest, and he said, "How shall I find something new?" "O, nothing so easy," said Fuseli, "I'll help you to ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... love her husband. He must be a genius or a very commonplace man. Marriage always is a failure with such men. Common men live so low that women are afraid some one may steal into their lives at night through a cellar window. Genius—well, genius lives on the top ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien

... bit sudden," he remarked in whimsical commonplace, "however—" His hands went into his pockets automatically. His eyes followed a seam on the paper overhead back and ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... science takes a stain of romance and superstition. Elsie Venner, through an experience of her mother's, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from common life as the tale of "Melusine," or any other echidna. The fantasy has its setting in a commonplace New England environment, and thus recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more humorous. The heroine of the "Guardian Angel," again, exposes a character in layers, as it were, each stratum of consciousness being inherited from a different ancestor—among ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... played with political passions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal figure. In the Congress ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... beckoned to tread a perpetual measure. Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to rest his wings, for he was winged, cap and heel. The fiction of flight has lost its charm long since. Modern art grew tired of the idea, now turned to commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyant urchins—naughty cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenth century was in love with that old fancy—more in love, perhaps, than any century in the past. Its late painters, ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell

... Boss Simpson," he began suddenly, as the last shower of sparks went up into the air, "you don't—smell nothing, do you—nothing pertickler, I mean?" The commonplace question, Simpson realized, veiled a dreadfully serious thought in his mind. A shiver ran down ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood

... responsible. Reason, if we bring these emotions to it, cannot even pronounce upon them. Yet in them and from them springs the life of the soul and the conviction of immortality. 'To act on impulse'—who but daily realizes that commonplace in his own experience? The mind does not only play tricks and laugh at reason in dreams while we sleep. It laughs at reason while we wake, and the sanest spirit experiences inspired moments, mad moments, unaccountable ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... Charlie as he did for her. He worshipped the very ground she walked on. He thought her perfection. Uncle Max, it was pitiful to hear him sometimes. He would tell me how sweet and unselfish she was, and all the time I knew she was but an ordinary, commonplace girl. If he had lived to marry her he would have been disappointed in her. He was so large-hearted, and ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... of Hukwang, a giant in intellect and a hero in achievement, is not a commonplace character. If my readers will follow me, while I trace his rise and progress, not only will they discover that he stands head and shoulders above most officials of his rank, but they will gain important side-lights on ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the desert of blusterous commonplace. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... bolder, rambling in turn through all the districts of Rome, and discovering the many "classical" curiosities catalogued in the guide-books. One evening he spoke with a kind of affection of the principal squares of the city which he had first thought commonplace, but which now seemed to him very varied, each with original features of its own. There was the noble Piazza del Popolo of such monumental symmetry and so full of sunlight; there was the Piazza di Spagna, the lively ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... the sole daughter, the sole child indeed of the house, a girl who had no idea of life except as a place in which to have a serenely good time, and teach everybody to do as she desired them to. Money was a commonplace matter-of-course article, neither to be particularly prized nor despised; it was convenient, of course, and must be an annoyance when one had to do without it; but of that, by practical experience, she knew nothing. Yet Ruth was by no means a "pink-and-white" girl ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... which, later on, were to burst forth into fiery and boiling metaphors in the Confessions, and in his homilies and paraphrases of Holy Scripture. Later on, he will not have the time to observe, or he will have lost the power. Rhetoric will stretch its commonplace veil between him and the unceasing springtide of the earth. Ambition will turn him away from those sights which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then, later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He will no longer perceive the creation save at odd ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... warmly espoused the cause of the impostor. Perkin Warbeck remained in Ireland about a year, when he was invited to France and, for a while, became the centre of the disaffected Yorkists there. He was a very poor specimen of the genus impostor, and seems even to have been destitute of the commonplace quality ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... up and walked home despondently. She climbed in at the acting-room window, and went to her own room. The sun was shining on the apple-blossom in the orchard opposite, and she looked for the charm of yesterday, but finding only the garish commonplace of fruit-trees in flower with the sun on them, she drew down the blind. Then she took off her hat and jacket, threw herself on her bed, and fell into a heavy sleep, with her brow puckered and the corners of her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... puts it. And yet—was not this rather harking back to mere sentiment, often proved delusive? Her own "good man's love" had been very precious to her,—but it had not fulfilled all her heart's longing, though she considered herself an entirely commonplace woman. And what sort of a man would it be that could hold Morgana? As well try to control a sunbeam or a lightning flash as the restless vital and intellectual spirit that had, for the time being, entered into feminine form, ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli

... me thine. I starve for sympathy. I shall go mad. I saw my baby die And all around me were my husband's friends Who spoke in terms of polished elegance. With formal platitudes and commonplace Regarding me as something curious, A vulgar, noisy creature, lacking taste And proper self-control. While on its bier Lay all the joy that life in promise held. Dead, and my heart within it. (Weeps) (Shylock turns to go, looks back after ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... of all the columns of all Mr Hearst's journals, here it is clearly used in the same hope which inspires the sandwichman to carry on his front the classic legend: "Please do not look on my back." But what is dearest to the souls of these editors is a mean commonplace. One leader, which surely had a triumphant success, is headed, "What the Bar-tender Sees." And the exordium is worthy so profound a speculation. "Did you ever stop to think," murmurs the Yellow philosopher, "of all the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... Gore said, "not in the long run. Of course," she went on with a smile, "to say a thing is not 'natural' is simply begging the question, and sounds as if one were dismissing a very complicated problem with a commonplace formula, but it has truth in it all the same. It is difficult enough to fashion existence in the right way, even with the help of others, but to do it single-handed is a task few people are qualified to achieve. I am quite sure that a woman has more chance ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... rejecting commonplace life with a wave of her hand, 'I wish to make, one last explanation I wish to offer, there was a time ere Mr F. first paid attentions incapable of being mistaken, but that is past and was not to be, dear Mr Clennam you no longer wear a golden chain you are free I trust you may be happy, here ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... is often in the public mind this poorer type of teacher; and when an idea or an ideal, however low, becomes once established, it is changed only with difficulty. The commonplace individual, the mediocre type of man or of woman, is by many regarded as a fairly typical representative of what the teacher usually is; or, as the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... was falling steadily in feathery flakes, hiding the grime of London beneath a garment of shimmering white and transforming the commonplace houses built of brick and mortar, each capped with its ugly chimneystack, into glittering fairy palaces, crowned ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... nebulous region of the spirit where feeling and fancy grow confused. Her emotions, with all their intensity and all their exaggeration, retained the plain prosaic texture of everyday life. And it was fitting that her expression of them should be equally commonplace. She was, she told her Prime Minister, at the end of an official letter, "yours aff'ly V. R. and I." In such a phrase the deep reality of her feeling is instantly manifest. The Faery's feet were on the solid earth; it was the ruse cynic who ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... magnificences I loved to dream. Why not dream therefore in the Place Vendome? Surely my aspirations in those days soared as high as the Column, and surely the student's garb (beloved and ordained by Paragot)—the mushroom-shaped cap, the tight ankled, tight throated velveteens—rendered any eccentricity a commonplace. Early Spring too was in the air, which encourages the young visionary. Spruce young men and tripping modistes with bandboxes under their arms and the sun glinting over their trim bare heads hurried along through the traffic ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing but the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and gentlemen—soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made me, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books, common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and joke and think as friends—and the Thing—the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... the schoolroom her face was red with running and excitement, her hair was rough, and her bonnet under her arm still, so oblivious was she to the things of this very every-day and commonplace world. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... jury. He is not a tongue-tied, but he speaks in a colloquial, commonplace sort of fashion which does not shed a very brilliant lustre ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... believe it?" said he to Forester—"my essay has not been thought worthy of the prize! The medal has been given to the most wretched, tame, commonplace performance you ever saw. Every thing in this world is done by corruption, by party, by ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... considerations on the diminution of death, disease, and suffering by improved sanitary arrangements, is the delicate subject of the propagation of hereditary disease. It is a commonplace that the most important of all the acts of life, is that on which men and women venture most thoughtlessly. But experience shews, unmistakably, that there are many forms of disease, both mental and bodily, which are transmitted from the parents to the children, and that, consequently, the marriage ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler

... with a tender touch, for Phebe's strength had inspired her with a desire to be as self-reliant. "I'm going to set about living in earnest, as she has; though I think it will be harder for me than for her, because she stands alone and has a career marked out for her. I'm nothing but a commonplace sort of girl, with no end of relations to be consulted every time I wink and a dreadful fortune hanging like a millstone round my neck to weigh me down if I try to fly. It is a hard case, Uncle, and I get low in my mind when I think about it," sighed Rose, oppressed ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... him with admiration. She was struck by what seemed to her a nobleness of sentiment which elevated his theme above the level of commonplace polemics. She was pleased to notice, in the attentive silence of his intelligent listeners, that they shared the effect produced on herself. In fact, Graham Vane was a born orator, and his studies had been those of a political thinker. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... saw how violently affected she was, and began to talk to her in a commonplace and practical manner about all that he and Cardross had been ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... pass in a minute; The boys follow on like a tail to a kite; The commonplace street has but traffic now in it - The great fire engines have ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... 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 History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... the plans Will has ever made'—her 'Will' is an architect, you know—'these seem to me most likely to suit you and Jack, although they are by no means, adapted to conventional, commonplace housekeepers. In the centre of the first floor the large hall, opening freely to the outside world, is a sort of common ground, hospitable and cheerful, where the stranger guest and the old friend meet; where the children play, where the entire household are free to come and go without formality. ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... live very happily with commonplace wives, and Robert Worth had never regretted that his Maria did not play on the piano, and paint on velvet, and work fine embroideries for the altars. They had passed nearly twenty-six years together in more than ordinary content and ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr

... it which I believe cannot be too strongly condemned if the world is to be made better, and this is rendered the more repugnant to right-thinking people by the fact that the participants are middle-class persons who converse in quite commonplace language such as one may hear ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... the most important moral phenomena in War, and with all the care of a diligent professor try what we could impart about each, either good or bad. But as in such a method one slides too much into the commonplace and trite, whilst real mind quickly makes its escape in analysis, the end is that one gets imperceptibly to the relation of things which everybody knows. We prefer, therefore, to remain here more than usually incomplete and rhapsodical, content to have drawn attention to the importance of ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... not merely to those who attend the new jury courts established in the present reign, but to every one. And what do we read almost daily? Of things beside which the present case grows pale, and seems almost commonplace. But what is most important is that the majority of our national crimes of violence bear witness to a widespread evil, now so general among us that it is difficult ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... it is a rule frequently observed. It is even observed in circumstances much less grave than those I have just cited. I have remarked that in the theatre a crowd exacts from the hero of the piece exaggerated virtues, and it is a commonplace observation that an assembly, even though composed of inferior elements, shows itself as a rule very prudish. The debauchee, the souteneur, the rough often break out into murmurs at a slightly risky scene or expression, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... from a bedroom or dressing-room. As Hewitt and his companion approached the house the French window was pushed open, and a man appeared—a middle-aged, slightly stoutish man with a short, grey beard; commonplace enough in himself, but now convulsed with noisy anger, shaking his fists and stamping ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... imagery of the shepherd and the flock, as perhaps of the tower and the gate, may, be as well taken from the scenes of the Roman Campagna as from any previous writing. The keeping of the commandments is a commonplace of Christianity, not to say of religion. And the Divine immanence in the soul is conceived rather in the spirit of the elder Gospels ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow (1781-1829), an intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney's muse, was a special favourite with Lamb. He copied it into his Commonplace Book, and De Quincey has described, in his "London Reminiscences," how Lamb used ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... was unfortunate. Beatrice did not return his passion, and had no conception of its force, and perhaps was not even worthy to call it forth. She may have been beautiful; she may have been gifted; she may have been commonplace. It matters little whether she was intellectual or not, beautiful or not. It was not the flesh and blood he saw, but the image of beauty and loveliness which his own mind created. He idealized the girl; she was to him all that he fancied. But she never encouraged him; she denied his greetings, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... term, "laying the bearings," others say "setting the temperament." The former is more commonplace, as it merely suggests the idea of laying a number of patterns by which all others are to be measured. The latter term is extremely comprehensive. A lucid definition of the word "temperament," in the sense in which it is used here, would require ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer

... declared Polly emphatically, "dreadfully fresh. But somehow,—I'm on the grind committee, you know,—and they don't do anything funny. They just do quantities and quantities of stupid, commonplace things, like mistaking the young faculty for freshmen and expecting Miss Raymond to help them look up their English references. I just wish they'd think of something original," ended ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment, the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local colours. Severe pedagogic ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... a Sunday, to various places in the country. There was generally a volume of Burke or Emerson in his pocket, whose sonorous periods filled the interval when we lunched frugally or rested. I have never known him anything but good-humoured under any conditions. His enthusiasm for our most commonplace jests was unfailing—perhaps one of the surest ways of getting to a man's heart and staying there—and he had a wide tolerance for the minor offences of undergraduate thought and deed. Yet, as for the ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson

... gradually toward the clump of ancient and lofty ash-trees, behind which rose the Buxieres domicile. This magnificent grove of trees, and a monumental fence of cast-iron, were the only excuse for giving the title of chateau to a very commonplace structure, of which the main body presented bare, whitewashed walls, flanked by two small towers on turrets shaped like extinguishers, and otherwise ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... following the general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace of ordinary life. ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... the more likely that he had seen a true vision; for instead of making common things look commonplace, as a false vision would have done, it had made common things disclose the wonderful that was ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald

... young man's ears a note which almost made him sober again. It was certainly the voice of Adam Covert. He made some commonplace reply, and waited for another flash of lightning to show him the stranger's face. It came, and he saw that his ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... feeling which in some directions and under certain circumstances became prejudice. He could never, in any case, be made to run a machine. He hated the obvious way of saying or doing a thing. He cultivated the "unexpected" almost to a fault, and always gave a touch of originality even to the commonplace. His pessimistic and unhopeful temperament was doubtless due to inherent and hereditary bodily weakness, and to the lack of muscular cultivation in his youth, which might have modified inherent tendencies. His mental lack was form not force; and he had enough original elemental ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various



Words linked to "Commonplace" :   unexciting, comment, truism, input, remark, unoriginal, ordinary



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com