A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A woman, the more curious she is about her face, is commonly the more careless about her house.
Ben Jonson

Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.
Ambrose Bierce

Abscond - to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.
Ambrose Bierce

Acting is the most personal of our crafts. The make-up of a human being - his physical, mental and emotional habits - influence his acting to a much greater extent than commonly recognized.
Lee Strasberg

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
Thomas Hobbes

And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.
David Kay

As fathers commonly go, it is seldom a misfortune to be fatherless; and considering the general run of sons, as seldom a misfortune to be childless.
Lord Chesterfield

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
Philip Levine

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.
David Bohm

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.
Ambrose Bierce

Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together.
John Webster

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
Maxwell Maltz

Fortune has something of the nature of a woman. If she is too intensely wooed, she commonly goes the further away.
Charles V

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
J. L. Austin

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

I commonly went ashore every day, either upon business, or to recreate myself in the fields, which were very pleasant, and the more for a shower of rain now and then, that ushers in the wet season.
William Dampier

If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.
Bruce Sterling

In valley drift we meet commonly with the bones of quadrupeds which graze on plains bordering rivers.
Charles Lyell

Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor's trade.
Miranda Richardson