Commonplace Quotes

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

Integrity, Different, Against

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

Become, Another, Far

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

Great, Minds, Interested

To make mistakes is human; to stumble is commonplace; to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity.
William Arthur Ward

Yourself, Mistakes, Human

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

Present, Quite, Seem

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.
John Ruskin

Truth, May, Cannot

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
Samuel Butler

Men, Seldom, Supreme

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.
Willa Cather

Single, Dark, Sometimes

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.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Said, Difficult, Face

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

Mind, Decision, Moment

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
Gertrude Stein

Nature, Imitation

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
Brian Eno

Music, Put, Become

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Charles Mingus

Simple, Creativity, Making

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.
Jean Cocteau

Job, Done, Same

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Nothing, Wish, Remarkable

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.
Michael Ende

Life, Time, Great

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.
Jessica Lange

Life, Age, Death

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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

Mind, Knowing, Rights

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

Selfish, Escape, Existence

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

Saying, Mean, Makes

It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.
Jonathan Kozol

School, Children, America

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.
Lewis Thomas

Nature, Time, Nothing

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

Sometimes, Ordinary, Attempt

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.
Marc Jacobs

Funny, Long, Find

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
Jorge Luis Borges

Death, Ignorant, Except

Even though I support the blue side of Manchester's football heritage, I don't really mind that wherever I go in the world it's not Manchester City that starts the conversation. 'Ah, yes, Manchester United,' is the response when I say where I come from. It's commonplace everywhere - in Europe, Africa, Asia and even the U.S.
Lucy Powell

Mind, Football, Support

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.
Thomas Perry

Time, Fun, Character

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

Spiritual, Mean, Acting

Space is going to be commonplace.
Christa McAuliffe

Let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace.
Jean Henri Fabre

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