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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Maxfield Parrish

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

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.
Philip Levine

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.
Richard Eyre

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.
Christopher Fry

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

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

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, Jr.

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

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

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