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

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

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

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
Gertrude Stein

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

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

Space is going to be commonplace.
Christa McAuliffe

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

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

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

The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly.
Dorothy Denning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.
Raoul Vaneigem

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