Commonplace Quotes - Page 3

• I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.

  Annalee Newitz

  Mass Extinction, Cities, Fuel

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the commonplace.

  Aristotle

  Metaphor, Halfway

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• If God does not enter your kitchen, there is something wrong with your kitchen. If you can't take God into your recreation, there is something wrong with your play. We all believe in the God of the heroic. What we need most these days is the God of the humdrum, the commonplace, the everyday.

  Peter Marshall

  Believe, Play, Kitchen

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• A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Ideas, Groups, Interest

  Vladimir Nabokov (2017). “Lectures on Russian Literature”, p.309, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When you're young and you first see the extent and depth of the world's hypocrisy, it's fun to go after it. But by the time you're sixty, it's so commonplace. What's the point in ridiculing people anymore? Their existence itself is a sort of sick joke.

  Harold Ramis

  Fun, People, Sick

  Interview with Eric Spitznagel, believermag.com. March 1, 2006.

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• I get inspiration, a lot of times, from very commonplace things that just strike a chord and develop themselves in the subconscious.

  Stephen King

  Inspiration, Strikes, Chords

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

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• It is in the everyday and the commonplace that we learn patience, acceptance, and contentment.

  Richard J. Foster

  Acceptance, Everyday, Contentment

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• It has always seemed to me. ever since early childhood, amid all the commonplaces of life, i was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realms beyond-only a glimpse-but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Wind, Childhood, Kingdoms

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2014). “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Insightful, Stories

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories”, p.25, Vintage

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• My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Long, Effort, Littles

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892). “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, p.55

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• Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

  Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

  Dog, Miracle, Luck

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• If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence.

  Oswald Chambers

  Religious, Shoes, Feet

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “The Quotable Oswald Chambers”, p.359, Discovery House

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• Me, I've seen 45 years and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive.

  Haruki Murakami

  Philosophy, Years, Effort

  "Pinball, 1973". Book by Haruki Murakami, September 1985.

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• nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Heart, Talking, Utterance

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2016). “THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER (Literary Classics Series): Historical Romance Novel”, p.29, e-artnow

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• What was once impossible now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man-the heart of it-is pure and holy joy.

  George Leonard

  Inspirational, Brother, Wall

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• Wine has been to me a firm friend and a wise counsellor. Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace. Wine has made me bold, but not foolish; has induced me to say silly things, but not do them. If such small indiscretions standing in the debit column of wine's account were added up, they would amount to nothing in comparison with the vast accumulation on the credit side.

  Duff Cooper

  Wise, Silly, Wine

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• Commonplace minds usually condemn what is beyond the reach of their understanding.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Understanding, Mind

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• Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.

  William Hazlitt

  Wise, Men, Thinking

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• What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Believe, Humility

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• Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Intellectual, Transportation, Mundane

  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1960). “the Revolt of the Masses”

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• Death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for us the friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence.

  Alexander Smith

  Death, Life Death

  "Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country".

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• The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Home, Crime, Difficult

  "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891)

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• It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

  Pablo Picasso

  Errors, Personality, Genius

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• To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

  Mark Twain

  Justice, Pleasure, Ecstasy

  The Innocents Abroad ch. 26 (1869)

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• ...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

  Karl Marx

  Simple, Class, Circles

  Karl Marx (2008). “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, p.9, Cosimo, Inc.

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