Commonplace Quotes
249 quotes by 223 authors
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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,…
— Cecil Beaton
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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…
— Jorge Luis Borges
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Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
— Samuel Butler
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Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.
— George Carlin
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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,…
— Willa Cather
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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…
— Jean Cocteau
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It is a commonplace of American life that immigrants have made our country great and continue to make a very important contribution to the fabric…
— William J. Clinton
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In proportion as our own mind is enlarged we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man…
— Blaise Pascal
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Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets…
— William James
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Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural…
— Cesare Pavese
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Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it;…
— Samuel Smiles
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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…
— Christopher Fry
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Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world ... unless…
— Edward Eggleston
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It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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In this commonplace world every one is said to be romantic who either admires a fine thing or does one.
— Alexander Pope
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Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. ... Though to the layman, the world revealed by the chemist may…
— Henry Taube
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Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to…
— Hilary Putnam
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[Before the time of Benjamin Peirce it never occurred to anyone that mathematical research] was one of the things for which a mathematical department existed.…
— Julian Coolidge
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No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters,…
— W. Somerset Maugham
Who Wrote These Commonplace Quotes
223 authors contributed a total of 249 Commonplace Quotes, led by these top contributors: