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.
quote by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by Arthur Conan Doyle
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A Commonplace Song
Ebbs and flows the restless river
In the city street
Where the great nerve centres quiver,
Where the pulses beat.
Where the human waves are driving
Drifts a woman’s face,
White and worn by ceaseless striving
With the commonplace.
Want has written strange inscriptions
On the brow and cheek;
Pain could weave some weird descriptions
If the lips would speak;
Toil has touched the lines of beauty
And, the curves of grace.
Comeliness is good, but duty
Rules the commonplace.
Thick-soled shoes and shabby bonnet,
Dingy cotton gloves,
Old turned dress with darns upon it
(Not what woman loves),
Gaunt umbrella, green with weather—
One must self efface
To keep home and bairns together
In the commonplace.
Late and early, never shirking
Tub and scrub and broom,
Late at night with needle working
In the dwelling-room;
Yet when week’s receipts are thinner
Grocers’ bills to face—
Tenpence means three children’s dinner
In the commonplace!
Poets sing their wild Iambics—
Love and War and Gods—
Let us sing of humble women
Fighting fearful odds,
Not where steel and bullets rattle
And the squadrons race,
But the grim unending battle
With the commonplace.
Now they shriek the creeds are dying!
Faith is of the air!
Wailfully their lyres are sighing
Sonnets of despair!
All the scheme of things evolving
Somehow out of Space!
Darken then, instead of solving,
This grim commonplace!
Rogues may win success and glory,
Beauty pride of fame,
Statesmen make a nation’s story,
Poets deathless name.
But the patient woman Toiler
What is hers to win?
On the one hand—Want, the Spoiler,
On the other—Sin!
Ye who swear and strut and bluster,
So-called manly pride,
When you answer at the muster
On the other side,
Will the courage you have vaunted
Stand you in such grace
As weak hands that fought undaunted
With the commonplace?
Noblest worth works ever humbly,
Oftest is unseen,
Half the world is toiling dumbly
In the gray routine.
Sing, O Poet of the Morrow!
Cheer the weary face
Where brave women moil and sorrow
In the commonplace!
poem by George Essex Evans
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You Feel a Sense of Worthlessness
If those 'things' did not exist,
Would you still be who you are?
They have given you a sense of status.
And without them,
You feel a sense of worthlessness.
And you have paid a price to have them.
Even when they must be taken away...
They seem to stale with the commonplace of their use.
Taken for granted and has seduced...you,
Into shameless needing!
Like an appendage depended upon.
And you?
You try not to feel lost without them!
But you lay craving their use.
Feeling useless.
You can not do without them.
They are attached like a habit.
Like a muscle flexed.
They grow on you to affix themselves.
Like a missing leech recognized when absent.
However...
These taxing blood suckers have no feeling for you at all.
They are just things!
Things.
Things.
And yet those things...
They stay on your mind!
On your mind they stay.
And yet...those things?
If those 'things' did not exist,
Would you still be who you are?
Would you recognize yourself,
Without them?
Who are you anyway?
Do you know?
Have you cared to know?
If those 'things' did not exist,
Would you still be who you are?
They have given you a sense of status.
And without them,
You feel a sense of worthlessness.
And you have paid a price to have them.
Even when they must be taken away...
They seem to stale with the commonplace of their use.
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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Space is going to be commonplace.
quote by Christa McAuliffe
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
quote by Thomas Hardy
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To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.
quote by John Philip Sousa
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Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
quote by Samuel Butler
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Let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace.
quote by Jean Henri Fabre
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Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
quote by Gertrude Stein
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Big Books
Big Books are commonplace
In the big bookcase
Written by big persons
Now on my television
poem by Tom Thompson
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Miracle Fair
Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.
An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.
One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.
Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it's backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.
An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.
First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.
Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.
A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.
A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.
A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.
A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.
An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.
poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.
quote by Hjalmar Branting
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.
quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Where servant, master,
are seen as commonplace roles
pregnant disaster
haiku by Jonathan Robin (04 March 2002)
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The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.
quote by Goldwin Smith
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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 it for the first time.
quote by Christopher Fry
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Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.
quote by John Masefield
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I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.
quote by Christopher Hampton
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To make mistakes is human to stumble is commonplace to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity.
quote by William Arthur Ward
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