Quotes About Commonplace

However, it's in a less formal book by Bentham, The Commonplace Book, that you find the phrase 'the happiness of the greatest number', which really sums up the philosophy. ('commonplace books' being a kind of posh scrapbook popular at the time with intellectuals to copy out their favourite poems and so on.)

Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn.

Tal vez el impulso heroico sea hoy en día algo completamente vulgar y corriente.

Music coheres and resolves according to lots of intrinsic rules—so many that we tend to call it a "language." But natural languages [...] typically have many specific words to point toward specific commonplace ideas. This language doesn't, or at least resists being used quite in that way.

At the university level, this perspective is commonplace – and that leads to ideological discrimination.

I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you.

It had barely registered, the lament was so commonplace. But I felt it now.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

Really the topic of breakfast cereal is generally a very boring one.

We look for visions of heaven and we never dream that all the time God is in the commonplace things and people around us.

It is so commonplace," she drawled, "to be understood by everybody.

but what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?" "It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all.

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.

Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.

O característico do momento é que a alma vulgar, sabendo-se vulgar, tem a audácia de afirmar o direito à vulgaridade e o impõe em toda parte.

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.

The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.

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

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

I try and take the commonplace - and some of it is writ large, like death - take the commonplace and make it universally resonant, revelatory, and beautiful at the same time.

La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d'émotion, de rire ou de rêverie

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.