Commonplace Quotes

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs. ~ William Osler

Lying, stealing, and cheating are commonplace. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side - in wave-like motions following each other. ...At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this life - prosperity, the education which procures more pleasures, more food - will become glorious at first and then that will degrade and degenerate. Along with the prosperity will rise to white heat all the inborn jealousies and hatreds of the human race. Competition and merciless cruelty will be the watchword of the day. To quote a very commonplace and not very elegant English proverb, "Everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost", becomes the motto of the day. Then people think that the whole scheme of life is a failure. And the world would be destroyed had not spirituality come to the rescue and lent a helping hand to the sinking world. Then the world gets new hope and finds a new basis for a new building, and another wave of spirituality comes, which in time again declines. As a rule, spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centered in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then ~ Swami Vivekananda

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. ~ W. H. Auden

She saw that he had singled her out from the three, as a woman is singled out in such cases, for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters, unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last intention of their lives is to be occupied with the feminine. ~ Thomas Hardy

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. ~ Anne Thaxter Eaton

Even though I support the blue side of Manchester's football heritage, I don't really mind that wherever I go in the world it's not Manchester City that starts the conversation. 'Ah, yes, Manchester United,' is the response when I say where I come from. It's commonplace everywhere - in Europe, Africa, Asia and even the U.S. ~ Lucy Powell

One thing is certain, however; whereas it has been almost commonplace among historians to attribute Adams's opposition to Franklin's style of diplomacy to simple jealousy, in fact Adams also was critical of his fellow envoy because of a genuine concern that America might be ruined by anything less than a wary, coequal, unbending relationship with its new ally.38 ~ John Ferling

Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child's head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed. ~ George MacDonald

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.
Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.
Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. ~ Michael Ende

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

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle

The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

{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. Today it is a commonplace in all the leading universities. Peirce stood alone - a mountain peak whose absolute height might be hard to measure, but which towered above all the surrounding country. ~ Julian Coolidge

Playing whist by the cabin lamps when it is storming outside is pleasant; walking the quarterdeck in the moonlight is pleasant; smoking in the breezy foretop is pleasant when one is not afraid to go up there; but these are all feeble and commonplace compared with the joy of seeing people suffering the miseries of seasickness. ~ Mark Twain

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen. ~ Charles Simic

Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the '70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films. ~ Dan Gilroy

Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected. ~ Chuck Jones

I have not much faith in women in fiction ... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before. ~ Willa Cather

The man who puts life into an idea is acclaimed a genius, because he does the right thing at the right time. Therein lies the difference between the genius and a commonplace man. ~ Douglas Fairbanks

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low. ~ Aldous Huxley

I always admired Ray Kroc, the man who invented McDonald's. Ray had a vision of the most commonplace thing - a hamburger and fries to go - but to him it was just the greatest thing ever, and he was going to make it the greatest thing ever for everybody else, and he did. ~ David Lee Roth

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. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page. ~ Peter De Vries

I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! Current appreciation of my work is a bit highbrow, I've always considered myself a popular artist. ~ Maxfield Parrish

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness. (246) ~ Robert Whitaker

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace - the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us. ~ George MacDonald

Often thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine who lives in Mortimer Street ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. ~ Max Beckmann

Here march the eaters of earth,
the swallowers of rain. ~ J. Aleksandr Wootton

( ... ) perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain. ~ Terry Pratchett

It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time ... The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not. ~ Jim Holt

An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers. ~ William Hazlitt

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace ~ Marquis De Sade

No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

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

The concept of 'different' confines to nothing but mobility. We can be both commonplace and unique depending on the ground we occupy and the people we engage with. ~ Jay Mark Mateo Balmes

There is doubtless such a thing as a 'national character'. In art, it is the lowest common denominator. The more specific the character, the more commonplace it is. That is why creation always requires overcoming such a character.

An artist, if he is anything, is an individual. But to be an individual means embodying your own truths, suffering your own experiences, and inventing your own style. But these things can only occur by renouncing facility, and the most unfortunate facility comes from these so-called national characters, formed by the sedimentation of collective mediocrity, which lies there ready-made. National character is by definition that which remains in a culture after you have removed the personal effort involved in thinking, the personal experience of life and the triumph of individual creation. ~ Mihail Sebastian

The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be "Oriental" in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be - that is, submitted to being - made Oriental. ~ Edward W. Said

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look. ~ Laura Bates

All around, everywhere you look, is dullness and uncertainty. Even something born of beauty soon leads to boredom and banality, commonplace, the human ritual, the tedious rhythm of life. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Dying is one of the few experiences we'll eventually all enjoy firsthand, and like most shit that's commonplace, it's boring to dwell on. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

That is an expression, Sir John," said Marianne, warmly, "which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common–place phrase by which wit is intended; and "setting one's cap at a man," or "making a conquest," are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity. ~ Jane Austen

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars... ~ Jack Kerouac

A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home. ~ Margaret Oliphant

Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood; some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day...but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. ~ Philip K. Dick

It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility. ~ G.H. Hardy

The fact is, rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if it's something shocking and extraordinary whenever it hits the headlines. We remain silent, and so we condone it…Until rape, and the structures – sexism, inequality, tradition – that make it possible, are part of our dinner-table conversation with the next generation, it will continue. Is it polite and comfortable to talk about it? No. Must we anyway? Yes."

'To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape ~ Desmond Tutu

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is presentation which lifts the card trick from the level of the commonplace puzzle to the status of an unforgettable and inexplicable mystery. ~ Jean Hugard

James M. McPherson spoke for a later generation of scholars when he asserted in 1988 that Lincoln's entire, public inaugural journey might have been a "mistake," because in his effort to avoid "a careless remark or slip of the tongue" that might "inflame the crisis further," the president-elect "indulged in platitudes and trivia," producing "an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer. ~ Harold Holzer

It is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one's own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations. ~ Ruth Benedict

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Her father's old books were all she could command, and these she wore out with much reading. Inheriting his refined tastes, she found nothing to attract her in the society of the commonplace and often coarse people about her. She tried to like the buxom girls whose one ambition was to "get married," and whose only subjects of conversation were "smart bonnets" and "nice dresses." She tried to believe that the admiration and regard of the bluff young farmers was worth striving for; but when one well-to-do neighbor laid his acres at her feet, she found it impossible to accept for her life's companion a man whose soul was wrapped up in prize cattle and big turnips. ~ Louisa May Alcott

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 as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next. ~ Cesare Pavese

It is no easy matter to say commonplace things in an original way. ~ Horace

What else has changes since 1984? Oil's running our, I say Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinction of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Aparteid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state - and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffed cannibal. p 500 ~ David Mitchell

Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it's easier to get used to it than carve it out. ~ Steven Erikson

If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that "least mediocre of the mediocre" is a discouraging title for a prize[.] ~ Edward St. Aubyn

The wild things and places belong to all of us. So while I can't fix the bigger problems of race in the United States - can't suggest a means by which I, and others like me, will always feel safe - I can prescribe a solution in my own small corner. Get more people of color "out there." Turn oddities into commonplace. The presence of more black birders, wildlife biologists, hunters, hikers, and fisher-folk will say to others that we, too, appreciate the warble of a summer tanager, the incredible instincts of a whitetail buck, and the sound of wind in the tall pines. Our responsibility is to pass something on to those coming after. As young people of color reconnect with what so many of their ancestors knew - that our connections to the land run deep, like the taproots of mighty oaks; that the land renews and sustains us - maybe things will begin to change. ~ J. Drew Lanham

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting. ~ Gertrude Stein

Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color ... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are. ~ Mark Nepo

For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. ~ Hannah Arendt

Social media is not new. It has been around for centuries. Today, blogs are the new pamphlets. Microblogs and online social networks are the new coffee houses. Media-sharing sites are the new commonplace books. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the privileged bottleneck of broadcast media. The rebirth of social media in the Internet age represents a profound shift - and a return, in many respects, to the way things used to be. ~ Tom Standage

Self-Exam

Dear audience, please stand if you were raised
By a terrible mother. Okay, okay,

Approximately half of you. So I'd say
That terrible mothers are commonplace.

Just like terrible fathers. So let's mourn
For the children who never knew childhood.

Our grief is justified. Our anger is good.
I won't blame children for childish scorn.

But there comes a day when a broken child
Becomes an adult. On that day, you'll need

To choose between the domestic and wild.
You'll need to escalate war or declare peace.

I tell you this because I'm the kid, mother-stung,
Who became a terrible adult son.

And I'm to blame for that. I made that mess.
Because I am the Amateur of Forgiveness. ~ Sherman Alexie

I glory in the emotionally commonplace ~ Lionel Shriver

(E)ach generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup
if any. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

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

One is reminded in this connection of a story concerning Kobori-Enshiu. Enshiu was complimented by his disciples on the admirable taste he had displayed in the choice of his [art] collection. Said they, "Each piece is such that no one could help admiring. It shows that you had better taste than had Rikiu, for his collection could only be appreciated by one beholder in a thousand." Sorrowfully Enshiu replied: "This only proves how commonplace I am. The great Rikiu dared to love only those objects which personally appealed to him, whereas I unconsciously cater to the taste of the majority. Verily, Rikiu was one in a thousand among tea-masters. ~ Kakuzo Okakura

And the ladies dressed in red for my pain and with my pain latched onto my breath, clinging like the fetuses of scorpions in the deepest crook of my neck, the mothers in red who sucked out the last bit of heat that my barely beating heart could give me - I always had to learn on my own the steps you take to drink and eat and breathe, I was never taught to cry and now will never learn to do this, least of all from the great ladies latched onto the lining of my breath with reddish spit and floating veils of blood, my blood, mine alone, which I drew myself and which they drink from now after murdering the king whose body is listing in the river and who moves his eyes and smiles, though he's dead and when you're dead, you're dead, for all the smiling you do, and the great ladies, the tragic ladies in red have murdered the one who is floating down the river and I stay behind like a hostage in their eternal custody.

I want to die to the letter of the law of the commonplace, where we are assured that dying is the same as dreaming. The light, the forbidden wine, the vertigo. Who is it you write for? The ruins of an abandoned temple. If only celebration were possible. A mournful vision, splintered, of a garden of broken statues.

Numb time, time like a glove upon a drum. The three who compete in me remain on a shifting point and we neither are nor is. My eyes used to find rest in humiliated, forsaken things. Nowadays I see with them; I've seen and approved of no ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Commonplace they might be, but the accumulation of these memories has led to one result: me. ~ Haruki Murakami

I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, becuase I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people - and there my vanity steps in ... ~ Charles Dickens

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

The overwhelming bulk of the cosmos is deathly quiet. But here and there - on worlds where matter is thick and conditions are right - noises are commonplace. And in some cases, these noisy worlds may ring with the sounds of life - the bleats and bellows of creatures we have never seen, but may someday discover. ~ Seth Shostak

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace. ~ Elbert Hubbard

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, the slaves of the ordinary. ~ Cecil Beaton

The way we are conditioned to see the world in our own culture seems so completely obvious and commonplace that it is difficult to image that another culture might do things differently. It is only when you start to identify what is typical in your culture but different from others, that you can begin to open a dialogue of sharing, learning, and ultimately understanding. ~ Erin Meyer

The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on. ~ Jaron Lanier

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Outside, most people knew that decades ago, the religious fundamentalists lost the ability to transform society when they became a political movement. Their boycotts and protests were commonplace, any outcry against anything beyond the narrow range of what they saw as biblically acceptable was dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction. ~ Sigmund Brouwer

Love is like magic and it always will be. For love still remains life's sweet mystery! Love works in ways that are wondrous and strange and there's nothing in life that love cannot change! Love can transform the most commonplace into beauty and splendor and sweetness and grace. Love is unselfish, understanding and kind, for it sees with its heart and not with its mind! Love is the answer that everyone seeks ... Love is the language, that every heart speaks. Love can't be bought, it is priceless and free, love, like pure magic, is life's sweet mystery! ~ Helen Steiner Rice

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . .

Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . .

The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . .

Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities ~ Russell Kirk

Commonplace, adj.
... But then I'll walk into the bathroom and find you've forgotten to put the cap back on the toothpaste again, and it will be this splinter that I just keep stepping on. ~ David Levithan

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot. ~ Graham Joyce

We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull. ~ Richard C. Wydick

Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Those of us who oppose hateful bigotry must not be silent when it rears its ugly head. When the tolerant tolerate the intolerant they risk losing the very freedoms they are trying to protect. Bigotry should never be allowed to become acceptable and commonplace in a healthy society. ~ Laurence Overmire

Nature is another name for the miracles that are so commonplace in our lives that we take for granted and have grown used to seeing them. ~ Shalom Arush

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic. ~ Richard Eyre

Yes, he knew that we was withdrawing from everything: not merely from human beings. A moment more and everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and the commonplace, will have become unintelligible, strange and heavy. So he sat there and waited until it should have happened. And defended himself no longer. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems to be a general rule that sciences begin their development with the unusual. They have to develop considerable sophistication before they interest themselves in the commonplace. ~ Ralph Linton

I've never recognized 'emo' as a genre of music. I always thought it was the most retarded term ever. I know there is this generic commonplace that every band that gets labeled with that term hates it. They feel scandalized by it. But honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. The reason I think it's so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren't emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn't make any sense to me. ~ Guy Picciotto

The Best Tips For Marketing Your Dental Lab Services Business

A single dental lab services business owner will find it a complex task in making their concept generate higher profits and revenue. It's tricky to find the most appropriate method to develop your market share and improve your sales. In order to expand your dentalgroup business dramatically, you should analyze popular marketing techniques to discover which works best for your industry. When you are putting together a marketing program, some of the tips below will help you be more successful.

When companies only offer products of the highest quality, they are going to likely to find they are extremely profitable. When you offer the highest quality output, you will be able to watch your sales and reserve resources grow. It is commonplace for a customer to refer your dental lab services business when they are happy with their experience. If you are persistent about trying to be outstanding in your industry, you are destined for success.

When you begin a web dental lab services business, it's vital to be patient and stay focused until the paying customers come in. The success of your dentalgroup business depends on the time, energy, and resources you invest at the beginning. Your most important goals should be the key focus whenever your dentalgroup business gets to the first quiet period. Dental lab services business owners must keep the growth and expansion of their businesses firs ~ Stephen Coates, D.D.S., Inc.

Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing. ~ Dennis Lehane

The Tower is not a sacred monument, and no taboo can forbid a commonplace life to develop there, but there can be no question, nonetheless, of a trivial phenomenon here; the installation of a restaurant on the Tower, for instance ... The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it its an object wither very old (analogous, for instance, to the Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further, by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there, as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world. ~ Roland Barthes

You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy. ~ Lemony Snicket

There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes. ~ Edward Bond

It's alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. ~ Vladimir Putin