Commonplace Quotes

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.

But at the same time, the commonplace statement about them is true: every character is the hero of his own story. Each has a justification for his actions that is convincing to him. It's fun to give these people voices.

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.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

I always find it kind of embarrassing, kind of funny, and kind of exciting. In New York I'm recognized a lot, although nobody says anything. You know, they stare at you just a second too long. But in Paris it's not as commonplace to be recognized.

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.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

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 as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.

I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.

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.

Space is going to be commonplace.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

To make mistakes is human; to stumble is commonplace; to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

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.

The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.

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 know that one is immortal.

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.

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.

Ya know, 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.

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.