Commonplace Quotes

NBC’s pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the birth of both ‘Friends’ and ‘ER’. While ‘ER’ came essentially out of the blue, we’d been casting around for a ‘Friends’-like show for some time at the network.

It has become commonplace to call Trump a reality TV star. That is said as an aspersion, the way Ronald Reagan was called an actor. But Reagan’s acting experience, his ability to talk to the camera and not yell to the hall, is what helped make him such a good politician. It is the same with Trump.

My father’s card-playing buddies treated me as a plain, ordinary, commonplace kid destined for mediocrity – or less. I suppose they expected that I would spend my life as a clerk of some sort.

I think it is commonplace for parties to change candidates and reshuffle ministries to bring in new faces.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

When I was growing up and watching ‘The Sweeney,’ the notion of police officers being an inch away from the villains that they’re chasing was commonplace.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it’s commonplace for users to create ‘throwaway’ accounts to reveal sensitive information.

Since 1955, the U.K. has been part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Intelligence-sharing is, in itself, commonplace.

I have been in teen shows for years, so doing that stuff – kissing – is kind of commonplace and not a big deal. It was way more cool just because it was Meg Ryan.

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.

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

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

I think everyone knows someone who’s battling with dementia or caring for a relative affected by it. I’ve been staggered by how commonplace it is.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

When the new becomes commonplace, people become accustomed to it. That’s a tribute to our sense of adventure.

Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.

Many actors in films are willing to go to Broadway, and screenwriters are writing plays. It’s almost commonplace.

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.

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.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Back when the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were one great intellectual hodgepodge, proving the existence of God was a relatively commonplace exercise. To the modern mind, however, science and religion talk past each other.

The abuse on Twitter has become so commonplace and accepted that people have literally made careers out of it.

What is now commonplace was once not, and I think that’s a testament to what it means to really break the mold and push the limits.

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.

I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away.

Lying, stealing, and cheating are commonplace.

Disaffection, alienation and conspiracy theories are commonplace among European Muslims, but dangerous Islamist radicalism and the Islamic State’s ‘foreign fighter’ recruitment successes tend to be specific to certain European towns, districts and ghettos.

My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace – be comfortable with it – then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.

Compared to being caught in the wrong body, being plagued by ‘dysmorphic OCD thoughts,’ being gay is commonplace and mostly accepted. What once seemed unimaginable and shameful has been revealed to be perfectly normal.

I invent by analogy. I thought, ‘It’s commonplace that you can mix colors, smear them together to get new emerging colors. Likewise, you can mix radio waves to get new frequencies.’ So, I wondered, ‘Why can’t you mix sound to get new sounds?’

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

Extradition treaties date back at least to 1259 B.C., when the Hittite King Hattusili the Third and Ramesses the Second signed a treaty of ‘peace and brotherhood for all time.’ They have become more commonplace as international travel has become easier and sensibly streamlined.

Casual dehumanization of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table.

By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape’s sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 – Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded.

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.

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.

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.

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.

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

There’s always a way to say something that could seem really commonplace and make it special again.

In all great epochs of history, the existence of standards – that is, the conscious adoption of type-forms – has been the criterion of a polite, well-ordered society; for it is a commonplace that repetition of the same things for the same purpose exercises a settling and civilizing influence on men’s minds.

Security is a component of everyday life that one spending time in Washington, D.C., gets accustomed to. Metal detectors, police vehicle barriers and heavily-armed police officers become strangely commonplace after awhile.

September 11, 2001, was a terrible tragedy by any measure, but it was not a historical turning point. It did not herald a new era of international relations in which terrorists with a global agenda prevailed or in which such spectacular terrorist attacks became commonplace.

One rare and exceptional deed is worth far more than a thousand commonplace ones.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

I love to take something very commonplace and reuse it in an original way.

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.

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

It’s no longer permissible to have sexist comments, but growing up in this industry, I spent time in many other organizations where it was just commonplace for men to talk about how a woman looks or give a woman a little bit of a harder time in a meeting and then say, ‘I’m just joking – it’s because I care about you.’

The problem with dragons is that everyone uses them. All the time. When that happens, they become commonplace. A lot of people think you can just throw them into a story and suddenly whatever you’re writing is 28% cooler. But that doesn’t work. All that does is make dragons into some boring cliche.

In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as ‘heresy’ in the churches.

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

Despite being commonplace, too many people with mental health problems still face stigma, prejudice and discrimination.

For artists, looking back in time for ideas is commonplace, but there’s an overwhelming sense of ’70s and ’80s nostalgia in California musician Ariel Pink’s music. It’s impossible to separate ‘Round and Round’ from the anachronism, and there’s no loving one without loving the other.

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.

It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the ‘international community’ had learned nothing since the Holocaust.

Is the casual objectification of women so commonplace that we should all just suck it up, roll over, and accept defeat? I hope not.

Cars will talk to each other and the world around them to make driving both safer and more efficient. ‘Vehicle-to-vehicle’ and ‘vehicle-to-infrastructure’ connectivity will become commonplace.

There have always been men of all background and ethnicities on my father’s job sites. And long before it was commonplace, you also saw women.

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.

I have friends who have children with various disabilities, and I was able to talk to them about just sort of the struggle and the extra effort that has to be put into very commonplace things.

Celebrity is this thing that’s unattainable. This unattainable lifestyle. This unattainable social status. But there’s nothing more commonplace than dying from hot sauce.

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.

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.

The depressing reality is that campaigns like the Everyday Sexism Project would not need to exist were casual sexism not so startlingly commonplace.

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.

At the turn of the twentieth century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication.

We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can’t be unique and universal at the same time.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

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.

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.

In England, gossiping is not as commonplace or even celebrated as much as it is in Latino culture. But it is not as frowned upon as it is in the United States by U.S. Americans.

I think the main reason is that people binge watch because they can. We’re like dogs, really. If we like something, we tend to gorge ourselves on it until there’s no more left. And as bingeing becomes possible and commonplace, it’s only natural that shows should start to take it into account.

Let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace.