When you first commence painting everything is a muddle. Even the commonest colors seem to have the devil in them.
One of the commonest mistakes is thinking your worries are over when your children get married.
The commonest form, one of the most often neglected, and the safest opportunity for the average man to seize, is hard work.
I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
Oh, God, if I were sure I were to die tonight I would repent at once. It is the commonest prayer in all languages.
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
It is only in exceptional moods that we realize how wonderful are the commonest experiences of life. It seems to me sometimes that these experiences have an "inner" side, as well as the outer side we normally perceive. At such moments one suddenly sees everything with new eyes; one feels on the brink of some great revelation. It is as if we caught a glimpse of some incredibly beautiful world that lies silently about us all the time.
Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.
The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
For proverbs are the pith, the proprieties, the proofs, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good.
To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.
Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates - more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts - an atmosphere of not loving and not caring.
The commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes.
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
