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1 " The common theme of common sense is that it’s commonly rejected as uncommonly demanding. "
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
2 " She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , The Painted Veil
3 " But there she was, standing next to his mother, so beautiful, so radiant that he could not see anyone else. Suddenly the rest of the world seemed like such a chore. He didn’t want to be here at this dance, with people he didn’t want to talk to and messages he didn’t particularly wish to deliver. He didn’t want to dance with young ladies he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to make polite conversation with people he did. He just wanted Billie, and he wanted her all to himself. He forgot about Tallywhite. He forgot about pease, porridge, and pudding, and he stalked across the room with such single-minded purpose that the crowds seemed to melt from his path. And somehow, amazingly, the rest of the world had not yet noticed her. She was so beautiful, so uncommonly alive and real in this room full of waxen dolls. She would not go undiscovered for long. But not yet. Soon he would have to fight the throngs of eager young gentlemen, but for now, she was still his alone. "
― Julia Quinn , Because of Miss Bridgerton (Rokesbys, #1)
4 " Learn to do common things uncommonly well "
5 " To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. "
― C.G. Jung
6 " Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors. "
― John Updike , The Poorhouse Fair
7 " Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age. "
― K.J. Bishop , The Etched City
8 " Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary. "
― Adam Smith , The Theory of Moral Sentiments
9 " Darona’s face bore the pinched, taut look and shadowed eyes of someone constantly in pain, but the lack of lines suggested she was younger than Jesral had first thought; middle-aged, fifty at the very most.‘You make an uncommonly fine looking noblewoman, for a Mhrydaineg commoner.’‘Thank you.’ Jesral was careful to keep all tone out of her voice. Darona gave her a shrewd stare, then a slight smile.‘Self-control. Good. You must ignore me when I offend you unintentionally. They say that pain can make one waspish, but my brothers and son tell me there’s been no change in my manner. I was acid-tongued long before this set in,’ she held up a knotted hand, ‘and taking devil’s claw root has no effect on that. Rest assured, young woman, when I intend offence people are in no doubt about it. "
10 " But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. (6.12) "
11 " On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems.And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the narrow streets. The only thing missing was Scheherazade with her tales of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights ... A few days later I saw my first missile attack on Kabul. This country was at war. "
― , Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
12 " All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect. "
― Arthur Schopenhauer , On The Will In Nature (Living Time Thought)
13 " He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put myself in win-win situations, and that, “You have to know what you want, and you have to get it, "
― Aspen Matis , Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
14 " When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love. "
― Patrick Süskind , Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
15 " I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's " control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a " teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. (" The Vane Sisters" ) "
16 " Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty: he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware: to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with. "
― Jane Austen , Pride and Prejudice
17 " Like snowflakes the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action. "
18 " It was my father who taught me to value myself. He told me that I was uncommonly beautiful and that I was the most precious thing in his life. "
19 " To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success. "
