A Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Quote Topics

Commonplace Nothing Remarkable Wish

Quote Author

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
American - Judge
March 8, 1841 - March 6, 1935

Remarkable work is always not on the list, because if it was, it would be commonplace, not remarkable.

Seth Godin

Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable.(attributed to)

William Shakespeare

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A man's desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable pattern may not be lost to the world.

Helen Rowland

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.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.

Gertrude Atherton

In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.

Theodore Parker

Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous - who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?

John Keats

Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.

Peter Medawar

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Nothing fires the warrior’s heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowels or guts but from one’s discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions.

Steven Pressfield

No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.

Bill Brandt

I try and take the commonplace - and some of it is writ large, like death - take the commonplace and make it universally resonant, revelatory, and beautiful at the same time.

Sally Mann

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

I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a commonplace dauber, so I don't intend to try any more.