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.

— Cocteau, Jean

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.

— Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

— Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

— Lincoln, Abraham

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.

— Twain, Mark

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

— Vaneigem, Raoul

Thou unassuming common-place of Nature, with that homely face.

— Wordsworth, William