A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection, education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the spermatozoa, so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according to their comparative commonness.

We detect the other in the complacency of its platitudes and the stereotyped commonness of its metaphors.

They know well enough that they must give us something which we in our commonness regard as valuable enough to exchange for a bushel of our potatoes, or a sack of our white onions.

A few ages hence, its ablest descendants will probably have made their choice, if they have constitution enough to survive in the battle of lifewhich, from the commonness of the plant, they seem likely to have.

Habit [includes commonness due to frequency of occurrence]

He passed and repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity or flat commonness.

What a cheap vein of commonness was revealed in herin every oneby the temptation of a great fortune!

To Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver is a mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic possibilities beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole volumes of romance.

Yet, in thinking of the commonness of depressed spirits, even where the mind is otherwise very free from anything morbid, we should remember that there is a strong temptation to believe that this depression is more common and more prevalent than it truly is.

They are from a writer, who of all other men, knows how to extricate a common thing from commonness, and to give it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and wisdom.

We have alluded to the advantages we enjoy in our days from the commonness of books, and from the knowledge which by their means is spread all over the world; and the sense of this advantage has led people to feel a great interest in all that concerned the inventor or discoverer of printing.

She had never especially noted before, but now she was noting as a shuddering exhibition of "commonness," that he wore detachable cuffsand upon this detail her distraught mind fixed as typical.

"Yet the commonness of such sentences prevents in a great measure a too early expectation of the end.

This has never yet been claimed as literal and regular syntax, though the usages differ in nothing but commonness; both being honourably authorized, both still improper on some occasions, and, in both, the Enallage being alike obvious.

He had been mercifully spared from moving among the infinitudes of small men who hold such a large estimate of the incapacity and commonness of women....

Marguerite Grey was saying: "When I get too weary, or heart-sick, tired of my own work, in the sense of being bored by its commonness" "Wicked woman," murmured Vina.

Quite as he would have had her do, the artist merely turned from one to the other a quick glance, and ignored the matter; yet that glance had stamped him with her conception of his commonness.

The trying part was that look in Beth Truba's eyes, which told him how bored she was by this sort of commonness.

This would affix him eternally to commonness in her mind.

Did the Destiny Master fall asleep for a century at a time, that such a genius for motherhood should be denied, while the earth was being replenished with children of chance, branded with commonness and forever afraid?

Commonness: that is the great note of the incarnation and the purposed feature of Christ's earthly life.

They would have been ashamed of it before they came to Roslyn school, but the commonness of the habit had now made them blind or indifferent to its meanness.

There was never a touch of commonness.

I often blush for the cheap Americans with loud voices and provincial speech, and general commonness, whom one meets over here; but with all their faults they cannot approach the vulgarities at table which I have seen in Paris.

Surely this is as wonderful as the Akashic Records, though its "commonness" makes it lose its wonderful appearance to us.