Ordinary Quotes by Anuj, Harvey Pekar, William Zinsser, C. S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers, Susan Sarandon and many others.
A person’s words reflect the image of his character and the amount of truth and lies in it is always visible to the human heart than ordinary eyes.
Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.
It is impossible to live the life of a disciple without definite times of secret prayer. You will find that the place to enter in is in your business, as you walk along the streets, in the ordinary ways of life, when no one dreams you are praying, and the reward comes openly, a revival here, a blessing there.
I feel I`ve always been on the outside and always on the edge of an abyss. The women I portray, and the woman I am, are ordinary but maybe find themselves in extra-ordinary circumstances, and what they do is at great cost.
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
Stereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status – so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn’t just visual.
The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white folks for two contradictory reasons. First, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don’t. Second, he has a high IQ, but they don’t.
Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.
I’m just an ordinary person.
The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven’t been observed yet.
Mark, therefore, the ordinary theory of practical religion, what it leads to. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism. It is not religion. It is no better than atheism – a little less.
Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified’, and raised into immortal life by harmony.
If governments were kind, they’d realize that conficts are resolved and wars prevented not by armies but by ordinary people.
Growth at an exceptional rate is a red flag in banking. It is hard enough to manage an ordinary bank; to control a sprouting weed is well-nigh impossible. If loans are expanding too quickly, the lending officers have probably been saying ‘yes’ too frequently.
Always try to grow in your garden some plant or plants out of the ordinary, something your neighbors never attempted. For you can receive no greater flattery than to have a gardener of equal intelligence stand before your plant and ask, “What is that?”
I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.
Obama is not the messiah any longer. He is now your standard, ordinary, everyday politician who lies, who breaks promises, who’s in it for himself, who can’t do anything on his own. He’s not qualified. All of this is becoming known, sadly, too late.
If you spend a lot of time with activists, as I have, they’re just ordinary people who instead of Netflix are getting together in church basements and making posters or making phone calls doing organizing work. It really is about finding a community of other people.
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
I like to show ordinary people reacting to extraordinary circumstances. It’s an opportunity for adventure, and I like women to have adventures. There’s been far too little of it with women.
The questions that we scientist have about Saturn’s rings are the questions that an ordinary person might be moved to ask when first seeing them, you know. What caused them? How did they get there? How long have they been around? How long are they going to last?
The cat is the only non-gregarious domestic animal. It is retained by its extra-ordinary adhesion to the comforts of the house in which it is reared.
In the startup world, you’re either a genius or an idiot. You’re never just an ordinary guy trying to get through the day.
I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.
I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Life is too short, the world is too big and God’s love is too great to live ordinary.
Those who are nothing particular are noble people. Don’t strive – just be ordinary.
To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.
What is called “apathy” is, I believe, a feeling of helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen, a feeling of impotence in the face of enormous power. It’s not that people are apathetic; they do care about what is going on, but don’t know what to do about it, so they do nothing, and appear to be indifferent.
No Ordinary American Cares About Their Constitutional Rights
In every single day, in every walk of life, ordinary people do extraordinary things. В Ordinary People accomplish Extraordinary things.
How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.
There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.
‘The Talk-Funny Girl’ opens with a glum picture of a desperately poor rural New England family. Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.
We have to make good use of the time we have. That simple. We have to wake up every day, knowing that it’s not just an ordinary day. We have to take the moment, seize each day.
The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.
What dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
A hero called Adin rose from the ranks of the people. He was an ordinary man, a blacksmith who made swords and armor and shoes for horses. But he had been blessed with strsngth, courage, and cleverness.
If you don’t have a way to speak to ordinary Americans, you’re not in the game.
I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.
Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.
Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
What you dismiss as an ordinary coincidence may be an opening to an extraordinary adventure.
[T]he politically correct are above the rules of ordinary civility, once they have identified you as an unbeliever in their religion.
Extraordinary potential exists in all of us. With the right environment, resources, skills and knowledge, ‘ordinary’ people can produce extraordinary results.
At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.
The test of a man’s religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. The worth of a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not before the footlights.
Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA – ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.
The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.
I am an ordinary woman from a Tamil family.
The people who stood out in the Sandy Hook incident, the heroes, were the normal, ordinary people who went to save those children.
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
With these vast advantages, ordinary and extraordinary, one would have supposed the North would have been content, and would have at least respected the security and tranquility of such obedient and profitable brethren; but such is not human nature.
Every missionary I know is extraordinarily ordinary. Everything they do, they do by the grace of God.
Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.
Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.
Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.
We live very ordinary lives.
The right to strike is one of the most important safeguards working people have in this country. It’s a weapon of last resort that has served throughout history as a bargaining tool which allows unions to push for recognition of ordinary workers’ rights to be paid fairly and treated with dignity.
Why live an ordinary life, when you can live an extraordinary one.
It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
If Christians were Christians, there would be no anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew. There is nothing that the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as this awkward historical fact.
Ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: it won’t allow you to fly.
I’m not interested in hiding from the fact that my parents are actors. I’m proud of them! It’s very ordinary to pursue a career that your parents do, but when it’s in the public eye, it becomes a complicated thing.
Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.
When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
A lot of healing is in the mind. I’m not talking about serious illnesses like cancer. I’m talking about ordinary broken bones. Healing begins in the head. You have to convince yourself you can do it.
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole… Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.
When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly ’til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling.
On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
Leadership isn’t the private reserve of a few charismatic men and women. It’s a process ordinary people use when they’re bringing forth the best from themselves and others. Liberate the leader in everyone, and extraordinary things happen.
What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.
Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn’t want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.
…but there isn’t going to be any First Lady. There is just to be plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt…I never wanted to be the president’s wife, and don’t want it now. You don’t quite believe me, do you? Very likely no one would-except possibly some woman who had had the job.
There are no ordinary moments.
Some trials look as much like the trial of an ordinary criminal case as a Hitchcock film looks like a home movie.
Im drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. Im not saying I dont love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because Im always struggling with it myself.
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s) you don’t realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.
The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.
My parents were an ordinary East End family and very supportive – they would have supported me no matter what I wanted to do.
Modiji is a BJP worker, and crores of karyakartas are proud of the fact that an ordinary worker has become a beloved personality in India and abroad.
What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing.
Best Witchcraft is Geometry
To the magician’s mind –
His ordinary acts are feats
To thinking of mankind.
To the magician’s mind –
His ordinary acts are feats
To thinking of mankind.
The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.
The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.
I’m not a star, and I don’t want to be a star. Stars fall. I’m an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job.
I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.
All truth is very ordinary. It is peoples’ fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary.
The most significant change wrought by adolescence is the taming of the ideals by which a person measures himself. . . . Love of oneself becomes love of the species. Conscience is pointed to the future, whispering permission to reach beyond the safety net of our ordinary and finite human existence.
It’s just that if you’re not disruptive everything seems to be repeated endlessly – not so much the good things but the bland things – the ordinary things – the weaker things get repeated- the stronger things get suppressed and held down and hidden.
I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry. … I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it’s too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
I didn’t have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.
Ordinary people in such positions – working at firms, companies, or chains – have the absolute right to have their voice in the public square.
Unless people can express themselves well in ordinary English, they don’t know what they are talking about.
Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size.
When you think about it, psychological thrillers often involve extraordinary events happening to ordinary people.
We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.
Powerful dictatorships that make their leaders powerful need to stage wars to get ordinary people to march in lockstep like mindless Nazi robots. That is the road to Greatness.
The work of the Lord is done by ordinary people who work in an extraordinary way.
you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.
What people don’t understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing. There’s no other nation in the world where that happens. And it’s very much a part of our heritage.
The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
You never know,” Jack said speculatively. “There may come a time when savages like William Hamleigh aren’t in power; when the laws protect the ordinary people instead of enslaving them; when the king makes peace instead of war. Think of that – a time when towns in England don’t need walls!
I’m an ordinary Hackney boy, and I can talk to people.
A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens… if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly… to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?
Every conversation is a form of Jazz. The activity of instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing.
I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.
Mrs. Miniver was an ordinary middle-class English housewife, a character created by Jan Struther when she was commissioned by the ‘Times of London’ to write a weekly ‘cheer-up’ article in 1937.
What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse – we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won’t think twice about it.
The ordinary man says in his ignorance, “My religion is the sole religion, my religion is the best.” But when his heart is illuminated by the true knowledge, he knows that beyond all the battles of sects and of sectaries presides the one, indivisible, eternal and omnipresent Benediction.
A single, ordinary person still can make a difference – and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.
All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
My dream is to play ordinary characters. I have no interest in playing a pretty girl or an NRI girl.
Thus, on this World Refugee Day, let us take time to recognize and draw inspiration from these ordinary people who have shown such extraordinary courage – the world’s millions of refugees and displaced.
The ritual of exorcism is not practiced by an ordinary priest. An exorcist requires specific training and must be thought to have a personal sanctity. He can be exposed to dangerous behavior and personal threat. His prayers often cause a violent response as he attempts to shine a beam of light into the darkness.
Poetry’s medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.
I’m not really managing the work-life balance, I’m just accepting that the work increases and the ordinary life has to decrease when you’re the prime minister.
Achievement does not require extraordinary ability. Achievement comes from ordinary abilities applied with extraordinary persistence.
I like examining the ordinary, and by doing so, one hopefully reveals the extraordinary nature within.
You have to give kids from ordinary families a ladder. You have to show them there’s a way out.
May we, as image makers, shapers of the culture, set our sights on things we value, rituals we engage in that heal and serve. May our images honor the ordinary endeavors of common people, and may they make their way to the eyes of the weary – light to the dark, fire to the chill.
Ordinary faithfulness leads to extraordinary impact.
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.
Stripped of its plot, the ‘Iliad’ is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
I think there’s a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
A letter makes ordinary things seem important.
Cooking was taken with such seriousness in France that even ordinary chefs were proud of their profession. That’s what appealed to me.
It is the height of professionalism to be able to make an ordinary piece of music sound good. When playing routine melodic studies the player must treat them as if they are musical value.
Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
I don’t understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
I’m nothing special, just an ordinary human being. That’s why I always describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk.
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary
David Simon is a brilliant writer, brilliant at being able to take what is ordinary and make it extraordinary.
Ordinary human laws are the means – however imperfect – by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money…And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.
Credit expansion and money printing hasn’t filtered much to ordinary people. It’s boosted asset markets, real estate and stocks. So well-to-do-people have done very well.
Because I’m just an ordinary person that did some extraordinary things.
My life may seem glamorous from the outside but off screen it’s as ordinary as anyone else’s.
The problem with Maigret is he hasn’t got a limp, and he hasn’t got a lisp, and he hasn’t got a French accent, or a particular love of opera… or all those other things that people tend to attach to many fictional detectives. He’s just an ordinary guy doing an extraordinary job, in a very interesting time.
The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.
Consultant: any ordinary guy more than fifty miles from home.
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers’ shelves permit ordinary poets to exist.
[Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.]
[Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.]
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
I’m not trying to sign people up to a creed, I’m much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn’t mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does them day in and day out.
We’re all so busy chasing the extraordinary that we forget to stop and be grateful for the ordinary.
Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.
In the ordinary affairs of life we do not require nor expect demonstrative evidence, because it is inconsistent with the nature of matters of fact, and to insist on its production would be unreasonable and absurd.
I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don’t understand.
Good-breeding shows itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.
The ideal of an all-sided education for youth had always been close to my heart. I saw clearly the arid results of ordinary instruction, aimed only at the development of body and intellect.
They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there’s now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you’re next. I don’t buy it.
there on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness.
Success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. Once you are above the level of 25; once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
I just see me, an ordinary girl. I know my life is not typical, but I have tried to stay really grounded and true to myself. My family really helps me with that.
Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.
There are no extraordinary people only ordinary people who do extraordinary things with what they’ve been given
Unlike the interference of ordinary interest, power, or prejudice, which touches philosophy only at its outskirts and becomes at most a matter for philosophical tactics, the claim of revelation to the highest truth touches philosophy at its core and must affect its whole strategy.
Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labors monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.
The courage of very ordinary people is all that stands between us and the dark.
My daily affairs are quite ordinary; but I’m in total harmony with them. I don’t hold on to anything, don’t reject anything; nowhere an obstacle or conflict. Who cares about wealth and honor? Even the poorest thing shines. My miraculous power and spiritual activity: drawing water and carrying wood.
I want to be able to separate the average from the good and from the great. I want to separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.
You can learn from everyone, the president or the cleaner. You need teachers in life, but they’re not always school teachers or professors. You learn from ordinary people. You learn from travel, from just walking down the street.
Ordinary citizens are so accepting of what is going on, grumbling when their material interests were affected, but seemingly accepting the spiritual poverty so characteristic of today.
If I want to experience the life of an ordinary person, I cannot do it in Asia.
Everybody likes an extraordinary person or likes to think that they would be great with a superpower in an ordinary world.
The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.
Smart people underestimate the ordinarity of ordinary people.
I’m always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.
Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
It’s jarring to go from one amazing experience to another that feels ordinary. I don’t quite know how to explain it. You see the uniqueness of what you’ve been doing, and disassociating yourself from it and going back to the ‘normal’ life is tough.
Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused.
The best education I received was working with people in the community on a grassroots basis. Because what it taught me was that ordinary people, when they are working together can do extraordinary things.
I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.
I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
Moses became Americas true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.
There’s nothing wrong with ordinary. I just prefer to shoot for extraordinary.
I feel like I’m an ordinary person, but I’ve had extraordinary opportunities in my later life, and I never saw any of it coming. I never saw ‘The Office’ coming, I never saw ‘Inside Out’ coming, and I just feel grateful and thankful to have these opportunities and to have an actual real enthusiasm in my life.
We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle.
It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives – many quite extraordinary – make up that history.
Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly natural to me. It is also perfectly natural for the many scientists I know who are also people of deep religious faith.
When you’ve got a team who are making a concerted effort to make a batsman feel uncomfortable it can look pretty ordinary.
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
Though there is nothing more dangerous, yet there is nothing more ordinary, than for weak saints to make their sense and feeling the judge of their condition. We must strive to walk by faith.
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
Our intelligence agencies will continue to gather information about the intentions of governments – as opposed to ordinary citizens – around the world, in the same way that the intelligence services of every other nation does. We will not apologize simply because our services may be more effective.
I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences. Today is one of those experiences.
What is amazing is how we treat a meeting with God as ordinary or burdensome.
God is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
When you stir up the passion, your faith will allow God to do amazing things. If you want to remain passionate, you cannot let what once was a miracle become ordinary.
I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man’s life, don’t you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.
After spending time in the East and meeting with ordinary Afghans there, it’s hard to imagine how a future Afghan government will retain control of provinces such as Khost or Paktia once U.S. forces are gone.
The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to followoneparticular path. And if wefollow it, it isnotthe sign of anunconscious act.On the contrary, it showsthat there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness.
The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate amongst them and parade their discriminations before others. So I say; those who discriminate, fail to see.
Enlightenment is just another word for feeling comfortable with being a completely ordinary person.
Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time.
The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Usually, ordinary histories don’t get the emotional feel of a period. That’s what a novel can do.
I will become a clean president. I will become a president who can retire home as an ordinary citizen and is welcomed by neighbors.
… the most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.
It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind’s habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.
Prayer is such an ordinary, everyday, mundane thing. Certainly, people who pray are no more saints than the rest of us. Rather, they are people who want to share a life with God, to love and be loved, to speak and to listen, to work and to be at rest in the presence of God.
Nothing out of the ordinary ever occurs to me when I’m by myself. But you attract duels, ambushes, immortal enemies, obscure creatures such as the Ra’zac, long-lost family members, and mysterious acts of magic as if they were were starving weasels and you were a rabbit that wandered into their den.
What turns ordinary people into overachievers is the way they use their minds when they are called on to perform.
When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice. When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.
We should assume that we all have a lot in common. Speak as if our views are the only sensible ones. This resonates with ordinary people, as long as we speak ordinary language and don’t come across as elitists.
Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists – or artists from the United States – that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture.
True art is the intermediary between man’s ordinary nature and his higher potentialities.
Probably a dozen times since their death I’ve heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them … It doesn’t seem strange to me.
We have to transform those ordinary actions of our day into dharma practice because otherwise nothing is going to move.
Every great success is an accumulation of thousands of ordinary efforts that no one else sees or appreciates.
And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.
He stepped into my room with one graceful move, as if entering through bedroom windows was nothing out of the ordinary.
I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to me.
Any given moment – no matter how casual, how ordinary – is poised, full of gaping life.
What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing…having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.
You’ve faced horrors in these past weeks… I don’t know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
For me, it is exciting to see a woman take a chance and wear something out of the ordinary.
I idolize Gene Hackman. He is not a natural star, not an incandescent personality like Jack Nicholson, but he makes luminous the problems of being an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.
I am just your ordinary,
average every day sane psycho,
supergoddess.
average every day sane psycho,
supergoddess.
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
You are God’s own masterpiece! That means you are not ordinary or average; you are a one-of-a-kind original.
I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that’s just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal – a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.
Food as a hobby used to be an elite pastime, and it has become something that is totally ordinary for people of every background. In that way, we see the growing up of the American food scene: that it’s okay to be a regular person and be really into food.
People in the business always say, “You look fabulous.” You get that all the time and it kind of goes in one ear and out the other because most of the time they just say that to make you feel good. It’s nice when you hear it from an ordinary person and then I appreciate it.
I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?
The Tea Party emerged from a laudably grassroots base: libertarians, fervent Constitutionalists, and ordinary people alarmed at the suppression of liberties, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
I think people would be surprised to discover that their challenges and struggles are not too dissimilar to us, average ordinary people. We’re all looking for essentially the same thing and I think that’s faith and hope and love and meaning and of course satisfaction, peace, joy.
I wouldn’t say I’m normal. But I’m relatively stable. When I think of normal, I think of mediocrity, and mediocrity scares the f— out of me.
The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills- like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.
Men of genius are often considered superstitious, but the fact is, the fineness of their nerve renders them more alive to the supernatural than ordinary men.
We all try to camouflage the monotony. But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we’re so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary.
The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.
I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves.
Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot… I’ve seen all these marriages that failed. Those people are always hollering at each other. That doesn’t work.
I’m a tomboy at heart. I always like to say that I’m an ordinary girl doing extraordinary things.
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
I’m just a regular person, like any other ordinary person is.
You see yourself as very average, ordinary. And there is nothing ordinary about you, Rachel.” (Something Borrowed)
I always say that No Ordinary Family was the show that should’ve been.
Ordinary people simply don’t know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.
Successful people rely heavily on their mentors. Ordinary people don’t. It’s that simple.
If you think you’re average, then you’ll be average. If you think you’re ordinary, then you’ll live ordinary. The truth is, there is nothing ordinary about you. You have something to offer that nobody else can offer.
The average ordinary citizen can do a lot of different things when it comes to the climate crisis.
Coach Landry was a master at maintaining discipline and creating an environment where ordinary people could achieve extra ordinary results.
It is your enemies who keep you straight. For real use one active, sneering enemy is worth two ordinary friends.
The holiness of love inspired ordinary men and women to act like angels. It lifted them on wings closer to God.
The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.
The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience’s eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience ‘right now.’
Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we’ll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we’d do and become will never come to be – and that we’re ordinary.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don’t like going back to ordinary language and first principles.
That’s what I am, Frank thought, an ordinary genius. He had unlocked the secret of radio. The sport of the ordinary! Brillliant me like Reed Seymour couldn’t figure this out for the life of them! Reed was ashamed of radio. …radio was a cinch if you kept reaching down and grabbing up handfuls of the ordinary.
I have a son, who is a… not an ordinary form of schizophrenia, but clearly, cannot take care of himself. And the great fear of then, of all parents is, when the parents die, who takes care of your child? And the answer is: they become homeless.
Using every means possible to show that, although you’re just an ordinary human being, you’re far above other mortals.
An ordinary day. I get up early, drive to the airport, from there driving to the arena where we wrestle. Then if we have a show I will take another plane for my destination. Otherwise I will take a plane to return home and fall in bed very, very late.
The difference between a great soul and an ordinary man is this: the latter weeps while leaving this body, whereas the former laughs. Death seems to him a mere play.
It is very difficult to be like the other guy, to be ordinary. Mediocrity takes a great deal of energy. But to be ourselves is very easy. You don’t have to do a thing.
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams… Man…is above all the plaything of his memory.
When I speak of drama, I’m really referring to just ‘desperately trying not to be ordinary’. Trying to get something that has a little bit of friction, conflict, absurdity.
To face one who is extraordinary,I cant allow myself to be ordinary
Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.
Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.
We are apt to mistake our vocation by looking out of the way for occasions to exercise great and rare virtues, and by stepping over the ordinary ones that lie directly in the road before us.
If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can’t be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.
The biggest revenue target is the preferential rate for long-term capital gains, which raises a perennial question: Why should capital income be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income? Capital assets are owned overwhelmingly by the rich.
The capacity for “uncontaminated wonder,” ultimately, is what distinguishes the successful from the ordinary, the happily engaged players of whatever era from the chronically disappointed and malcontent. Therein lies a lesson for geeks, geezers, and the sea of people who fall in between.
I’d rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.
The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
There are lots of things about millionaires that make them pretty ordinary, but what’s not ordinary is their ability to accumulate wealth, how hard they work, and what they do for a living.
Looking at America’s history, ordinary people did something extraordinary. Leaders risked their lives for freedoms that we take for granted today.That’s what instills confidence. That’s us. We will move forward and prosper because that’s who we are as Americans.
The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.
It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
Theodore Roosevelt had drawn public attention to his attractive family in order to create a bond with ordinary Americans. Eleanor Roosevelt had successfully broached the idea that a First Lady could be nearly as much a public figure as her husband.
As a kid, I was a huge fan of movies and acting. My mom was in the sort of community theater, and I always hung around down there, and I was a massive fan of everything I’m kind of involved in now. But fairly ordinary and cheeky.
I am one Dana when I am talking to my daughter, another when I am talking to the IRS, and another still when I do an interview. These characters are just extreme versions of ordinary human self-switching.
In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.
I like to set aggressive targets; without them, you will get ordinary performances.
Illegitimacy is important for the socialisation of little girls and especially little boys. If you have large numbers of young men growing up who never see an adult male doing the ordinary things men do, then you get chaos. This is not a moral statement, it’s an empirical statement.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
What is there unreasonable in admitting the intervention of a supernatural power in the most ordinary circumstances of life?
The three ordinary things that we often don’t pay enough attention to, but which I believe are the drivers of all success, are hard work, perseverance, and basic honesty.
In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.
I find that very appealing: the blurring of the lines between what’s funny and what’s tragic. And what’s ordinary and what’s not – the big things in the small things.
My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.
I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.
It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.
Work harder to appreciate your ordinary day.
Champions are champions not because they do anything extraordinary but because they do the ordinary things better than anyone else.
Every time we see people as ordinary, we turn the wine back into water.
We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.
There is this sense of David Cameron leading a Government that’s badly out of touch with ordinary people’s lives. I’d absolutely welcome the opportunity to show all political leaders what life is like for most people.
I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes – learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it’s time to start writing again – that I’m not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.
The special life is where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the natural becomes miraculous, the everyday becomes unique. Finding the magic and wonder within nature is the most assured means by which children rediscover the joy of life.
Map reconciles himself to almost any event, however trying, if it happens in the ordinary course of nature. It is the extraordinary alone that he rebels against. There is a moral idea associated with this feeling; for the extraordinary appears to be something like an injustice of heaven.
My life may seem glamorous from the outside but off screen it’s as ordinary as anyone else’s.
Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.
I am an ordinary man.
I believed in myself. I never imagined myself as just an ordinary player.
We must be truthful and fair in the ordinary affairs of life before we can be truthful and fair in patriotism and religion.
Champions do ordinary things better than everyone else.
The decision to do it [play Maigret] was related to the fact that the character is a very ordinary man, and generally speaking I haven’t played very many ordinary men.
You can’t make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn’t do that.
Without seeing the origin of light, the true form of one’s Self, the ordinary man sees by the mind different things and is deluded.
Novelty serves us for a kind of refreshment, and takes off from that satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary entertainments.
I figure I’m just one of many people. I’m not that different from anybody else, and I don’t have great language, highfalutin’ language – I’m very ordinary. So I figure if I write about myself, other people with similar feelings and experiences would go, ‘Oh, that’s me.’
The firefly is an unassuming insect in the daytime. If you didn’t know what it was, you’d think it was nothing special. But at night, the firefly glows with its own light source. The darkness brings out its most beautiful gift. That’s an extraordinary talent for an ordinary-looking creature, isn’t it?
Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.
I’d love to be approached to do ordinary things more.
What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.
The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire… Now that they’ve gone, the high drama’s over. What remains is ordinary human life.
Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
There are three kinds of friends in the world. An ordinary person sees only who you are; for that you don’t need a friend. Then there’s a friend who sees in you what you can be. And then there’s the real holy Friend, and the presence of this Friend you are already.
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.
Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.
If we can figure out how to give more Americans a shot in tech, a shot at the ordinary jobs that don’t necessarily afford rock star status or come with generous stock options but that can sustain middle-class life, then we might just take a step toward stitching our nation back together.
There are no ordinary lives.
Human beings go to church. The guy in the front dressed in black is the guy you defer to. He is in charge of the mysteries of universe, which ordinary human beings don’t seem to have the inclination to understand.
Celebrate the Sacred in the ordinary.
Either we learn to find the Lord in the ordinary everyday life or else we shall never find him
In all common ordinary cases, we see intuitively at first view what is out duty, what is the honest part. This is the ground of the observation, that the first thought is often the best. In these cases, doubt and deliberation is itself dishonesty; as it was in Balaam upon the second message.
The situation in the United States is becoming more dire for average ordinary Americans, and the last thing we need to do is to spend money on death, destruction and war.
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality–same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.
We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we
want to talk “about” mathematics!
want to talk “about” mathematics!
One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days
Day-to-day things, the mundane, are what keeps the motor running.В How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.
In one of the scenes [in the Ordinary World], you can see a little cameo of my son, who’s in the party. You’ve just gotta bring it all back home.
Ordinary people who are just kind of just going about their lives are transformed into heroes because they have the courage to put their voices out there. I think that’s a powerful message in this time of political strife.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky – what a travesty!
There are no great men, only ordinary men, who have met extraordinary challenges.
An ordinary pushup is much more advanced and challenging performed on a stability ball.
What landed Jesus on the cross was the preposterous idea that common, ordinary, broken, screwed-up people could be godly.
Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed.
I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn’t interest me. I’m not interested in psychotics. I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Everyman.
There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet.
I know for myself how the fruits of the gospel of Jesus Christ can transform lives from the ordinary and dreary to the extraordinary and sublime.
Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.
We’re all ordinary in a way. We can all be hurt. We can all be unbalanced. We all have feelings. Life can treat us harshly, even shockingly sometimes.
In this world, the greatest rewards of success, wealth and happiness are usually obtained not through the exercise of special powers such a genius or intellect but through one’s energetic use of simple means and ordinary qualities.
Ordinary people want good government.
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
Characters that are not the norm or a bit out of the ordinary are always a challenge as an actress. You learn more by using different tools for those type of characters. They are always much more fun to play and much more interesting. They take you places that you wouldn’t necessarily go in your everyday life.
I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
ordinary is the door for extraordinary.
You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the “ordinary world.
All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man’s head.
Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! … Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
It seems to me that [my films] are talking about very simple and, I hope, universal feelings. And at the same time, even though they are set in a very weird world with elements that are irrational, at the same time, it’s very close to an ordinary world. And I like to have this third feeling of mystery.
An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!
When I began to write my books about Coalwood, I was surprised to discover, upon reflection, that it wasn’t an ordinary place at all.
Art transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Believing people can soar beyond ordinary life.
Cloning creates ordinary children. They will be unique individuals, not photocopies of individuals.
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?
I make the most money, I think, in Russia and Paris, for the people of those countries are so willing to be amused, so eager to see something new and out of the ordinary.
We are determined to build a society defined by decency and integrity that does not tolerate the plunder of public resources nor the theft by corporate criminals of the hard-earned savings of ordinary people.
My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother’s voice and smile.
The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.
There is no such thing as an ordinary life.
I’m not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
I take it that reasonable human conduct is part of the ordinary course of things.
Generally speaking we don’t want to hear from the soul. We want it to just do its job. Unfortunately, in a broken world, it also is broken, and we’re going to hear from it because many of the ordinary miseries and extraordinary glories of human life are expressions of the state of the soul.
I shy away from the word ‘creation.’ In the ordinary, social meaning of the word – well, it’s very nice, but fundamentally, I don’t believe in the creative function of the artist. He’s a man like any other.
In most cases the favorable price performance will be accompanied by a well-defined improvement in the average earnings, in the dividend, and in the balance-sheet position. Thus in the long run the market test and the ordinary business test of a successful equity commitment tend to be largely identical.
Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.
Inspiration is that state in which mind and heart are connected. When you feel inspired you find yourself thrust into a world where ordinary objects and events are full of light, as if illuminated from within. This inner light is truth, and when you suddenly see the truth, we gain insight, clarity, and joy.
Trump Tower is no ordinary property: It is the jewel in Donald Trump’s brass crown.
Heroism is an extraordinary feat of the flesh; holiness is an ordinary act of the spirit. One may bring personal glory; the other always gives God glory.
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.
A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.
I am just an ordinary Catholic.
We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives … What is the essence of this art of living? Of course, even this art should have beauty as its essence.
I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.
The cinema should be human and be part of people’s lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.
The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the ‘invisible worlds’ beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in any area of your life – from spirituality and health to work and relationships.
Well, that’s what life is – this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments. We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.
The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.
I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.
We both [with Donald Trump] share a desire to ensure that governments are working for everyone and particularly that governments are working for ordinary working families and working-class families. And I think that’s important. That’s what I’ve spoken about.
Unfortunately, once a person who is willing to act against the interests of the United States assumes the awesome powers of the presidency, the laws and investigative techniques we use in ordinary national security situations are woefully inadequate.
It is best for ordinary men to have only one wife !
I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we’ve all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.
If you love a person truly, you can make an ordinary day very special for her.
But there’s a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what is possible and impossible?
I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.
I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me, they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.
If you love the roses, that is ordinary; if you love the weeds, that is extraordinary! Rather than being common, be extraordinary!
Something that is very special today might not be special tomorrow, but to hold it, to grasp it, to keep it, to make it special, to elevate it from the ordinary, that’s when you open up the champagne. To make it sparkle.
The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
I’m not Meryl Streep. My God – she’s the greatest actor that ever lived. It’s sad that ordinary actors like me are compared to her.
Given a fair shot, given a fair chance, Americans have never, ever, ever, ever let their country down. Never. Never. Ordinary people like us. Who do extraordinary things.
Who wants to be ordinary? Be extraordinary.
I think that the so-called average person often exhibits a great deal of heroism in getting through an ordinary day . . .
I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, ‘Oh! Will you look at that?’ Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don’t look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.
I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading – he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.
By using novels, I show ordinary kids confronting and overcoming great odds.
In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one’s eyes. It becomes its symbol.
Is it any wonder why Princes & Kings, Are clowns that caper in their sawdust rings, When ordinary people who are like you and me, Are the builders of their destiny…
It’s amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.
The teacher’s task is not a small easy one! She has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child’s mental hunger. She is not like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. The needs of the child are clearly more difficult to answer.
I believe that photographs should be simple technically, and easy to look at. They shouldn’t be directed at other photographers; their point is to make ordinary people react – to laugh, or to see something they hadn’t taken in before, or to be touched. But not to wince, I think.
Basically, Urban Fantasy means D&D in New York. Ordinary people have no idea that they share the world with fantastic, supernatural creatures. It can’t just be vampires or werewolves; it has to be a whole continuum of fantastic beings, with their own society within society.
But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you’ve taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn’t.
I don’t believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.
The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? … If it fails to set a lovable God–a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being–before ordinary people, we have gone wrong
No thanks,” said Digory, “I don’t know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I’d rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.
Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job.
She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.
I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.
I think these things [firearms] were invented by Satan himself, for they can’t be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what’s coming.
Trump has the courage to stand up to Wall Street, to the K Street lobbyists, and say our trade deals have not been best for the ordinary, average citizen American.
Each of us is a moving center, a space of divine mystery. And though we spend most of our time on the surface in the daily details of ordinary existence, most us hunger to connect to this space within, to break through to bliss, to be swept away into something bigger than us.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
An expert is an ordinary fellow from another town.
I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that’s helped me in my writing because I’m writing about ordinary things.
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Youth demands more than ordinary life. Age clings to it.
Restoring accountability will be one of the major priorities of our new government. Accountability is what ordinary Canadians, working Canadians, those people who pay their bills, pay their taxes, expect from their political leaders.
The truth of faith is a slender, glowing element that runs through even the seemingly ordinary and undramatic moments of existence. Even at low intensity, it is a steady source of illumination. Such religious truth is powerful even when it seems faint, even when it seems obscured by the larger events of history.
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.
the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart
It wasn’t because they had extraordinary powers, really, but because of how well they used the ordinary powers everyone had: the power of courage, the power of kindness, the powers of curiosity and knowledge.
Sun lighting a child’s hair. A friend’s embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.
The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.
None of us is born thinking we are ordinary. Feeling special is an essential part of the human birthright. If you don’t think you are special, you won’t seek to contribute your gift to the world.
When I was a kid I loved to read, but I didn’t write and I didn’t create imaginary worlds. So, if one student walks away thinking, “She’s obviously just an ordinary person, yet she gets to make her living doing what she wants to do. Maybe that applies to me, too,” then I feel like my time has been well spent.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
Play the open variation of the Ruy is my advice to all ordinary club players, and I recently even wrote a book about it, seen from Black’s point of view. Why does everybody try to copy the grandmasters’ strange positional maneuvers in the 5. … B-K2 variation, instead of fighting for the in intiative?
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.
By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else’s life.
We need to remember that the first disciples were ordinary men called to an extraordinary mission. Their devotion to Jesus outweighed- by hair- their fears and insecurities. As a result God change them and use them to accomplish some mind-boggling things. Why couldn’t God – why wouldn’t God do the same in your life?
What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
In language that’s lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.
That is probable which for the most part usually comes to pass, or which is a part of the ordinary beliefs of mankind.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
She squeezed my hand, and I drew a shaky breath, marveling at the fact that while on an ordinary leave in an ordinary place, I’d somehow fallen in love with an extraordinary girl named Savannaah Lynn Curtis.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented … The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.
Ordinary people can bring about change.
This is the thing I’ve noticed is that the greater the distance between you and any ordinary task is the measurement of how much rockstar potential you have.
The major work of the world is not done by geniuses. It is done by ordinary people, with balance in their lives, who have learned to work in an extraordinary manner.
Rely on the teaching, not on the person;
Rely on the meaning, not on the words;
Rely on the definitive meaning, not on the provisional;
Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary mind.
Rely on the meaning, not on the words;
Rely on the definitive meaning, not on the provisional;
Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary mind.
It is not special to be special, it’s special to be ordinary
Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.
I used to be an open-spear fisherman, and if you’re looking for fish, you’re never going to see them. In an almost meditative state, you have to pick out anomalies, something out of the ordinary.
Acting, in general, is something most people think they’re incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I’ve ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don’t, or trying to hide something. It’s something everyone learns at an early age.
I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge – what kind of monster would fascinate people?
The history of the human race is the history of ordinary people who have overcome their fears and accomplished extraordinary things.
The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.
I thank God for having given the Company subjects who belong more to Him than to themselves, and who serve the neighbor at the risk of their lives! They are like unrefined gold, which becomes visible in fire and which would otherwise remain hidden under ordinary actions and sometimes under faults and failings.
Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.
In a way, bullying is an ordinary evil. It’s hugely prevalent, all too often ignored – and being ignored, it is therefore condoned.
When it’s time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. When you’re tired, lie down. The fool will laugh at you but the wise man will understand.
Will: “You are not really dying, are you?” Jem: “So they tell me.” Will: “I am sorry.” Jem: “No. Don’t be ordinary like that. Don’t say you’re sorry. Say you’ll train with me.” Will: “I’ll train with you.
It might sound ordinary for a woman to find out her husband’s cheating on her, but not if you’re the woman and it’s your husband.
My father was not in power when I started my political career, or when I fought my first election in 1996. Starting like any ordinary person, I reached out to people everywhere.
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
We could form a government of national unity fighting corruption. The ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of it, because it’s she or he that pays the price.
I think that giant American corporations should start asking themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the ordinary. Clearly people want things that make their lives the way they wish they were.
The instrument by which it [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!
When ordinary people decide to do extraordinary things they transform their lives and the lives of others around them.
In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water and when you’re tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
Ordinary people can be very articulate and very eloquent.
It seemed that a woman should remember the night a new life began inside her. Such a miracle should not be the result of routine or an ordinary coming together. Life should begin in a cataclysm of heat and fury bathed in the sweat of passion and urgency.
Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.
In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the chГўteau, and while every village here contains at least severalgentlemen or “squires,” there is but one to a seigniory.
I certainly think it’s very important that writers as citizens – not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens – should talk about things that matter to them.
The more one lives alone on the river or in the open country, the clearer it becomes that nothing is more beautiful or great than to perform the ordinary duties of one’s daily life simply and naturally.
What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.
Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.
I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capabilities.
Coaching doesn’t make sick people well…it helps healthy people become extra-ordinary.
Nimzovitch became then for me more or less the author of the only book which could help me get away from these Euwe books, which, I admit, are very good for the ordinary club player. But once you’ve reached a certain strength you get the impression that everything that Euwe writes is a lie.
I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed.
I am here to seduce you into a love of life; to help you to become a little more poetic; to help you die to the mundane and to the ordinary so that the extraordinary explodes in your life. .
Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.
What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child’s destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child.
[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.
Hitler was without a doubt exceptional in his criminal deeds. Yet in many respects, he was not at all out of the ordinary.
If an ordinary person parks outside another ordinary person’s house for a week, it’s considered stalking. If, however, that person is considered newsworthy, it’s perfectly legal for paparazzi to do the same thing.
In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.
As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them –“ordinary things” is a better expression. That is the way the world is.
Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires.
People say that crisis changes people and turns ordinary people into wiser or more responsible ones.
The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.
The ordinary focus on what they’re getting. The extraordinary think about who they’re becoming.
Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
In the midst of an ordinary training day, I try to remind myself that I am preparing for the extraordinary.
Juries are the constitutional institution designed to protect ordinary citizens against the wealthy and powerful.
My hearing is out of the ordinary as others might see it, but not for me. I’m used to my hearing in the same way that I’m used to the size of my hands.
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
I couldn’t find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento – Stanley Something-or-other – to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots.
Good and productive labor is valuable, and it doesn’t mean you have to have a fancy job description. You don’t have to become rich. You can be ordinary. Happiness lies there. Do good work, create good work for others.
The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.
But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.
You know what’s cool? My kids think I’m ordinary.
For ‘Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain,’ I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history – ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.
I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life.
In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.
If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
I am just an ordinary person trying to do an ordinary job.
I’ve always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don’t just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.
[T]he strike is inherently dangerous to the rich, and to the corporations who have brought this country to her knees, because it is the only defense the ordinary citizen has.
Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet.
As late as the early ’50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
If I’m shopping at the Gap or Old Navy, I’m saying that I’m an ordinary person: I don’t want to be seen; I don’t want to stand out. That’s a statement. If I’m wearing a leather jacket, there’s something about me that’s kind of a rebel. So everybody says something, whether they want to or not.
Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there’s rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.
Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.
I do not know how I shall develop, but for the present, I am continuing to work within ordinary, generally known terrain, different only because of a deep substratum, which leads those who are receptive to sense the finer regions.
I don’t want to be considered a hero…. Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.
Success is doing ordinary things extraordinary well.
And let me say this as a politician I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see.
After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh – 25 km. outside Bhopal – along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.
The interesting thing is that in everyday life, I fail to see the most ordinary things. I often stumble and sometimes I even fall over. But when I draw or look at a painting, I go into a sort of overdrive and just see things differently than other people.
The idea of the extraordinary happening in the context of the ordinary is what’s fascinating to me
It is the ordinary woman who knows something about love; the gorgeous ones are too busy being gorgeous.
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different – a supplementary – set of standards.
Greatness comes by doing a few small and smart things each and every day. Comes from taking little steps, consistently. Comes from a making a few small chips against everything in your professional and personal life that is ordinary, so that a day eventually arrives when all that’s left is The Extraordinary.
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
I prefer to scare myself in the ordinary ways, Daddy. Like letting my children cross the country for college. Why bungee jump when you can put a kindergartener on a school bus? Now, that’s real terror.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet’s metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.
I love to take something ordinary and make it really special.
I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.
Socialists don’t like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose Socialism.
I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I’m in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don’t know who they’re talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.
When we trust God, He can make the ordinary extraordinary!
Ordinary people have an extremely important role to play in fighting climate change. Not only can you make your home more energy efficient, drive less, and eat more local food – you can also tell your leaders to take climate action.
the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes
I don’t really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn’t really. It’s just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.
The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side.
I’m a fairly ordinary person – a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life!
When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I’m qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!
Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin
The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us, and carry out, in our ordinary conduct; the insignficances of daily life are the importances and the tests of eternity, because they prove what really is the spirit that possesses us.
Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.
For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of criss-crossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible.
Let’s not look back in anger, or forward in fear but around in awareness. Let’s see the beauty in everything. Let’s create opportunities. Let’s step out of something ordinary into something extraordinary!
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.
The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world’s bulwark of liberty.
I did not come into Parliament to be a Muslim MP. And I have never set myself up as a Muslim spokesperson or community leader. Just as ordinary citizens have multiple identities, so do MPs.
My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother’s voice and smile.
When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‘Well, you know: It’s secret.’
By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.
Photography is an art of observation – it’s about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.
And she is your holy Mary. And I am so ordinary.
There are these two strands, the Dionysian and the Appollonian, and in the same theater grew up from these folks who during the day were just ordinary citizens, and at night they would sneak off to the woods and party.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
I like to live life in an understated way because that’s who I am – an ordinary guy who has experienced an extraordinary journey.
I will focus on smoking in movies and with the amount of time that I have left in the world, I will do the best I can to stop smoking in movies and also to help people stop smoking, just normal ordinary people who may need help.
I wanted to look at them because I feel, internally, that I am an ordinary person who has had an extraordinary life.
If I’m half as good as everybody said I am, I’m far too good to be wasting time with ordinary people. But I seem to be spending my life with ordinary people, who are the best people in the world.
Each day the worst of our faults, our deficiencies, our crimes, the truth of our lives, is stifled under a triple layer of forgetfulness, death and the ordinary course of justice.
When I look back on my ordinary, ordinary life, I see so much magic, though I missed it at the time.
When we were making the record, I just decided, at the last second. I thought, “This song [“Ordinary World”] makes a lot of sense, being on the album [Revolution Radio].”
Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.
You don’t have to be a hero to accomplish great things—to compete. You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.
There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education oftenlabors to silence and obstruct.
I asked a lot of friends and people I’d meet, “Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn’t expect it to happen?” I wasn’t interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.
When you meet the man [Brassai] you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes. And the sharpness of vision and depth of insight are revealed in Brassai’s lifelong photographic exploration of Paris – its people, places, and things.
One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.
Have you not learned that strength comes to an ordinary soul when given an extraordinary calling?
The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.
I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
I’m interested in things which suggest the world rather than express the personality… The most conventional thing, the most ordinary – it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.
I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.
Successful people do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency, commitment and focus.
People who don’t know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don’t understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
The absolute truth cannot be realized within the domain of the ordinary mind, and the path beyond the ordinary mind is the path of the heart.
What is it about a secret love that makes everything they do shine, everything they say sound like a sonnet and every expression they make perfect, when to everyone else you speak to they’re quite ordinary. It’s a cruel sort of thing.
Many people – when they think about North Korea and the dictatorship, or the military or nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles, those things – tend to forget ordinary citizens are living there.
I would say I am an ordinary bowler but one with a really big heart, and that’s what has stood me in good stead in all these years.
Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia – you know, back in the ’40s and ’50s.
After all, the ordinary hero hiding in each of us is often the most powerful catalyst for change.
The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep; for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the world of greater importance.
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
If there was no Bill Bowerman, there would have been no me. He had about as much of an impact on my life as any one person could have. He taught me about competition and ingrained it in me. He taught me not to praise ordinary performances.
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
I had learned to respect the intelligence, integrity, creativity and capacity for deep thought and hard work latent somewhere in every child. they had learned that I differed from them only in years and experience, and that as I, an ordinary human being, loved and respected them, I expected payment in kind.
Nothing extraordinary is achieved through ordinary means.
No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say any fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one’s ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned to account.
John Smith: Mankind doesn’t need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let’s hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds.
We didn’t know if ordinary lunatics or just unstable people on the ground could feel incited to harm me.
We’re not ordinary, you don’t want to be ordinary.
There’s a notion I’d like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.
Most organizations should be pro-active, but philanthropists concerned with poverty should deliberately be reactive, learning from the efforts of ordinary folks who tired of looking the other way as their communities fell apart.
Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary.
Results are often obtained by impetuosity and daring which could never have been obtained by ordinary methods.
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.
It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things for God: but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes
‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
When people come up to me expecting me to be just like what they thought a Beatle would be, they’re disappointed. I never was a Beatle, except musically. I don’t think any of us was. What is a Beatle anyway? I’m not a Beatle or an ex-Beatle or even the George Harrison. I’m just a man. Very ordinary.
There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different.
Sometimes you need a special player to do something out of the ordinary.
While few judges or prosecutors would be afraid to exercise their perfectly legitimate discretion in favour of an ordinary man, not to mention a minority group member, most would be terrified to exercise the same discretion for someone politically, financially or socially powerful.
Remember. Every day, some ordinary person does something extraordinary. Today, it’s your turn.
I’ve been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I’m quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I’m one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
Ordinary people can spread good and bad information about brands faster than marketers.
Ordinary people aren’t going to give up emotions and inspiration just because science sniffs at subjectivity. Science shouldn’t be so edgy and defensive. Vandals aren’t going to smash their way into laboratories and throw Bibles at the equipment.
Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.
A miracle is nothing more nor less than this One who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the allpervading Wisdom and Power, thus makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him.
Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
I originally thought I’d be an ordinary business man, but I really like art, so that’s how I became a manga artist.
There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.
Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay small acts of kindness and love.
Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don’t drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
Ordinary people seem to not like me. They tend to think that I’m a little weird.
I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.
My family is out of the ordinary in our physical lifestyle and the day-to-day things that we deal with, but my approach to them is pretty rational and sound. And I’m the quiet one! It’s very different from my performing life.
God never intended His people to be ordinary or commonplace. His intentions were that they should be on fire for Him, conscious of His divine power, realizing the glory of the cross that foreshadows the crown.
It is Cameron’s cabinet of millionaires who are the real spongers given free rein to live out their Thatcherite fantasies at the expense of ordinary, decent communities throughout these islands.
I was just an ordinary player with a big heart and a fighting spirit to recommend me.
Such as are betrayed by their easy nature to be ordinary security for their friends leave so little to themselves, as their liberty remains ever after arbitrary at the will of others; experience having recorded many, whom their fathers had left elbowroom enough, that by suretyship have expired in a dungeon.
I’d rather be happy and odd than miserable and ordinary.
Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.
Every single ordinary person has an extraordinary story.
I did like Robert Vavra’s book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He’s no ordinary fellow, obviously.
But what I do believe is that if you’re a girl who was born in Homsea, a girl who lives in a nothing kind of house with an ordinary kind of family, then you can’t know everything about the world and that it’s probably good to keep an open mind about things, just in case.
They [the English] have a special word, “civil,” for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.
To many women marriage is only this. It is merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion – far less by the white fire of love.
ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars
My life is pretty ordinary in so many ways. I live in a town called Plainville. I have the life of an average dad. It feels like I have this secret identity as an author, and it’s still very surreal to me.
Great men are just ordinary men that didn’t quit.
Take new values: Leave behind a legend to be followed by those who follow you. Be a yogi – don’t be an ordinary person.
I think the movie, ‘Joy,’ has so many touchpoints with so many people because it is about the ordinary, but a lot of the times, the ordinary is extraordinary.
For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the cirumstances. He said, ‘Let me see how the fault arose.
We have these traditional political parties that are less and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people, so people are in search of their own values.
The sixties were a time when ordinary people could do extraordinary things . . . !
The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
That which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in. and the best of me is diligence.
Ordinary people who faithfully, diligently, and consistently do simple things that are right before God will bring forth extraordinary results.
And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.
The national characteristics… the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.
No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.
A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.
My quarrel with the advocates of contraceptives lies in their taking for granted that ordinary mortals cannot exercise self-control.
All players have ‘ordinary’ periods in their career and it’s hard to explain why. So at these times, its all about self belief, hard work and hopefully you get the break and your form returns.
When you fuel up with purpose you find the excitement in the mundane, the passion in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.
It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.
Our galaxy’s pretty ordinary, garden-variety. So if we believe our galaxy has a super massive black hole, that tells us that most, if not all, galaxies host such a black hole at their centers.
If you want a team of smart, creative people to do extraordinary things, don’t put them in a drab, ordinary space.
For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
I’d lied many times: to bolster my credentials, to elicit sympathy, to make myself appear less ordinary.
Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
Don’t wait for extraordinary circumstance to do good; try to use ordinary situations.
The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.
Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he’s just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros – which incidentally was not true.
We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.
When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning point has come.
“You do not really love me — you love nobody. Is that not true?” “Maybe,” said Siddhartha wearily. “I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can — that is their secret.”
I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what’s special in ordinary things.
A company can seize extra-ordinary opportunities only if it is very good at the ordinary operations.
I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.
I want my kids to know that they’re just as good and just as American as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Dr. Martin Luther King. My worst fear is they will become ordinary.
They that are virtuous from principle may receive confidence in every capacity; but they that are so from custom or habit, are capable of trust only in matters of ordinary and settled occurrence.
The American people need to know we understand that they elected us to fight for economic opportunity for all. We need to create America 2.0 – a multicultural, progressive, and innovative country that fights every day for ordinary people.
Ordinary Catholics are praying when they do not think they are. They are praying when they offer implicitly all they are doing to God.
You will have written exceptionally well if, by skilful arrangement of your words, you have made an ordinary one seem original.
All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.
The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.
If ordinary means I have suddenly got to produce a household of kids and iron Peter’s shirts, I’m sorry, I’m not interested.
In general, when you travel, you get into a different reality and are able to more accurately reflect on your ordinary life. Hiking does that for me.
Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.
I had spent time in New York, where I loved the idea that theater could be done up in tiny little rooms rather than for lots of money on a big stage, and be tied to ordinary life.
It’s strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary.
What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don’t read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
For most of human history, ‘literature,’ both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn’t a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special.
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.
I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn’t know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn’t going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.
Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life.
It means eating your words, this thing of refusing to be a fence-sitter, but I’d rather eat my words than get calluses from sitting.
No one who has not experienced the condescension of a buyer toward an ordinary salesgirl can have any conception of its withering effect.
No one who has not experienced the condescension of a buyer toward an ordinary salesgirl can have any conception of its withering effect.
‘What I would give,’ I thought, ‘to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective.’
Life gives to all the choice. You can satisfy yourself with mediocrity if you wish. You can be common, ordinary, dull, colorless, or yyou can channel your life so that it will be clean, vibrant, useful, progressive, colorful, and rich.
In a weird way, I like to find the quirkiness in ordinary things. I like to find what is ordinary in quirky people.
If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
I didn’t know baboons could drive recreational vehicles, but Khufu did okay. When I woke up around dawn, he was navigating through the early morning rush hour in Houston, baring his fangs and barking a lot, and none of the other drivers seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?
There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.
How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.
Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
I am sorry,” Will said. “No,” Jem said… “Don’t be ordinary like that. Don’t say you’re sorry.
No leader did more for his country than Winston Churchill. Brave, magnanimous, traditional, he was like a king-general from Britain’s heroic past. His gigantic qualities set him apart from ordinary humanity; there seemed no danger he feared, no effort too great for his limitless energies.
Not material or economic conditions in the ordinary sense, but perverse religious ideas explain the suspension of civilization in Europe from the 5th to the 12th century, and in the Mohammedan world after the 15th century.
What people don’t understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing.
There’s no other nation in the world where that happens. And it’s very much a part of our heritage.
There’s no other nation in the world where that happens. And it’s very much a part of our heritage.
I came out, as not enough of our stories are told from our perspective. ‘Marie Claire’ was offering the chance to be a part of a women’s magazine, which often celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.
The country is stronger than the result of any one election. But we shouldn’t forget that these are just ordinary people. I wish Americans would look at them level, not down or up – just level. It doesn’t take some special dimension to be president.
I’m happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you’ve won the lottery.
Miracles may be, for anything we know to the contrary, phenomena of a higher order of God’s laws, superior to, and, under certain conditions, controlling the inferior order known to us as the ordinary laws of nature.
Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least “deserving” in direct opposition to our celebrity culture’s emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.
We must now examine whether just people also live better and are happier than unjust ones. I think it’s clear already that this is so, but we must look into it further, since the argument concerns no ordinary topic, but the way we ought to live.
People hope that if they scream loudly enough about “values” then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness , as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
For me, everything that you’re passionate about always comes with a little pain. That’s how life is, and that’s how I want to live it. I don’t want it to be balanced and ordinary.
Our ordinary abilities will never worship God unless they are transformed by the indwelling Son of God.
Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage and wisdom moves the world.
Frankly that’s what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don’t think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.
We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.
Ordinary people merely think how they shall ‘spend’ their time; a man of talent tries to ‘use’ it.
One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.
We meet With few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth.
Ive lived this very dramatic life, with high points and terrible low points. Nothing has been ordinary, and I want to have the experience of the last breath. I want a little drama to it.
And this is what was fascinating to me about ‘The Help’; they were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
I love stories of female empowerment. I love stories of, “Hey, I’m an ordinary person.” “No, you’re not!” I love stories about not knowing you have it in you, but when called to task, you rise and you find out who you are.
The America I know is great – not because government made it great but because ordinary citizens like me, like my father and like you are given the opportunity every day to do extraordinary things.
Quote from CARE OF THE SOUL…Thomas Moore …to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfullness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparant insignificance.
I’m just an ordinary, walking-down-the-street, mother of two children who sings for her supper.
When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.
I don’t like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand … you’ve got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different … the X-factor – so important in rock and roll – which is the feel.
It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
People want you to be ordinary. They don’t like it when people are different. They don’t like it when a man soars over their heads while they stand in the dirt. People hate you when you’re special; it reminds them of everything that they aren’t.
Despite being the greatest, Messi is an ordinary guy. He speaks like a normal guy, he acts like a normal guy. As a normal person, he has family, day-to-day problems in his life, friends and family, the usual.
A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man.
Our life is frittered away by detail Simplify, simplify.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.
We want to see a struggle. We want to see people falling over but getting themselves back up on their feet, and that’s what’s extraordinary- ordinary people and their struggle. There’s nothing as interesting as real life out your window. You walk down the street for half an hour, I’ll give you half an hour of drama.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.
I want ordinary people to enjoy a decent standard of living, with ever increasing security, comfort and joy.
I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.
Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
You can find the sacred in the most ordinary of things.
In my research, what I found most interesting was how common and ordinary magic was to people in the past.
To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.
I have pets, but they’re the really ordinary sort – yellow Labrador, tabby cat, white rabbit, a few goldfish – that kind of stuff. Nothing very… extravagant or unusual or exotic, but I find, in terms of inspiration, Mother Nature is just it.
Being able to walk out of the studio after a week of intense recording and jump into a cold sea and sit in a hot spring and soak for a few hours completely resets the whole system. Really refreshing. For me, it’s all about stepping out of the ordinary. Even psychically.
Fine wine leaves you with something pleasant. The ordinary wine just leaves.
Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.
For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.
Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace
Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
Holiness doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things with love and faith.
Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary.
What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.
Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.
Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they dont fit in with normal, healthy people.
A worldview is not the same things a formal philosophy, otherwise it would only be for philosophers. Even ordinary people have a set of convictions about how reality functions and how they should live. Some convictions are conscious while others are unconscious but together they form a consistent picture of reality.
I don’t like playing to guitar players, actually. I’d rather just play to ordinary people.
The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way – engaging, compelling, even beautiful.
The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.
Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.
Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.
Faith is believing things by definition, which are not justified by reason. If it were justified by reason, it wouldn’t be faith. It would just be ordinary belief. It’s something you can’t prove. That’s what faith is, believing something you can’t prove.
I put ordinary people in jeopardy and give them the opportunity to be heroic. Then there’s a great payoff for the reader at the end, when the heroic character gets what he or she deserves. Readers will come back again and again if they feel satisfied at the end.
In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.
For lack of a few pinches of ordinary iodised table salt in the diet of a third world pregnant mother, a child can lose up to ten IQ (Intelligence Quotient) points.
For the sake of argument and illustration I will presume that certain articles of ordinary diet, however beneficial in youth, are prejudicial in advanced life, like beans to a horse, whose common ordinary food is hay and corn.
Take the classic experiment of using ordinary feedback: just take the output of something and feed it back into the input. Those of us who do that have had really rich experiences. And it is obvious that that line of experimentation can continue.
To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility – that is what I am interested in.
Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.
I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.
It was going to be so much fun dragging his complacent sexual views out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary.
The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn’t reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.
Relish the challenge of overcoming difficulties that would crush ordinary men…learn to suffer.
The overarching issue, as I see it, is the elitism of America’s political system; the fact that regular, ordinary Americans aren’t considered in policy debates or legislation, and regularly get shafted by the powers-that-be in Washington.
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
If you’re going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you’re going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
No day is an ordinary day; all days are extraordinary, because life itself is extraordinary!
Things happen in ‘If This is a Man’ that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’, or Conrad in ‘The Heart of Darkness’.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
There’s the larger shiny Marvel universe where everybody has new gear and it’s all made of chrome and leather. And then there’s Deadpool. I think the world that he explores is a much seedier, everyday sort of ordinary type world. But he still lives in that universe. It still has to sit next to all these other films.
Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.
I love oatmeal. To me, it’s not boring. I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind – the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.
We tend to overlook the fact that a mature clean energy economy in fact will give an opportunity to ordinary people to earn more money as clean energy workers/entrepreneurs – and save more money, through conservation and energy efficiency.
One difference between artists and ordinary people is that artists have big egos. In some cases, it’s the only difference.
Song is the licensed medium for bawling in public things too silly or sacred to be uttered in ordinary speech.
A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. – Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.
If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace
I am just an ordinary person committed to doing extraordinary things.
This is the Zen approach: nothing is there to be done. There is nothing to do. One has just to be. Have a rest and be ordinary and be natural.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordina ry.
My character should not be ordinary, cliched, and if I feel that it’s difficult to do this character, I take up that challenge to get into his character.
The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don’t have to go anywhere. We must simply change our preception, our description, our consciousness of where we are.
To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual’s belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is.
A man will blithely do in politics what he would kick a man downstairs for in ordinary life.
Fashion is only complete when it is worn by ordinary people who exist now, managing their lives, loving and grieving.
Leadership is the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people.
I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
My reading and drawing drew me away from the ordinary interests, and I lived a great deal in the world of imagination, feeding upon any book that fell into my hands. When I had got hold of a really thick book like Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables,’ I was happy and would go off into a corner to devour it.
I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apparently called President Obama directly to complain about NSA and how it spies on ordinary Americans. That’s right, the guy who runs Facebook got mad at the NSA for spying on people. Talk about the pot unfriending the kettle!
The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
The ordinary experiences of aging alter and clarify your view of past, present, and future.
The West, both the elites (consciously) and ordinary people (sub-consciously), want Russia to go to hell; to disappear, drown, explode. It is because Russia is once again defending humanism all over the world.
The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.
A border–the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory–forms the edge of an area of ‘ordinary’ city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.
Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.
There’s a lot of chatter in basketball and, rightfully, you want players to be talking to each other… But sometimes in practice, it gets too verbose… so I tried to take things out of the ordinary and make them special so they’d understand the difference.
I always put myself in the audience’s seat, whether it is a film like ‘Judwaa 2’ or ‘Badlapur.’ There has to be a message; the core story needs to have a hook, which should be out of the ordinary.
There’s ordinary people out there doing extraordinary things.
Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.
Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses.
Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.
If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do In His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing.
There isn’t any such thing as an ordinary life. (92)
The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.
In a word, removing control farther away from the ordinary citizen and taxpayer is tantamount to giving the intelligent, far-sighted and public spirited elements in society a longer lever to work with.
In the startup world, you’re either a genius or an idiot. You’re never just an ordinary guy trying to get through the day
Prayer turns ordinary parents into prophets who shape the destinies of their children, grandchildren, and every generation that follows.
Living in intention through acceptance, responsibility, pro-active choice, and the willingness to be ordinary, will move fear aside and allow intuition to surface. All of those skills teach us to be inner focused and aware of who we are becoming. That is powerful. That changes lives.
The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton.
My personal interest in ordinary people is unlimited, but I am fascinated by the challenge of portraying true greatness adequately with my camera.
It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.
The most satisfying thrillers send ordinary people into battle against the forces of evil – otherwise known as greed, ego, rage, fear and laziness – and bring them out bloodied but whole.
Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don’t fit in with normal, healthy people.
Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts.
A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow “for company.” Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.
My dance move has seemingly turned into push-ups. Sometimes, especially if I’ve indulged a little bit in an evening, it’s not out of the ordinary to find me, for some reason, doing push-ups. That seems to be my go-to dance move.
The hours that ordinary people waste, extraordinary people leverage.
When I was doing ‘Ordinary People’ and ‘Taps,’ I never wondered if it would have a lasting impression. I was just wanting to make the best film we could and do my part in that and be true to what my responsibilities were.
Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people–but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.
Before two human beings come in close physical contact, their auras have mingled; that is the reason why we ‘feel the presence of another’ at times before we become aware of him by means of our ordinary senses.
By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.
We are not meant to be seen as God’s perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace.
How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)
We’re all pretty ordinary on paper.
I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman or child.
To listen to the interests of all marks an ordinary government; to foresee them marks a great government.
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
Higgins: I’m an ordinary man, who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance, to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants. An average man am I, of no eccentric whim, Who likes to live his life, free of strife Doing whatever he thinks is best for him, Well, just an ordinary man
Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
Without my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one – a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers.
Great people are just ordinary people with an extraordinary amount of determination. They simply don’t know how to quit. They just keep on ‘keepin’ on’.
I really admire Nick Hornby – for example, the way that he can make ordinary stuff so beautiful!
I think all of us ordinary mortals tend to mythologize people as good-looking as you.
Democracy elevates by turning ordinary people into extraordinary ordinary people called celebrities.
When I was done with the movie [Ordinary World], I felt really compelled to start working on another album. Little did I know, they were going to come out back to back.
I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration – that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.
Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
School is now a place where punishment and discipline are prioritized over serving students and educating them. Any moment where a student falls outside scripted behavior becomes an opportunity for law enforcement to come in, criminalizing ordinary things people do every day.
The ultimate first date? Something that is completely out of the ordinary – go crazy, because first dates are always a little awkward, so do something a little extreme.
People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.
When your real, effortless, joyful grateful nature is realized, it will not be inconsistent with the ordinary activities of life.
A sensitive boy’s humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately.
I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
[S]uppose you make a hole in an ordinary evacuated electric light bulb and allow the air molecules to pass in at the rate of 1,000,000 a second, the bulb will become full of air in approximately 100,000,000 years.
There was a time when an ordinary American could close the door and keep the world at bay. Now the world comes elbowing in every time you go online.
Any ordinary man can…surround himself with two thousand books…and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
