"My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success."
Ordinary quotes
Ordinary
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Ordinary quotes (page 1 of 57)
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"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."
"I want to put the interests of ordinary working people right up there, center stage. Those people who - you know, they're working all the hours. They're doing their best for their families and sometimes they just feel the odds are stacked against them."
"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
"The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict."
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
"I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff."
"Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation."
"An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality."
"Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life."
"The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days."
"The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism."
"When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better."
"All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it."
"I don't work at being ordinary."
"If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much."
"Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life."
"Satan frequently steals the will of God from us due to reasoning. The Lord may direct us to do a certain thing, but if it does not make sense - if it is not logical - we may be tempted to disregard it. What God leads a person to do does not always make logical sense to his mind. His spirit may affirm it and His mind reject it, especially if it would be out of the ordinary or unpleasant or if it would require personal sacrifice or discomfort."
"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."
"What separates an ordinary woman from an extraordinary one? The belief that she is ordinary."
"This war is not an ordinary war. It is the war of the entire Russian people. Not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our heads, but to aid all people groaning under the yoke of Fascism"