"They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness."
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Ordinary quotes
Ordinary
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Ordinary quotes (page 11 of 57)
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"It was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them."
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"What is particularly intriguing, in fact, is that whereas many peoples tend to locate this experience (of the sacred) in certain unusual, if not 'supernatural' moments and circumstances . . . the Oriental focus is upon mystery in the most obvious, ordinary, mundane-the most natural-situations of life."
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"Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold."
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"The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet."
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"I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways."
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"Most leaders are indispensable, but to produce a major social change, many ordinary people must also be involved."
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"You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!"
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"The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine."
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"...ordinary people are capable of doing truly extraordinary things."
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"The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such."
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"Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless"
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"Ordinary people can bring about change."
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"It's simply not enough to just show up and do your work. Superior performance is not, never has been, nor will it ever be, the by-product of ordinary efforts."
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"I'm not that old, and I haven't lived a life so far from the ordinary, really."
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"There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people."
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"For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted."
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"Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose."
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"Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through."
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"Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like."
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