Ordinary quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"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."
"The demands of Jesus are difficult just because they require us to do something extraordinary. At the same time he asks us to regard these as something usual, ordinary."
"A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being."
"A lot of people that get out of prison have anti-social personality disorder, which makes them promiscuous and erratic, and they can't form ordinary relationships."
"I cannot - nor will not - be ordinary. I have to keep training and seeking and growing. I have to stay hungry. It is my will and so has become my nature."
"Choice word and measured phrase above the reach Of ordinary men."
"When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public."
"When you bring an idealised relationship down to the level of an ordinary one it isn't necessarily the ordinary one that suffers'."
"But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable."
"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."
"you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way."
"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."
"Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us."
"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."
"One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy."
"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."
"The theater troubled her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better."
"I hold it to be our duty to see that the wage-worker, the small producer, the ordinary consumer, shall get their fair share of business prosperity. But it either is or ought to be evident to everyone that business has to prosper before anybody can get any benefit from it."
"Creation,' in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence, and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some preexisting Being."
"The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience."
