Ordinary quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"If you are obliged to neglect any thing, let it be your chemistry. It is the least useful and the least amusing to a country gentleman of all the ordinary branches of science."
"Ordinary thinking and ordinary effort are almost never enough to generate leadership."
"The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state."
"[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete."
"Ordinary is a word that has no meaning."
"Your greatest asset is your learning ability. The ordinary stroke their egos - the exceptional polishes their craft"
"Ordinary performers have giant TVs. Extraordinary performers have huge libraries."
"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."
"Many parts of my life are perfectly ordinary, if that's what you mean. One could even call it boring, but that's what I like about it."
"Be content with an ordinary life."
"There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life."
"When ordinary people decide to do extraordinary things they transform their lives and the lives of others around them."
"I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations."
"An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience."
"If by happiness you mean instead an ordinary contentment, then yes - I'm fairly contented. Not satisfied - contented."
"It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think."
"I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion."
"The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don't look like much of a minstrel, and you're— pardon me for saying so lad, but it's true— ordinary as cheese crumbs. So it's love if you ask me."
"Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached."
"amazingly, i'd actually forgotten that i'm supposed to be plain. i'm so used to alex telling me i'm beautiful. i'm so used to feeling beautiful around him. a hollow opens up in my chest. this is what life will be like without him: everything will become ordinary again. i'll become ordinary again."
