Ordinary quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"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."
"That is probable which for the most part usually comes to pass, or which is a part of the ordinary beliefs of mankind."
"Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal."
"Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends."
"It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality."
"For envy, like lightning, generally strikes at the top Or any point which sticks out from the ordinary level. LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura Our envy always outlives the felicity of its object."
"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."
"Maybe the Jefferson case will give members of Congress second thoughts the next time they get ready to legislate away the rights of ordinary Americans."
"Exalted Manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest."
"We can see now that we Americans were caught unprepared, because we were ordinary human beings, following the best advice we had at the time. No one would have guessed in 1941 that we would be attacked in such an unsportsmanlike manner as we were. No one could have visualized Pearl Harbor, either out there or in Washington. But if we had known then what we know now, we would have expected an attack in 1941."
"but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence."
"Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work."
"If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class."
"If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters."
"We are all ordinary people. And it's the extraordinary people Who know it."
"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 came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort."
"I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it."
"To achieve respectability, to be admitted to the debate, they must accept without question or inquiry the fundamental doctrine that the state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions, adopting a defensive stance, not an actor in world affairs but only reacting to the crimes of others...If even the harshest of critics tacitly adopt these premises, then the ordinary person may ask, who am I to disagree?"
"In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least severalgentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory."
