Best 1038 quotes in «ordinary quotes» category

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.

The Constitution was made for ordinary people.

The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.

The courage of very ordinary people is all that stands between us and the dark.

The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

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.

The difference between ordinary and extra-ordinary is so often just simply that little word - extra.

The difference between being ordinary and extraordinary is doing the right thing while nobody is watching.

The difference between ordinary and extra-ordinary is so often just simply that little word - extra. And for me, I had always grown up with the belief that if someone succeeds it is because they are brilliant or talented or just better than me... and the more of these words I heard the smaller I always felt! But the truth is often very different... and for me to learn that ordinary me can achieve something extra-ordinary by giving that little bit extra, when everyone else gives up, meant the world to me and I really clung to it.

[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.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.

The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.

The experience of emptiness is not found outside the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth, we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance.

The extraordinary lies in the path of ordinary people.

The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.

The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Because they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience.

The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.

The genres change but all of my stories feature ordinary people thrown into frightening, life-altering situations.

The first step toward becoming extraordinary is, of course, to stop being ordinary.

The genius of the American system is that we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.

The freedom we enjoy is a richly textured gift handcrafted by ordinary folk

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

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 hours that ordinary people waste, extraordinary people leverage.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.

The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them - and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right. If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn't have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?

The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal - a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.

The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences.

The idea of excessive diversification is madness. Wide diversification, which necessarily includes investment in mediocre businesses, only guarantees ordinary results.

The importance of the ordinary citizen is very greatly underestimated - not so much by those in authority as by the ordinary citizen himself.

The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices.

The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.

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.

The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.

The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun.

... the most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.

The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.

The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead.

The most efficient action, the most significant testimony to nonviolence, is living a life in which there is no violence-showing that such a life is possible, and even not more difficult than a life of gain, nor more unpleasant than a life of pleasure, nor less natural than an 'ordinary' life.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

The most successful people on the planet have failed more than ordinary ones.