Best 1038 quotes in «ordinary quotes» category

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

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

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

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

... 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 words have amazing life in them.

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 multitude always strains after rarities and exceptions, and thinks little of the gifts of nature; so that, when prophecy is talked of, ordinary knowledge is not supposed to be included. Nevertheless it has as much right as any other to be called Divine.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

The only difference between an extraordinary life and an ordinary one is the extraordinary pleasures you find in ordinary things.

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.

Then all the foreigners started coming over. I don't mind that but a lot of teams are laying out fortunes for ordinary players and that's no good for our youngsters coming through.

The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience.

The opportunity for greater courage comes in the most ordinary of moments.

The ordinary air fighter is an extraordinary man and the extraordinary air fighter stands as one in a million among his fellows.

The ordinary is ultimately what moves us most deeply. It's what touches us, and it's what we most recognize, in great moments of art.

The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

The ordinary chestnut can beget a sickly and reluctant laugh, but it takes a horse chestnut to fetch the gorgeous big horse-laugh.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

The ordinary saying is, Count money after your father; so the same prudence adviseth to measure the ends of all counsels, though uttered by never so intimate a friend.

The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.

The ordinary can be absolutely miraculous.

The ordinary Christian with the Bible in his hand can say that the majority is wrong.

The ordinary manner of spending their time, is the only way of judging of people's inclination and genius.

The ordinary ministry is that which receives all of its direction from the will of God revealed in the Scriptures and from those means which God has appointed in the church for its continual edification.

The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.

The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

The Ordinary Life: the misery seems planned, the happiness accidental.