Ordinary Quotes

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.

I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

Live a life less ordinary.

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

I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary.

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

The America I know is great - not because government made it great but because ordinary citizens like me, like my father and like you are given the opportunity every day to do extraordinary things.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

Do not be grand. Try to get the ordinary into your writing - breakfast tables rather than the solar system; Middletown today, not Mankind through the ages.

...just being ordinary in and of itself is and expression of divinity; the truth of one's real self can be discovered through the pathway of everyday life.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Christianity makes of life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand significance.

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.

Ive lived this very dramatic life, with high points and terrible low points. Nothing has been ordinary, and I want to have the experience of the last breath. I want a little drama to it.

Jack: Actually, I was found. Lady Bracknell: Found? Jack: Uh, yes, I was in... a handbag. Lady Bracknell: A handbag? Jack: Yes, it was... [makes gestures] Jack: an ordinary handbag.

What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.

Song is the licensed medium for bawling in public things too silly or sacred to be uttered in ordinary speech.

Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.

You would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

The Olympic Games are not just ordinary world championships but a quadrennial festival of universal youth. . . celebrated by each succeeding generation as it arrives on the threshold of adulthood.

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.

It is the ordinary woman who knows something about love; the gorgeous ones are too busy being gorgeous.

Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm - that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive!

I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.

What if I have it all upside down? What if I'm the one who knows nothing of God, and the people in the world are actually interceding on my behalf with their ordinary daily struggles

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Even in ordinary reproduction [photography] verges on facsimile.

Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

We need the word proclaimed so that we hear the gospel clearly, but then it's also very natural to have people talk about the Christian faith in ordinary conversation.

In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.

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

If Christians were Christians, there would be no anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew. There is nothing that the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as this awkward historical fact.

When you stir up the passion, your faith will allow God to do amazing things. If you want to remain passionate, you cannot let what once was a miracle become ordinary.

We must learn to live in the ordinary 'gray' day according to what we saw on the mountain.

I am just an ordinary Catholic.

If you want a team of smart, creative people to do extraordinary things, don't put them in a drab, ordinary space.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

I want my kids to know that they're just as good and just as American as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Dr. Martin Luther King. My worst fear is they will become ordinary.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.