Extraordinary Quotes

The difference between an ordinary life and an extraordinary life is only a matter of perspective. Pull the blinds. Look around you. It is a mad, mad world and you do not require ten digit bank accounts to immerse yourself in it. Travel down dusty roads without a destination in mind. Climb a mountain and scream out into the void. Kiss the hell out of a stranger. Skinny dip in a lake. Get lost and lose yourself (they are two separate things). Explore the wilderness (especially the one within). Think less of destiny and more of the moment right here. Because when you are old and ill with your loved ones around you, fame won't matter, nor will the extent of your wealth. You are the sum of the stories you can tell. ~ Beau Taplin

Quite simply, I love newspapers and the men and women who make them. Newspapers have given me a full, rich life. They have provided me with a ringside seat at some of the most extraordinary events in my time on the planet. They have been my university. They have helped feed, house and educate my children. I want them to go on and on and on. ~ Pete Hamill

We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations. ~ Bryan Sykes

I think that the resistance against Darwin is not just the difficulty of seeing the power of a spectacularly beautiful explanation: it is the fear of realizing the extraordinary power that such an explanation has in shattering rests of old world views. ~ Carlo Rovelli

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. ~ Stephen King

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for the Next Big Thing. We're growing bored with the ordinary means of God's grace, attending church week in and week out. Doctrines and disciplines that have shaped faithful Christian witness in the past are often marginalized or substituted with newer fashions or methods. The new and improved may dazzle us for a moment, but soon they have become "so last year". Michael Horton, Ordinary, 16 ~ Michael S. Horton

I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us. ~ Jeremy Paxton

Perhaps no two events ever united so intimately and forceably to combat and expel prejudice, as the Revolution of America, and the Alliance with France. Their effects are felt, and their influence already extends as well to the old world as the new. Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution, more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. ~ Thomas Paine

An extraordinary writer ... It is the vastness of Nick Tosches' heart that makes it possible to reveal the darkness. ~ Hubert Selby, Jr.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action. ~ Stanley Milgram

My prayer today is that God would make me an extraordinary Christian. ~ George Whitefield

In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite different ways. One view recognizes what an extraordinary country the U.S. is. ~ Edward Said

There is nothing special about Tim Scott. I'm an ordinary guy serving an extraordinary God and that makes the difference. ~ Tim Scott

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity. ~ Emily Carr

It's extraordinary how much you can tell about a person from their interpretations. It can show you how they see the world, and how they might see you. ~ Angela Richardson

People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our ~ Mark Manson

because Jesus was strong for me, I was free to be weak; because Jesus won for me, I was free to lose; because Jesus was someone, I was free to be no one; because Jesus was extraordinary, I was free to be ordinary; because Jesus succeeded for me, I was free to fail. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan.
Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over ~ Stacey Ballis

We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations and we are ending a war not with a final battle but with a final march toward home. This is an extraordinary achievement ~ Barack Obama

What I will say is that what I have learned for myself is that I don't have to be anybody else; and that myself is good enough; and that when I am being true to that self, then I can avail myself to extraordinary thingsYou have to allow for the impossible to be possible. ~ Lupita Nyong'o

I need to give you one last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which you find yourself is actually true- that somehow you've fallen deep down into a Cordova story. I stared back at him. Be the good guy, he said. How do I know I'm the good guy? He pointed at me, nodding. A very wise question. You don't. Most bad guys think they're good. But there are a few signifiers. You'll be miserable. You'll be hated. You'll fumble around in the dark, alone and confused. You'll have little insight as to the true nature of things, not until the very last minute, and only if you have the stamina and the madness to go to the very, very end. But most importantly- and critically- you will act without regard for yourself. You'll be motivated by something that has nothing to do with the ego. You'll do it for justice. For grace. For love. Those large rather heroic qualities only the good have the strength to carry on their shoulders. And you'll listen. ~ Marisha Pessl

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Raising the ordinary to extraordinary ~ E.L. James

From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance. ~ Charles Tilly

I love you. The words reverberated between them, sinking into their skin, scored onto their hearts as they staked their claims to each other's bodies, surrendering themselves and possessing each other, a tangle of limbs and lust and love, coiled together into one perfect unit, one small miracle, one simple story that has been told and retold since the beginning of time: just two people meeting, the most extraordinary and wondrous and mundane thing in the world. ~ Kate Aaron

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger. ~ Mary McCarthy

It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary. ~ Paul Valery

Fantastic accomplishments seem like something unattainable and everyone doing the extraordinary seems to be unlike you until YOU do something amazing. Then you realize those talented, heroic leaders are not different from you in any important way." Clara Branon, Ph.D., "This Is/Is Not the Way I Thought Things Would Change," Volume III, "The Spanners Series ~ Sally Ember

I honestly consider that the greatest gift to me, is the reaction that I get from my work. That is a given which I never, ever take for granted. But to be given that by audiences, individuals, on the street, in the theater, is an extraordinary feeling. ~ Angela Lansbury

Sharing our stories is a vital part of doing life together. The disciples shared their stories and changed the world, not because they were extraordinary men, but because they told about an extraordinary God. ~ Cindee Snider Re

Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. ~ David Bentley Hart

This is an extraordinary illustrated collection of Chinese herbsaccompanied by concise and expert comments. Jing-Nuan Wu has succeeded incompiling this most unique and informative book. ~ Koji Nakanishi

As long as you ask questions you are breaking through, but the moment you begin to accept, you are psychologically dead. So right through life don't accept a thing, but inquire, investigate. Then you will find that your mind is something really extraordinary, it has no end, and to such a mind there is no death. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

The great climb mountains;
the extraordinary move them. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

You have to be careful around miracles, around extraordinary highs, because they're disruptive to your regular life...you have to cope when they end. ~ Anya Ulinich

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis. ~ Emil Cioran

Nicholas Benedict did have an exceptional gift for knowing things (more exceptional, in fact, than most adults would have thought possible), and yet not even he could know that this next chapter was to be the most unusual-and most important-of his entire childhood. Indeed, the strange days that lay ahead would change him forever, though for now they had less substance than the mist through which he ran. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

Conrad Ludlow was an extraordinary partner ... We just called him the greatest partner because he just knew what a woman's balance was. ~ Patricia McBride

New Orleans is a city whose basic industry is the service industry. That's why it makes its money. That's - it brings people to the city. People come to the city and experience the wonders of this extraordinary city and everything else. The question is that, how do we create jobs which are the jobs that have pay, that - living wages? ~ Danny Glover

That was how he got there, seeking asylum, hounded--the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of being untrue. ~ Philip Roth

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much. ~ Norman Mailer

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

It is discovered an extraordinary similarity between Nietzsche and the Hindu-Aryan Rishi, visionary poets of the Vedas.

They also thought the ideas from outside to inside: they 'appeared' to them. Rishi means 'he who sees'. See an Idea, express it, or try to express it. The job of the Rishis has been fulfilled for millennia and the vision of the Vedas was revised, elaborated, in subsequent visions, in scholastics, in doctrinal buildings and sophisticated verifications, through centuries.

In any case, he, who preached not to subtract anything that life offers as Will of Power, as possession, increasing its power, lived chaste, like a yoga, always looking for the highest tensions of the soul, climbing always, more and more lonely, to be able to open up to that style of thinking, where the Ideas could possess him as the most authentic expression of life, as his 'pulse', hitting him in the center of the personal being, or of the existence there accumulated, and that he called, long before Jung and any other psychologist, the Self, to differentiate it from the conscious and limited self, from the rational self.

Let's clarify, then. What Nietzsche called thinking is something else, Nietzsche did not think with his head (because 'synchronistically' hurt) but with the Self, with all of life and, especially, 'with the feet'. 'I think with my feet,' he said, 'because I think walking, climbing. ~ Miguel Serrano

Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding ... that's extraordinary. And that's why we have already won ... they can't ... it's light. It's democracy. They can't shut that down. ~ Jon Stewart

Don't be an Extraordinary, you have to be extra in Extraordinary ~ Vishvendra Singh Nathawat

There is an extraordinary power in storytelling that stirs the imagination and makes an indelible impression on the mind. ~ Brennan Manning

Catherine de Hueck Doherty observes in The Gospel Without Compromise: The Gospel can be summed up by saying that it is the tremendous, tender, compassionate, gentle, extraordinary, explosive, revolutionary revelation of Christ's love. ~ Brennan Manning

Wittgenstein could not avoid recognizing that "an experience is such that when I prove it to myself I marvel at the existence of the world. And here I am inclined to use phrases such as 'how extraordinary it is that something exists' or 'how extraordinary it is that the world exists.'" This wonder at existence is the condition for an authentic encounter with things and opens up the possibility of knowledge. ~ Marco Bersanelli

[On Jerry Falwell] No, and I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to ... The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. ~ Christopher Hitchens

So this is what I've decided: In the eyes of many people, I may never live an extraordinary life. But I will love in extraordinary ways. And I hope I choose to always see the best in people" -Emma ~ Natalie Lloyd

Don't hide your scars, your stretch marks,
your laugh lines, your calloused hands.
They are your life story,
telling of struggles won and lost,
challenges faced, losses overcome,
life grown and birthed and nurtured,
hard work accomplished,
stars reached for, hopes dashed, dreams realized,
rock bottoms and mountain tops.
They tell the story of your one
amazing, awful, beautiful life
written in the curves and lines of
extraordinary, miraculous, beautiful you. ~ L.R. Knost

Hatred may keep a body warm, but it takes a lot to keep the fire stoked, so unless a person is extraordinary in some way, some people are not worth hating, just like they're not worth loving. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren't a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you'll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now. ~ Epictetus

Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life. ~ Gary Keller

The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary about the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe. ~ Douglas Adams

Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual.
Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack. ~ John Cleese

Men's and nations' finest hour consist of those moments when extraordinary challenge is met by extraordinary response. Hence in those darkest hours, we must light our individual candles rather than vying with others to call attention to the enveloping darkness. Our indignation about injustice should lead to illumination, for if it does not, we are only adding to the despair-and the moment of gravest danger is when there is so little light that darkness seems normal! ~ Neal A. Maxwell

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

Holiness doesn't mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things with love and faith. ~ Pope Francis

Tomorrow at seven o'clock a strange phenomenon will occur: the earth is going to sit on the moon. This has also been written about by the noted English chemist Wellington. I confess, I felt troubled at heart when I pictured to myself the extraordinary delicacy and fragility of the moon. For the moon is usually made in Hamburg, and made quite poorly. I'm surprised England doesn't pay attention to this. It's made by a lame cooper, and one can see that the fool understands nothing about the moon. He used tarred rope and a quantity of cheap olive oil, and that's why there's a terrible stench all over the earth, so that you have to hold your nose. And that's why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people can't live on it, and now only noses live there. And for the same reason, we can't see our own noses, for they're all in the moon. ~ Nikolai Gogol

The extraordinary hides behind the camouflage of the ordinary. Assume nothing, Maisie. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. ~ Gertrude Stein

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them? ~ Richard Flanagan

I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles. ~ Cate Blanchett

From a cultural point of view the richest moments in civilization, in history, have occurred when the boundaries separating popular and creative literature disappear, and literature becomes simultaneously both things-something that enriches all audiences, something that can satisfy all kinds of mentalities and knowledge and education, and at the same time is creative and artistic and popular. Dickens, Hugo, and Dumas are extraordinary cases in point; and in Spain in the nineteenth century there are many other examples, such as Perez Galdos. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

When you have some skills but don't fully understand your environment, there is no way you can be plus one. At best, you can be a zero. But a zero isn't a bad thing to be. You're competent enough not to create problems or make more work for everyone else. And you have to be competent, and prove to others that you are, before you can be extraordinary. There are no short-cuts, unfortunately. ~ Chris Hadfield

If I am to be known for anything, I would like it to be for encouraging Canadians, for knowing a little bit about their daily, extraordinary courage. And for wanting that courage to be recognized. ~ Romeo LeBlanc

Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal. ~ Irena Sendler

Imperfect. Beautiful. The most extraordinary thought of all. ~ Grace Curley

Not infrequently it turns out that a writer whom people have long credited with an extraordinary depth of ideas whom they have expected to exert an extraordinary and major influence on the direction of society, displays in the end such a watered down and minuscule version of his basic little idea that no one is even sorry that he's succeeded in writing himself out. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary. The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary. But you wouldn't clap yet, because making something disappear isn't enough. You have to bring it back. ~ Michael Caine

Ego cannot bring anything extraordinary into the world; the extraordinary comes only through egolessness. And so is the case with the musician and the poet and the dancer. So is the case with everybody. ~ Rajneesh

Surely," said Miss Marple, aghast at an idea that had come into her mind, "there can't be a bond of ruthlessness between us?" Was she, Jane Marple - could she ever be - ruthless? "D'you know," said Miss Marple to herself, "it's extraordinary, I never thought about it before. I believe, you know, I could be ruthless ... . ~ Agatha Christie

The universe is littered with them: hidden villages, windswept little towns under wide skies, isolated cabins on chilly mountains, whose only mark on history is to be the incredibly ordinary place where something extraordinary started to happen. Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all gynecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall. Mist ~ Terry Pratchett

If you want to be holy, if you seek meaning in your life, start looking into your own life and attacking your pride in all of its many forms. God will give you extraordinary light and the ultimate reward of holiness. For your holiness relies not on what you do, but on what you allow God to do through you. Have courage. God will perfect you. ~ Mother Angelica

Thanks to [language], human beings - and we alone - can truly enter and explore the feelings of others. What an extraordinary skill. ~ Naoki Higashida

The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn't expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

Most of us don't win instantly.
Instant wins usually don't last.
Real wins come slow.
Real wins don't come easy,
But they do come.
And when we win,
It is extraordinary! ~ Deborah D. Johnson

Gossip is not adopted by the bored. It is an art of discourse adopted by those who have experienced absolutely nothing thrilling in their lives; they have never really fallen in love or casually spoken to a complete stranger, and they never dreamt of doing anything extraordinary. They are a group of people with dull lives and souls. ~ Kanza Javed

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. ~ Seamus Heaney

My tears gave me the strength to turn hurt into forgiveness, and forgiveness into love. Tears are extraordinary showers that are filled with a purpose. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor's Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the - to me - extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy's father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy's - I think his little sister - did Imps in the Pantomimes. ~ Charles Dickens

Our family may seem extraordinary in some magazines or something, but at home it's not. We're really just a very loving family. We're very close, and we don't read magazines. We just kind of go to work and come home. We try to keep a sense of reality into their lives. What's truly real, not Hollywood real. ~ Angelina Jolie

People are seeing the impact of climate change around them in extraordinary patterns of floods and droughts, wildfires, heatwaves and powerful storms. ~ John Holdren

If you want to lead an extraordinary life, find out what the ordinary do–and don't do it. ~ Tommy Newberry

The ordinary build houses when they have bricks; the extraordinary build mansions when they have pebbles. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That's the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades. But it takes young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical ability to pull it off. ~ Daniel James Brown

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries. ~ Jerry Saltz

Gratefully accepting the proffered honor, [to inscribe a new legal work to him] I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Change starts with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The path to the extraordinary is open to anybody at any time. ~ Larry Brilliant

Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into an all-out millennium alert. Watson and the White House counterterrorism group met around the clock. They sought an extraordinary number of FISA wiretaps; Janet Reno authorized at least one warrantless search on her own authority. Clarke ~ Tim Weiner

I come from a country that lives and breathes rugby, and I didn't think there would be anywhere else in the world that could be the same. But New Zealand takes it to another dimension. It's extraordinary how much passion Kiwis have for the game. ~ Luke Evans

You can start from the ordinary bizzare to the extraordinary incredible ~ Richmond Akhigbe

We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural. A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises. ~ Marcel Proust

Even the greatest actions of a celebrated person labor under this disadvantage, that however surprising and extraordinary they may be, they are no more than what are expected from him. ~ Joseph Addison

Understanding that, I know I have not seen a ghost. I am not mad. It is something more extraordinary than that. I have made a mistake! ~ Avi

Perhaps it was his wife who mainly made him laugh, for there are people who can make us laugh even when they don't intend to, largely because their very presence pleases us, and so it's easy enough to set us off, simply seeing them and being in their company and hearing them is all it takes, even if they're not saying anything very extraordinary or are even deliberately spouting nonsense, which we nevertheless find funny. ~ Javier Marias