Ordinary And Extraordinary Quotes

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 ... ~ Bear Grylls

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum. ~ William Boyd

I am glad we're not ordinary, Elentiya." Nehemia was smiling into the darkness of the carriage. "It'd be so boring if we were."

Celaena grinned. "Incredibly boring."

"And, for what it's worth, I'd pick you over a thousand ordinary and extraordinary friends. I think even if we just met on the street, even if I just saw you in passing, I'd know what you are."

Celaena cocked her head to the side. "An assassin?"

Nehemia's dark eyes were bright as she shook her head. "The sister of my heart. ~ Sarah J. Maas

With these vast advantages, ordinary and extraordinary, one would have supposed the North would have been content, and would have at least respected the security and tranquility of such obedient and profitable brethren; but such is not human nature. ~ Robert Toombs

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value. ~ Desmond Tutu

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

We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible ~ Cherie Carter-Scott

The difference between the ordinary and extraordinary is the extra. Go the extra mile and enter your extraordinary success ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

If we see their (Navajo) lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic. ~ Gunnar Myrdal

The beauty of 'The Hunger Games' and also 'Game of Thrones,' in fairness, both projects have really complex, three-dimensional, contradictory, strong women ... The writing of female characters is extraordinary and equal to the men. ~ Natalie Dormer

This is not an academic book. I have not written it for professional theologians. I have tried to write a practical book for ordinary Christians who want to hear God's voice above the clamor of everyday life. The still, small voice that spoke to Elijah in the cave is far more powerful than many of us realize. It can keep us from being bound by tradition or driven by circumstance. The voice can give us more than our own abilities to understand the Bible. Many Christians have wandered into a spiritual wilderness devoid of passion and power. Those who hear and obey the voice of God will escape that wilderness or see it changed into a garden. ~ Jack S. Deere

In the Scottish Orkneys, the little stone houses with their single large room and central hearth had an extraordinary range of built-in furniture. ~ Stephen Gardiner

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty ... ~ Louise Brooks

If the movie is terrible you can have fun. You can joke about it and have a ball. The movie is already sort of established as a kind of extraordinary piece of work even though it hasn't opened yet to the public. It is harder because you can't go against it and you can't be interesting. You have to go with the flow. Although one is very happy to be in it, it is sort of hard to talk about it. It is hard to talk about successful. It is much easier to talk about failure. ~ Christopher Plummer

I've been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the extraordinary landscape of Dartmoor, I looked at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I could see the personality in those forms ... then they metamorphosed under my pencil into faeries, goblins and trolls. After Alan and I published "Faeries", he moved on from the subject of faery folklore to illustrate Tolkien and other literary works ... while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn't finished with me yet. ~ Brian Froud

You should never settle for what you think is just good. You should drive the editors and writers and everybody nuts until it's great. And if you don't go for great, you won't end up with good. You've got to go beyond your wildest dreams because the exigencies of filmmaking are going to smash you into the ordinary. ~ Fred Schepisi

Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul's research is extraordinary; his writing is taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure, ~ Debby Applegate

In many ways, we all have extraordinary circumstances thrust upon us in life, and it's up to us to do the best with them. ~ Box Brown

What an extraordinary time to be alive. We're the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life. ~ Frances Moore Lappe

I know that there is no such thing as an ordinary life. All lives shimmer and pulse with particularity, with richness and texture. ~ Martha Mason

One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart - but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into "play" - to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

…she stretched and yawned, a suggestion of desire informing all her nerves. Extraordinary…not that she should feel desire but that she should not have felt it, consciously, for years. ~ Jane Rule

Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently. ~ David Halberstam

You don't think there's a reason most Finders are ordinary, and if they're Talented then they don't use their magic? Don't think you can replace instincts, honed through experience, with synthetic ones, like you've done with potions and their ingredients. ~ Amy Alward

But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living. ~ John Verdon

This book attempts to
record a journey to restoration that applies to ordinary people like you and I. It is a shot towards healing. A step headed for a new consciousness. It emerges from a moment in time where all seems lost. ~ Phindiwe Nkosi

Religion and science have nothing to do with each other, they're about different things, science is about the way the world works and religion is about miracles, I mean, if you ask most ordinary people in church or in a mosque why they believe, it's almost certainly got something to do with the belief that God does wonderful things, that God intervenes, that God heals the sick, that God answers prayers, God forgives sins. ~ Richard Dawkins

background extinction." In ordinary times - times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs - extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste... [Gravity's Rainbow, p. 590] ~ Thomas Pynchon

The poorer your self-esteem and the lower your self-confidence, the more easily negative feelings can overwhelm ordinary good sense. ~ Julian Short

It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and water, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. ~ Donna Tartt

The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success. ~ Luc De Clapiers

To extraordinary powers of labor, both mental and physical, he unites that tact and judgement which are requisite to the successful direction of such an office as that of Chief Magistrate of a free people. ~ Andrew Jackson

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty. ~ Philip Yancey

But was chance necessary? Hubbard, too, thought about the parallels between the Mandelbrot set and the biological encoding of information, but he bristled at any suggestion that such processes might depend on probability. "There is no randomness in the Mandelbrot set," Hubbard said. "There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. ~ James Gleick

It is remarkable, however, that at the very lowest point of Kant's depression, when he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, [Footnote: Physical Geography, in opposition to Political.] chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler's, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless, - even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear). ~ Thomas De Quincey

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know. ~ Natalie Goldberg

For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space. ~ David Hoffman