Ordinary 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

How many cities of forty thousand, which is the population of Burlington, have a foreign policy? Well, we did. During my tenure as mayor we made the point that excessive spending on the military and unnecessary wars meant fewer resources to address the needs of ordinary people. Somewhere in the Reagan Library, or wherever these things are kept, there is a letter from the mayor of Burlington opposing the U.S. funding of contras in Nicaragua. The letter stated, "Stop the war against the people of Nicaragua. Use our tax dollars to feed the hungry and house the homeless. Stop killing the innocent people of Nicaragua." As ~ Bernie Sanders

Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day. ~ Terry Pratchett

One of the plagues of our day is that it's easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of massive violence, poverty and injustice around the globe...One of the greatest needs in this country is for us to have some hope, and to feel empowered that as ordinary people we can make a difference. ~ David Hartsough

The haters and the trolls have always used me as an excuse to make fun of something that is out of the ordinary, something that doesn't necessarily make sense to them. For whatever reason, I have always been a target that people love to attack. ~ Steve Aoki

If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset, ~ Haruki Murakami

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

Another factor: Christianity offered opportunities for advancement in the church to intelligent young men, some of whom might otherwise have become mathematicians or scientists. Bishops and presbyters were generally exempt from the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil courts, and from taxation. A bishop such as Cyril of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan could exercise considerable political power, much more than a scholar at the Museum in Alexandria or the Academy in Athens. This was something new. Under paganism religious offices had gone to men of wealth or political power, rather than wealth and power going to men of religion. For instance, Julius Caesar and his successors won the office of supreme pontiff, not as a recognition of piety or learning, but as a consequence of their political power. ~ Steven Weinberg

An Attempt at Jealousy"

How is your life with an ordinary
woman? without the god inside her?
The queen supplanted -

How do you breathe now?
Flinch, waking up?
What do you do, poor man?

How's your life with a tourist
on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?)
is it to your liking?

How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising?
How's kissing plaster-dust?

Are you bored with her new body?
How's it going, with an earthly woman,
with no sixth sense?

Are you happy?
No? In a shallow pit - how is your life,
my beloved? Hard as mine
with another man? ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs. ~ William Osler

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

We no longer live in a mass-media world with a few centralized choke points with just a few editors in charge, operated by commercial entities and governments. There is a new, radically different mode of information and attention flow: the chaotic world of the digitally networked public sphere (or spheres) where ordinary citizens or activists can generate ideas, document and spread news of events, and respond to mass media. This new sphere, too, has choke points and centralization, but different ones than the past. The networked public sphere has emerged so forcefully and so rapidly that it is easy to forget how new it is. Facebook was started in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. The first iPhone, ushering in the era of the smart, networked phone, was introduced in 2007. The wide extent of digital connectivity might blind us to the power of this transformation. It should not. These dynamics are significant social mechanisms, especially for social movements, since they change the operation of a key resource: attention… Attention is oxygen for movements. Without it, they cannot catch fire. ~ Zeynep Tufekci

Youth demands more than ordinary life. Age clings to it. ~ Mason Cooley

What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them? ~ Alan Alda

The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. ~ Christopher Lasch

Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences
good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as "ordinary courage. ~ Brene Brown

Believe like every Hindu in God and His oneness, in rebirth and salvation ... I can no more describe my feeling for Hinduism than for my own wife. She moves me as no other woman in the world can. Not that she has no faults; I daresay she has many more than I see myself. But the feeling of an indissoluble bond is there. Even so I feel for and about Hinduism with all its faults and limitations. Nothing delights me so much as the music of the Gita, or the Ramayana by Tulsidas. When I fancied I was taking my last breath, the Gita was my solace. Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it there is room for the worship of all the prophets of the world. 11 It is not a missionary religion in the ordinary sense of the term. It has no doubt absorbed many tribes in its fold, ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

The great achievements of western capitalism have rebounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful. ~ Milton Friedman

Certain people have good, ordinary blood and others have an animated, lively sort of blood that comes to the face quickly. ~ Seneca.

The target audience goes back to conception. That means pre-natal care, safe delivery, post-natal screening, and the ordinary stuff you do in pediatrics. ~ C. Everett Koop

One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew's eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face. ~ E.L. Doctorow

Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it...The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being already there) - which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning ~ Benjamin Paul Blood

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

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. ~ Stella Benson

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

We understood, intuitively, that no one in this awful place could be judged by the standards of the ordinary world. ~ Nando Parrado

You never, never ask a young man to take you anywhere, Molly. It's cheap. It sounds desperate. It sounds like you can't get a date any other way. With your height and those big breasts, you're always going to have to be careful not to look desperate. A real beauty can get away with it, maybe, but the rest of us ordinary girls have to be very, very careful not to look desperate. ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar's chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma's shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother's shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn't use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she'd cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.

None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn't stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn't have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. I suppose what they really did was physiological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry. ~ Jo Walton

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. ~ Anais Nin

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

While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance. ~ Thomas Merton

Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. Once you are above the level of 25; once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing. ~ Warren Buffett

It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world. ~ Deborah Eisenberg

I'm so odd, and I'm so limited, and I'm so different from the ordinary human being - so you say. I have a strong suspicion that I'm the simplest of you all, and that it's my extreme transparency that baffles you. I dont think I ever feel anything but the most ordinary emotions. ~ Virginia Woolf

The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes ~ T. S. Eliot

For him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class - all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class - she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

a controversial theory," Claire said, "that proposes that dark matter, which we know is invisible in our universe, is ordinary matter from another universe. There's also a theory that our Big Bang resulted from a collision between two parallel universes and that this was only one in perhaps an infinite number of Big Bangs to occur in the multiverse. So maybe the two theories are compatible. Maybe dark matter, like the dark matter in the Grail, came to us from another bubble. ~ Glenn Cooper

[I]f the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting, the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their Government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I'll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar. ~ John Lennon

Raising the ordinary to extraordinary ~ E.L. James

This story was written many moons ago under an apple tree in an orchard in Kent, which is one of England's prettiest counties . . . I had read at least twenty of the [fairy tales] when I noticed something that had never struck me before--I suppose because I had always taken it for granted. All the princesses, apart from such rare exceptions as Snow White, were blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful, with lovely figures and complexions and extravagantly long hair. This struck me as most unfair, and suddenly I began to wonder just how many handsome young princes would have asked a king for the hand of his daughter if that daughter had happened to be gawky, snub-nosed, and freckled, with shortish mouse-colored hair? None, I suspected. They would all have been of chasing after some lissome Royal Highness with large blue eyes and yards of golden hair and probably nothing whatever between her ears! It was in that moment that a story about a princess who turned out to be ordinary jumped into my mind, and the very next morning I took my pencil box and a large rough-notebook down to the orchard and, having settled myself under an apple tree in full bloom, began to write . . . the day was warm and windless and without a cloud in the sky. A perfect day and a perfect place to write a fairy story. ~ M.M. Kaye

These tales, without exception, express the truth that justice triumphs in the end. They all contain the idea that it is worth while to fight for the truth, in any situation.
In this fight man is assisted by more powerful beings than ordinary mortals. And the triumph of justice is the only sense and consolation in this world. Indeed, the world itself started out with this hope. The human race received it long, long ago as a cradle-song. ~ Gyula Illyes

I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves. ~ Rachel Joyce

This water was very different from any ordinary food. It was born from the walk under the stars, the song of the pulley, the effort of carrying him in my arms. It did the heart good, like a present. When I was a little boy, the lights of the Christmas tree, the music of the midnight mass, the sweetness of people's smiles, all formed part of the radiance of the Christmas gifts I received. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

I wonder if only artists can feel peace like this - such a gentle, inconspicuous peace that an ordinary person might not even notice. ~ Tessa Emily Hall

She has never understood, nor been able to relate to a herd mentality. She doesn't get along with followers and avoids the bandwagon. She marches to her own tune and does it alone. She's despised by the weak-minded and respected by the strong. She ruffles the feathers of the flock because she champion's the defenseless and pick's on the mob. Does she wish she could not give a damn and live an ordinary life surrounded by nodding and needy ordinary people? At times ... but she'd be bored out of her mind when she's never bored alone, and because of that she's patient because a couple of times in a lifetime she's lucky enough to come across a memorable, magnetic and remarkable person - one worth knowing, even if just for the brevity of a conversation. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

You come into this world as you leave it, on your own. It's made me want to live a life slightly less ordinary. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch

Here we are, all these years later, standing back and watching our grown children have their lives - through ordinary times, through heartbreak and anguish. But even after horrible events, we are sometimes blessed with a moment of unexpected joy. We learn to grasp, to hold tightly to these moments for the short time they exist. ~ Frances Itani

I feel all agitated, like one of those snow globes you see resting peacefully on shop counters. I was perfectly happy being an ordinary, dull little Swiss village. But now Jack Harper's come and shaken me up, and there are snowflakes all over the place, whirling around until I don't know what I think anymore. And bits of glitter, too. Tiny bits of shiny, secret excitement. ~ Sophie Kinsella

​They, society, hate you because they don't want your help. You remind them of how weak willed and sheep like they are. How gleeful they are, deep down, to be ordinary. They don't want heroes. They don't want special people around them. Because if there are special people and they aren't one of them - well who wants that? Who wants a constant reminder that they aren't even trying to be special? ~ Brian Michael Bendis

I can kill with a single word. I can hurl a ball of fire into the midst of my enemies. I rule a squadron of skeletal warriors, who can destroy by touch alone. I can raise a wall of ice to protect those I serve. The invisible is discernible to my eyes. Ordinary magic spells crumble in my presence ... But I bow in the presence of a master.
Lord Soth to Raistlin Majere ~ Margaret Weis

The qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians - none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse - because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep - if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. ~ Noam Chomsky

There is a darkness in you. In all of us, probably. Beasts we keep chained. Ordinary men have to keep the chains strong, for if we let the beast loose then society will turn upon us with fiery vengeance. Kings though ... well, who is there to turn upon them? So the chains are made of straw. It is the curse of kings, Helikaon, that they can become monsters. And they invariably do. ~ David Gemmell

I don't know. I suppose I should have had a better idea of what I was letting myself in for. Still, the first murder – the farmer – seemed to have been so simple, a dropped stone falling to the lakebed with scarcely a ripple. The second one was also easy, at least at first, but I had no inkling how different it would be. What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now. ~ Donna Tartt

A few dozen other people lingered in the arena. Some were in groups, some were pointedly solo and eyeing everyone else as potential enemies. Some looked like ordinary people you'd run into at the mall. Others practically had "Yes, I want to join a fanatical vampire-hating group" stamped across their foreheads. ~ Richelle Mead

Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious. ~ Ai Weiwei

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. ~ Edmund Morris

So the two went: the boy who had escaped from darkness because he loved light more than he knew and the girl who had become ordinary because she did not realize how wonderful it was to be a princess. ~ David R. Mains

Socialists don't like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose socialism. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Do have a mind of your own. This is not just a spiritual matter only, but one which concerns ordinary manliness. I would do many things to please my friends, but to go to hell to please them is more than I would venture. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity. ~ Edward Gibbon

The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Just like other ordinary people, I want to have a happy family. ~ Lee Byung-hun

She was afraid of us moving in together. With Mark, domestic intimacy had become domestic claustrophobia; and had riddled romance (though she never quite said this) like woodworm. It wasn't that she was resistant to the glamourlessness of stray toenails and washing up and underpants and mug-rings and hoovering and boredom; on the contrary: it was that she was horrified by her own willingness to sink so deeply into the comfort of such details. A no nonsense streak in her identified the ordinary with truth, the exotic with delusion. She and Mark had delighted in dehumbugging their own romance, had (she confessed) Larkinized themselves into mundanity addicts. In Mark's case (she suspected) because he knew deep down he had no magic in him; in her own because she knew deep down that she had too much (no nonsense streak or not), and that to release it would be to lose him - and perhaps herself. Therefore they had wallowed together in cosiness, both suffering, Mark for fear of her leaving him, her for fear (certainty, actually) that the romantic inside her would rise up and smash their deadening familiarity to pieces. ~ Glen Duncan

Ordinary men and women may often feel unmotivated to exert their citizenship, either because they cannot tell the difference between the different alternatives, or because they have lost faith in the political classes, or because they feel that the really important issues are not in their power to decide. ~ Patricio Aylwin

You could probably call the whole thing an ordinary love story. ~ David Lagercrantz

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright ... ~ Tom Wolfe

She shook her head in puzzlement.
'You're very strange,' she said.
'No, I'm very ordinary,' said Arthur,'but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I'm more differed from than differing. ~ Douglas Adams

What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures ... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth
an ordinary life. ~ Irena Klepfisz

Then if it is denied that the unity at that level is the interconnection of the plurality or dissimilarity of religions as of parts constituting a whole, rather that every one of the religions at the level of ordinary existence is not part of a whole, but is a whole in itself-then the 'unity' that is meant is 'oneness' or 'sameness' not really of religions, but of the God of religions at the level of transcendence (i.e. esoteric), implying thereby that at the level of ordinary existence (i.e. exoteric), and despite the plurality and diversity of religions, each religion is adequate and valid in its own limited way, each authentic and conveying limited though equal truth. The notion of a plurality of truth of equal validity in the plurality and diversity of religion is perhaps aligned to the statements and general conclusions of modern philosophy and science arising from the discovery of a pluraity and diversity of laws governing the universe having equal validity each in its own cosmological system. The trend to align modern scientific discovery concerning the systems of the universe with corresponding statements applied to human society, cultural traditions,and values is one of the characteristic features of modernity.

The position of those who advocate the theory of the transcendent unity of religions is based upon the assumption that all religions, or the major religions of mankind, are revealed religions. They assume that the universality and transcendence of e ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

War is the price of change.'
'And it's ordinary people who pay it, peasants like me. Never men like you. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards. That such rewards most often go unnoticed keeps the artist in business. ~ Robert Wrigley

Why be usual when you are unique? Why be average when you can be awesome? Why be ordinary when you are an original? You were born to be a THRILLER! ~ Rodney Walker

Josh was ordinary. But ordinary teens did not find themselves in the middle of a battle between two incredibly ancient magicians. ~ Michael Scott

It is only the mind which does not belong that can be alone. And aloneness is not something to be cultivated. You see this? When you see all this, you are out, and no governor or president is going to invite you to dinner. Out of that aloneness there is humility. It is this aloneness that knows love - not power. The ambitious man, religious or ordinary, will never know what love is. So, if one sees all this, then one has this quality of total living and therefore total action. This comes through self-knowledge. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything) ~ T. S. Eliot

…I interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is Prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often to you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes – well, maybe seven. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often. Many of those I talked to experienced prayer more as a burden than as a pleasure. They regarded it as important, even paramount, and felt guilty about their failure, blaming themselves. Does this sound familiar? (pp. 14/Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?) ~ Philip Yancey

It means eating your words, this thing of refusing to be a fence-sitter, but I'd rather eat my words than get calluses from sitting.
No one who has not experienced the condescension of a buyer toward an ordinary salesgirl can have any conception of its withering effect. ~ Mary Barnett Gilson

It has something to do with the cosmic rays coming from outer space. They strike some person or thing, and then you get a mutation - like the stripes on a zebra.
The attraction of two such mutants to one another would have an almost incestuous appeal and be far stronger than the bond of love between ordinary human beings. ~ Anna Kavan

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can. ~ Colm Toibin

Many, Lorenzo, have held and still hold the opinion, that there is nothing which has less in common with another, and that is so dissimilar, as civilian life is from the military. Whence it is often observed, if anyone designs to avail himself of an enlistment in the army, that he soon changes, not only his clothes, but also his customs, his habits, his voice, and in the presence of any civilian custom, he goes to pieces; for I do not believe that any man can dress in civilian clothes who wants to be quick and ready for any violence; nor can that man have civilian customs and habits, who judges those customs to be effeminate and those habits not conducive to his actions; nor does it seem right to him to maintain his ordinary appearance and voice who, with his beard and cursing, wants to make other men afraid: which makes such an opinion in these times to be very true. But if they should consider the ancient institutions, they would not find matter more united, more in conformity, and which, of necessity, should be like to each other as much as these (civilian and military); for in all the arts that are established in a society for the sake of the common good of men, all those institutions created to (make people) live in fear of the laws and of God would be in vain, if their defense had not been provided for and which, if well arranged, will maintain not only these, but also those that are not well established. And so (on the contrary), good institutions without the help of t ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

The reality of the ordinary progress of Christian understanding should not escape our notice: early believers "know no answers"; immature believers "know all the answers"; and mature believers "know the limits of our answers. ~ Bryan Chapell

Valentine's Day is devoted to love. Why don't we have a day devoted to hatred? The raw, visceral hatred that is felt every hour of the day by ordinary people, but is repressed for reasons of social order. I think it would be very cathartic, and it would certainly make for an exciting six o'clock news. ~ George Carlin

It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique. ~ Jose Saramago

My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success. ~ Isaac Newton

Sometimes I look out the window out into the big, bright world and stare at people. Passers-by who live their ordinary lives and experience a full range of extraoridnary emotions. I stare at them for minutes, sometimes hours and then it makes me think, it makes me wonder. Are there people who are born healthy, who are born perfectly normal yet there is something wrong with them? Something nobody feels, nobody understands or questions, something that no one has ever even heard of? What if there are people among us who are capable of truly falling for someone, who are - in all biological, emotional, hormonal, chemical, philosophical senses - capable of loving someone with romantic love but no one in this wide world is capable of requiting that? Is it possible? Is it the fault of that person? Is it perhaps in the genes, the very DNA of someone? Is it perhaps destiny? And those passers-by go along happily without knowing anyone has ever asked something like this and they will probably never think about anything such because there might be only one person in this world who has to experience the feeling, the feeling that is so deeply rooted in a life alone. ~ Daniel Gyorki

You may not mean to, but you do seem to look down your nose at many of us mere mortals muddling along down here. I feel as though you think everyone should be better than they are. I certainly think you expect me to behave like some sort of perfect princess. But I'm just an ordinary girl who wants to grow up and find out where I belong in the world. ~ Emily Arden

Utensil

While feasting
On venison stew
After we buried my mother,
I recognized my spoon

And realized my family
Had been using it
For at least forty-two years.
How does one commemorate

The ordinary? I thanked
The spoon for being a spoon
And finished my stew.
How does one get through

A difficult time? How does
A son properly mourn his mother?
It helps to run the errands--
To get shit done. I washed

That spoon, dried it,
And put it back
In the drawer,
But I did it consciously,

Paying attention
To my hands, my wrists,
And the feel of steel
Against my fingertips.

Then my wife drove us back
Home to Seattle, where I wrote
This poem about ordinary
Grief. Thank you, poem,

For being a poem. Thank you,
Paper and ink, for being paper
And ink. Thank you, desk,
For being a desk. Thank you,

Mother, for being my mother.
Thank you for your imperfect love.
It almost worked. It mostly worked.
Or partly worked. It was almost enough. ~ Sherman Alexie

Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious - a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand - and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.
John Gardner ~ Marcy Sheiner

One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person. ~ Blaise Pascal

I still maintain that you cannot treat [Donald] Trump, analyze Trump, destroy Trump the way politics says you destroy people that are running for office. I don't think the standard, ordinary operating procedures work. ~ Rush Limbaugh

But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't. ~ David Hockney

Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman. A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man, - it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his features handsome and somewhat severe. There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth - brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing. ~ Willa Cather

He that in the ordinary affairs of life would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration would be sure of nothing in this world but of perishing quickly. ~ John Locke

The artist is he who can take something ordinary and wring out of it attar of roses. ~ Walter Sickert

In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere. ~ Christopher Hitchens

They are soldiers. They depend upon routine, and anything out of the ordinary will give them pause. And they are men. They hate to be insulted, but they love to hear others mocked. And they are fools, because they cannot imagine that a woman alone in the woods would be a threat. ~ Kiersten White

Hanging laundry on a line is a very ordinary task. It is as ordinary as scraped knees and lost keys, as fixing the same simple dish for supper again, and again. Ordinary is most days, and Lord helps is if we overlook them. ~ Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, through illness and in one's own bed, was actually a blessing. Death was part of everyday life; medieval people considered their deaths regularly. Indeed, as one medieval historian puts it, "One of the chief obsessions of medieval Christians was the need to make a 'good death.'"38 ~ Diana Butler Bass

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. ~ Swami Satchidananda