Ordinary World Quotes

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

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

This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no more the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all. Your mind was distorting everything, your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone, even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you. ~ Rajneesh

what had appeared accidental to me in the past, now often seemed to bear the imprint of supernatural intent. Once you see it you can't unsee it: the supernatural is not supernatural; the ordinary world is suffused with the miraculous. Here ~ Andrew Klavan

Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance. ~ Richard J. Foster

Finding such a person makes everyone else appear so ordinary ... and if anything happens to him, you've got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world, and a kind of isolation that never existed before. ~ Alan Turing

When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice. ~ Anne Michaels

Medicine people are truly citizens of two worlds, and those who continue to walk the path of medicine power learn to keep their balance in both the ordinary and the non-ordinary worlds ... ~ Paula Gunn Allen

Artful without being pretentious, well-made without being staid, Trey Moody's investigations of our weird and ordinary world are a little off, by which I mean that they're onto something. Read 'em and be crept into. ~ Graham Foust

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting. ~ Graham Greene

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to - an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world. ~ Tom Standage

He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman. ~ Walker Percy

But there's a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what is possible and impossible? ~ David Eddings

I would like to be a parson on this island. Explain the Sermon on the Mount to ordinary people and let the world be the world. ~ Joseph Goebbels

The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'. ~ Alain De Botton

The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful. ~ Ted Kooser

And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells. ~ Marisha Pessl

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country's philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.)

Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn't take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodie ~ Robin McKinley

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part. ~ C. Wright Mills

Ordinary won't change the world. ~ Lewis Pugh

... in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world. ~ Wisława Szymborska

How desperately she wanted to pretend they were waking up in just any ordinary bed, in an ordinary world. ~ Aria Kane

Why do you love it? I had a sense that I would enjoy her answer. I knew it would be unexpected and unique. Everything about her was unexpected and unique. She was my bright light of eccentricity in a very predictable and ordinary world. She made everything new and interesting or funny. ~ Penny Reid

This is why I write: I believe the ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories. ~ Lucy Ke

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us. ~ Eudora Welty

I had never been so close to death before.
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?< ~ Andre Brink

No matter what the other fifty odd weeks of his life offered, here, at least for a few days, he was officially a very special person in an otherwise ordinary world. ~ Lisa Luciano

I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the most daunting barrier for most people with physical impairments, because it, even more than flights of steps or elevators without braille, prevents them from participating fully in the ordinary world, where most of life's satisfactions dwell. ~ Nancy Mairs

For me, the difference between an 'ordinary' and an 'extraordinary' person is not the title that person might have, but what they do to make the world a better place for us all. ~ Jody Williams

It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness. ~ Carlos Castaneda

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic - in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself. ~ Anais Nin

Seekers are offered clues all the time from the world of spirit. Ordinary people call these clues coincidences ~ Deepak Chopra

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered. ~ Peter Straub

There are two great mythological themes that weave throughout human history: the heroic and shamanic journeys. In the former, the hero journeys out of the ordinary world into a realm of primal forces, finding and facing monsters and allies in a quest for healing.

In the latter, the protagonist enters another order of reality, a landscape of mystery and power to be pulled apart and put back together in a new and more powerful way.

These great stories remind us that the soul is not accessible merely through the rational mind. The thinking intellect is a small part of the larger self. The soul makes its appearance known in dream and deep imagery, in feeling states (dark or light) that transcend the usual boundaries of the self, and in the sacred time and space accessed in ritual and ceremony.

The entrance to this vibrant territory lies in another way of seeing, a creative and active quality of perception that engages our full capacity, across the threshold where mind, body, and emotions merge within a path of heart. ~ Sparrow Hart

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it. ~ Colin Hay

When we are born into this world, the world revolves around us. We're spoon-fed on the front end and diaper-changed on the back end. It's as if the entire world exists to meet our every need. And that's fine if you are a two-month-old baby. If you're twenty-two, it's a problem! Newsflash: ~ Mark Batterson

Writing is a miracle. You can travel anywhere in the world, to any time and any place - and still be home in time to have dinner. ~ Mary Pope Osborne

When you admire others, you become one with them and the world loves you. ~ Frederick Lenz

It's a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes. ~ Edward Lear

In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares. ~ Anthony Trollope

Another world. Another life. And for me it was much longer than five measly years. A world with more darkness and less hope than I care to remember. Bleak and starless, full of diseased men. It's inside them there. In some ways it makes it worse. You don't know who's diseased and who isn't. You don't know when you've become a Scab. ~ Ted Dekker

We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species. ~ Murray Bookchin

And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation ... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them ... ~ Michel De Montaigne

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism. ~ Madeleine Albright

Zoya placed her hands on her hips. "Is anyone going to thank me - or Genya, for that matter - for this little miracle?"
"Thank you for nearly killing and then reviving the most valuable hostage in the world so you could use him for your own gain," Kaz said. "Now you need to go. The streets are almost empty, and you need to get to the manufacturing district."
Zoya's beautiful blue eyes slitted. "Show your face in Ravka, Brekker. We'll teach you some manners."
"I'll keep that in mind. When they burn me on the Reaper's Barge, I definitely want to be remembered as polite. ~ Leigh Bardugo

If you're so certain," I said, my voice rocky and low, "that the poor are born inferior, then all the shame in the world on you for not protecting them. If people are born generation after generation into poverty and deprivation, it is your duty to look after them, not sacrifice their lives to save your own! ~ Jessica Cluess

The next words were a revelation that God had made the world not for me.
It was a revelation that rung in my ears and nearly flayed me. I looked at my bandaged hand and thanked the heavens or the devil for my luck. I tried to swallow but my tongue was thick and dry.

I could feel my heartbeat in my eyeballs.

Then, I was alone in the universe. ~ -Milan Sime Martinic, Ironway: Watching Over Benjamin Hill -

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. ~ Samuel Beckett

Since nature has the most sustainable ecosystem and since ultimately agriculture comes out of nature, our standard for a sustainable world should be nature's own ecosystem. ~ Wes Jackson

The problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make the world more humane again. ~ John Maeda

Music education opens doors that help children pass from school into the world around them - a world of work, culture, intellectual activity, and human involvement. The future of our nation depends on providing our children with a complete education that includes music. ~ Gerald R. Ford

May we be the kind of good faith Christians who shape the future by asking the right questions and then confronting what is wrong, clarifying what is confused, celebrating what is good, and creating what the world is missing. ~ David Kinnaman

The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world. ~ Alice Munro

But it was no good trying to tell about the beauty. It was just that life was beautiful beyond belief, and that is a kind of joy which has to be lived.

Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus: huge towers of modeled vapor, looking as white as Monday's washing d as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would lie before them several miles away. They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth; and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jeweled world once more: a sea under them like turquoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry. ~ T.H. White

I started racing go-karts. And I love karts. It's the most breath taking sport in the world. More than F1, indeed, I used to like it most. ~ Ayrton Senna

It's Hard to Stay Mad When There's So Much Beauty in the World ~ Kevin Spacey

Therefore does the world love the Swedes, because in the midst of their woes they can draw it all to their bosom and be so galant that they shine a long way away. ~ Isak Dinesen

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does. ~ George Orwell

... I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really - rather's it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it's brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world. ~ Mark Doty

I told them all, "If possible, I would be here with only you, forever. But I am a man who toils, and I must go where I must. We need currency for famous nightclubs, yes? I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love. So do not spleen me." But to be truthful, I was not even the smallest portion sad to go to Lutsk to translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. As I mentioned before, my life is ordinary. But I had never been to Lutsk, or any of the multitudinous petite villages that still endure after the war. I desired to see new things. I desired to experience volumes. And I would be electrical to meet an American. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You have the power. You have the magic to transform the world; you just have to use it. ~ Debasish Mridha

The day I came squealing and squalling into the world was the first time someone tried to kill me. I guess it should have been obvious to everyone right then that I wasn't going to have a normal life. ~ Justina Ireland

When we developed the 'Seinfeld' show, we took a bet on Jerry Seinfeld, who was not a household name. But Jerry had a voice. He was appearing on 'Late Night', on 'The Tonight Show', had some commercials out there, his voice of observational comedy, looking at the world around him, that voice was really starting to come into its own. ~ Warren Littlefield

Through books you will meet poets and novelists whose creations will fire your imagination. You will meet the great thinkers who will share with you their philosophies, their concepts of the world, of humanity and of creation. You will learn about events that have shaped our history, of deeds both noble and ignoble. All of this knowledge is yours for the taking ... Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well. ~ Neil Armstrong

In Detroit, in a city that in many cases the world has rejected, that's where God shows up. Every example in the Gospels where God shows up, it's always when the seas are the stormiest, where there is discontinuity. ~ Clark Durant

In these uncertain, unsettling times, with unpopular policies being implemented by a patchwork coalition of the damned, Nick Clegg is proving to be perhaps the most useful tool in the government's shed. Not because he says or does anything particularly inspiring, but because he functions as a universal disappointment sponge for disenchanted voters. You stare at Nick Clegg and feel infinitely unhappy, scarcely noticing Cameron and Co. hiding behind him. Governments around the world must be studying the coalition and working out how to get their own Clegg. He's the coalition's very own Pudsey Bear: a cuddly-but-tragic mascot representing the acceptable face of abuse. But unlike Pudsey, he actually speaks. ~ Charlie Brooker

Every time I shot back, What's wrong with living in a dream world? And she'd say, You have to wake up. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Sandra Kasturi's magical poems transform the ordinary into the surreal and exotic. ~ Phyllis Gotlieb

I have asked myself if the best which can be done with virtue is to shut it within high walls as though it were some savage creature. If the good will lock themselves up, and if the wicked will still wander free, then alas for the world! Alleyne ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

New Self, New World is an extraordinary work - an awesome display of wisdom distilled from the world's great wisdom traditions and the majestic individuals who have experienced them. This book is about achieving the highest dimensions of which humans are capable. Highly recommended. ~ Larry Dossey

Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections ... and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive, nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one's threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city... the fog is thick, blinding, and immobile... this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts of coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you've got company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility... ~ Joseph Brodsky

The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east ~ James A. Michener

Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their security. The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by their neighbors according to their lights; and there was in them neither harm nor malice. If Lydia saw how much of their good nature, their kindliness, their unpleasing self-complacency depended on the long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building castles on the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face. ~ W. Somerset Maugham