Ordinary Quotations

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.

The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience's eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience 'right now.'

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

There are lots of things about millionaires that make them pretty ordinary, but what's not ordinary is their ability to accumulate wealth, how hard they work, and what they do for a living.

Part of what I do and what I want to do is I want to bring art into the everyday life. If you can take ordinary just walking in the street and you're confronted by something, that might change your day - it might inspire you.

The true call of a Christian is not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way.

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

The truth of faith is a slender, glowing element that runs through even the seemingly ordinary and undramatic moments of existence. Even at low intensity, it is a steady source of illumination. Such religious truth is powerful even when it seems faint, even when it seems obscured by the larger events of history.

I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.

It's just that if you're not disruptive everything seems to be repeated endlessly - not so much the good things but the bland things - the ordinary things - the weaker things get repeated- the stronger things get suppressed and held down and hidden.

The vice president had a bargaining asset, however, that no ordinary person has: He was next in line to the presidency. I saw no chance that he would resign first, then take his chances on trial, conviction, and jail.

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.

The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I'm interested in happiness.

Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labor's monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.

Most activism is brought about by us ordinary people.

I have pets, but they're the really ordinary sort - yellow Labrador, tabby cat, white rabbit, a few goldfish - that kind of stuff. Nothing very... extravagant or unusual or exotic, but I find, in terms of inspiration, Mother Nature is just it.

Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.

The stuff that I find really intriguing is always how do ordinary people behave in extraordinary circumstances. And that's why we have a lot of cop shows and lawyer shows and medical shows is that you're looking for situations that just always heighten the stakes.

From the time I went into baseball, I have always been handicapped by my hands, which are too small. I never saw the day yet when I was able to span an ordinary baseball.

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.

There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you're trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society.

We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.

There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.

I was in college when tens of thousands of people marched on Washington for the first Earth Day. Raw sewage floated in rivers and clouds of smog hung over cities. But then something amazing happened. People spoke out. Thousands of students, workers, and ordinary citizens used their voices to say, 'This has to change.'

Emphasis was usually put on the horizontal acceleration factor, for the simple reason that ordinary structures have a built-in safety factor for the vertical component; that is, gravity.

Magical realism is a blending of the unusual or supernatural into an otherwise ordinary setting. And, to me, this perfectly describes the South. 'The Sugar Queen' involves a lot of magical happenings, but in a very down-home Southern setting. It's full of things that could almost be true.

Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.

Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Well, that's what life is - this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments. We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.

I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

This sounds an extraordinary statement to make, but in fact all truth is very ordinary.

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.

You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational - but it's in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.

The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

I love hearing other people's stories, and I freely admit I'm scavenging for material through their conversations, but really, at the same time, I'm living an ordinary life.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

Flying into a storm, even its outer edges, did not seem like a good idea to me. And this was no ordinary tempest. Everyone on the bridge knew what it was: the Devil's Fist, a near-eternal typhoon that migrated about the North Indian basin year-round. She was infamous, and earned her name by striking airships out of the sky.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

The ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the Occidentals. It is a relatively important matter to him to be true to his own ideals and to carry them out in actual life.

If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.

September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.

I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God.

If the attainment of peace is the ultimate objective of all statesmen, it is, at the same time, something very ordinary, closely tied to the daily life of each individual.

Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires.

Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it's about identification, affiliation, participation in society and a sense of purpose.

Nothing can be more striking to one who is accustomed to the little inclosures called public parks in our American cities, than the spacious, open grounds of London. I doubt, in fact, whether any person fully comprehends their extent, from any of the ordinary descriptions of them, until he has seen them or tried to walk over them.

Put me in a costume, and I'm your man. I must have one of those faces which seems to suit period drama more than modern films and TV programmes. But I'm not complaining, I love going back in time. I feel quite lucky because nobody knows who I am. I can walk about and have ordinary conversations with people.

On television, it's all just shiny, successful people, and so I feel somebody has to wave a flag for the ordinary people who are not quite sure that they are getting it right.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.

Our soul is not united to our body in the ordinary sense of these terms. It is immediately and directly united to God alone.

The courage of very ordinary people is all that stands between us and the dark.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart.

In the 40 years I've been working as an economist and investor, I have never seen such a disconnect between the asset market and the economic reality... Asset markets are in the sky, and the economy of the ordinary people is in the dumps, where their real incomes adjusted for inflation are going down and asset markets are going up.

Although I was born to famous parents, I know and feel the problems of ordinary citizens.

Some of the most interesting research that I did was about risk assessment and how ordinary citizens like me handle risk assessment and how irregular our risk assessments are.

I am just as ordinary as anyone else, and I also have my problems, but I also am responsible for my own health. So I'll be on that exercise bike, I'll be out there walking and try to improve my health and diet as much as I'm expecting of other Tasmanians.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.

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

The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.

You can't always do the extraordinary, in between you have to do the ordinary. Because if you didn't, what would constitute the extraordinary?

I started using contact microphones that you can place on common, ordinary objects, like a rake. I put a microphone on it and it picked up the tines vibrating and turned it into a horrible din. What attracted me to it was the horrible din - that's what I really liked.

I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens.

I have always thought music as a way out of the ordinary mundane obligations of life.

My life may seem glamorous from the outside but off screen it's as ordinary as anyone else's.

The problem with climate change is that it's quite complicated for the ordinary person to understand.

The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.

Of mediumship there are many grades, one of the simplest forms being the capacity to receive an impression or automatic writing, under peaceful conditions, in an ordinary state; but the whole subject is too large to be treated here.

I say I don't need a tax cut. It will not do me any more good. I can't buy more, I can't eat more, I can't do more, and I want it distributed among the ordinary people who work every day.

My grandfather was originally from the south of China before he emigrated to Malaysia pre-World War II. And I wanted to learn more about the history of the country of my ancestors. I knew I wanted a narrative set in contemporary Beijing. I was really interested in the effect of the rapid social and economic change on ordinary citizens in China.

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

I look for something that is highly unusual, involving ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations.

My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success.

Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations.

I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.

When I was little, I guess I was just an ordinary kid. But then things changed when I was in junior high. You know, kids that become geeks become one because of something. Like, they aren't good at sports, or girls don't like them. I, too, for some reason, got into things like science fiction and, well, especially science fiction as an escape.

I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, 'Oh! Will you look at that?' Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don't look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.

On sand, you can never be sure of anything. An ordinary shot can take a wicked deflection at the last moment.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

Day after day, ordinary people become heroes through extraordinary and selfless actions to help their neighbors.

Unlike the interference of ordinary interest, power, or prejudice, which touches philosophy only at its outskirts and becomes at most a matter for philosophical tactics, the claim of revelation to the highest truth touches philosophy at its core and must affect its whole strategy.

I put ordinary people in jeopardy and give them the opportunity to be heroic. Then there's a great payoff for the reader at the end, when the heroic character gets what he or she deserves. Readers will come back again and again if they feel satisfied at the end.

I don’t do ordinary work. That is not me in the least.

The deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process - as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project.

My father was very clear; I had to have an ordinary upbringing. I was put to work as a lowly-paid trainee after college. I didn't like it at the time, but I can't help but feel that that was probably the best thing for me.

When the cinematograph first made its appearance, we were told that the days of the ordinary theatre were numbered.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

I would not take for granted that my personal life - because I knew better than anybody - that it was just a life. It was surprisingly an ordinary life.

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.