Ordinary famous quotes

Now then, Pooh," said Christopher Robin, "where's your boat?" "I ought to say," explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, "that it isn't just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it's a Boat, and sometimes it's more of an Accident. It all depends." "Depends on what?" "On whether I'm on the top of it or underneath it.
-- A. A. Milne

#Islands #Ordinary #Robins

It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.
-- Abigail Tarttelin

#Ordinary #Proud #Accepting Yourself

When we free ourselves from the constraints of ordinary goals and uninformed scoffers we will find ourselves roaring off the face of the earth.
-- Abraham Maslow

#Goal #Ordinary #Roaring

If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
-- Abraham Verghese

#Ordinary #Sacred #Intrusion

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.
-- Adam Weishaupt

#Religious #Political #Ordinary

An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary.
-- Adyashanti

#Men #Ordinary #Enlightened

Tea! Bless ordinary everyday afternoon tea!
-- Agatha Christie

#Tea #Everyday #Ordinary

It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.
-- Alan Brennert

#Islands #People #Ordinary

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.
-- Alasdair Gray

#Numbers #Immature #Ordinary

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
-- Albert Einstein

#War #Mind #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.
-- Aleister Crowley

#Believe #Devil #Ordinary

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
-- Aleister Crowley

#People #Ordinary #Morality

It's the ordinary things that seem important to me.
-- Alex Colville

#Important #Ordinary #Ordinary Things

Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
-- Alex Tabarrok

#People #Hollywood #Ordinary

False happiness is like false money; it passes for a time as well as the true, and serves some ordinary occasions; but when it is brought to the touch, we find the lightness and alloy, and feel the loss.
-- Alexander Pope

#Happiness #Loss #Ordinary

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Math #Ordinary #Language

To me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.
-- Alice Paul

#Ordinary #Complicated

Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary', for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn

#Photography #Ordinary #World

Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary.
-- Amedee Ozenfant

#Art #Ordinary #Demonstration

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
-- Anais Nin

#Ordinary #Doe #True Happiness

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

#Ordinary #World #Want

Ordinary life does not interest me.
-- Anais Nin

#Ordinary #Doe #Interest

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

#Gold #Ordinary #Alchemy

A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.
-- Anais Nin

#Men #Magic #Ordinary

The truth is that my chess development was nothing out of the ordinary, and it proceeded probably at a pace no faster than others.
-- Anatoly Karpov

#Learning #Ordinary #Pace

I do what I feel, that's all. I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That's all I've ever done.
-- Andre Kertesz

#Ordinary #Done #Photographer

Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.
-- Andrew Motion

#Honor #Ordinary

One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
-- Andrew Solomon

#Ordinary #Lost #Description

The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere
-- Andy Hertzfeld

#Crazy #Apples #Ordinary

We spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary.
-- Andy Puddicombe

#Ordinary #Littles #Moments

love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
-- Anita Shreve

#Love Is #People #Ordinary

You'll turn out ordinary if you're not careful.
-- Ann Brashares

#Ordinary #Careful #Turns

As a stylist, I know accessorization is essential: It is the personal touch to any outfit. With these pieces everybody can have fun, turning an ordinary day into a fantastic fashion day.
-- Anna Dello Russo

#Fashion #Fun #Ordinary

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
-- Anna Funder

#Past #People #Ordinary

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
-- Anne Enright

#Believe #Evil #Ordinary

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
-- Anne Michaels

#Ordinary #Matter #Moments

Most leaders are indispensable, but to produce a major social change, many ordinary people must also be involved.
-- Anne Scott

#People #Leader #Ordinary

Please don't ask me for the actual answer to anything, because I don't have it. Because all I do is look at stuff and ask questions. What can I say? I just think the world's barking mad. Look, I'm not an expert. I'm just an ordinary person.
-- Annie Lennox

#Thinking #Mad #Ordinary

Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...
-- Annie Proulx

#Party #Games #Ordinary

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it.
-- Annie Proulx

#Light #Darkness #Ordinary

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.
-- Anthony Kennedy

#Asking Questions #Police #Ordinary

Thus, on this World Refugee Day, let us take time to recognize and draw inspiration from these ordinary people who have shown such extraordinary courage - the world's millions of refugees and displaced.
-- Antonio Guterres

#Inspiration #People #Ordinary

Readily people do not accept any ordinary to behave like an extraordinary unless and until some extraordinary but preferably wealthy approves him to be not ordinary.
-- Anuj

#People #Ordinary #Accepting

A man will blithely do in politics what he would kick a man downstairs for in ordinary life.
-- Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

#Men #Ordinary #Politics

In love the ordinary is made sacred.
-- Arthur Dobrin

#Love #Ordinary #Sacred

Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.
-- Arthur Quinn

#House #Ordinary #Speech

If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much.
-- Artie Shaw

#Ordinary #Wonder #Phenomenon

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
-- Arundhati Roy

#Events #Ordinary #Stories

Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.
-- Arundhati Roy

#House #Events #Ordinary

The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.
-- Asa Gray

#Animal #Ordinary #Definitions

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.
-- Balthus

#Art #Desire #Ordinary

It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
-- Banana Yoshimoto

#Long #Missing #Ordinary

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the respected patriarch of an ordinary English family." "Very boring, Emerson.
-- Barbara Mertz

#Ordinary #Would Be #Sometimes

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

#Giving Up #Differences #Ordinary

The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal - a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.
-- Beatrice Webb

#Ordinary #Half #Waste

We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary. Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it's called documentary, which I suppose is all right ... We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.
-- Ben Shahn

#Taken #Ordinary #Done

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

#Ordinary #World #Want

Live a life less ordinary.
-- Benedict Cumberbatch

#Ordinary

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.
-- Benjamin Haydon

#Ordinary #Genius #Done

Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance.
-- Bennett Cerf

#Ignorance #Ordinary #Gross

Every day is ordinary, until it isn't.
-- Bernard Cornwell

#Ordinary

It takes no effort to be ordinary. Ordinary is not even a challenge. You can do nothing and be ordinary.
-- Bernard Hopkins

#Effort #Challenges #Ordinary

I'm an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job.
-- Bernie Mac

#Jobs #Guy #Ordinary

An individual's ability to draw is... the ability to shift to a different-from-ordinary way of processing visual information - to shift from verbal, analytic processing to spatial, global processing.
-- Betty Edwards

#Drawing #Ordinary #Different

I try to be available for life to happen to me. We're in this life, and if you're not available, the sort of ordinary time goes past and you didn’t live it. But if you're available, life gets huge. You're really living it.
-- Bill Murray

#Past #Trying #Ordinary

When you're blind to your own nature, the Buddha is an ordinary being. When you're aware of your own nature, an ordinary being is the Buddha.
-- Bill Porter

#Nature #Ordinary #Blind

Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labors 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.
-- Bill Shorten

#Jobs #Creating #Ordinary

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
-- Blaise Pascal

#Men #Differences #Ordinary

Sometimes I'm more true when I'm up onstage than I'm able to be in my regular life. It's not as exciting to be at home, but I've got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman.
-- Bonnie Raitt

#Home #Ordinary #Able

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

#Art #People #Ordinary

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.
-- Brad Meltzer

#Hero #Ordinary #Shy

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.
-- Brassai

#Reality #Vision #Ordinary

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
-- Brenda Ueland

#Believe #Hero #Ordinary

When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.
-- Brené Brown

#Fear #Feelings #Ordinary

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.
-- Brian Andreas

#Photography #Ordinary #Looks

I've tried to make a book that's accessible to the ordinary, intelligent reader. Very often books that cover this kind of subject are written by academics, for academics. But I am not an academic.
-- Brian Crozier

#Book #Intelligent #Ordinary

When ordinary people pray, extraordinary things can happen.
-- Brian Houston

#People #Ordinary #Praying

Courage is the moment when an ordinary being becomes an extraordinary being.
-- Brian Jacques

#Ordinary #Moments #Extraordinary

All truth is very ordinary. It is peoples' fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary.
-- Brian Perkins

#Ordinary #Fantasy #Truth Is

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

#Sound #Ordinary #Facts

Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.
-- Brian Tracy

#Determination #Decision #Ordinary

Every great success is an accumulation of thousands of ordinary efforts that no one else sees or appreciates.
-- Brian Tracy

#Appreciate #Effort #Ordinary

Dependence upon God makes heroes of ordinary people like you and me!
-- Bruce Wilkinson

#Hero #People #Ordinary

In my experience, God rarely makes our fear disappear. Instead, He asks us to be strong and take courage. What is courage? As Ordinary discovered, courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it's choosing to act in spite of the fear. You could say that without fear, you can't have genuine courage.
-- Bruce Wilkinson

#Strong #Ordinary #Absence

Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.
-- Bruno Schulz

#Soul #Together #Ordinary

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

#Mean #Stuff #Ordinary

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.
-- C. K. Williams

#Writing #Waiting #Ordinary

until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing.
-- C. S. Lewis

#People #Ordinary #Way

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Eye #People #Ordinary

Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Miracle #Ordinary #Extraordinary

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Book #Wish #Ordinary

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
-- C. S. Lewis

#People #Ordinary #Ordinary People

You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Eggs #Ordinary #Goes On

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
-- C. S. Lewis

#People #Ordinary #Ordinary People

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
-- Cab Calloway

#Music #Mind #Ordinary

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
-- Cab Calloway

#People #Mind #Ordinary

I have not led an ordinary life, nor a life that would suit everyone. I took great risks, but because I did, I also earned great reward. I found the way to show my true face freely, without fear. Because of this, I found true love.
-- Cameron Dokey

#True Love #Risk #Ordinary

I would have preferred to be successful here with a piece that cost me a huge amount of money and effort... rather than sending to Bohemia some ordinary works.
-- Camille Claudel

#Successful #Effort #Ordinary

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.
-- Camille Paglia

#Party #Class #Ordinary

What may appear as a towering peak to one may seem but an ordinary eminence to another.
-- Cargill Gilston Knott

#Ordinary #May