Ordinary Life Quotes - Page 2

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

Alain de Botton

Sublime, Bows, Ordinary

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Underneath our ordinary lives, underneath all the talking we do, all the moving we do, all the thoughts in our minds, there's a fundamental groundlessness. It's there bubbling along all the time. We experience it as restlessness and edginess. We experience it as fear. It motivates passion, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, but we never get down to the essence of it.

Pema Chodron

Moving, Ignorance, Passion

Pema Chodron (2000). “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times”, p.44, Shambhala Publications

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In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

Robert Bly

Men, Emotional, Discipline

"Iron John: A Book About Men". Book by Robert Bly, 1990.

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Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.

Jean Baudrillard

Stress, Holiday, Vacation

"Cool Memories".

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I have very strongly this feeling that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

Bryan Magee

Life, Feelings, Everyday

YouTube Channel "Manufacturing Intellect"/"Heidegger and Existentialism with Bryan Magee (1977)", www.youtube.com. September 17, 2017.

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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

Alain de Botton

Home, Self, Encounters

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Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.

Rajneesh

Sleep, Thinking, Special

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Ordinary life did not stop just because kings rose and fell, Mosca realized. People adapted. If the world turned upside down, everyone ran and hid in their houses, but a very short while later, if all seemed quiet, they came out again and started selling each other potatoes.

Frances Hardinge

Kings, People, Rose

Frances Hardinge (2011). “Fly By Night”, p.315, Pan Macmillan

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I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration - that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.

Susan Orlean

People, Way, Ordinary

Susan Orlean (2000). “The Orchid Thief”, Ballantine Books

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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Doris Lessing

Ordinary, Flats, Feels

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When it's time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. When you're tired, lie down. The fool will laugh at you but the wise man will understand.

Linji Yixuan

Wise, Lying, Tired

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In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

Roger Caillois

Running, Stress, Reality

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Purpose is the thread that connects the dots to everything you do that leads you to an extraordinary life.

Oprah Winfrey

Powerful, Dots, Purpose

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We know, from ordinary life, that we are not able to direct our attention perfectly steadily and uniformly to one and the same object... At times the attention turns towards the object most intensely, and at times the energy flags.

Wilhelm Wundt

Psychology, Energy, Ordinary

Wilhelm Wundt, (2013). “An Introduction to Psychology”, p.24, Read Books Ltd

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Architects are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to "think outside the box." Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box?

Lebbeus Woods

Hate, Thinking, People

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In this life, your so-called ordinary life, you must be rooted; and in your inner space, in the spiritual life, you must be weightless and flying and flowing, floating.

Rajneesh

Life, Spiritual, Space

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Eight days the light continued on its own: A miracle, they say, but not more so Than ordinary lives of flesh and bone, Consuming wicks burned ashen long ago.

Nick Gordon

Eight, Light, Long Ago

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Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Memories, Ordinary, Connections

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913). “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology”

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These phantoms speak with human voices — friendly, vapor- like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there. At times, voices come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, traveling through distances that can't be measured by the scale of human miles; familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.

Charles Lindbergh

Wall, Airplane, Voice

"The Spirit of St. Louis".

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Though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications. Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which startle or fatigue the imagination but they will form no familiar portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life.

Arthur Balfour

Education, Science, Men

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Their example testifies that Baptism commits Christians to participating courageously in the spreading of the Kingdom of God, if need be cooperating with the sacrifice of life itself... This martyrdom of ordinary life constitutes a particularly important witness in the secularized society of our time. It is the peaceful battle of love which every Christian, like Paul, must fight without flagging: the race to spread the Gospel that involves us until our death. May the Virgin Mary, Queen of Martyrs and Star of Evangelization, help us in our daily witness.

Pope Benedict XVI

Christian, Queens, Stars

Pope Benedict XVI's Angelus, w2.vatican.va. October 28, 2007.

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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

Susan Sontag

Opening Up, Healthy, Ordinary

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SIR,-Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as a history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating very little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet.

Thomas Jefferson

Animal, Doctors, Hands

Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, 4: Correspondence and Private Papers”, p.321

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To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.

John Cowper Powys

Book, Mean, People

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What is an Extraordinary Life? A life of meaning, a magnificent life, a life of joy, happiness, love, passion, success, and fulfillment. Life experienced on your terms.

Tony Robbins

Passion, Joy, Inner Strength

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