Ordinary Life Quotes - Page 7

Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.

Rajneesh

Blessing, Ordinary, Different

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If you don't make the commitment today to start becoming the person you need to be to create the extraordinary life you really want, what makes you think that tomorrow - or next week, or next month, or next year - is going to be any different? They won't. And that's why you must draw your line in the sand TODAY.

Hal Elrod

Commitment, Thinking, Next Week

FaceBook post by Hal Elrod from Dec 19, 2012

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Believing people can soar beyond ordinary life.

Frank Fools Crow

Believe, People, Ordinary

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To walk into Bill Olsen's poems is to enter a mind so weirdly curious, you can't be released to sadness, not yet: it's just too surprising. But this book-half microscope, half telescope-shadows grief, our shared and ordinary life where an old neighbor obsessively gathers twigs to wish back the tree, where the moon is regularly ‘sawn in half,’ where sprinklers give off ‘little wet speeches.’ What else? It's brilliantly instead and odd.

Marianne Boruch

Grief, Book, Sadness

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It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.

Ian Mcewan

Children, House, Ordinary

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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

Annie Dillard

Writing, Ordinary, Doe

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I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

Mark Haddon

School, Oxford, People

"Mark Haddon: 'What I love about theatre is that it's like being a kid again'". Interview with Carole Cadwalladr, www.theguardian.com. March 27, 2010.

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A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow "for company." Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.

C. S. Lewis

Mother, Children, Selfish

C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Iris Murdoch

Home, Sick, People

Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Bell”, p.74, Penguin

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Every day, each of us makes a multitude of choices that will impact our lives...the quality of our choices will dictate whether we will struggle in frustration or live an extraordinary life--the life of our dreams.

Debbie Ford

Dream, Struggle, Frustration

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...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.

Salman Rushdie

Children, Book, Secret Identity

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How is your life limited by your fear? What are you not doing that you'd really like to do? When we use fear to our advantage by tackling those things that evoke a sense of excitement and trepidation, fear becomes and ally. Each experience provides a challenge and an opportunity to expand your comfort zone. The way to create an extraordinary life is to make the challenge of fear work for you by building your courage muscles.

Cheryl Richardson

Fear, Opportunity, Challenges

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I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

Patricia Highsmith

Character, Ordinary, Abnormal

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Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.

Roger Scruton

Art, Light, Shining

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Giving my life to you may mean leading a very ordinary life or it may mean leading an extraordinary life. It may mean having a family and a career or it may mean going beyond all that to just work for others. It's hard to say. Rather than making a decision myself, I'm going to give my life to you, to do with as you will, because I know that you are my self, you are my very being.

Frederick Lenz

Karma, Yoga, Mean

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I see a generation comprised of all ages, inclusive of men and women, awakening to the extraordinary qualities hidden within. The power to accomplish remarkable feats and live an exceptional life is not defined by an individual's family, education, or occupation; it's a disposition of the heart. Unless it's suppressed, there is an innate desire to rise above the norm. I encourage you to step into the unknown, embrace the divine empowerment, and live your extraordinary life.

John Bevere

Heart, Men, Age

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A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.

Janet Malcolm

War, Law, Ordinary

Janet Malcolm (2011). “The Journalist and the Murderer”, p.63, Vintage

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In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Alain de Botton

Reality, Odds, Play

"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Alain de Botton

Achievement, Ordinary, Enough

"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, 2000.

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Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

Edna O'Brien

People, Ordinary, Way

Novelists, Poets and Playwrights (2002).

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We are not meant to be seen as God's perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace.

Oswald Chambers

Essence, Perfect, Miracle

Oswald Chambers (2013). “Utmost: Classic Readings and Prayers from Oswald Chambers”, p.60, Discovery House

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When I look back on my ordinary, ordinary life, I see so much magic, though I missed it at the time.

Jamie Cullum

Magic, Ordinary, Looks

Song: Photograph, Album: Catching Tales, 2005

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When you approach spirituality as an adventure of being alive, you start as you would any adventure--with a sense of mystery and not-knowing. Instead of searching for answers that make you feel safe, you set out into the vastness of life and death, with a willingness to continually grow. You open up to the possibility that your ordinary life is an extraordinary adventure, and that your joys and sorrows have meaning. Spiritual practice becomes your rudder, offering direction and insight and discretion as you venture into the unknown.

Elizabeth Lesser

Spiritual, Adventure, Offering

Elizabeth Lesser (2008). “The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure”, p.16, Ballantine Books

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Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are much more accessible. They are men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God's people.

Henri Nouwen

Struggle, Men, Thinking

"Bread For the Journey". Book by Henri J. M. Nouwen, 1996.

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Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

Michael Sandel

What Matters, Perfect, People

"What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel - review" by John Lanchester, www.theguardian.com. May 17, 2012.

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