Ordinary Quotes - Page 10

• Leadership is the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people.

  Brian Tracy

  Leadership, People, Achievement

  FaceBook post by Brian Tracy from Aug 28, 2013

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• Ordinary people with commitment can make an extraordinary impact on the their world.

  John C. Maxwell

  Teamwork, Commitment, Impact

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• The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

  K. Patricia Cross

  Education, Appreciation, Teacher

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• The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate amongst them and parade their discriminations before others. So I say; those who discriminate, fail to see.

  Zhuangzi

  Spiritual, Men, Sage

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• For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Home, Fate

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.

  William J. Clinton

  Gun, Rights, Government

  Clinton, William J. (1994). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1993”, p.223, Best Books on

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• What a person says and does in ordinary moments when when no one is looking reveals more about true character than grand actions taken while in the spotlight. Our true character is revealed by normal, consistent, everyday attitudes and behavior, not by self-conscious words or deeds or rare acts of moral courage.

  Michael Josephson

  Attitude, Taken, Character

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• The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic world & its connection with the time past & with Man; that it involves the question of Man & his relation to the brutes, of instinct, intelligence & reason, of Creation, transmutation & progressive improvement or development. Each set of geological questions & of ethnological & zool. & botan. are parts of the great problem which is always assuming a new aspect.

  Charles Lyell

  Science, Past, Men

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• It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.

  George Will

  Wise, Positive Thinking, Persons

  George F. Will (1983). “The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions”, Touchstone

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• Working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation.

  Winston Churchill

  Holiday, Long, Each Day

  Sir Winston Churchill, Andrew Scotland (1965). “Churchill on men and events: a selection from "Thoughts and adventures" and "Great contemporaries"”

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• Liebig was not a teacher in the ordinary sense of the word. Scientifically productive himself in an unusual degree, and rich in chemical ideas, he imparted the latter to his advanced pupils, to be put by them to experimental proof; he thus brought his pupils gradually to think for themselves, besides showing and explaining to them the methods by which chemical problems might be solved experimentally.

  Hermann Kolbe

  Teacher, Science, Thinking

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• I'm proof that great things can happen to ordinary people if they work hard and never give up.

  Orel Hershiser

  Sports, Perseverance, Giving Up

  Orel Hershiser (1990). “Out of the Blue”, Jove Books

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• Don't wait for extraordinary circumstance to do good; try to use ordinary situations.

  Charles Francis Richter

  Motivation, Procrastination, Waiting

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• Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.

  John C. Bogle

  Life, Motivational, Perseverance

  John C. Bogle (2010). “Common Sense on Mutual Funds”, p.112, John Wiley & Sons

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• Prayer turns ordinary mortals into men of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings rain. It brings life. It brings God.

  Samuel Chadwick

  Prayer, Rain, Men

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• The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Meditation Practice, Enlightenment, Events

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• If Christians were Christians, there would be no anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew. There is nothing that the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as this awkward historical fact.

  John Haynes Holmes

  Christian, Jesus, Justice

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• All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.

  Alain LeRoy Locke

  Spiritual, Epic, Class

  Alain LeRoy Locke (1983). “Crit Temp Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture”, Scholarly Title

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• 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

  Motivational, Determination, Decision

  FaceBook post by Brian Tracy from Apr 27, 2014

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• Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives such a phase both warier and chastened. When-ten years ago-I emerged from a bad dip into suicidal speculation, I felt utterly exhausted and yet quite fearless of ordinary dangers, vastly afraid of myself but much less scared of extraneous eventualities.

  Edward Hoagland

  Cancer, Heart, Suicidal

  Edward Hoagland (1999). “Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life”, p.29, Rowman & Littlefield

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• It is in a way a mystery that, instead of demanding that their governments give primary attention to their own needs and aspirations, most of the citizens of big counties-those, that is, that have the status of being "powers" in the world-far from being self-centered or materialistic as they are commonly credited with being, the ordinary citizen and his elected representative all too often turn out to be romantics, ready and eager to sacrifice programs of health, education and welfare for the power and pride of the nation.

  J. William Fulbright

  Educational, Pride, Sacrifice

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• Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they are specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed, and unreasonable as everybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous.

  Hans Eysenck

  Science, Intelligent, Pigs

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• We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Educational, Writing, Winning

  Jonathan Kozol (1993). “On Being a Teacher”, Oneworld Publications Limited

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• Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.

  Sun Tzu

  Wise, War, Moving

  "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, translated by Chow-Hou Wee, (Chapter XIII), 2003.

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• We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives ... What is the essence of this art of living? Of course, even this art should have beauty as its essence.

  Kenji Miyazawa

  Beauty, Art, Fire

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