Ordinary Quotes - Page 28

• Take me. I'm an ordinary player in the key of C.
  And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity.
  Who's gonna love you when you're looks are gone?
  God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill.

  Paul Simon

  Life, Flower, Love You

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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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• Appreciation of life itself, becoming suddenly aware of the miracle of being alive, on this planet, can turn what we call ordinary life into a miracle. We come awake to such a realization when we recognize our connection to a spiritual dimension.

  Dan Wakefield

  Spiritual, Appreciation, Miracle

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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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• When something out of the ordinary happens, it is ridiculous to say that it is a mystery or a portent of something to come... the mystery is created in (their) minds, and by waiting for disaster, it is from their very minds that it occurs.

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo

  War, Waiting, Mind

  Miyamoto Musashi, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Inazo Nitobe (2010). “Honor: Samurai Philosophy of Life - The Essential Samurai Collection; The Book of Five Rings, Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai, Bushido: The Soul of Japan.”, p.64, Bottom of the Hill

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• Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Character, Ambition, Law

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Quentin P. Taylor, John Jay (1998). “The Essential Federalist: A New Reading of the Federalist Papers”, p.133, Rowman & Littlefield

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• It is impossible to live the life of a disciple without definite times of secret prayer. You will find that the place to enter in is in your business, as you walk along the streets, in the ordinary ways of life, when no one dreams you are praying, and the reward comes openly, a revival here, a blessing there.

  Oswald Chambers

  Dream, Prayer, Live Life

  Oswald Chambers (2016). “Studies in the Sermon on the Mount: God's Character and the Believer's Conduct”, p.30, Discovery House

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• Just as in prayer it is not we who momentarily catch His attention, but He ours, so when we fail to hear His voice, it is not because He is not speaking so much as that we are not listening. We must recognize that all things are in God and that God is in all things, and we must learn to be very attentive, in order to bear God speaking in His ordinary tone without any special accent.

  Charles Brent

  Prayer, Order, Voice

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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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• Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Greatness, Important, Tasks

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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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• It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus, and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.

  R. H. Tawney

  Educational, Ignorance, Opportunity

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• There is nothing that does not get easier through cultivation. The buddhas of the past started out as ordinary beings. They were not buddhas in the beginning. The path to buddhahood is traversed only through gradually developing more and more courage and DETERMINATION -then it is attained.

  Dalai Lama

  Determination, Past, Doe

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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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• What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

  Sun Tzu

  Wise, Art, War

  The Art of War (6th century b.c.).

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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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• 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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• The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education. It is inconceivable that any nation should achieve prosperity and success unless this paramount, this fundamental concern is carried forward. The principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples is ignorance. Today the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex needs of the time.

  Abdu'l-Bahá

  Educational, Fall, Ignorance

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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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