Ordinary Quotes - Page 40

• In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Dog, Green, Want

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• It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

  Edmund Burke

  Drawing, Ideas, People

  Edmund Burke (1963). “Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches”, p.201, Transaction Publishers

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• I think people like players they can relate to. It seems as if people think they know me. I just think I'm an ordinary Joe who plays golf very, very well.

  Fred Couples

  Golf, Player, Thinking

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• Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

  Lewis Mumford

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Revenge

  "The Conduct Of Life" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 1, 1951.

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• In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.

  E. Stanley Jones

  Church, Desire, Respectability

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• My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Children, Book, People

  "Novelist Khaled Hosseini". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. May 21, 2013.

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• If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

  Don DeLillo

  Heart, Men, Games

  Libra pt. 2 (1988)

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• The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

  R. D. Laing

  Real, Self, Consistency

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• Our soul is not united to our body in the ordinary sense of these terms. It is immediately and directly united to God alone.

  Nicolas Malebranche

  Soul, Body, Term

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• I believe that earning your living doing something you enjoy is one of the very best ways to nourish yourself. But even if you are employed at something that is not your ideal work, it is important to find ways to take as much pleasure in it as possible. Living in the present moment can make ordinary activities more interesting and joyful; you may be surprised, if you only look, at what you will find. If you try to stay connected with why you are doing what you are doing, for example, then even the parts of your life that aren't especially interesting can become more meaningful.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Meaningful, Work, Believe

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• In attempting to explain geological phenomena, the bias has always been on the wrong side; there has always been a disposition to reason á priori on the extraordinary violence and suddenness of changes, both in the inorganic crust of the earth, and in organic types, instead of attempting strenuously to frame theories in accordance with the ordinary operations of nature.

  Charles Lyell

  Earth, Violence, Sides

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• 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, Definitions, Laying Down

  Asa Gray (1880). “Natural Science and Religion”

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• Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

  Terry Eagleton

  Book, Bus Stops, Everyday

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.2, John Wiley & Sons

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• I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

  Graham Swift

  Thinking, Extraordinary

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• No one is ever ordinary.

  Tanith Lee

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• To many women marriage is only this. It is merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion - far less by the white fire of love.

  Mary Webb

  Marriage, Passion, Fire

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• I like being able to go to the supermarket and go on the Tube and have an ordinary domestic life. I'd hate to have to protect myself. I'm quite lucky that I can carry on without any intrusions. I don't get given a hard time by anyone.

  Jim Broadbent

  Hate, Hard Times, Lucky

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• We're all pretty ordinary on paper.

  Michael Bergin

  Paper

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• When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

  Brian Chesky

  Art, People, Trying

  "INSTANT MBA: If You've Just Solved A Problem, You May Have Solved It For Millions" by Patricia Laya, www.businessinsider.com. August 4, 2011.

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• 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, Cost

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• The ultimate first date? Something that is completely out of the ordinary - go crazy, because first dates are always a little awkward, so do something a little extreme.

  Gina Carano

  Crazy, Awkward, Littles

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• It's fair to say that, for much of my lifetime, New Zealand certainly was a property-owning democracy and working people, ordinary people, had assets.

  Helen Clark

  People, Democracy, Lifetime

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• I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Artist, Thinking, Want

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• You would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.

  Matt Drudge

  Guy, Would Be, Amazed

  Speech to the National Press Club on Media and the Internet, delivered 2 June 1998

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• I think it's time we had a president who carried the same life experiences into the White House as most ordinary Americans.

  Dick Gephardt

  Thinking, White, House

  Twitter post from Oct 10, 2016

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