Ordinary Quotes - Page 6

• A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent (which I cannot deny myself to be without being impious) will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Inspiring, Travel, Men

  48 Copy quote

• Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

  Iain Banks

  Years, Waking Life, Doe

  Iain Banks (1986). “The bridge”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

  Yukio Mishima

  Art, Men, Looks

  Yukio Mishima (1969). “Thirst for love”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  92 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time.

  Rachel Joyce

  Feet, Long, People

  Rachel Joyce (2012). “The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry”, p.150, Random House

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Father, Everyday, Details

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “The Museum of Innocence”, p.312, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.

  Haruki Murakami

  War, Thinking, Japan

  "Kafka On The Shore". Book by Haruki Murakami, www.newyorker.com. 2002.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I couldn't remember ordinary moments, only the ones that had made an impression. Ordinary moments were the ones that fell away first.

  David Levithan

  Firsts, Remember, Moments

  David Levithan (2011). “Every You, Every Me”, p.86, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Memories, Men, World

  Cheryl Strayed (2014). “Torch”, p.161, Atlantic Books Ltd

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.

  Lionel Shriver

  Past, Miracle, Three

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.21, Counterpoint Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.

  Henry Miller

  Levels, Problem, Choosing To Live

  15 Copy quote

• The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.

  Carl Sagan

  Running, Night, Ideas

  "Cosmos". Book by Carl Sagan, 1980.

  86 Copy quote

  Show source

• The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Two, People

  19 Copy quote

• Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.

  Anne Frank

  Book, Reading, Mean

  Anne Frank, General Press (2016). “The Diary of a Young Girl”, p.63, GENERAL PRESS

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.

  John Berendt

  Cities, People, Personality

  John Berendt (2010). “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, p.454, Vintage

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!

  Idries Shah

  Wise, Men, Thinking

  Idries Shah (1983). “Reflections”, p.28, Octagon Press Ltd

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Time, Men, Thinking

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.88, Publishdrive

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.

  Ted Hughes

  Children, People, Walking Dead

  Ted Hughes, Christopher Reid (2008). “Letters of Ted Hughes”, Farrar Straus & Giroux

  49 Copy quote

  Show source

• There were few things worse than being ordinary, in Evie’s opinion. Ordinary was for suckers.

  Libba Bray

  Opinion, Sucker

  5 Copy quote

• Mothers were much too sharp. They were like dogs. Buster always sensed when anything was out of the ordinary, and so did mothers. Mothers and dogs both had a kind of second sight that made them see into people's minds and know when anything unusual was going on.

  Enid Blyton

  Mother, Dog, Sight

  Enid Blyton (2013). “The Mystery of the Hidden House”, p.68, Egmont UK

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do you know what constitutes a great poet? He is a person without shame, incapable of blushing. Ordinary fools have moments when they go off by themselves and blush with shame; not so the great poet.... If you really have to quote someone, quote a geographer; that way you won't give yourself away. (p 44)

  Knut Hamsun

  Giving, Way, Fool

  Knut Hamsun (2011). “Mysteries”, p.33, Souvenir Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.

  Aldous Huxley

  Drinking, Animal, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• [Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.

  Tom Wolfe

  Men, Knowing, Perception

  Tom Wolfe (1999). “The electric kool-aid acid test”, Bantam Dell Pub Group

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.

  Pema Chodron

  Warrior, Inspire, Everyday

  Pema Chodron (2002). “The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times”, p.85, Shambhala Publications

  68 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

  Stendhal

  Powerful, Grief, Men

  Stendhal (2016). “The Red and the Black”, p.154, Tyché

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance or compassion, we are all made richer by their example. Like the rivers that flow out of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the inspiration they generate washes down to the rest of us. It waters everyone's fields.

  Greg Mortenson

  Inspiration, Compassion, Rivers

  6 Copy quote