Quotes About Ordinary

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.

I'm happy for all the small things a man never gets around to putting his finger on - the things we take for granted.

Looking at America's history, ordinary people did something extraordinary. Leaders risked their lives for freedoms that we take for granted today. That's what instills confidence. That's us. We will move forward and prosper because that's who we are as Americans.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century.

When we made 'Life in a Day,' we asked people around the globe to record their lives on a single ordinary day. When we were cutting that film, we talked about what it might be like if we chose a day that already had significance to people. The result is 'Christmas in a Day.'

My favorite filmmaker is Frank Capra. He talked about the redemption of the human spirit - not the superhero, but the common man.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.

I'm drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. I'm not saying I don't love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because I'm always struggling with it myself.

It is precisely in the "slop-bucket job"—the work that we abhor—where we will find God the most. We do not need to have good feelings or a warm glow in order to do work for the glory of God. All good work is pleasing to the Father. Even the jobs that seem meaningless and mindless to us are highly valued in the order of the kingdom of God. God values the ordinary.

To believe that God can reach us and bless us in the ordinary junctures of daily life is the stuff of prayer.

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things…as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.    Ã¢â'¬â€Teilhard de Chardin

One more thing: this way of living is not confined to people in religious orders or those who have special skills in spiritual matters. No, this life is also for ordinary people. People who work in the high-pressure jobs of information technology and finance. People who are constantly dealing with the stresses of raising children and balancing the family budget. People who teach school and work in hospitals and provide social services and so much more. In short, people just like you and me.

Everything, it seems, revolves on this reversibility of higher and lower case It/it. The miracle consists in the transubstantiation of higher into lower, extraordinary into ordinary, transcendence into immanence. And vice versa. It is a moment both kenotic (the emptying of Word into flesh) and eucharistic (the celebration of the infinite in the finite bread and wine of quotidian experience).

An architect is like an airline pilot, he might not look busy all of the time but he uses decades of experience to constantly monitor the situation, taking immediate action if he sees or hears something out of the ordinary.

But the propaganda accompanying collectivization placed emphasis on the elimination of rural "exploiters," to divert attention from the fact that by far the most numerous victims of collectivization were ordinary peasants.

But there is a danger that we might begin to think of the encounter with God as if it were something radically distinct from our ordinary activities. In fact, we Catholics believe that in Jesus Christ, God rendered the whole of human existence holy. Because of Jesus we should expect to find the sacred not merely juxtaposed to our ordinary lives on a separate, supernatural plane, but in the midst of our ordinary human activities.

Let's state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.

A few dozen other people lingered in the arena. Some were in groups, some were pointedly solo and eyeing everyone else as potential enemies. Some looked like ordinary people you'd run into at the mall. Others practically had "Yes, I want to join a fanatical vampire-hating group" stamped across their foreheads.

She could've done the extraordinary. I couldn't even handle the ordinary.

Why?" Mrs. Hogendobber might preach about evil, but when confronted with it she was at a loss. She expected the Devil with green horns or a human being with a snarling face. It had never once occurred to her in her long and relatively happy life that evil is ordinary.

REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.

normal's the watchword