Quotes About Ordinary

The extraordinary's the norm.

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.

He hovered on unexceptionality.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.

For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

I'm so odd, and I'm so limited, and I'm so different from the ordinary human being—so you say. I have a strong suspicion that I'm the simplest of you all, and that it's my extreme transparency that baffles you. I dont think I ever feel anything but the most ordinary emotions.

Or was there always, he thought, as he too rose and looked for his hat, something that came to the surface, inappropriately, unexpectedly, from the depths of people, and made ordinary actions, ordinary words, expressive of the whole being …

Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile—what they said, what they did—she said something perfectly commonplace again.

For Jesus' resurrection is not presented as a restoration to ordinary life but was seen as a catapulting of Jesus into the glorious/glorified life of the world to come.

People say the word 'nice' and they mean 'boring.

Pleasant, polite, utterly normal. Yet in the Daily Mail an expoliceman had written this about her: 'One great difficulty is that the search is for a woman with certain attributes that are not common to the ordinary individual. She is talented. She is a woman who by the very nature of her work would have an exceptionally elastic brain. Consequently one would expect her, consciously or subconsciously, to do something extraordinary.' Well that, she thought, was really rather nice.

Implementation questions: What big adventure(s) did you experience this week? What little adventure(s) did you experience this week? What effects did you see in your life from doing something out of the ordinary? What challenges, if any, did you face while implementing this week's strategy? Did anything make it difficult for you to plan adventures into your life, or to have the adventures you planned? How did you address these challenges? If you modified this rule, how did you do so?

RULE 33: MORE OFTEN THAN NOT THERE IS A VERY ORDINARY EXPLANATION FOR THE 'EXTRAORDINARY' HAPPENING.

We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our "self-improvement.

As a reasonable person who is perturbed by your relationship with the so-called bread-and-butter world and uninspired by the prospects presented by this ordinary version of reality, you may begin to think of the possibility of getting into a different and higher realm of discipline and experience.

As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer," said Mrs. Maylie; "I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.

I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, becuase I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people - and there my vanity steps in...

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

Good work requires of us an appreciation of the value of routine, ordinary, mundane rhythms of doing what needs to be done, each day and each week, thoroughly and with care.