Quotes About Ordinary

98. Look for the Extraordinary in the Ordinary I heard a story about two workers who were approached by a reporter. The reporter asked the first worker, "What are you doing?" His response was to complain that he was virtually a slave, an underpaid bricklayer who spent his

It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history's continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.

If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it--pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. Artistic fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions--and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

Exhausted, emptied-out. I had no desire to tell Margaret about what had happened. I thought more often of Susie, and of the luck any parent has when a child is born with four limbs, a normal brain, and the emotional makeup that allows the child, the girl, the woman to lead any sort of life. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby.

I thought more often of Susie, and of the luck any parent has when a child is born with four limbs, a normal brain, and the emotional make-up that allows the child, the girl, the woman to lead any sort of life. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby.

Because "Platitude" was a language everyone spoke

Sometimes extraordinary things can happen on the most ordinary of days.

although the people walking along the streets were strangers to each other, they formed a tight chain, like some organic composition, and I could not squeeze in. Could sharing ordinary, normal faces forge such a strong bond among them? Moreover, even the things they wore matched. The mass-produced patterns of today called fashion. Is that a negation of the uniform, for heaven's sake, or simply a new kind of uniform?

It was suitably like limbo to depress the spirits of an ordinary man, let alone one with Alec's problems.

Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung?

Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an assault upon society, and is branded as Socialism

One has to 'leave philosophy aside,' one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality . . . Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.

That was the one thing June had been terrified of having - a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents' - living in a pink sandstone semi-detached villa in the suburbs with a neat garden and an en-suite master bedroom with fitted wardrobes

I like the tradition of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances and how they react to events which force them to be heroic in a way that is not in their natures.

Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.

The ordinary air fighter is an extraordinary man and the extraordinary air fighter stands as one in a million among his fellows.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.

To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.

Simplicity of manner is the last attainment. Men are very long afraid of being natural, from the dread of being taken for ordinary.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.