Ordinary Quotes - page 6

People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists. (Cesare Pavese)
The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines. View quote
Charles de Gaulle
The gospel freely admitted makes a man happy. It gives him peace with God, and makes him happy in God. It gives to industry a noble, contented look which selfish drudgery never wore; and from the moment that a man begins to do his work for his Saviour's sake, he feels that the most ordinary employments are full of sweetness and dignity, and that the most difficult are not impossible. And if any of you, my friends, is weary with his work, if dissatisfaction with yourself or sorrow of any kind disheartens you, if at any time you feel the dull paralysis of conscious sin, or the depressing influence of vexing thoughts, look to Jesus, and be happy. Be happy, and your joyful work will prosper well. View quote
William Wilberforce
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story. View quote
Arundhati Roy
Scientists are entitled to be proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call 'theirs' except the things they have done or thought of first? People who criticize scientists for wanting to enjoy the satisfaction of intellectual ownership are confusing possessiveness with pride of possession. Meanness, secretiveness and, sharp practice are as much despised by scientists as by other decent people in the world of ordinary everyday affairs; nor, in my experience, is generosity less common among them, or less highly esteemed. View quote
Peter Medawar
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self. View quote
Iris Murdoch
She squeezed my hand, and I drew a shaky breath, marveling at the fact that while on an ordinary leave in an ordinary place, I'd somehow fallen in love with an extraordinary girl named Savannaah Lynn Curtis. View quote
Nicholas Sparks
He was ordinary in a world that loved the extraordinary. View quote
Nicholas Sparks
Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse. View quote
Friedrich Schiller
I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people. (Jeanette Winterson)
The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away. View quote
Anne Tyler
Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world. View quote
Erica Jong
These masters of the universe must be tamed in the interests of the ordinary families whose jobs and livelihoods are being put at risk... The Tories won't say anything about the current crisis as they are completely in the pockets of the hedge funds. View quote
Vince Cable
No one is ever ordinary. View quote
Tanith Lee
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. View quote
Joan Didion
Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself. View quote
Matthew Arnold
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves. View quote
Matthew Arnold
The overarching issue, as I see it, is the elitism of America's political system; the fact that regular, ordinary Americans aren't considered in policy debates or legislation, and regularly get shafted by the powers-that-be in Washington. View quote
Jerry Springer
Auto-suggestion is disconcerting in its simplicity. To the uninitiated, auto-suggestion or self-mastery is likely to appear disconcerting in its simplicity. But does not every discovery, every invention, seem simple and ordinary once it has become vulgarized and the details or mechanism of it known to the man in the street? Not that I am claiming autosuggestion as my discovery. Far from it, auto-suggestion is as old as the hills; only we had forgotten to practice it, and so we needed to learn it all over again. (Émile Coué)
16. Without seeing the origin of light, the true form of one's Self, the ordinary man sees by the mind different things and is deluded. View quote
Ramana Maharshi
In most cases the favorable price performance will be accompanied by a well-defined improvement in the average earnings, in the dividend, and in the balance-sheet position. Thus in the long run the market test and the ordinary business test of a successful equity commitment tend to be largely identical. View quote
Benjamin Graham
He strode over to the ruined church. This, Blue had discovered, was how Gansey got places - striding. Walking was for ordinary people. View quote
Maggie Stiefvater
It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door. View quote
John Searle