Ordinary Quotes - page 7

There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality. (Hans Blix)
Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the ‘luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life. View quote
Anthony Crosland
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. View quote
Oscar Wilde
It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country. View quote
Saki
You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that God's creative principle works in you. View quote
Paramahansa Yogananda
The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest. View quote
Thomas Moore
[Nietzsche inveighs] against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks. View quote
Georg Brandes
A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog. View quote
Irving Babbitt
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. View quote
Augustine Birrell
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The successful sale of British Telecom...reveals a vast and untapped yearning among ordinary people for a direct stake in the ownership of British enterprise. Investment in shares has begun to take its place, with ownership of a home and either a bank or building society deposit, as a way for ordinary people to participate in enterprise and wealth creation. We are seeing the birth of people's capitalism. View quote
Nigel Lawson
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed. View quote
Theodore Roosevelt
The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest. View quote
Pierre Stephen Robert Payne
While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves. View quote
Reinhold Niebuhr
I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! View quote
Charles Lamb
We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings - many of them not so much. View quote
John Muir
I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing. View quote
Terence McKenna
Ordinary people merely think how they shall spend their time a man of talent tries to use it. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
Take me. I'm an ordinary player in the key of C. And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity. Who's gonna love you when you're looks are gone? God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill. (Paul Simon)
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. View quote
Werner Heisenberg
He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents. View quote
Michel de Montaigne
I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray...I am myself the matter of my book. View quote
Michel de Montaigne
It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men. View quote
Thucydides