Top 100 Not So Ordinary Quotes
#1. He was just drifting off to sleep when it occurred to him that perhaps the dog was not so ordinary after all. Perhaps he was someone the ogre had changed, and Ivo was going to spend the night hugging a headmaster or a tax inspector
Eva Ibbotson
#2. Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
P. J. O'Rourke
#3. After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#4. That we're not dealing with your ordinary serial killer. More the Twilight kind. And this one isn't a vegetarian.
Leanna Ellis
#5. What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different.
V.C. Andrews
#6. The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
Phil Gramm
#7. Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Nelson Mandela
#8. That which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in. and the best of me is diligence.
William Shakespeare
#9. The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
Thomas Sowell
#10. Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.
Judith Viorst
#11. Using every means possible to show that, although you're just an ordinary human being, you're far above other mortals.
Paulo Coelho
#12. Never get so fascinated by the extraordinary that you forget the ordinary.
Magdalen Nabb
#13. Attain complete emptiness,
Hold fast to stillness.
Understanding the ordinary:
Mind opens.
Mind opening leads to compassion,
Compassion to nobility,
Nobility to heavenliness,
Heavenliness to TAO.
TAO endures.
Your body dies.
There is no danger.
Lao-Tzu
#15. I'm a very ordinary girl, Moses. I know that I am. And I always will be. I can't paint. I don't know who Vermeer is, or Manet for that matter. But if you think ordinary can be beautiful, that gives me hope. And maybe sometime you'll think about me when you need an escape from the hurt in your head.
Amy Harmon
#16. What's the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man.
Anton Chekhov
#17. Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don't drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
Malala Yousafzai
#18. Because in that moment, watching and listening, he was profoundly moved that God had seen fit to gift him, an ordinary man, an Indiana boy through and through, with these people in his life.
Kristen Ashley
#19. The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet.
Edward Witten
#20. The knowledge of the Spirit is the true secret of creativity, leadership and happiness. It is spiritual intelligence that makes an ordinary person a genius. When a genius loses his spiritual intelligence, he becomes quite ordinary.
Awdhesh Singh
#21. The true call of a Christian is not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way.
Dean Stanley
#22. I don't know how easy that would be but I'd try just to lead an ordinary life again. Stay out of the papers.
Mark David Chapman
#23. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
George Orwell
#24. Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.
Edward Gibbon
#25. Huge waves that would frighten an ordinary swimmer produce a tremendous thrill for the surfer who has ridden them.
Oswald Chambers
#26. I have a contract but it's not a commitment in the ordinary sense. It's our ongoing conversation.
Diane Sawyer
#27. And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
E.L. Doctorow
#28. Striving to live the ordinary life in a non-ordinary way.
Book Of Runes
#29. Take your everyday, ordinary life- your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life-and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him." (The Message)
Cody Bobay
#30. There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.
Edward Zwick
#31. Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.
Tadeusz Konwicki
#32. The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.
Austin O'Malley
#33. It is notorious that we speak no more than half-truths in our ordinary conversation, and even a soliloquy is likely to be affected by the apprehension that walls have ears.
Eric Linklater
#34. It is notorious that, whenever the demand for labor is much greater than the supply, or the wages of labor are much higher than the expenses of living, very many, even on the ordinary laboring class, are remarkable for indolence, and work no more than compelled by necessity.
Edmund Ruffin
#35. Fiction is people having extraordinary reactions to ordinary things, but in genre fiction, they have ordinary reactions to extraordinary things.
Mary Robinette Kowal
#36. An ordinary man would have been unable to maintain his balance there, to say nothing of holding on with such narrow support. But the Green Lama had held more difficult positions, according to the Yoga, for hours.
Kendell Foster Crossen
#37. I have always lived an ordinary life, and always will. It's who and what has to do with my job that makes it 'unordinary.' I cook, go to the supermarket, pick my children up at school.
Kate Winslet
#38. Medicine people are truly citizens of two worlds, and those who continue to walk the path of medicine power learn to keep their balance in both the ordinary and the non-ordinary worlds ...
Paula Gunn Allen
#39. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online - what's good for ordinary people - but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that's what I want to do next.
Sue Gardner
#40. People often think that people like me don't have ordinary lives. I have the greatest pleasure, and in fact, the greatest success in my career is having been a mother.
Jenny Shipley
#41. If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.
Idries Shah
#42. Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty!
Walter J. Phillips
#43. An ordinary Turk, an ordinary Arab, an ordinary Tunisian can change history. We believe that democracy is good, and that our people deserve it.
Ahmet Davutoglu
#44. Emphasis was usually put on the horizontal acceleration factor, for the simple reason that ordinary structures have a built-in safety factor for the vertical component; that is, gravity.
Charles Francis Richter
#45. The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things
that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic, fully alive you. That's what Paris does.
Alexander McCall Smith
#46. Take a little time to make ordinary things extraordinary.
Emilie Barnes
#47. The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
D.T. Suzuki
#48. In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.
Charles Baudelaire
#49. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. I do sometimes miss living on the edge. The view from there takes your breath away.
Amy Molloy
#51. For a man who is in love with the existence, nothing is ordinary in life!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#52. That is probable which for the most part usually comes to pass, or which is a part of the ordinary beliefs of mankind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#53. I was truly happy. But my state was not that of any ordinary satisfaction. It was a joy which stemmed directly from creative, artistic achievement.
Konstantin Stanislavski
#54. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.
Robert Thurman
#55. I couldn't shake this feeling that I had uncovered more than something ordinary.
Nicole Gulla
#56. He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description.
Evelyn Waugh
#57. The ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.
Ellen Glasgow
#58. No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.
Theodore Roosevelt
#59. A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.
Nan Fairbrother
#60. My healthcare plan puts more money into average families' pockets than the Bush tax cuts ... He's got a lousy tax cut. It's only good for the super wealthy. I've got a tax cut that will help ordinary people.
Dick Gephardt
#61. It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
Banana Yoshimoto
#62. Honey, these aren't ordinary penis bones." "Not the kind you pick up at Walgreens, with a bottle of aspirin and a scented candle?
Cherie Priest
#63. The difference between ordinary players and champions is the way they think.
Patty Berg
#64. In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.
Roger Caillois
#65. Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.
David Mitchell
#66. The kind of young woman who can be a terrific torchbearer has high standards all the time, not just in her prom dress, but every, ordinary day.
Margaret D. Nadauld
#67. Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.
Augustine Birrell
#68. It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.
Benjamin Cardozo
#69. I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
Ransom Riggs
#70. If we see their (Navajo) lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary.
Natalie Goldberg
#71. Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.
Sun Tzu
#72. Mutants, super beings, gods, aliens, a guy who sticks to walls at one extreme, a creature who eats planets at the other; Each one that comes into being, they feel, diminishes the rest of humanity, ordinary homo sapiens, that little bit more.
Jim Lee
#73. The kids kept walking, moving through the Henley's halls like a tide, but when Kat turned to leave, she walked in the opposite directions. She wasn't an ordinary kid, after all.
Katarina Bishop followed no one.
Ally Carter
#74. There are no great men, only ordinary men, who have met extraordinary challenges.
William Halsey
#75. Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.
Nick Tosches
#76. I'm not really managing the work-life balance, I'm just accepting that the work increases and the ordinary life has to decrease when you're the prime minister.
Tony Abbott
#77. Gansey threw open his door. Gripping the roof of the car, he slid himself out. Even that gesture, Ronan noted, was wild-Gansey, Gansey-on-fire. Like he pulled himself from the car because ordinary climbing out was too slow.
This was going to be a night.
Maggie Stiefvater
#78. Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel.
James Gleick
#79. Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Jon Ronson
#80. I've lived this very dramatic life, with high points and terrible low points. Nothing has been ordinary, and I want to have the experience of the last breath. I want a little drama to it.
Dominick Dunne
#81. After all, life was not made up of moments of exaltation, but of quite ordinary, everyday things
Georgette Heyer
#82. Eventually what was the superhuman becomes the common, the ordinary, the mundane.
Stephen Richards
#83. Understanding is the reward of obedience. Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.
George MacDonald
#84. Don't assume you have to be extraordinary to be used by God. You don't have to have exceptional gifts, talents, abilities, or connections. God specializes in using ordinary people whose limitations and weaknesses make them ideal showcases for His greatness and glory.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
#85. Beware of singing divine psalms for an ordinary recreation, as do men of impure spirits, who sing holy psalms intermingled with profane ballads: They are God's word: take them not in thy mouth in vain.
Lewis Bayly
#86. The country is stronger than the result of any one election. But we shouldn't forget that these are just ordinary people. I wish Americans would look at them level, not down or up - just level. It doesn't take some special dimension to be president.
Jack Germond
#87. [I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love with these guys, then puts our hearts in harm's way. It's lovely and ghastly and extremely powerful. His best yet.
Katherine Dunn
#88. The lesser your achievements the lesser your critics.
The greater your achievements the greater your critics.
Ordinary achievements attract ordinary admirers.
Extraordinary achievements attract extraordinary admirers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#89. There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.
Horace Bushnell
#91. The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
Francis Spufford
#92. It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
George Will
#93. When putting words together is good to do it with nicety and caution, your elegance and talent will be evident if by putting ordinary words together you create a new voice.
Horace
#94. I think main storylines are what always intrigued me, with those that were the relationships between the characters against whatever backdrop, whether it was in an ordinary universe or a universe in the future.
John Noble
#95. I'm one of those people who was meant to have a very ordinary life. I have no special talent, no great beauty, nothing that distinguishes me from a hundred, thousand other girls. But I can't go through an entire lifetime without at least one night of magic.
Lisa Kleypas
#96. One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#97. I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural - never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.
Walter Huston
#98. Personally, love is very important for me. There are lots of ordinary things in life, so love should be extraordinary. I hope I achieve that.
Ranbir Kapoor
#99. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.
Andrew Roberts
#100. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.
Patrick Ness
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