Top 100 Ordinary Men Quotes
#1. That which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in. and the best of me is diligence.
William Shakespeare
#2. 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
#3. There are no great men, only ordinary men, who have met extraordinary challenges.
William Halsey
#4. Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.
Gerald Weinberg
#5. Ordinary men died, men of iron were taken prisoner: I only brought back with me men of bronze.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#6. For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us.
Virginia Woolf
#7. I sometimes hear preachers speak of the sad condition of men who live without God in the world, but a scientist who lives without God in the world seems to me worse off than ordinary men.
Louis Agassiz
#8. Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.
Lao-Tzu
#9. 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.
Rob Lowe
#10. Great men learn from their weaknesses,
and learn to use their strengths.
Ordinary men learn nothing from their weaknesses,
and underuse their strengths.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#11. Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down". My eyes are seeing through what the ordinary men call a mirage!
Bayode Ojo
#12. Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them.
George Henry Lewes
#13. The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.
Brian Greene
#14. The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
Tahir Shah
#15. Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.
Roland Allen
#17. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves - the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.
G.K. Chesterton
#19. Both men and women who have children as a rule regulate their lives largely with reference to them, and children cause perfectly ordinary men and women to act unselfishly in certain ways, of which perhaps life insurance is the most definite and measurable.
Bertrand Russell
#20. What interests me is the experience of ordinary people. To tell you the truth, although I can repeat certain dates, statistics, and so on, what I am really curious about is what happens to ordinary men, women, and children in extraordinary times.
Jacqueline Winspear
#21. The intellectual ... must try never to forget the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one's own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.
Raymond Aron
#22. Heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility bigger than themselves. Breakthroughs are created by such heroes, by men and women who will stand for the result while it is only a possibility - people who will act to make possibility real.
Werner Erhard
#23. Great men simplify great principles and make them easily intelligible to ordinary men
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#24. It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.
Woodrow Wilson
#25. Men of genius are often considered superstitious, but the fact is, the fineness of their nerve renders them more alive to the supernatural than ordinary men.
Benjamin Haydon
#26. It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.
G.H. Hardy
#27. Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them; but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive.
Jean De La Bruyere
#28. The sun flickers through the trees and shines upon the faces of the men lined up on the porches. Soldiers no more, just ordinary men who, by the grace of God, were spared to tell their stories
Nancy B. Brewer
#29. There are no extraordinary men ... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.
William Halsey
#30. He had heard that women often did care for ugly and ordinary men, but he did not believe it, for he judged by himself, and he could not himself have loved any but beautiful, mysterious, and exceptional women.
Leo Tolstoy
#31. We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.
Carl Jung
#32. Dads are most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventurers, story-tellers, singers of songs.
Pam Brown
#33. One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard
#34. He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.
Leo Tolstoy
#35. The holiness of love inspired ordinary men and women to act like angels. It lifted them on wings closer to God.
Nancy Holder
#36. There aren't any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.
William Halsey
#37. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both
Timothy Snyder
#38. It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.
Thucydides
#39. A fool can read a thousand books and learn nothing.
A wise person can read one and become great. Using books for decoration is what ordinary men do. Using books for knowledge is what intelligent people do.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#40. I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained.
Ben H. Winters
#41. That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive.
Barack Obama
#42. His thoughts inhabit a different plane from those of ordinary men; the simplest interpretation of that is to call him crazy.
Juliet Marillier
#43. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
Sun Tzu
#44. Ordinary men are given the authority of the priesthood. Worthiness and willingness - not experience, expertise, or education - are the qualifications for priesthood ordination.
David A. Bednar
#45. Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
Sigmund Freud
#46. She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.
Marcel Proust
#47. The years go by one after the other; time slips past us with out our being aware of it; we grow old like ordinary men and we shall end like them.
Louis XIV
#48. Sir, sometimes I feel there are no heroes, no villains. Just men, ordinary men locked up by circumstances, good or bad. This I truly believe, and I suggest that you believe it too.
Terry Pratchett
#49. You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.
Luc De Clapiers
#50. What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited.
C. Wright Mills
#51. To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.
Yoshida Shoin
#52. Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
Denis Diderot
#53. The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
Anna Quindlen
#54. He realized that the path of love, which Bertlef had suggested, was closed to him; it was the path of saints, not of ordinary men.
Milan Kundera
#55. The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
Jacob Bronowski
#56. Relish the challenge of overcoming difficulties that would crush ordinary men ... learn to suffer.
Mark Twight
#57. As theories increased, simple medicines..were forgotten, at least in the politer nations ... Medical books, were immensely multiplied, ... (towards) an abstruse science, quite out of reach of ordinary men.
John Wesley
#58. Great men are just ordinary men that didn't quit.
Tommy Barnett
#59. I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends
and I from Legends created only the ordinary!
Peter Shaffer
#60. Everything has two aspects; the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.
Giorgio De Chirico
#61. It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession
Thomas Hardy
#62. Ordinary men, we have seen, are not much interested in any political problems which do not immediately affect themselves.
Aldous Huxley
#63. For the most part, it is true, ordinary men and women regard mathematics with energetic distaste, counting its concepts as rhapsodic as cauliflower. This is a mistake-there is no other word. Where else can the restless human mind find means to tie the infinite in a finite bow?
David Berlinski
#65. Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.
Walter Savage Landor
#66. Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
Russell Banks
#67. A clown needn't be the same out of the ring as he has to be when he's in it. If you look at photographs of clowns when they're just being ordinary men, they've got quite sad faces.
Enid Blyton
#69. We might even say that the one thing which separates a saint from ordinary men is his readiness to be one with ordinary men. In this sense the word ordinary must be understood in its native and noble meaning; which is connected with the word order.
G.K. Chesterton
#70. In a sport like this - hard work, not much glory, but still popular in every century - well, there must be some beauty which ordinary men can't see, but extraordinary men do. - George Yeoman Pocock
Daniel James Brown
#71. Ordinary men commit extraordinary evil all the time. Trust me.
Mindy Mejia
#72. The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep; for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the world of greater importance.
Henry Taylor
#73. The kind of cruelty Ernie showed today scares me, reminds me and warns me not to forget what men are capable of. And not even bad men. Just ordinary men. The
Lauren Nicolle Taylor
#74. The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate amongst them and parade their discriminations before others. So I say; those who discriminate, fail to see.
Zhuangzi
#75. When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. ACTS 4:13
Andrew Murray
#76. Whenever justice to ordinary men, widows, orphans, poor, disadvantaged and the general mass is delayed or denied, that leads to God's frustration. At a time like that, God laments, WHERE IS A MAN
Sunday Adelaja
#77. What is it with these prophets? Almost without exception ordinary men, some of them with more vices than virtues, suddenly they were touched with fire.
Is it that a man sees best the stars when he is prone?
Little Pigeon
#78. Ordinary men with extraordinary power
Common men with uncommon results
Usual men with unusual anointing
Unschooled mortal men with immortal vision
Weak men with mighty deeds
-Insight for Fruitful Living
Ikechukwu Joseph
#79. It is best for ordinary men to have only one wife !
Akbar
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Great men are little men expanded; great lives are ordinary lives intensified.
Wilferd Peterson
#85. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#86. Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people - men and women, boys and girls - that make the world a special place
Nelson Mandela
#87. At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate - which comes to the same thing in practice - we behave as though we were certain of men's equality.
Aldous Huxley
#88. It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.
Ian McEwan
#89. An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.
D.H. Lawrence
#90. It is almost a sadness to my soul that men should be astonished and surprised at an ordinary, tangible evidence of the power of God.
John G. Lake
#91. Powerful men tire of their toys easily. And the novelty of a pet doesn't last forever. After a while even the prettiest things become ordinary.
Kate Jarvik Birch
#92. Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
Alexander Theroux
#93. We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.
Matt Chandler
#94. Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license.
Confucius
#95. The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world's bulwark of liberty.
Steve Buyer
#96. An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary.
Adyashanti
#97. The expression of a man's face is commonly a help to his thoughts, or glossary on his speech; but the countenance of Newman Noggs, in his ordinary moods, was a problem which no stretch of ingenuity could solve.
Charles Dickens
#98. But an ordinary day can mark the beginning of an extraordinary journey!
Elizabeth George
#99. 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.
Robert Payne
#100. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.
Henry David Thoreau
