Top 100 Quotes About Being Ordinary
#2. We know what country this is: It's the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary.
Steve Toltz
#3. An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary.
Adyashanti
#4. I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.
Brene Brown
#5. For example, when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary.
Brene Brown
#6. It was clear to me that thinking yourself superior was a sure sign of being inferior and that thinking yourself extraordinary was a sure sign of being ordinary.
Erica Jong
#7. I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.
Anne Lamott
#9. What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing ... having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.
Russell Brand
#10. I didn't want to be a loser, but I didn't want to fit in at the same time because I don't like just being ordinary. So it's one of those situations where I always kept my head up.
ASAP Rocky
#11. if you want to be extraordinary, the first thing you have to do is stop being ordinary.
Juli Baldwin
#12. I can't understand why people can't go on just being ordinary to each other even if they are in love.
Henry Green
#13. When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.
Brene Brown
#14. There's nothing good about being ordinary. People don't respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don't run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.
Erica Jong
#15. The first step toward becoming extraordinary is, of course, to stop being ordinary.
Seth Godin
#16. There were few things worse than being ordinary, in Evie's opinion. Ordinary was for suckers.
Libba Bray
#17. His anguish, he wrote, had multiple sources, from a fear of fame to a fear of failure. Behind the ordinary fears lurked the fear of being ordinary.
D.T. Max
#18. The difference between being ordinary and extraordinary is doing the right thing while nobody is watching.
Jim Rohn
#19. Just being ordinary in and of itself is and expression of divinity; the truth of one's real self can be discovered through the pathway of everyday life.
David Hawkins
#20. The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.
Yukio Mishima
#21. so many people going about their lives, millions of them, being ordinary, doing ordinary things that no one notices, that no one sings about, but there they are nevertheless, and they are filled with life. I
Rachel Joyce
#22. All exceptional people are, by definition, exceptions to the norm. If we insist on being ordinary, we can never be truly extraordinary.
William Ritter
#23. 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
#24. What makes the marvellous is its peculiar way of being ordinary; what makes the ordinary is its peculiar way of being marvellous.
Orhan Pamuk
#25. I was not born to live up to society's expectations of who I should be but rather I define my own individuality and my uniqueness for I chose to follow the path of being an extraordinary instead of just being ordinary.
Elizabeth E. Castillo
#26. It's not something you can put your finger on, like height (though he's taller than me) or strength (though he's stronger than me), but there's something there. This power. Like being ordinary is just a mask he wears.
Alexis Hall
#27. Using every means possible to show that, although you're just an ordinary human being, you're far above other mortals.
Paulo Coelho
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.
Ha-Joon Chang
#32. Enlightenment is just another word for feeling comfortable with being a completely ordinary person.
Veronique Vienne
#33. I had always thought that if I just did something extraordinary enough, then people would like me. But that wasn't true. You will drive away everyone by being extraordinary ... . But you, you will never learn your lesson. The world embraces ordinary. The world will never embrace you.
Leila Sales
#34. You're kind and patient and honorable, and yes, maybe those aren't flashy, magical, extraordinary traits. Maybe being all those things does make you a bit ordinary, but the ordinary things are the important things.
H.L. Burke
#35. Nothing else seems out of the ordinary for a horrible haunted forest being inhabited by a child eating witch.
Seanan McGuire
#37. Having a baby is different from all the ordinary ways of being hurt. it's worth it all. Other pain isn't worth anything, but that is.
Ruth Park
#38. People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
Marcel Proust
#39. When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.
Jon Ronson
#40. The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? ... If it fails to set a lovable God
a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being
before ordinary people, we have gone wrong
Dallas Willard
#41. After eighteen years of being utterly ordinary, I finally found that I can shine
Stephenie Meyer
#42. I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary. How can I just have this one life?
Meg Wolitzer
#43. Ordinary people, even weak people, can do extraordinary things through temporary courage generated by a situation. But the person of character does not need the situation to generate his courage. It is a part of his being and a standard approach to all life's challenges.
Michael Josephson
#44. He denounced him openly as a charlatan
a fraud with no valuable knowledge of any kind, or powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being.
Mark Twain
#45. Needed the very famous actor to know that you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way. But
Rachel Joyce
#46. What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives.
Tracy Kidder
#47. What a vindication of the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, what a reminder of what Bobby Kennedy once said, about how small actions can be like pebbles being thrown into a still lake, and ripples of hope cascade outwards and change the world.
Barack Obama
#48. From the outside looking in, everything looked completely ordinary. The problem was being on the inside, looking out.
Belle Malory
#49. There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you're trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society.
Colm Keaveney
#50. A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman
#51. We all try to camouflage the monotony, But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary.
Peter Hoeg
#52. If lying and fabrication are psychologically harmful even in ordinary relations with other men (a sphere where a certain amount of falsification is not uncommon) all falsity is disastrous in any relation with the ground of our own being
Thomas Merton
#53. It is very difficult to be like the other guy, to be ordinary. Mediocrity takes a great deal of energy. But to be ourselves is very easy. You don't have to do a thing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#54. Because you happen to be a writer doesn't mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.
Philip Roth
#55. She gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.
Nicole Krauss
#56. Common people are often enough; that is why God made so many of them. Your job is to be
EXTRAORDINARY.
Shannon L. Alder
#57. If you love the roses, that is ordinary; if you love the weeds, that is extraordinary! Rather than being common, be extraordinary!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#58. Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.
Nick Cave
#59. There has never been, and never again will be a human being like you. There is nothing ordinary about you. If you feel ordinary, it is because you have chosen to hide the extraordinary parts of yourself from the world.
Barbara De Angelis
#60. Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
#61. When you open up to the ultimate, immediately it pours into you. You are no longer an ordinary human being - you have transcended. Your insight has become the insight of the whole existence. Now you are no longer separate - you have found your roots.
Rajneesh
#62. Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible.
Thrity Umrigar
#63. I didn't want to be ordinary," I mumbled.
My mother looked up. "What ordinary, Charley?"
"You know. Someone you forget."
From the other room came the squeals of children. Miss Thelma turned her chin to the sound. She smiled,"That's what keeps me from being forgotten.
Mitch Albom
#64. I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.
Harrison Ford
#65. In a social media world, the danger is being overexposed and when something is overexposed it is no longer interesting ... if ever it was.
Donna Lynn Hope
#66. Aside from being bad sportsmanship - Romney basically said Obama won by cheating - he was displaying the same obtuseness about the wants and needs of ordinary people that did more to torpedo his campaign than any goodies Obama might have had to dole out.
John Podhoretz
#67. What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can't I just be an ordinary woman?
Marilyn Monroe
#68. I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
Sharon Olds
#69. Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.
Ted Hughes
#70. Appearing ordinary is one of her best talents. As long as nothing unexpected blows up in her face, which, of course, life being the minefield that it is, is about to.
Lesley Kagen
#71. Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.
C. G. Jung
#72. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
George Orwell
#73. I live a very ordinary life. The rare awards ceremonies I go to are quite fun, because I can enjoy the irony of one minute walking to the tube, and the next being driven along the same stretch of road in a limo.
Jonathan Pryce
#74. When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I'm qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!
Philip Yancey
#75. Valuing unusual conduct is not as good as being careful about ordinary actions.
Zicheng Hong
#76. Forgive me for being so ordinary while claiming to know so extraordinary a God.
Jim Elliot
#77. When you're blind to your own nature, the Buddha is an ordinary being. When you're aware of your own nature, an ordinary being is the Buddha.
Bill Porter
#78. When we look in the mirror, the one thing we don't want to see is an ordinary human being.
Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
#79. A hero is an ordinary human being who does the best of things in the worst of times.
Leon Leyson
#80. Of mediumship there are many grades, one of the simplest forms being the capacity to receive an impression or automatic writing, under peaceful conditions, in an ordinary state; but the whole subject is too large to be treated here.
Oliver Joseph Lodge
#81. The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices.
Nelson Mandela
#82. A day can start out ordinary and end up being in the top ten. - Joe Bunch
James Howe
#83. They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.
Terry Pratchett
#84. 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.
Vince Cable
#85. In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.
Jodi Kantor
#86. Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#87. I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.
Haruki Murakami
#88. I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#89. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.
Eugene H. Peterson
#90. No animal that massive could be so quiet. But if he was no ordinary animal, if he was of Prythian origin, if he was somehow a faerie, then being eaten was the least of my concerns. If he was a faerie, I should already be running.
Sarah J. Maas
#91. I'm so odd, and I'm so limited, and I'm so different from the ordinary human being - so you say. I have a strong suspicion that I'm the simplest of you all, and that it's my extreme transparency that baffles you. I dont think I ever feel anything but the most ordinary emotions.
Virginia Woolf
#92. Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?
Neal Stephenson
#93. Simplicity of manner is the last attainment. Men are very long afraid of being natural, from the dread of being taken for ordinary.
Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey
#94. Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly natural to me. It is also perfectly natural for the many scientists I know who are also people of deep religious faith.
William Daniel Phillips
#95. Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.
Lee Smolin
#96. What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
#97. My father knows more about sports than any human being out there. He relaxes. The ribbing that we give each at the Christmas holidays is incredible. He's much more of an ordinary American and a proper American than a lot people would probably ever believe.
Donald Trump Jr.
#98. He is constantly reminding me that real magic doesn't come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.
Martha N. Beck
#99. Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
Thomas Sowell
#100. Whether you are watching a video or playing a game, whether you are doing work or fielding an unwanted phone call, whether you are being successful or smarting from failure - in the ordinary context of daily living, you show the power and viability of Christian faith.
Tedd Tripp
