Quotes About Not Being Ordinary

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can't I just be an ordinary woman?

Marilyn Monroe

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

George Orwell

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Our Lord Himself, not being detached from things externally. Our Lord was amazingly in and out among ordinary things; His detachment was on the inside towards God. External detachment is often an indication of a secret vital attachment to the things we keep away from externally.

Oswald Chambers

#20. 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

#21. True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.

Ronald Rolheiser

#22. I idolize Gene Hackman. He is not a natural star, not an incandescent personality like Jack Nicholson, but he makes luminous the problems of being an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.

Brian Dennehy

#23. In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.

Pema Chodron

#24. To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

Anton Chekhov

#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. I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capabilities.

Abraham Maslow

#27. 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

#28. Common people are often enough; that is why God made so many of them. Your job is to be
EXTRAORDINARY.

Shannon L. Alder

#29. As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil.

M. Scott Peck

#30. Summer weather, like being in love,is a philosopher's stone which turns our ordinary days to gold. But not the whole day ... For it is never the whole day, never all our life which is transformed in any happiness, but only the exquisite moments.

Nan Fairbrother

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Forgive me for being so ordinary while claiming to know so extraordinary a God.

Jim Elliot

#34. Valuing unusual conduct is not as good as being careful about ordinary actions.

Zicheng Hong

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Nothing else seems out of the ordinary for a horrible haunted forest being inhabited by a child eating witch.

Seanan McGuire

#38. An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary.

Adyashanti

#39. After eighteen years of being utterly ordinary, I finally found that I can shine

Stephenie Meyer

#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. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. We know what country this is: It's the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary.

Steve Toltz

#45. Being out of the ordinary is AWESOME.

Tanya Masse

#46. I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary. How can I just have this one life?

Meg Wolitzer

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Enlightenment is just another word for feeling comfortable with being a completely ordinary person.

Veronique Vienne

#50. Being poor doesn't mean being ordinary.

Jacqueline Novogratz

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. I don't work at being ordinary.

Paul McCartney

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Using every means possible to show that, although you're just an ordinary human being, you're far above other mortals.

Paulo Coelho

#65. From the outside looking in, everything looked completely ordinary. The problem was being on the inside, looking out.

Belle Malory

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. For example, when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary.

Brene Brown

#71. 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

#72. 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