Top 100 Quotes About Ordinary Life
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. There is no special protection when you cross that invisible line from your ordinary life to that parallel world where tragedies happen. It happens just like this. You don't become someone else. You're still exactly the same. Everything around you still smells and looks and feels exactly the same.
Liane Moriarty
#4. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime.
Leo Tolstoy
#5. I would not take for granted that my personal life - because I knew better than anybody - that it was just a life. It was surprisingly an ordinary life.
Jane Pauley
#6. Religion is not something separate and apart from ordinary life. It is life - life of every kind viewed from the standpoint of meaning and purpose: life lived in the fuller awareness of its human quality and spiritual significance.
A. Powell Davies
#7. I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.
Patricia Highsmith
#8. You only live at once. Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life.
Lorrie Moore
#9. I have this sensation of being in flight all the time, but being on stage is like creating a sanctuary in which you can completely lose yourself. The bits of your personality that you keep under wraps in ordinary life, you can let them run free.
Florence Welch
#10. You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.
Charles Baxter
#11. He must become an apprentice to ordinary life.
Paul C. Nagel
#12. What an illusion, she thinks, the idea of an ordered, ordinary life.
Dalia Sofer
#13. You may have living and habitual conversation in heaven, under the aspect of the most simple, ordinary life. Remember that holiness does not consist in doing uncommon things, but in doing every thing with purity of heart.
Henry Edward Manning
#14. Louisa May Alcott is right. An extraordinary girl can't have an ordinary life. Don't judge yourself. Love yourself.
Caroline Kepnes
#15. Appreciation of life itself, becoming suddenly aware of the miracle of being alive, on this planet, can turn what we call ordinary life into a miracle. We come awake to such a realization when we recognize our connection to a spiritual dimension.
Dan Wakefield
#17. To have my life accepted as just another ordinary life, to have it viewed as common and regular, was a singular moment.
Katherine A. Briccetti
#18. I am so thankful to MOTHER for making my ordinary life extraordinary. MOTHER - Multiplied Opportunities Through Her Endless Reinvention.
Olarewaju Oladipo
#19. Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.
Garry Kasparov
#20. We are not meant to be seen as God's perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace.
Oswald Chambers
#21. 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
#22. 'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
Salman Rushdie
#23. There is a plan for you, Good Thunder. You will be an honored leader. The hand of the creator has reached into a valley of wildflowers and picked you. From millions, you. My great son, you must understand, no ordinary life awaits you.
Kerry Casey
#24. Ordinary life did not stop just because kings rose and fell, Mosca realized. People adapted. If the world turned upside down, everyone ran and hid in their houses, but a very short while later, if all seemed quiet, they came out again and started selling each other potatoes.
Frances Hardinge
#25. We need to be poor! Let us live an ordinary life, but, beloved, let us live it with a passionate love for God. Become a mystery. Stretch one hand out to God, the other to your neighbour. Be cruciform. ... Christ's cross will be our revolution and it will be a revolution of love!
Catherine Doherty
#26. The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
#27. The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
Don DeLillo
#28. So few people get to truly steer their course the way you have the chance to now. And the question before you is - will you strive to be normal and live an ordinary life? Or will you do what no one else can do - and be more?
Robert J. Crane
#29. Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.
Huston Smith
#30. There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
May Sarton
#31. An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.
Susan Orlean
#32. I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
Colum McCann
#33. Once again I glimpsed the way in which departure ripped the veil from ordinary life, revealing things that were normally kept hidden.
Margot Livesey
#34. Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.
Joyce Meyer
#35. In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency.
Machado De Assis
#36. By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.
Margaret Mahy
#37. If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
Eugene H. Peterson
#38. Youth demands more than ordinary life. Age clings to it.
Mason Cooley
#39. What's usual for us may not be the same for everyone. I'm inspired by lives and stories of all those amazing people who overcome extraordinary challenges each day to live what we see as an ordinary life.
Sharad Vivek Sagar
#40. She tried to live like an ordinary woman, but some women cannot live an ordinary life.
Philippa Gregory
#41. Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies.
Christopher Hitchens
#42. In ordinary life, creativity means making something for the soul out of every experience." Thomas Moore Finding
Joanna Penn
#43. Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don't think that you are making or doing something special - and then you will be special.
Osho
#44. Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.
Rajneesh
#45. I love hearing other people's stories, and I freely admit I'm scavenging for material through their conversations, but really, at the same time, I'm living an ordinary life.
Liane Moriarty
#46. The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.
Blaise Pascal
#47. There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.
Margaret Mahy
#48. For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce.
... how to set yourself spinning?
Annie Dillard
#49. I'm not some pure heart chasing after dreams. I know how difficult it is to live an ordinary life, having to overlook each other's shortcomings.
Inio Asano
#50. We will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.
N. T. Wright
#51. Every individual," wrote another enormously perceptive portrayer of ordinary life, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "is part and parcel of a great picture of the society in which he lives and acts, and his life cannot be painted without reproducing the picture of the world he lived in.
Jack Larkin
#52. The most efficient action, the most significant testimony to nonviolence, is living a life in which there is no violence-showing that such a life is possible, and even not more difficult than a life of gain, nor more unpleasant than a life of pleasure, nor less natural than an 'ordinary' life.
Lanza Del Vasto
#53. Nor was I the only one struggling.To live an ordinary life, like any ordinary person, must have been the vain dream of countless others.
Sayo Masuda
#54. Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well. As the old-church father said, 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
William Sloane Coffin
#55. It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.
Ian McEwan
#56. If you're going to be a fucking rock star go be one. People don't want to see the guy next door on stage; they want to see a being from another planet. You want to see somebody you'd never meet in ordinary life.
Lemmy Kilmister
#57. I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#58. Peace can only be found in what your extraordinary imagination has defined as an ordinary life.
Shannon L. Alder
#59. There is no such thing as an ordinary life.
Mark Twain
#60. I do not believe it is possible to exaggerate what she has been in the way of a Sacrament out here - God conveying His presence through the common elements of an ordinary life.
Oswald Chambers
#61. In the business of politics, emotions and productive dissatisfaction with the world in which we live today are gradually being covered up by the minutiae of ordinary life.
Sigmar Gabriel
#62. Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life.
Gary Oldman
#63. You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.
David Simon
#64. An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.
Jill Lepore
#65. But she was half in love with chaos... With all her yearning for the ordinary life, she was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream.
Andrew O'Hagan
#66. their combined voices giving them a unity and strength they did not possess in ordinary life.
Alice K. Boatwright
#68. For the average person leading an ordinary life, fame holds an hypnotic attraction. Many would sooner perish than exist in anonymity. But for the unlucky few who've had notoriety forced upon them, infamy can be a sentence more damning than any prison term
Emily Thorne
#69. It is necessary to observe yourself differently than you do in ordinary life. It is necessary to have a different attitude, not the attitude you had till now. You know where your habitual attitudes have led you till now. There is no sense in going on as before.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#70. Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
Roger Scruton
#71. I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
Mark Haddon
#72. When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.
Andrew O'Hagan
#73. 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
#74. It's better to live an ordinary life. If you go on striving for this and that, you'll end up paying with your life.
Yu Hua
#75. I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
Petronius
#76. But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
#77. Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
#78. 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
#79. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
Azar Nafisi
#80. Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
W. H. Auden
#81. I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, 'Oh! Will you look at that?' Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don't look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.
Harold Feinstein
#83. Ordinary life is fascinating when viewed with extraordinary perspective.
Angela Howell
#84. When it's time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. When you're tired, lie down. The fool will laugh at you but the wise man will understand.
Linji Yixuan
#85. I had spent time in New York, where I loved the idea that theater could be done up in tiny little rooms rather than for lots of money on a big stage, and be tied to ordinary life.
Garry Hynes
#86. Once in a while, in the middle of an ordinary life ... love gives us a fairy tale." "It's how I feel," he said, swallowing hard. "I think I've been in love with you since I was fifteen years old.
Melissa Brown
#87. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain De Botton
#88. Be content with an ordinary life.
Laozi
#89. The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.
Marcel Proust
#90. When we find the crossing point between our attitude and what happens in our life, then we change ordinary life into a miraculous adventure.
Ivinela Samuilova
#91. She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment.
Anonymous
#92. I went camping in the Maasai Mara and we moved site every night. I had no idea how spectacular it would be, how removed from ordinary life, or how many animals we would see.
Georgina Chapman
#94. Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
#95. In this life, your so-called ordinary life, you must be rooted; and in your inner space, in the spiritual life, you must be weightless and flying and flowing, floating.
Rajneesh
#96. One of the difficulties about interviewing people in Rwanda is that the country is trying to get on with ordinary life and some people just don't want to get involved in this.
Tony Greig
#97. Lucien was a whole lot of trouble because he made her want things she couldn't possibly have. He made ordinary life feel pale and insipid, a watered-down version of the existence she'd tasted that had him in it.
Kitty French
#98. It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.
Doris Lessing
#99. It's about the terror of an ordinary life" or "It's the story of a man shipwrecked in his own mind." But
Joe Hill
#100. When I look back on my ordinary, ordinary life, I see so much magic, though I missed it at the time.
Jamie Cullum
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