Top 100 Quotes About Ordinary Lives
#1. 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
#2. Great men are little men expanded; great lives are ordinary lives intensified.
Wilferd Peterson
#3. Philosophers and psychologists may argue over what's real and what isn't, but most of us living ordinary lives know and accept the texture of the world around us.
Stephen King
#4. Better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives. While
Katherine Boo
#5. Joy comes to us in moments - ordinary moments. We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary. Scarcity culture may keep us afraid of living small, ordinary lives, but when you talk to people who have survived great losses, it is clear that joy is not a constant.
Brene Brown
#6. Eight days the light continued on its own:
A miracle, they say, but not more so
Than ordinary lives of flesh and bone,
Consuming wicks burned ashen long ago ...
Nick Gordon
#7. If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
George Will
#8. Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
Buzz Aldrin
#9. Most people live out ordinary lives by denying death. Others live more completely because they're aware of it. I choose the second group.
Alan Joshua
#10. It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.
Deborah Eisenberg
#11. The Next Big Thing is Christ's return. Until then, we live in hope that changes our ordinary lives here and now.
Michael S. Horton
#12. People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. Bid hoped to recapture something.
The officer stared at him.
The precious ordinary.
Kent Haruf
#13. But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
Russell Banks
#14. He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden.
Lois Lowry
#15. What simple and
ordinary lives we live,
underneath the shadows
of projection screen
artists
Phil Volatile
#16. The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
John Updike
#17. Christians must return to the great story that has its fulfillment in life after death, so we may live and die well in the light of our extraordinary hope that enables us to embrace the ordinary lives God gives us here and now.
Michael Horton
#18. The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them ...
Christina Baldwin
#19. There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
#21. Anyone can make a positive impact on the lives of other people. All we have to do is live our ordinary lives extraordinarily well. Be happy and positive. Do what you love and love your work. Reach out not only by using your hands, but with your heart as well. Life is lived wonderfully that way.
Kcat Yarza
#22. 'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#23. History is about ordinary people living their ordinary lives, just as we do today, while all around the world is changing. It makes heroes out of some people and victims out of others.
Vicky Adin
#24. I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
Tracy Chapman
#25. Some of us, no matter how hard we try, aren't meant to lead ordinary lives. Fate finds us. Gives us a shove.
Kathleen Tessaro
#26. After all, the function of a vacation is regenerative, not luxurious. It's to restore our equipment so that we can live our ordinary lives better.
Malcolm Bradbury
#27. 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
#28. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.
Andrew Roberts
#29. Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.
Marianne Williamson
#30. Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.
Elizabeth McCracken
#31. It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.
Alan Brennert
#32. Despite how impressive many of my teachers were, they were undoubtedly human and susceptible to the same cultural biases and physical infirmities that define the lives of ordinary people.
Sam Harris
#33. Ordinary people who walk with an extraordinary God of grace and power, really can make a difference in other as yet unreached lives.
Ross Paterson
#34. From the ashes of the Triangle Company fire began to rise one of the most dramatic and far-reaching [changes] in American history-one that would...eventually redefine forever the role the government played in the lives of ordinary people.
Ric Burns
#35. We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet.
Shane Claiborne
#36. 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
#37. Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
E. M. Forster
#38. The more one lives alone on the river or in the open country, the clearer it becomes that nothing is more beautiful or great than to perform the ordinary duties of one's daily life simply and naturally.
Rabindranath Tagore
#39. But there's a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what is possible and impossible?
David Eddings
#40. There is this sense of David Cameron leading a Government that's badly out of touch with ordinary people's lives. I'd absolutely welcome the opportunity to show all political leaders what life is like for most people.
Frances O'Grady
#41. For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.
Orson Scott Card
#42. But what I do believe is that if you're a girl who was born in Homsea, a girl who lives in a nothing kind of house with an ordinary kind of family, then you can't know everything about the world and that it's probably good to keep an open mind about things, just in case.
Karen Tayleur
#43. I think there's a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
Jody Williams
#44. Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do.
Orhan Pamuk
#45. I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.
Jesse Kellerman
#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. All the bravery that lines our lives, in the ordinary moments adds up to an extraordinary, successful life.
Andrea T. Goeglein
#48. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
Tom Stoppard
#49. The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.
Claire Denis
#50. Sometimes ordinary people are destined for extraordinary lives.
Dannika Dark
#51. Living in intention through acceptance, responsibility, pro-active choice, and the willingness to be ordinary, will move fear aside and allow intuition to surface. All of those skills teach us to be inner focused and aware of who we are becoming. That is powerful. That changes lives.
Rhonda Britten
#52. Says to ordinary people like me and you that instead of closing our eyes and bowing our heads, sometimes God wants us to keep our eyes open for people in need, do something about it, and bow our whole lives to Him instead.
Bob Goff
#53. It's no coincidence that geniuses not only dare to dream of the impossible for their work, but do the same for their lives. They're audacious enough to think that they're not just an ordinary player.
Sean Patrick
#54. 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
#55. I think that giant American corporations should start asking themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the ordinary. Clearly people want things that make their lives the way they wish they were.
John Peterman
#56. And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.
Stephen King
#57. Ordinary people who live their lives peacefully, whose days gently resemble each other, may happen one day to stop and wonder why and what for do they do the things they do and have been doing for so many years?
Haim Shapira
#58. The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?
Jeanette Winterson
#59. The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire ... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.
Salman Rushdie
#60. When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.
Philip Jenkins
#61. And so, this was the final major theme we found: that when a group of people, no matter how small or ordinary, was willing to die out to their selfish desires, the life which came out of that death was immeasurable, and continued to affect lives far into the future.
Peter Marshall
#62. Embedded in the larger story of redemption is a principle we must not miss: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the lives of others.
Paul David Tripp
#63. The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who've happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years.
Fred Saberhagen
#64. 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
#65. It seemed that people could walk through life without causing a ripple, leading ordinary and uneventful lives. It was only after they'd been murdered that people took notice of them.
Joanne Fluke
#66. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
Pema Chodron
#67. Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.
Ann Bancroft
#68. I know that there is no such thing as an ordinary life. All lives shimmer and pulse with particularity, with richness and texture.
Martha Mason
#69. The light has gone out of our lives ... Yet I am wrong, for the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light ... and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country and the world will see it ... For that light represented the living truth.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#70. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part.
C. Wright Mills
#71. Fashion is only complete when it is worn by ordinary people who exist now, managing their lives, loving and grieving.
Yohji Yamamoto
#72. Tea with milk and sugar is so ordinary. We want to see a change, feel the necessity to bring colours other than the ordinary, in our lives. We feel liberated, enriched, superior. But we lose a part of nature, the ordinary beautiful essential nature in doing so.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#73. Our duty is found in the revealed will of God in the Scriptures. Our trust must be in the sovereign will of God as He works in the ordinary circumstances of our daily lives for our good and His glory.
Jerry Bridges
#74. The major work of the world is not done by geniuses. It is done by ordinary people, with balance in their lives, who have learned to work in an extraordinary manner.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#75. God created every one of us to be successful. Before the foundation of the world, He laid out an exact plan for our lives. And in this plan He has moments of favor that will come across our path. These moments are not ordinary. They are destiny-altering moments.
Joel Osteen
#76. I love to hear about ordinary people's lives and interests and what motivates them.
Jane Clayson
#78. It's a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.
Bill McKibben
#79. Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#80. No dog ever thinks that ordinary loyalty is anything special. But people have elevated this feeling dogs have into something unusual because not all people have a sense of loyalty and fidelity strong enough to be the root of their lives, the natural base of their existence.
Gavriil Troyepolsky
#81. The enduring realization that when a great challenge comes, the most ordinary people can show that they value something more than they value their own lives. When the last of the veterans had gone, and the sorrows and bitterness which the war created had at last worn away, this memory remained.
Bruce Catton
#82. The path of specialization leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of understanding in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-day life.
William Barrett
#83. Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.
Jim Rohn
#84. September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.
Geraldine Brooks
#85. A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.
Anthony Crosland
#86. We expect our spouses to fill voids in our lives or hearts that only God can fill. Unmet expectations reduce a journey expected to be amazing to ordinary. Unmet expectations breed hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and unresolved conflict.
Justin Davis
#87. Philosophy itself should not be merely "the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth" but should offer a practical guide for ordinary people in their everyday lives.
Anthony Pagden
#88. Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.
Henry David Thoreau
#89. Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments,
Elizabeth Kostova
#90. Heather Lende's small town is populated with big hearts
she finds them on the beach, walking her granddaughters, in the stories of ordinary peoples' lives, and knits them into unforgettable tales. Find the Good is a treasure.
Jo-Ann Mapson
#91. What I am proposing this year are not lofty concepts far removed form the daily struggle so of ordinary Georgians. They are proposals that directly effect the lives of the people we serve.
Roy Barnes
#92. I don't know how other people perceive the lives of actors, but my life is fairly ordinary. I go to work, I come home, I put my kids to bed. If I'm home in time for dinner, I have dinner, and then it's bedtime.
Steve Carell
#93. True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness. This is most visible in extraordinary lives, in saints and martyrs. But it is no less true for ordinary people like us.
John Ortberg
#94. Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.
Natalie Goldberg
#95. 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
#96. We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives ... What is the essence of this art of living? Of course, even this art should have beauty as its essence.
Kenji Miyazawa
#97. Looking at America's history, ordinary people did something extraordinary. Leaders risked their lives for freedoms that we take for granted today. That's what instills confidence. That's us. We will move forward and prosper because that's who we are as Americans.
Scott Walker
#98. The people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments.
Christina Baker Kline
#99. Ordinary points of bravery, the synchronistic moments we all engage in, and the transformative power of minding our voices, forgiving, trusting, and learning to love ourselves and our lives, while we wait.
Andrea T. Goeglein
#100. A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives ...
Jonathan Kozol
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