Quotes About Ordinary Man

#1. 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

#2. Because in that moment, watching and listening, he was profoundly moved that God had seen fit to gift him, an ordinary man, an Indiana boy through and through, with these people in his life.

Kristen Ashley

#3. There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.

Edward Zwick

#4. The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.

Austin O'Malley

#5. An ordinary man would have been unable to maintain his balance there, to say nothing of holding on with such narrow support. But the Green Lama had held more difficult positions, according to the Yoga, for hours.

Kendell Foster Crossen

#6. For a man who is in love with the existence, nothing is ordinary in life!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#7. No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.

Theodore Roosevelt

#8. Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.

Augustine Birrell

#9. Lord Rodrik Harlaw was neither fat nor slim; neither tall nor short; neither ugly nor handsome. His hair was brown, as were his eyes, though the short, neat beard he favored had gone grey. All in all, he was an ordinary man, distinguished only by his love of written words.

George R R Martin

#10. 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

#11. A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#12. If an ordinary man can be tapped to be the Messiah...then perhaps any one of us is capable of bringing about the Redemption.

Helen Maryles Shankman

#13. An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.

D.H. Lawrence

#14. Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Ezra Pound

#15. Do you ever see a man who struts around altogether too large to notice an ordinary working mechanic? Do you think he is great?
He is nothing but a puffed-up balloon, held down by his big feet.
There is no greatness there.

Russell H. Conwell

#16. The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

G.K. Chesterton

#17. An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.

Augustine Birrell

#18. The ordinary man so very rarely questions the principles in which he has been brought up, that he is usually willing, whenever he has a feeling that he ought to do 'x', to say on this ground that he ought to do 'x'.

R.M. Hare

#19. 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

#20. There is nothing called 'Extraordinary', it is just the way the World defines an 'ordinary' man or woman , who has recognized his own 'power to achieve' the IMPOSSIBLE ! Let us be ORDINARY, but an 'aware' ordinary , aware of our own selves !

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#21. Readers tend to like a character who is at least superficially like themselves. But they quickly lose interest unless this particular character is somehow out of the ordinary. The character may wear the mask of the common man, but underneath his true face must always be the face of the hero.

Orson Scott Card

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times - that is, hard - had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.

Yann Martel

#25. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Adyashanti

#27. By my physical constitution I am but an ordinary man ... Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean hypocracies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into rage like a lion.

John Adams

#28. When an ordinary man attains knowledge, he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding, he is an ordinary man

Anonymous

#29. Jane decided he was certainly beautiful, with brown eyes and a well-shaped nose. It is a refreshing thing for an ordinary-looking woman to look at a beautiful man occasionally and Jane gave herself up to contemplation.

Barbara Pym

#30. 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

#31. This is something an ordinary man can never know. You will enter the House of Dreams, Juanito, where you will live forever. Your mother and father and sisters and brothers, your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all you will greet in their dreams. And only you, among them, will be safe.

Barry Gifford

#32. How did you tell a man that you'd grown up, that you'd learned true love wasn't a night of passionate sex under a sky lit up by fireworks, but an ordinary Sunday morning when your husband brought you a glass of water, two aspirins, and a heating pad for your cramps?

Kristin Hannah

#33. A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man.

Emilio Estevez

#34. The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

Bertrand Russell

#35. The man was heavy with life. So often it's lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that.

Siri Hustvedt

#36. A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman.

Thomas Hardy

#37. 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

#38. If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'

Barbara W. Tuchman

#39. A hero called Adin rose from the ranks of the people. He was an ordinary man, a blacksmith who made swords and armor and shoes for horses. But he had been blessed with strsngth, courage, and cleverness.

Emily Rodda

#40. I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent I was given. I believed in myself, and I believe in the goodness of others.

Muhammad Ali

#41. It simply did not occur to her that she had hurt him as deeply as she had, because she still thought of herself as an ordinary woman, and him as an extraordinary man.

Arundhati Roy

#42. In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

Robert Bly

#43. I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. One genius does not inspire another.

Henry Miller

#44. For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space.

David Hoffman

#45. People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.

Idries Shah

#46. The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

T. S. Eliot

#47. She could not tell him that she protested because she did not believe he loved her enough to become his wife. It was no ordinary man but the Prince of Light who was asking her to be his bride. And, she thought gloomily, what sacrifice might she have disregarded had his gaze been only for her?

Noriko Ogiwara

#48. I'm a copper," he said. "Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.

Raymond Chandler

#49. Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl.

Ally Carter

#50. A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius.

Edgar Allan Poe

#51. The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.

Blaise Pascal

#52. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature.

Okakura Kakuzo

#53. It is the manner of death that reveals the importance of a man. Ordinary people are murdered while extraordinary people are assassinated.

Ashwin Sanghi

#54. There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.

Ernest Bevin

#55. A small room is enough; a small quantity of food is enough; a few clothes are enough; one lover, a very ordinary man

Rajneesh

#56. A genius does what he masters. An ordinary man tries to master what he does.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#57. She believed she was ordinary? Impossible! Any man with common sense would see what I do. The more she went on the angrier I became.#Ren

Colleen Houck

#58. The life of man is so short that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born

Halldor Laxness

#59. The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

William Osler

#60. I fear that many a man's good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

Charles Spurgeon

#61. A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

Graham Greene

#62. The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.

Paul Brunton

#63. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

Joseph Campbell

#64. The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#65. The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

George Bernard Shaw

#66. The ordinary man says in his ignorance, "My religion is the sole religion, my religion is the best." But when his heart is illuminated by the true knowledge, he knows that beyond all the battles of sects and of sectaries presides the one, indivisible, eternal and omnipresent Benediction.

Ramakrishna

#67. The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

Erich Fromm

#68. A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.

Irving Babbitt

#69. To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.

Mahatma Gandhi

#70. Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#71. Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

William Hazlitt

#72. I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.

Marcel Duchamp

#73. This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.

Henry Miller

#74. A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

Raymond Carver

#75. A man will blithely do in politics what he would kick a man downstairs for in ordinary life.

Archibald Primrose

#76. The mind of an ordinary man is truly near the heart.

Sri Aurobindo

#77. He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

Cheryl Strayed

#78. Do have a mind of your own. This is not just a spiritual matter only, but one which concerns ordinary manliness. I would do many things to please my friends, but to go to hell to please them is more than I would venture.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#79. I am no longer a Silent Brother," he said. "Only an ordinary man. My name is James, James Carstairs. But everyone calls me Jem.

Cassandra Clare

#80. St. Joseph was an ordinary sort of man on whom God relied to do great things. He did exactly what the Lord wanted him to do, in each and every event that went to make up his life.

Josemaria Escriva

#81. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.

G.K. Chesterton

#82. I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.

Ellsworth Kelly

#83. Higgins: I'm an ordinary man, who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance, to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants. An average man am I, of no eccentric whim, Who likes to live his life, free of strife Doing whatever he thinks is best for him, Well, just an ordinary man

Rex Harrison

#84. When one sees that everything exists as an illusion, one can live in a higher sphere than ordinary man.

Gautama Buddha

#85. A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

Quinn Loftis

#86. All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#87. A wound that'd make an ordinary man unconscious, I won't lose to it. A wound that would kill an ordinary person, I won't lose to it! To face one who is extraordinary, Hawk Eyes - I can't allow myself to be ordinary!

Zoro

#88. The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For ...
things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.

Woodrow Wilson

#89. A great man may not do great things but they do ordinary things greatly.

Mahatma Gandhi

#90. Ordinary man can try million times..but only a ambitions man try diffrent in million ways ... create new ways to solve existing problems.jj

Mahatma Gandhi

#91. There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.

Evelyn Waugh

#92. If you want the extra-ordinary, you've got to be willing to forsake the ordinary' - Annie Grimes in Mr Alhourani's Dead Man's Spots

D.M. Lee

#93. The ordinary man is as courageous and invulnerable as a hero when he does not recognize any danger, when he has no eyes to see it.Conversely, the hero's only vulnerable spot is on his back, and so exactly where he has no eyes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#94. I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer," said Mrs. Maylie; "I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.

Charles Dickens

#95. Strong men need strong love, and a soft touch. Once you fall in love with a man like that, there's no going back to ordinary.

Lauren Gilley

#96. Ordinary life goes on
that has saved many a man's reason.

Graham Greene

#97. Any ordinary man can ... surround himself with two thousand books ... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

Augustine Birrell

#98. Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.

Henry David Thoreau

#99. I'm not kidding myself. My voice alone is just an ordinary voice. What people come to see is how I use it. If I stand still while I'm singing, I'm dead, man. I might as well go back to driving a truck.

Elvis Presley

#100. Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Peace: The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.

Michael E. Gerber