Quotes About The Ordinary World

#1. I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked.

Anne Lamott

#2. The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.

Ted Kooser

#3. Finding such a person makes everyone else appear so ordinary ... and if anything happens to him, you've got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world, and a kind of isolation that never existed before.

Alan Turing

#4. You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the ordinary world.

D.H. Lawrence

#5. This is why I write: I believe the ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories.

Lucy Ke

#6. We understood, intuitively, that no one in this awful place could be judged by the standards of the ordinary world.

Nando Parrado

#7. It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness.

Carlos Castaneda

#8. Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.

Erica Jong

#9. Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world.

Tom Standage

#10. The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'.

Alain De Botton

#11. Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.

Graham Greene

#12. what had appeared accidental to me in the past, now often seemed to bear the imprint of supernatural intent. Once you see it you can't unsee it: the supernatural is not supernatural; the ordinary world is suffused with the miraculous. Here

Andrew Klavan

#13. I think fantasy is best described as a kind of fiction that evokes wonder, mystery or magic, a sense of possibility beyond the ordinary world in which we live, and yet which reflects and comments upon that known world.

Kate Forsyth

#14. What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.

Peter Straub

#15. And as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared.

Julie Schumacher

#16. Medicine people are truly citizens of two worlds, and those who continue to walk the path of medicine power learn to keep their balance in both the ordinary and the non-ordinary worlds ...

Paula Gunn Allen

#17. In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

Roger Caillois

#18. 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

#19. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.

Andrew Roberts

#20. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.

Patrick Ness

#21. The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

Jerome K. Jerome

#22. The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others.

Isaiah Berlin

#23. Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people - men and women, boys and girls - that make the world a special place

Nelson Mandela

#24. Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

Gerald Weinberg

#25. I have nothing but respect for people who travel the world to make art and put exotic Indians in front of linen backdrops, but it's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary.

Sally Mann

#26. 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

#27. There is great nobility in ordinary people. The world disappoints us all, and the ways we change our own stories to survive that disappointment are beautiful and tragic and hilarious. On balance, I find much more to admire about humanity than to despise.

Daniel Abraham

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

G.K. Chesterton

#29. 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

#30. As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them
"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

Chaim Potok

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. But when the world and all that's behind it and in it seem black, I tell myself that self-respect and self-mastery are not everything, that faith and belief in the power of prayer are not so wonderful as what we call the ordinary love of two apparently very ordinary people.

William Fryer Harvey

#34. What restricts the use of the word 'lady' among the courteous is that it is intended to set a woman apart from ordinary humanity, and in the working world that is not a help, as women have discovered in many bitter ways.

Judith Martin

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

Wendell Berry

#38. Please don't ask me for the actual answer to anything, because I don't have it. Because all I do is look at stuff and ask questions. What can I say? I just think the world's barking mad. Look, I'm not an expert. I'm just an ordinary person.

Annie Lennox

#39. The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world's bulwark of liberty.

Steve Buyer

#40. Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely ... It is simply the most ordinary place in the world ... It was so shabby and makeshift ... a place where poetry could never occur.

David Malouf

#41. The world is run by ordinary People, so fools and geniuses will always be out of place.

Garfield Ellis

#42. The Olympic Games are not just ordinary world championships but a quadrennial festival of universal youth ... celebrated by each succeeding generation as it arrives on the threshold of adulthood.

Pierre De Coubertin

#43. 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

#44. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.

Steven Johnson

#45. No matter what the other fifty odd weeks of his life offered, here, at least for a few days, he was officially a very special person in an otherwise ordinary world.

Lisa Luciano

#46. We've forgotten that God showers his extraordinary gifts through ordinary means of grace, loves us through ordinary fellow image bearers, and sends us out into the world to love and serve others in ordinary callings.

Michael S. Horton

#47. Via doesn't see me as ordinary. She says she does, but if I were ordinary, she wouldn't feel like she needs to protect me that much. And mom and dad doesn't see me as ordinary, either. They see me as extraordinary. I think the only person in the world who realizes how ordinary I am is me.

R.J. Palacio

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. The world is divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The problem is deciding which is which.

Piero Scaruffi

#51. If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.

Joanna R. Macy

#52. I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. (Brewster 1860, p. 331)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#53. When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.

Margaret Mahy

#54. For though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world.

M.M. Kaye

#55. I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met ... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.

Tracy Kidder

#56. RVM Thoughts for Today -
Dare to be different.The world is full of the Ordinary .

R.v.m.

#57. Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And

George Eliot

#58. 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

#59. ... this film taps perfectly into the viewers' sense of the world. It was a big, big hit, and one of Hollywood's best-remembered marriage movies, although by grounding itself in trendy political issues, it avoids ordinary day-to-day marital problems. Its bottom line is, however, marry your own kind.

Jeanine Basinger

#60. Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results.

Hakim Bey

#61. One way of opening ourselves up to new opportunities is to make conscious efforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a person to see the world as one rife with possibility and to take advantage of some of those possibilities if they seem worth pursuing.

Ken Robinson

#62. [Superheroes] aren't fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.

David Graeber

#63. There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.

John Cheever

#64. 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

#65. God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God.

D. A. Carson

#66. Ordinary won't change the world.

Lewis Pugh

#67. Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.

Jane Hirshfield

#68. The crazy people of the world ... shouldn't get to win. If God won't make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.

Stephen King

#69. 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

#70. There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world ... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.

Ernst Haas

#71. And what some people don't understand was that bleeding wasn't a sign of weakness; it was a sign of strength. It demonstrated to the world that you were vulnerable and ordinary, but when you wanted something enough, and fought hard for it, you were capable of doing extraordinary things.

Natasha Ngan

#72. Ordinary people with commitment can make an extraordinary impact on the their world.

John C. Maxwell

#73. At any rate, girls are differently situated. Having no need of deep scientific knowledge, their education is confined more to the ordinary things of the world, the study of the fine arts, and of the manners and dispositions of people.

William John Wills

#74. I'm a believer in the ordinary person, that the ordinary person is just as important and has an equally unique perspective on the world as someone who is famous or perhaps more privileged.

Brandon Stanton

#75. There are no ordinary people. The blur or everyday reality has created a world in which most of us have forgotten our unique and sacred existence ... it is [our] true self, once discovered, that enables us to understand more clearly the nature of our world, and our own existence.

Kim Chestney

#76. Citizens of a modern society need [ ... ] more than that ordinary "common sense" which was defined by Stuart Chase as that which tells you that the world is flat.

S.I. Hayakawa

#77. They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

Margaret Atwood

#78. I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.

Javier Marias

#79. Dare to be different.The world is full of the ordinary.-RVM

R.v.m.

#80. Live in robust sanity, in holy obedience to the ordinary." (The Message) "In an insane asylum like the world, simple sanity can be a heroic achievement.

Peter Kreeft

#81. An understanding of ordinary logic is no longer a required part of university degree programs, as was almost universally the case sixty years ago. Now, as a result, our world is full of uneducated people with higher degrees. They

Dallas Willard

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. I'm drawn to unusual, even freakish people. Why? They are far more engaging than the ordinary, which the world has too much of.

Donna Lynn Hope

#86. I write so others might contemplate things that are out of the ordinary. I write to make people feel - to cause laughter and tears and anger at injustice. I write so the world will imagine and wonder at crazy, incredible truths. I write to have a tiny bit of influence on a universal conscience.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#87. For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the cirumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose.

Victor Hugo

#88. Because it proves that you don't need much to change the entire world for the better. You can start with the most ordinary ingredients. You can start with the world you've got.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#89. History foretells that when you give an ordinary person the wisdom of what is right and the dignity to follow his or her heart, the world as we know it changes or goes through a phase

Dew Platt

#90. I'm not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Graham Swift

#91. We want big results-sooner rather than later. And we've forgotten that God showers his extraordinary gifts through ordinary means of grace, loves us through ordinary fellow image bearers, and sends us into the world to love and serve others in ordinary callings. Michael Horton, Ordinary, 14

Michael S. Horton

#92. I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

#93. 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

#94. I reject what I see as flat-footed accounts of the fundamental structure of the world, where we somehow assume that, because ordinary experience involves middle-sized objects in space and time, that fundamental reality must be essentially like that.

L.A. Paul

#95. For him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class - all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class - she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.

Leo Tolstoy

#96. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.

Yukio Mishima

#97. If you had all the resources in the world at your disposal to hire anybody you want who would you hire, ordinary unschooled men (Acts 4:13).

Jonah Books

#98. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren't chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway. Inej

Leigh Bardugo

#99. Compassion is an ordinary intent that is felt for everywhere in this world and it is the intent that, 'the whole world is trapped in worldly miseries; how can their miseries be alleviated?

Dada Bhagwan

#100. 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