Extraordinary Quotes - Page 30

• The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Believe, Mean

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• If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Children, Thinking

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

  Jim Elliot

  Forgive Me, Forgiving, Ordinary

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• He`s quite extraordinary with his moves and spins. I think he was a baton girl in a past life [on his co-star Hayden Christensen].

  Ewan McGregor

  Girl, Stars, Moving

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• A man in love can do extraordinary things, I don’t care if you’re an angel, you’re my angel, and I won’t let you go.

  Alexandra Adornetto

  Angel, Men, Care

  Alexandra Adornetto (2010). “Halo”, p.412, Feiwel & Friends

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• Just supposing," he said, "just supposing" --he didn't know what was coming next, so he thought he'd just sit back and listen--"that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn't know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I've only just met and not crash into lorries a the same time, what would you say..." He paused, helplessly, and looked at her. "I should do.

  Douglas Adams

  Stupid, Knowing, Important

  Douglas Adams (2009). “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”, p.51, Pan Macmillan

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• We want to see a struggle. We want to see people falling over but getting themselves back up on their feet, and that's what's extraordinary- ordinary people and their struggle. There's nothing as interesting as real life out your window. You walk down the street for half an hour, I'll give you half an hour of drama.

  Ricky Gervais

  Real, Drama, Struggle

  "Ricky Gervais Has An Animated Post-'Office' Life". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. March 3, 2010.

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• He was sound asleep, his long legs stretched out in front of him, the blessed fire blazing, an empty bottle of wine by his side. He hadn't been shaved recently, and he looked rumpled, dissolute and beautiful. Like a fallen angel. She moved to stand in front of him and pointed the pistol directly at his heart. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," he murmured, and then he opened his extraordinary eyes. "It's always unwise to shoot the man you're in love with.

  Anne Stuart

  Beautiful, Blessed, Eye

  Anne Stuart (2012). “The Devil's Waltz”, p.254, Harlequin

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• People do sometimes change, of course. Habits, allegiances, dreams are all alterable, but only under extraordinary pressure - like great love, fear, grief. More often, people don't change. A girl who never missed a day of work does not suddenly decide to stay home in bed, for no good reason.

  Josephine Humphreys

  Girl, Dream, Grief

  Josephine Humphreys (2000). “Dreams of Sleep”, p.32, Penguin

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• You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.” “A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.” “You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Simple, Doctors, Views

  Arthur Conan Doyle (2007). “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased Edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books)”, p.42, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.

  Aberjhani

  Dream, Book, Past

  Aberjhani (2012). “Visions of a Skylark Dresed in Black (HB Gift Edition)”, Lulu.com

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• Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.

  William Gibson

  Fun, Intelligent, Addiction

  William Gibson (2010). “Zero History”, p.71, Penguin UK

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• I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.

  Wendell Berry

  Wall, Book, Thinking

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.311, Counterpoint

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• What is it about wearing a tuxedo or that little black dress, that makes us feel confident, beautiful, splendid, even invincible? We put on formal wear and suddenly we become extraordinary. On the days when you feel low and invisible, why not try this on for size: imagine you are wearing a fantastic tailored tuxedo or a stunning formal gown. And then proceed with your day.

  Vera Nazarian

  Beautiful, Black, Trying

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• It was an odd relationship, but then she was an extraordinary woman: a prioress who doubted much of what the church taught; an acclaimed healer who rejected medicine as practised by physicians; and a nun who made enthusiastic love to her man whenever she could get away with it. If I wanted a normal relationship, Merthin told himself, I should have picked a normal girl.

  Ken Follett

  Girl, Men, Should Have

  Ken Follett (2011). “Ken Follett EPIC HISTORICAL COLLECTION”, p.2780, Penguin

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• Rover did not know in the least where the moon's path led to, and at present he was much too frightened and excited to ask, and anyway he was beginning to get used to extraordinary things happening to him.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Moon, Path, Excited

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “Tales from the Perilous Realm”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Yes, I'm often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt - an immense leap of an attempt - to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.

  Markus Zusak

  Pockets, Stories, Legion

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• An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Sunday, Average

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• Say it, reader. Say the word 'quest' out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn't it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.

  Kate DiCamillo

  Quests, Wonder, Loud

  Kate DiCamillo (2009). “The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread”, p.221, Candlewick Press

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• When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance or compassion, we are all made richer by their example. Like the rivers that flow out of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the inspiration they generate washes down to the rest of us. It waters everyone's fields.

  Greg Mortenson

  Inspiration, Compassion, Rivers

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• Maybe a man in a million could unite the Hallows, Harry. I was fit only to possess the meanest of them, the least extraordinary. I was fit to own the Elder Wand, and not to boast of it, and not to kill with it. I was permitted to tame and to use it, because I took it, not for gain, but to save others from it.

  J. K. Rowling

  Men, Use, Gains

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• But it seems to me that a man cannot and ought not to say that he loves, he said. Why not? I asked. Because it will always be a lie. As though it were a strange sort of discovery that someone is in love! Just as if, as soon as he said that, something went snap-bang - he loves. Just as if, when he utters that word, something extraordinary is bound to happen, with signs and portents, and all the cannons firing at once. It seems to me, he went on, that people who solemnly utter those words, 'I love you,' either deceive themselves, or what's still worse, deceive others.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Lying, Love You, Men

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• Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Use, Way, Ordinary

  Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet (2007). “Dialogues II”, p.3, Columbia University Press

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• Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Pain, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1079, Wordsworth Editions

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• Yes, Harry, blessed as I am with extraordinary brainpower, I understood everything you told me. I think you might even consider the possibility that I understood more than you did.

  J. K. Rowling

  Blessed, Thinking, Might

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