Ordinary Life Quotes - Page 5

• 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

  Home, Self, Encounters

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• 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.

  Rajneesh

  Sleep, Thinking, Special

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• Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

  Graham Greene

  Men, Ordinary, Goes On

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• 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

  Real, Fall, Battle

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.13, Open Road Media

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• I'm one of those people who was meant to have a very ordinary life. I have no special talent, no great beauty, nothing that distinguishes me from a hundred, thousand other girls. But I can't go through an entire lifetime without at least one night of magic.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Girl, Night, People

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• The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

  Alain de Botton

  Desire, Stronger, Comfort

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.250, Vintage

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• As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Life, Wise, Laughter

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• I want a simple, ordinary life . . . like humans enjoy.

  Deborah Harkness

  Simple, Ordinary, Want

  Deborah Harkness (2011). “A Discovery of Witches: A Novel”, p.83, Penguin

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• But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Grief, Joy, Soul

  Leo Tolstoy (2015). “Anna Karenina”, p.932, Xist Publishing

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• 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

  People, Everyday, Typical

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• That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Kindness, Home, Giving

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• The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. (viii)

  Stephen King

  Dog, Rain, Sunshine

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• [Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity." (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning)

  Brennan Manning

  Jesus, Giving, Promise

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• There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts.. see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me..it was magical. "We are already one, yet we know it not.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Heaven, House

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• All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

  Sherman Alexie

  Spiritual, Native American, Thinking

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• The loneliness caused by not hearing Ren's voice... I felt it deep in the night. I felt it deeper than anyone else. Even now at times I look back. In this ordinary life without Ren, I think my life with him was like a dream. Especially on a snowy night like this. On a night as cold as this. Someone keep this guy warm for me, please.

  Ai Yazawa

  Dream, Loneliness, Night

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• There is no such thing as an ordinary life.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Ordinary

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• I have not led an ordinary life, nor a life that would suit everyone. I took great risks, but because I did, I also earned great reward. I found the way to show my true face freely, without fear. Because of this, I found true love.

  Cameron Dokey

  True Love, Risk, Ordinary

  Cameron Dokey (2012). “Once: Before Midnight; Golden; Wild Orchid”, p.408, Simon and Schuster

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• I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive.

  Guy Sajer

  Love, Disappointment, War

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• If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

  George Will

  Jobs, Ordinary, Gone

  George F. Will (1995). “The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990-1994”, Penguin Group USA

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• When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

  Mary MacLane

  Taken, Years, Vapid

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• There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.

  Boris Yeltsin

  Friends, People, Political

  "The Struggle for Russia". Book by Boris Yeltsin, 1994.

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• 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

  Party, Heaven, Ordinary

  Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Machado de Assis, John A. Gledson (1998). “Dom Casmurro”, p.146, Oxford University Press

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• 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

  Running, Creating, Personality

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• Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

  Anais Nin

  Illumination, Space, Tree

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