Ordinary Quotes - Page 22

• I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration - that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.

  Susan Orlean

  People, Way, Aberration

  Susan Orlean (2000). “The Orchid Thief”, Ballantine Books

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• Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

  Alain de Botton

  Sublime, Bows, Alternatives

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• From the viewpoint of absolute truth, what we feel and experience in our ordinary daily life is all delusion. Of all the various delusions, the sense of discrimination between oneself and others is the worst form, as it creates nothing but unpleasantness for both sides. If we can realize and meditate on ultimate truth, it will cleanse our impurities of mind and thus eradicate the sense of discrimination. This will help to create true love for one another. The search for ultimate truth is, therefore, vitally important.

  Dalai Lama

  Mind, Important, Viewpoints

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• I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

  Ransom Riggs

  Would Be, Peculiar, Accepting

  Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.9, Quirk Books

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• It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

  Anne Tyler

  Mystery, Celebrate Life, Psychological

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• 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

  Running, Fashion, Men

  Idries Shah (1983). “Reflections”, p.15, Octagon Press Ltd

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• I leave these speculations to others. It’s quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn’t have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find beauty.

  Saul Leiter

  Order, Dreamland, Speculation

  "Saul Leiter: The Quiet Iconoclast". Interview with Dean Brierly, photographyinterviews.blogspot.com. April 22, 2009.

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• Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.

  Hermann Ebbinghaus

  Memories, Connections, Facts

  Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913). “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology”

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• Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.

  Wayne Thiebaud

  Way, Common, Objects

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• Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin

  Jonathan Sacks

  Heart, Mind, Doe

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• Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.

  Lee Smolin

  Guitar, Words Of Wisdom, Different

  Lee Smolin (1999). “The Life of the Cosmos”, p.65, Oxford University Press, USA

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• When it's time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. When you're tired, lie down. The fool will laugh at you but the wise man will understand.

  Linji Yixuan

  Wise, Lying, Tired

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• History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women's history is an assertion that women have a history.

  Toshiko Kishida

  Kings, Men, People

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• Not one idiot in a thousand has been entirely refractory to treatment, not one in a hundred has not been made more happy and healthy; more than thirty per cent have been taught to conform to social and moral law, and rendered capable of order, of good feeling, and of working like the third of a man; more than forty per cent have become capable of the ordinary transactions of life under friendly control, of understanding moral and social abstractions, of working like two-thirds of a man.

  Edouard Seguin

  Men, Two, Order

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• We know, from ordinary life, that we are not able to direct our attention perfectly steadily and uniformly to one and the same object... At times the attention turns towards the object most intensely, and at times the energy flags.

  Wilhelm Wundt

  Psychology, Energy, Attention

  Wilhelm Wundt, (2013). “An Introduction to Psychology”, p.24, Read Books Ltd

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• Coach Landry was a master at maintaining discipline and creating an environment where ordinary people could achieve extra ordinary results.

  Danny White

  Sports, Creating, Discipline

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• A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

  Margaret Fuller

  Beauty, Art, Interesting

  Margaret Fuller (1860). “At Home and Abroad, Or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe”, p.199

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• Now, occultism is not like mystic faculty, and it very seldom works in harmony either with business aptitude in the things of ordinary life or with a knowledge of the canons of evidence in its own sphere.

  A. E. Waite

  Business, Mind, Aptitude

  A. E. Waite (2012). “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot”, p.1, Courier Corporation

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• The special life is where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the natural becomes miraculous, the everyday becomes unique. Finding the magic and wonder within nature is the most assured means by which children rediscover the joy of life.

  Shmuley Boteach

  Life, Children, Mean

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• The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in this space or that processes occur during this time . . . the source of this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so-called laws of thought.

  Ludwig Boltzmann

  Time, Philosophy, Lying

  "Ludwig Edward Boltzmann" by S. Rajasekar, September 7, 2006.

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• We can see now that we Americans were caught unprepared, because we were ordinary human beings, following the best advice we had at the time. No one would have guessed in 1941 that we would be attacked in such an unsportsmanlike manner as we were. No one could have visualized Pearl Harbor, either out there or in Washington. But if we had known then what we know now, we would have expected an attack in 1941.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Time, Advice, Would Be

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1950). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945, Volume 13”, p.214, Best Books on

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• When ordinary people decide to do extraordinary things they transform their lives and the lives of others around them.

  Oprah Winfrey

  People, Brotherhood, Lives Of Others

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• If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him - to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Men, Law, Circles

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• The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.

  Robert Henri

  Art, Tongue, Moments

  Robert Henri (1960). “The art spirit”, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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• Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

  George Lakoff

  Thinking, People, Monday Morning

  George Lakoff, Mark Johnson (2008). “Metaphors We Live By”, p.3, University of Chicago Press

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