Ordinary Quotes - Page 37

• All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Knows, Extraordinary

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• We Americans understand freedom; we have earned it, we have lived for it, and we have died for it. This nation and its people are freedom's models in a searching world. We can be freedom's missionaries in a doubting world. The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.

  Barry Goldwater

  War, People, Doubt

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• A distinctly ordinary player of extraordinary dirtiness.

  Pete Gill

  Soccer, Football, Player

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• On April 2, the nurses started my first round of five intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusions. The clear IV bags hung on a metal pole above my head, their liquid trickling down into my vein. Each of those ordinary-looking bags contained the healthy antibodies of over a thousand blood donors and cost upwards of $20,000 per infusion. One thousand tourniquets, one thousand nurses, one thousand veins, one thousand blood-sugar regulating cookies, all just to help one patient.

  Susannah Cahalan

  Blood, Nurse, Healthy

  Susannah Cahalan (2012). “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness”, p.116, Simon and Schuster

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• We're all flawed, but basically, effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who aren't too screwed up.

  Henry Mintzberg

  People, Healthy, Flaws

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• 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

  Men, Normal, Christianity

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.120, Simon and Schuster

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• The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Destiny, Men

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• By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this - if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural - then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.

  William Cronon

  Environmental, Firsts, Helping

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• Fish play in the water
  birds play in the sky
  ordinary beings play on the earth
  sublime beings play in display.

  Thinley Norbu

  Sky, Play, Water

  Thinley Norbu (1999). “Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the Five Wisdom Dakinis”, p.47, Shambhala Publications

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• Then all at once in late August's heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory in the earth. This arcane act of nature, though perceived by us as ordinary, is a manifestation of Maya's phantom play, the great immensity expressed in every way. My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same.

  Duane Michals

  Garden, Purple, August

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• Rush Limbaugh is a principled conservative, master broadcaster and stinging social critic who has won his mammoth following through his own energy, individualism and wit. His daily radio show is the one reliable place ordinary citizens can turn to for a different perspective in the blizzard of propaganda and disinformation from the Northeastern media establishment. History will show that Limbaugh was a major force over the past decade in waking this country up from its p.c. coma.

  Camille Paglia

  Country, Past, Media

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• [T]he politically correct are above the rules of ordinary civility, once they have identified you as an unbeliever in their religion.

  Orson Scott Card

  Politics, Civility, Politically Correct

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• Sometimes during the day, I consciously focus on some ordinary object and allow myself a momentary "paying-attention." This paying-attention gives meaning to my life. I don't know who it was, but someone said that careful attention paid to anything is a window into the universe. Pausing to think this way, even for a brief moment, is very important. It gives quality to my day.

  Robert Fulghum

  Thinking, Giving, Perspective

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• Blay said yet again, that old, familiar voice cutting through all of those years of rejection and judgment, giving him not just a rope of acceptance to hang on to, but a flesh-and-blood hand to lead him out of the darkness of his past... And into a future that didn't require lies or excuses, because what he was, and what they were, was both extraordinary-and not hing out of the ordinary. Love, after all, was universal.

  J.R. Ward

  Lying, Cutting, Acceptance

  J.R. Ward (2013). “Lover At Last: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood”, p.578, Penguin

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• ...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

  Karl Marx

  Simple, Class, Circles

  Karl Marx (2008). “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, p.9, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Another discovery which came out of my investigation was the fact that when one gives his or her order to produce a definite result and stands by that order, it seems to have the effect of giving one what might be termed a second sight which enables him or her to see right through ordinary problems. What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when one is in that state of mind in which he or she knows exactly what one wants and is fully determined not to quit until he or she finds it.

  Alexander Graham Bell

  Determination, Sight, Discovery

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• Faith has to be exercised in the midst of ordinary, down-to-earth living.

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Faith, Earth, Midst

  Elisabeth Elliot (2007). “The Mark of a Man: Following Christ's Example of Masculinity”, p.12, Revell

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• What keeps faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humor. Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music, and books, raising kids-all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake.

  Garrison Keillor

  Sports, Sweet, Flower

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• It is only when you despair of all ordinary means, it is only when you convince it that it must help you or you perish, that the seed of life in you bestirs itself to provide a new resource.

  Robert Collier

  Mean, Despair, Helping

  Robert Collier (2013). “Riches Within Your Reach”, p.54, Simon and Schuster

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• Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Country, Nature, Men

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• Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Humorous, Men

  Tremendous Trifles "The Twelve Men" (1909)

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• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

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• When I look at what the world does and where people nowadays believe they can find happiness, I am not sure that that is true happiness. The happiness of these ordinary people seems to consist in slavishly imitating the majority, as if this were their only choice. And yet they all believe they are happy. I cannot decide whether that is happiness or not. Is there such a thing as happiness?

  Zhuangzi

  Happiness, Believe, People

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• The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Lying, Simple

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• But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.

  Walker Percy

  Giving Up, Ambition, Said

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.9, Open Road Media

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