Ordinary Quotes - Page 39

• In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Dog, Green, Want

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• It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

  Edmund Burke

  Drawing, Ideas, People

  Edmund Burke (1963). “Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches”, p.201, Transaction Publishers

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• It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.

  Stephen Covey

  Children, Commitment, Views

  Stephen R. Covey (2004). “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change”, p.92, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Book, Men, Years

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• They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

  Edmund Wilson

  Special, Politeness, Elsewhere

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• I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.

  Harrison Ford

  Airplane, Talking, Common Experience

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. January 20, 2010.

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• I think people like players they can relate to. It seems as if people think they know me. I just think I'm an ordinary Joe who plays golf very, very well.

  Fred Couples

  Golf, Player, Thinking

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• Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

  Lewis Mumford

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Revenge

  "The Conduct Of Life" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 1, 1951.

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• You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.

  Thomas Merton

  Block, Years, Ideas

  Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.862, Macmillan

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• In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.

  E. Stanley Jones

  Church, Desire, Respectability

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• My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Children, Book, People

  "Novelist Khaled Hosseini". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. May 21, 2013.

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• We are not built for the mountains and the dawns and aesthetic affinities, those are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. Spiritual selfishness always wants repeated moments on the mount. We feel we could talk like angels and live like angels, if only we could stay on the mount. The times of exaltation are exceptional, they have their meaning in our life with God, but we must beware lest our spiritual selfishness wants to make them the only time.

  Oswald Chambers

  Spiritual, Inspiration, Angel

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• I'm not an ordinary prisoner.

  Mikhail Khodorkovsky

  Prisoner

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• If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

  Don DeLillo

  Heart, Men, Games

  Libra pt. 2 (1988)

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• The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

  R. D. Laing

  Real, Self, Consistency

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• Joy is not the same as pleasure or happiness. A wicked and evil man may have pleasure, while any ordinary mortal is capable of being happy. Pleasure generally comes from things, and always through the senses; happiness comes from humans through fellowship. Joy comes from loving God and neighbor. Pleasure is quick and violent, like a flash of lightning. Joy is steady and abiding, like a fixed star. Pleasure depends on external circumstances, such as money, food, travel, etc. Joy is independent of them, for it comes from a good conscience and love of God.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Stars, Independent, Men

  "Fulton J. Sheen's Guide to Contentment". Book by Fulton J. Sheen, p. 120, 1967.

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• Our soul is not united to our body in the ordinary sense of these terms. It is immediately and directly united to God alone.

  Nicolas Malebranche

  Soul, Body, Term

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• We want someone else to act. But miracles aren't what other people do. They're what each of us does. They're what happens when ordinary people take extraordinary action. To be a miracle doesn't mean you have to tackle problems across the globe. It means making a difference in your own living room, cubicle, neighborhood, community.

  Regina Brett

  Mean, Differences, People

  Regina Brett (2012). “Be the Miracle: 50 Lessons for Making the Impossible Possible”, p.4, Hachette UK

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• The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.

  William Hazlitt

  Money, People, Secret

  William Hazlitt (1837). “Characteristics: in the manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims [by W. Hazlitt].”, p.132

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• You can find the sacred in the most ordinary of things.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Attitude, Sacred

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• I believe that earning your living doing something you enjoy is one of the very best ways to nourish yourself. But even if you are employed at something that is not your ideal work, it is important to find ways to take as much pleasure in it as possible. Living in the present moment can make ordinary activities more interesting and joyful; you may be surprised, if you only look, at what you will find. If you try to stay connected with why you are doing what you are doing, for example, then even the parts of your life that aren't especially interesting can become more meaningful.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Meaningful, Work, Believe

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• It must be those brief moments when nothing has happened - nor is going to. Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days. There, sometimes, you meet your own heart like someone you've never known.

  Hans Børli

  Ocean, Heart, Islands

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• In attempting to explain geological phenomena, the bias has always been on the wrong side; there has always been a disposition to reason á priori on the extraordinary violence and suddenness of changes, both in the inorganic crust of the earth, and in organic types, instead of attempting strenuously to frame theories in accordance with the ordinary operations of nature.

  Charles Lyell

  Earth, Violence, Sides

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• The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.

  Asa Gray

  Animal, Definitions, Laying Down

  Asa Gray (1880). “Natural Science and Religion”

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• Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.

  Benjamin Haydon

  Genius, Done, Way

  Benjamin Robert Haydon, Frederick Wordsworth Haydon (1876). “Correspondence and Table-talk: With a Memoir”, p.311

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