“A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.”

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 249

Ordinary Life, Ordinary Life, September 11, 2011, Adam Zagajewski, The New Yorker, November 26, 2007 http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2007/11/26/071126po_poem_zagajewski,

Source: Lighthousekeeping

Alain Daniélou, in Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus
Context: The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which... lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life.

A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 279 (See also: Niccolò Machiavelli..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

"'It never gets any easier'" in The Guardian (23 February 2004) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/feb/23/1

Quote by Jean Renoir, in: Renoir my father, p. 96; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 24

a remark of Bazille, in the winter of 1862 – 63 during a walk with Renoir

the two painters passed a crying baby while its nurse was flirting with a soldier
1861 - 1865