Quotes about ordinary
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“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

Anaïs Nin book Incest: From a Journal of Love

July 7, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Variant: Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Source: Incest: From a Journal of Love
Context: I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Life, Way

“It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Life, Death, Family, Dreams

“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Men, Drink, Knowledge, Science

“Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.”

James Allen book As a Man Thinketh

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Serenity
Source: As a Man Thinketh

Wisdom, Law, Beauty, Knowledge

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”

Harvey Pekar (1939–2010) writer

Life

“An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.”

Augustine Birrell (1850–1933) British politician

Happiness, Books, World

“A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives…”

Jonathan Kozol (1936) American activist and educator

Source: Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

People, Dreams

“Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Google this: Jean Vanier and what it means to be human http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-briggs/google-this-jean-vanier-a_b_7484702.html Huffington Post, 02/06/2015 <br class="br">From interviews and talks <br class="br">Source: Community And Growth

Love

“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

Source: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World

Time, Forgetting

“Just an ordinary in a world that loves the extra ordinary.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Variant: He was ordinary in a world that loved the extraordinary.
Source: The Last Song

Love, World

“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”

John Fowles book The Collector

Source: The Collector

Hate, People

“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.”

Jimmy Johnson (1928) American Chicago blues guitarist and singer

Motivational, Deep, Success, Inspirational

“There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Personality

“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"The Idea of Equality"
Source: Proper Studies (1927)

Men, Time

“The kids kept walking, moving through the Henley's halls like a tide, but when Kat turned to leave, she walked in the opposite directions. She wasn't an ordinary kid, after all.
Katarina Bishop followed no one.”

Ally Carter book Heist Society

Source: Heist Society

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Das Naturgesetz und die Struktur der Materie (1967), as translated in Natural Law and the Structure of Matter (1981), p. 34

Mathematics, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“We ordinary people might lack your great speed or your X-Ray vision, Superman, but never underestimate the power of the human mind. We carry the most dangerous weapon on Earth inside these thick skulls of ours.”

Mark Millar book Superman: Red Son

Source: Superman: Red Son

People, Speed

“A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

Source: Under a Glass Bell

Love

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 151

Men

“I wasn’t a nerd, mind you, but I’d spent a lot of my youth studying Epics, so I’d had limited experience with social interaction. I mixed with ordinary people about the same way that a bucket of paint mixed with a bag of gerbils.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: Firefight

People, Youth, Way, Study

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Life, Search

“And truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and wish to do it anyway, here lies the error and the blame.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

Men, Error, Nature

“It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter

“The crazy people of the world… shouldn't get to win. If God won't make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

God, People, World, Victory

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

Gilles Deleuze book Dialogues

Source: Dialogues

Way

“If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!”

Idries Shah book Reflections

Source: Reflections

Money, Happiness, Thinking

“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

“Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.”

Jasper Fforde book The Eyre Affair

Source: The Eyre Affair

Children

“How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.”

Henry Rollins book Black Coffee Blues

Source: Black Coffee Blues

Lie, Memory, Time, Heart

“people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They’re with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.”

Christina Baker Kline (1964) American writer

Source: Orphan Train

People

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Women, Men, Marriage, Appearance

“Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Secret Life of Prince Charming

Truth, Fools, Feeling

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things… as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Life, Forgetting

“I welcome each new day with a hopeful expectancy that I, too, will rise above the ordinary. For I am not content to live a merely "normal" life or settle for an average existence. No, I am destined for more--much, much more.”

Melody Carlson (1956) American writer

Source: Finding Alice

Life, Hope

“Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.”

Frank Portman King Dork

Source: King Dork

Understanding

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Fear, Feeling, Sense

“If you want to lead an extraordinary life, find out what the ordinary do–and don't do it.”

Tommy Newberry American writer

Source: Success is Not an Accident: Change Your Choices Change Your Life

Life

“Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.”

Robin McKinley (1952) American fantasy writer

Source: Pegasus

Night

“Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they'd sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes.”

Walter Moers (1957) German comic creator and author

Time

“Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Way, Girl, Boy, Idea

“She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Variant: She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Love, Time

“We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.”

Brad Meltzer (1970) writer

Dependency

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Life, Change

“The ordinary can be like medicine.”

Sherman Alexie book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Source: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

People

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Time

“I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 5.
Context: I resolved passionately to reach the spiritual causes of phenomena, and to dominate the material world which I detested by their means. I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.

Sense, Personality

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Courageous

“I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them.”

Christopher Reeve (1952–2004) actor, director, producer, screenwriter

Still Me (1999); also quoted at the Christopher Reeve Foundation http://www.christopherreeve.org/site/c.geIMLPOpGjF/b.1097025/k.6FF5/Christopher_and_Dana_Reeve.htm <br class="br">Context: When the first Superman movie came out, I gave dozens of interviews to promote it. The most frequent question was: What is a hero? My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences. Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them.

Family, Thinking, Perseverance

“The most ordinary things could be made extraordinary.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Lucky One

Variant: Even the most ordinary things can be made extraordinary simply by doing it with the right people.
Source: The Lucky One

Friendship

“We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Love, God

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Forgetting

“I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Life, Courage, Thinking

“Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary.”

Lisa See book Shanghai Girls

Source: Shanghai Girls

“With you, my life felt indeed like a fantastic adventure - despite our ordinary circumstances, your love imbued everything we did with secret riches.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

Love, Life, Secret

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Study, Learning, Reading, Personality

“Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Variant: Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything.
Source: City of Heavenly Fire

World, Soul