Home / Topics / Ordinary Quotes

Ordinary Quotes

Browse 3099 quotes about Ordinary.

Ordinary Quotes

“Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.”

Trying Heart Artist Break Ordinary Satisfying Quietness Break Your Heart

Author:Robert Rauschenberg

“the solution to racism lies in our ability to see its ubiquity but not to concede its inevitability. It lies in the collective and institutional power to make change, at least as much as with the individual will to change. It also lies in the absolute moral imperative to break the childish, deadly circularity of centuries of blindness to the shimmering brilliance of our common, ordinary humanity.”

Source: Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race

“Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.”

Thinking Writing Spiritual Break Our Lives Seeing Mystery Ordinary Understood Gains Concerned Sensual Intimacy Borders Divided Buoys

Author:Kevin Hart

“It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.”

“Organization is simply the means by which the acts of ordinary men can be made to add up to extraordinary results. To this idea of progress that does not wait on some lucky break, some chance discovery, or some rare stroke of genius, but instead is achieved through systematic, cumulative effort, the engineer has contributed brilliantly.”

“If you have free universal health care and free education supported by public school taxes, then you have more bargaining power with your bosses, but if everything is privatized, and ordinary Americans have to pay for everything through their wages, then they're at the mercy of their employers. If the workers know they'll be ruined if they lost their jobs, they're not going to be uppity. You want to break their spirit.”

“A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.”

Ifs Way Want Kind Character Helping Able Realizing Interesting Break Citizens Ordinary Bounds Population Definitions Available Criminals Unpredictable Paradoxical Ordinary Citizens

Author:William Monahan

“I invented a camera that has an exposure time of one hundred years and the camera works in the simplest possible terms, because anything more complicated is more likely to break down in one way or another. It's a pinhole camera that lets in very low light and instead of exposing film, which is going to spoil within a matter of days or weeks, I'm using ordinary black paper.”

Way Years Matter Light Film Black Term Break Week Paper Lows Ordinary Hundred Cameras Complicated One Way Breaking Down Simplest Exposure Spoil Exposing

Author:Jonathon Keats

“It's the people who work hard and earn big that keep the machine tipping for everybody else. If everybody else was equal down the bottom rung of a ladder, nobody would be on the ladder at all because it would break and everybody would fall off backwards. So you need people at the top to help pull those people up from the bottom. You can't take that and swing to the right. You can't have everybody living in the same ordinary $60,000 house because you may as well live in Russia, Bulgaria or some other Eastern block Communist nation.”

People Ifs Needs Wells May Hard Helping Bigs Would Be Fall House Nations Break Hard Work Equal Ordinary Machines Bottom Russia Block Communist Swings Backwards Eastern Ladders Tipping Bulgaria

Author:Robin Leach

“Obama is not the messiah any longer. He is now your standard, ordinary, everyday politician who lies, who breaks promises, who's in it for himself, who can't do anything on his own. He's not qualified. All of this is becoming known, sadly, too late.”

Lying Known Break Becoming Politician Promise Late Standards Ordinary Everyday Too Late Qualified Messiah

Author:Rush Limbaugh

“His [Death] voice is cold at first, John. It seems unfeeling. But if you listen without fear, you find that when he speaks, the most ordinary words become poetry. When he stands close to you, your life becomes a song, a praise. When he touches you, your smallest talents become gold; the most ordinary loves break your heart with their beauty.”

Ifs Firsts Heart Seems Song Speak Voice Break Talent Cold Ordinary Gold Praise Smallest Break Your Heart Unfeeling Ordinary Love

Author:Martine Leavitt

“It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God had made one in the first creation.”

Source: Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World

“To some extent, this urge to break out of the ordinary is present in every generation. Part of being young is desiring something beyond everyday life and a secure job, a yearning for something really truly greater. Is this simply an empty dream that fades away as we become older? No! Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough.”

“As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.”

Men Life Ideas Philosophy Break Practice Wise Feet Example Laughter Ordinary Affair Clouds Philosopher Useless Measuring Ordinary Life Fleas Oracles Humming Break Off Marveling Midges

Author:Desiderius Erasmus