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Ordinary Quotes

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Ordinary Quotes

“It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.”

Purpose Courses Asks Example Conversation Ordinary Our Society Acceptable

Author:Alain de Botton

“Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.”

Source: The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes.”

Ifs Doe Government Desire Purpose Company Records Grew Ordinary Program Phones Addresses Gaps Nsa Examining Databases Queries

Author:Barack Obama

“Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one's own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. Zen, therefore, is more than meditation and Dhyana in its ordinary sense. The discipline of Zen consists in opening the mental eye in order to look into the very reason of existence.”

Mind Looks Real Soul Reason Eye Purpose Order Nature Existence Meditation Objects Masters Buddhism Discipline Ordinary Fundamentals Insight Opening Zen Buddhism Dhyana

Book:An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

“So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness--united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable.”

Has Beens Self Feelings Purpose Friendship United Our Lives Danger Friends Ordinary Difficulty Obstacles Association Insurmountable Incompleteness

Author:Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The Red Cross in its nature, it aims and purposes, and consequently, its methods, is unlike any other organization in the country.It is an organization of physical action, of instantaneous action, at the spur of the moment; it cannot await the ordinary deliberation of organized bodies if it would be of use to suffering humanity,[ellipsis in original] it has by its nature a field of its own.”

“What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.”

“I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.”

Men Mean Two Different Used Purpose Next Animal Common Generations Information Ordinary Tradition Enjoyed Internals Transfers Heredity

Book:The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists

Source: The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists

“When you fuel up with purpose you find the excitement in the mundane, the passion in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.”

Purpose Passion Ordinary Extraordinary Everyday Excitement Fuel Mundane

Book:The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy

Source: The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy

“Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries. Earlier, there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was frenzy with a purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the doctrine of preemptive strike, also known as the United States can do whatever the hell it wants, and that's official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found, not even a little one.”

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

“The city breathing, burning, living the life thy had preserved. Ten million lives and more. If something should happen to all that life - how terrible! Nita gulped for control as she remembered Fred's word of just this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurts. Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn't control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen. Those were the side effects - not the reason, the purpose.”

“That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”

Ifs Giving Should Humans Soul Feelings Home Would Be Purpose Human Beings Kindness Ought Ordinary Capacity Vulnerable Ease Odd Complacency Ordinary Life

Author:Marilynne Robinson

“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.”

Source: The electric kool-aid acid test

“What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?" "Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire." "But, I saw-" "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind." "What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.”

Thinking Want Giving Mind Mean Doe Said Stories Purpose Forget Fire Saws Special Ordinary What You Want Smoke Storyteller

Book:Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Firsts: (The Way of Kings, Mistborn: The Final Empire, Rithmatist, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians)

Source: Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Firsts: (The Way of Kings, Mistborn: The Final Empire, Rithmatist, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians)

“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.”

Looks Enough Feelings Purpose Fear Ordinary Shame Extraordinary Vulnerability Narcissism Lenses Lovable

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

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

“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”

Source: Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)

“The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

“The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.”

Purpose Pay Attention Practice Meditation Events Bears Mindfulness Ordinary Enlightenment Extraordinary Pay Attention Ordinary Life Meditation Practice

Author:Peter Matthiessen

“Though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications. Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which startle or fatigue the imagination but they will form no familiar portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life.”

“One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms.”

People Purpose Arms Ordinary Gun Accomplish Resistance Tyrants Offense Gun Control Self Defense Right To Bear Arms Bearing Arms Gun Rights Pro Gun 2 Amendment Disarming

Book:A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States: Containing a Brief Commentary on Every Clause, Explaining the True Nature, Reasons, and Objects Thereof; Designed for the Use of School Libraries and General Readers

Source: A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States: Containing a Brief Commentary on Every Clause, Explaining the True Nature, Reasons, and Objects Thereof; Designed for the Use of School Libraries and General Readers

“The ordinary patient goes to his doctor because he is in pain or some other discomfort and wants to be comfortable again; he is not in pursuit of the ideal of health in any direct sense. The doctor on the other hand wants to discover the pathological condition and control it if he can. The two are thus to some degree at cross purposes from the first, and unless the affair is brought to an early and happy conclusion this diversion of aims is likely to become more and more serious as the case goes on.”