Ordinary Life Quotes

There isn't any such thing as an ordinary life. (92)

Why live an ordinary life, when you can live an extraordinary one.

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

There are no ordinary lives.

When I look back on my ordinary, ordinary life, I see so much magic, though I missed it at the time.

Believing people can soar beyond ordinary life.

Be content with an ordinary life.

Nor was I the only one struggling.To live an ordinary life, like any ordinary person, must have been the vain dream of countless others.

There is no such thing as an ordinary life.

I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.

When it's time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. When you're tired, lie down. The fool will laugh at you but the wise man will understand.

Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.

Even the most ordinary life is a mystery if you look close enough.

The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.

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

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.

Ordinary life does not interest me.

No day is an ordinary day; all days are extraordinary, because life itself is extraordinary!

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension

I kind of like the idea of living a rather ordinary life as a shopkeeper, and I examine that possibility as one of the outcomes of the young Gerald Bostock growing older.

In our prayer and meditation we hope for fulfilling ordinary life.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

To live an extraordinary life, you must resist an ordinary approach.

Myths are experienced in ordinary life, as everyday epiphanies.

Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.

In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter. The split between inner and outer - subjective and objective - that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.

A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.

Each individual is unique in ordinary life. The uniqueness becomes even more sharp and clear, crystal clear, when the person becomes enlightened - because only then his pure genius, his pure individuality, uncontaminated, unpolluted, is revealed.

The relaxation should not be a method. You should not relax through a Yoga posture. This very understanding is relaxing, this very understanding is relaxation. You relax, effort disappears. You live your ordinary life - you chop wood and you carry water from the well and you cook food and you eat and you sleep and you love and you live ordinarily with no hankering and no desire for anything extraordinary.

You may have living and habitual conversation in heaven, under the aspect of the most simple, ordinary life. Remember that holiness does not consist in doing uncommon things, but in doing every thing with purity of heart.

Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.

[Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity." (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning)

Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.

You cannot change the seasons, but you can change yourself.

My benefactor said that when a man embarks on the paths of sorcery he becomes aware, in a gradual manner, that ordinary life has been forever left behind; that knowledge is indeed a frightening affair; that the means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and that he must adopt a new way of life if he is going to survive. The first thing he ought to do, at that point, is to want to become a warrior.

In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.

Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

I got a sense of the amazingness of ordinary life, and I became aware of the marvel that we're around to begin with. I visited a lot of extreme communities, like the Amish, Hasidic Jews, and serpent-handlers. And I was proud, because I think I'm the first person to ever out-Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. After four hours, he said, "Okay, I have to go."

How is your life limited by your fear? What are you not doing that you'd really like to do? When we use fear to our advantage by tackling those things that evoke a sense of excitement and trepidation, fear becomes and ally. Each experience provides a challenge and an opportunity to expand your comfort zone. The way to create an extraordinary life is to make the challenge of fear work for you by building your courage muscles.

A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow "for company." Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.

The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'things' and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion.