I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.
The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.
Man is in need if a symbolical life- badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational or irrational things- but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life
The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God.
Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
God doesn’t care what you’re not. He cares who you are. You are His, you come from the Master, and when He adds His extra to your ordinary and His super to your natural, nothing is impossible for you.
If it were possible to transfer the methods of physical or of biological science directly to the study of man, the transfer would long ago have been made. . . We have failed not for lack of hypotheses which equate man with the rest of the universe, but for lack of a hypothesis (short of animism) which provides for the peculiar divergence of man. . . Let me now state my belief that the peculiar factor in man which forbids our explaining his actions upon the ordinary plane of biology is a highly specialized and unstable biological complex, and that this factor is none other than language.
Successful people do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency, commitment and focus.
The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
In a certain sense, all true leaders are heroes. Heroes are ordinary people who are given being and action by something bigger than themselves. . . . . . Each of us must make the personal choice to be a hero or not, to be committed to something bigger than ourselves or not, to go beyond the way we “wound up being” and have the purpose of our lives and our careers be about something that makes a difference or not, in other words, to be a leader or not.
What may appear as a towering peak to one may seem but an ordinary eminence to another.
When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.
A day can start out ordinary and end up being in the top ten. —Joe Bunch
Faith has to be exercised in the midst of ordinary, down-to-earth living.
This was no ordinary UFO. Scores of people saw it. It was no illusion, no deception, no imagination.
An expert is an ordinary fellow from another town.
What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different.
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.