Ordinary People Quotes

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them.”
― J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

“Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“I don't think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“He hangs on now, pressing his hand lightly against the wall, below the window, waiting for the familiar arrow of pain. Only there is none. An oddly pleasant swell of memory, a wave of warmth flooding over him, sliding back, slowly. It is a first”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“People use people according to their own needs. Or don't use them. When a primary need is one of safety.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“That's the funny thing about life. Extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people like you and me, but only if we open ourselves up enough to let them.”
― Mike Gayle, All the Lonely People

“But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“The opinions, eloquence and articulacy of the man or woman on the street can often be as invaluable as precious stones”
― Karl Wiggins, Dogshit Saved My Life

“Ordinary people listen to a huge amount of nonsense that they would be better off without.”
― Jonas Karlsson, The Room

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like [Frederick] Douglass, [Harriet] Tubman, and [Harriet] Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.

In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Simple things are the most difficult ones; they enquire much more than one thought of ordinariness.”
― Laura Chouette

“To define a person or people as ordinary is a fallacy, for to breathe, think, choose, and love is anything but ordinary… on the contrary, people are extraordinary. It is those things and situations we encounter that can be ordinary.”
― Nanette L. Avery

“In a world of the ordinary and predictable, be a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“And I want that - to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I don't want to be a phenomenon...... I want to
be a quite normal and ordinary woman.”
― Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: The First Sex Change

“Most ordinary people ... want to do their jobs, love their people, and live in peace with others. Add kindness to the mix and you have a picture of beauty. I may be different to you, believe differently from what you do, speak a different language to your home language, or have a different bank balance to yours, but when I act kindly toward you, I am bridging a divide between your world and mine.”
― Basil Sparks, FINDING MY LOST VOICE: By Acting Justly, Loving Kindness and Walking Humbly with God

“These “witches” with their feline friends, pictured often as evil creatures of the night, were not the haggard, worn, and crooked nosed demonic evil creatures of myth nor were they pointed hat wearing broom riders. They were not cursed spinsters of the night riding phallic symbols with a black cat on their tail end. Neither were they Charmed Ones with misunderstood powers that were unjustly hunted for having said powers.

These were merchants with families, friends, and businesses that were most likely in their community for years before the events. They were not “synagogues of Satan” nor Satan worshipers at all.

They were often the elderly women, besides merchants, that were many times Christian in faith. Women who were midwives, herbalists, healers that helped their communities when they were needed to ease pain and suffering. They were also pagans, non-Judeo-Christian religionists, and were like their other counterparts and helpers of their communities. These were good people, ordinary people.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“If you walk into an ordinary street and talk to ordinary people on an ordinary day, your day turns into an extraordinary day when you realize how extraordinary those people actually are!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“One of life's most surprising journeys is the journey in which we discover that the people we label as ordinary are in reality extremely extraordinary!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“I'm just an ordinary person."

That, of course, was exactly the appeal of this story. How, indeed, had God been able to use a fellow, with a bad back, a limited education, no sponsorship and no funds, to do things that well-connected, well-endowed people said were impossible? For us and other ordinary people, that was what made Brother Andrew's adventures so intriguing.”
― Brother Andrew, God's Smuggler

“Simple things are found in ordinariness - but extraordinary things live inside things that are loved.”
― Laura Chouette

“Simple things are found in ordinariness - but extraordinary things live inside love.”
― Laura Chouette

“He was an ordinary man. And believe me, there is little on God’s green earth more ordinary or tedious than ordinary men doing monstrous things for tedious reasons.”
― E.F. Coleman, immechanica

“The greatest stories aren’t always written. They’re plucked from the everyday lives of ordinary people.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected

“The military is full of ordinary people from all walks of life doing extraordinary things while facing potential danger and looking death in the eyes”
― Benjamin A. Saunders