Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls – the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book ‘Everyday Stalinism,’ called ‘ordinary life in extraordinary times.’
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
I look at ordinary objects, and I see things that other people don’t see. That’s why I’m a photographer.
It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice.
Being able to walk out of the studio after a week of intense recording and jump into a cold sea and sit in a hot spring and soak for a few hours completely resets the whole system. Really refreshing. For me, it’s all about stepping out of the ordinary. Even psychically.
When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.
Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.
We could try and establish a world in which the great and the powerful adhere to that international law which they require ordinary mortals to adhere to. In other words, there is one international law, and even America and even Russia and China and Japan must adhere to it, and Australia must adhere to it.
The three ordinary things that we often don’t pay enough attention to, but which I believe are the drivers of all success, are hard work, perseverance, and basic honesty.
When I speak of drama, I’m really referring to just ‘desperately trying not to be ordinary’. Trying to get something that has a little bit of friction, conflict, absurdity.
Architects today tend to depreciate themselves, to regard themselves as no more than just ordinary citizens without the power to reform the future.
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
Frankly that’s what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don’t think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.
For me, the difference between an ‘ordinary’ and an ‘extraordinary’ person is not the title that person might have, but what they do to make the world a better place for us all.
Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
There is a huge reservoir of support for abortion rights from ordinary women. I hear all the time from women who had abortions and say it made possible the good life they went on to have. Social shaming silences too many.
I can be very ordinary looking.
My character should not be ordinary, cliched, and if I feel that it’s difficult to do this character, I take up that challenge to get into his character.
Spirituality is no different from what we’ve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It’s just ordinary stuff.
Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are not superhuman. They are ordinary people with ordinary frailties. But therein lies the power of their example.
I came out, as not enough of our stories are told from our perspective. ‘Marie Claire’ was offering the chance to be a part of a women’s magazine, which often celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.
I’ve turned from an ordinary Australian housewife into a gigastar, icon, talk-show host, swami, spin doctor… and now I’m a style guru!
I like examining the ordinary, and by doing so, one hopefully reveals the extraordinary nature within.
The cinema should be human and be part of people’s lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.
I’ve always known that I’m very, very ordinary looking. But I’m not alien looking. I am an artist here to play characters.
Because I’m just an ordinary person that did some extraordinary things.
An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star’s life.
I am a simple, ordinary mother.
I consider myself an ordinary person.
My healthcare plan puts more money into average families’ pockets than the Bush tax cuts… He’s got a lousy tax cut. It’s only good for the super wealthy. I’ve got a tax cut that will help ordinary people.
‘Ordinary Grace’ freed me. I don’t have to write only Cork O’Connor novels now. I’m liberated. I can write whatever I want to write.
Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life.
The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle.
‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
No one is ever ordinary.
What is attained by a developed thinking is not visions but spiritual sight of realities; what is attained by a developed will is not ordinary soul-experiences but the discovery of a consciousness different from the ordinary.
I’m not a star, and I don’t want to be a star. Stars fall. I’m an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job.
Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations.
The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.
The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.
We’re all pretty ordinary on paper.
It is all around us, hidden in plain sight. It is walking our streets, supplying shops and supermarkets, working in fields, factories or nail bars, trapped in brothels or cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary street: slavery.
I just want to go to university and have fun – I want to be an ordinary student. I’m only going to university. It’s not like I’m getting married – though that’s what it feels like sometimes.
Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what’s special in ordinary things.
At the very least, my tastes are out of the ordinary.
Readers probably haven’t heard much about it yet, but they will. Quantum technology turns ordinary reality upside down.
I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent I was given. I believed in myself, and I believe in the goodness of others.
You can enjoy the quality of the ad and not let them pressure you to buy what you don’t really need. I have had fun taking back superlatives and just ordinary good words and phrases from ads and trying to restore some of their life to them.
At school, either gymnastics or dance, it was the same. It gave me pleasure to move. And then, when I worked to achieve something new and out of the ordinary, it made me feel good. I felt I had surpassed myself.
I do a film because at that particular moment, I want to make a film. It is my attempt at moving away from the ordinary.
There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.
We shall not be happy unless we live like good animals, unless we enjoy the exercise of the ordinary functions of life: eating, sleeping, loving, walking, running, swimming, riding, sailing.
