Ordinary Man quotes:

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The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference. -- Henry Miller
Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. -- Ezra Pound
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript. -- Aleister Crowley
I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances. -- Nelson Mandela
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist. -- Erich Fromm
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light. -- George Steiner
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. -- Elbert Hubbard
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. -- Loren Eiseley
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. -- George Orwell
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. -- Muhammad Ali
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. -- Augustine Birrell
The ordinary man considers solids and liquids and the energy manifestations of the material world to be vastly different, but the yogi sees them as various vibrations of the one cosmic light. -- Paramahansa Yogananda
I idolize Gene Hackman. He is not a natural star, not an incandescent personality like Jack Nicholson, but he makes luminous the problems of being an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. -- Brian Dennehy
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes. -- John le Carre
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous. -- Graham Greene
A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man. -- Emilio Estevez
Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world. -- Augustine Birrell
It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one. -- Pope Francis
Be assured, he is not an ordinary man. -- George Meade
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. -- John Fowles
Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason. -- Graham Greene
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality. -- D. H. Lawrence
Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse. -- Friedrich Schiller
The mind of an ordinary man is truly near the heart. -- Sri Aurobindo
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, -- George Herbert
War, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary. -- Philip Caputo
War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary. -- Philip Caputo
True art is the intermediary between man's ordinary nature and his higher potentialities. -- E. F. Schumacher
I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion. -- Kate Chopin
An ordinary man gets arrogant with beauty, conceited with knowledge and ruthless with power. -- Amit Kalantri
A great man may not do great things but they do ordinary things greatly. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality. -- William Hazlitt
A genius does what he masters. An ordinary man tries to master what he does. -- Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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For a man who is in love with the existence, nothing is ordinary in life! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent I was given. -- Muhammad Ali
An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary. -- Adyashanti
The scientific nature of the ordinary man is to go out and do the best you can. -- John Prine
A man will blithely do in politics what he would kick a man downstairs for in ordinary life. -- Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery
All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head. -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour. -- William Stanley Jevons
Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man." -- Albert Camus
I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man. -- Albert Camus
To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man. -- Anton Chekhov
The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
When one sees that everything exists as an illusion, one can live in a higher sphere than ordinary man. -- Gautama Buddha
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes. -- John le Carre
For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of criss-crossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible. -- Philip Kapleau
Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood. -- Joseph Addison
I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child. -- Joseph Campbell
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. -- George Orwell
Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them. -- John Dall
In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man. -- Giorgio Agamben
I originally thought I'd be an ordinary business man, but I really like art, so that's how I became a manga artist. -- Hiroyuki Takei
The ordinary air fighter is an extraordinary man and the extraordinary air fighter stands as one in a million among his fellows. -- Theodore Roosevelt
The job is interesting, and the task is difficult, but the man [Maigret] is just a decent man doing a very ordinary job. -- Rowan Atkinson
A small room is enough; a small quantity of food is enough; a few clothes are enough; one lover, a very ordinary man -- Rajneesh
I am the image maker, I am the magic maker, I can turn the most ordinary man in the world into a star. -- Ray Davies
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh. -- Georg C. Lichtenberg
If you want the extra-ordinary, you've got to be willing to forsake the ordinary' - Annie Grimes in Mr Alhourani's Dead Man's Spots -- D.M. Lee
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual. -- Thomas Mann
Without seeing the origin of light, the true form of one's Self, the ordinary man sees by the mind different things and is deluded. -- Ramana Maharshi
The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog. -- W. E. B. Du Bois
A democracy without faith is just a machine without power. Nothing can make it function except faith in itself, in the ordinary man and woman. -- Eleanor Dark
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual. -- Thomas Mann
For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. -- Joseph Campbell
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. -- Cheryl Strayed
I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man's life, don't you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful. -- Philip K. Dick
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man. -- E. B. White
The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does. -- Harpo Marx
I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation. -- William Graham Sumner
The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Any ordinary man can...surround himself with two thousand books...and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. -- Augustine Birrell
General Taylor is, I have no doubt, a well-meaning old man. He is, however, uneducated, exceedingly ignorant of public affairs, and I should judge, of very ordinary capacity. -- James K. Polk
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy. -- Augustine Birrell
The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one. -- Anna Quindlen
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. -- Henry David Thoreau
Country music turns the stuff we say every day into a soundtrack...taking an ordinary working man like me into that rough, happy country of longnecks and short tales. -- Jay Heinrichs
Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs. -- William Osler
The difference between a great soul and an ordinary man is this: the latter weeps while leaving this body, whereas the former laughs. Death seems to him a mere play. -- Sarada Devi
The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle. -- Andre Malraux
The decision to do it [play Maigret] was related to the fact that the character is a very ordinary man, and generally speaking I haven't played very many ordinary men. -- Rowan Atkinson
Work for god, love god alone, and be wise with god. When an ordinary man puts the necessary rime and enthusiasm into meditation and prayer, he becomes a divine man. -- Paramahansa Yogananda
A celebrity starts being a cele-crazy when he's seen often, he's just like the ordinary man in the streets. Without much ado to shout his name, i go my way. -- Michael Bassey Johnson
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse. -- Carlos Castaneda
If paparazzi armed with telephoto lenses have long been the scourge of the rich and famous; civilian drones are fast becoming the new menace to the ordinary man on the street. -- Alex Morritt
If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself! -- Idries Shah
The refusal of King George to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution. -- Benjamin Franklin
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality--same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under. -- D. H. Lawrence

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