ordinary quotes

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.