Top 433 Commonplace Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things which in our minds are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted to, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and commonplace are one…We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart

I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

Through TV and moving pictures a child may see more violence in thirty minutes than the average adult experiences in a lifetime. What children see on the screen is violence as an almost casual commonplace of daily living. Violence becomes the fundamental principle of society, the natural law of humanity. Killing is as common as taking a walk, a gun more natural than an umbrella. Children learn to take pride in force and to feel ashamed of ordinary sympathy. They are encouraged to forget that people have feelings.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

People used to think I was so strange because my toiletry bag used to contain so many grooming items and cosmetics and stuff. But I think it's more acceptable these day for guys to take care of themselves. I think it's becoming more commonplace, not just for sportsmen, but for all guys to take care of themselves. Taking care of yourself is a nice thing to do. It's not seen as just a girl thing anymore. You see a lot more guys at the gym taking care of themselves, and I think it's going to continue to grow.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.

Love is like magic and it always will be. For love still remains life's sweet mystery! Love works in ways that are wondrous and strange and there's nothing in life that love cannot change! Love can transform the most commonplace into beauty and splendor and sweetness and grace. Love is unselfish, understanding and kind, for it sees with its heart and not with its mind! Love is the answer that everyone seeks... Love is the language, that every heart speaks. Love can't be bought, it is priceless and free, love, like pure magic, is life's sweet mystery!

My friend had a brilliant idea. This impressed me. It reflected an immense deal of credit on his brain. But when he expressed it,it lost all value, and enjoyed but a commonplace status. My friend blamed this devaluation on the language. "I hate English," he said. So he studied another language. He mastered it so perfectly that there was no room left in his brain for a brilliant idea. Now he has a grudge against words. He refuses to use them. He prefers to shrug or grunt. A new crop of ideas is growing. They show promise of future refinement.