Top 1200 Ordinary Men Quotes & Sayings

Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.

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.

Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

An ordinary Turk, an ordinary Arab, an ordinary Tunisian can change history. We believe that democracy is good, and that our people deserve it.

Great men are ordinary men with extra ordinary determination.

I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.

Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.

But alas, the most terrifying aspect of the whole fascist episode is the dark fact that most of its poisons are generated not by evil men or evil peoples, but by quite ordinary men in search of an answer to the baffling problems that beset every society.

Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

There are no great men, only ordinary men, who have met extraordinary challenges.

Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.

Illegitimacy is important for the socialisation of little girls and especially little boys. If you have large numbers of young men growing up who never see an adult male doing the ordinary things men do, then you get chaos. This is not a moral statement, it's an empirical statement.

Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

Men of genius are often considered superstitious, but the fact is, the fineness of their nerve renders them more alive to the supernatural than ordinary men.

You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.

To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.

That which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in. and the best of me is diligence.

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.

I think some people are not interesting to themselves. They're the sad, resigned folk. When people call themselves ordinary - "I'm just an ordinary person" - you do wonder what they mean, because people who call themselves ordinary occasionally turn out to be serial killers. Beware of those who say they're ordinary.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

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.

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.

Great men are just ordinary men that didn't quit.

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.

Great men simplify great principles and make them easily intelligible to ordinary men

It takes no effort to be ordinary. Ordinary is not even a challenge. You can do nothing and be ordinary.

Great men are little men expanded; great lives are ordinary lives intensified.

It is best for ordinary men to have only one wife !

Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are much more accessible. They are men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God's 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.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

I sometimes hear preachers speak of the sad condition of men who live without God in the world, but a scientist who lives without God in the world seems to me worse off than ordinary men.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

Ordinary men died, men of iron were taken prisoner: I only brought back with me men of bronze.

The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest.

There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.

Though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications. Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which startle or fatigue the imagination but they will form no familiar portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life.

Tom Hanks has built his career playing ordinary men.

Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.

Choice word and measured phrase above the reach Of ordinary men.

A wound that’d make an ordinary man unconscious, I won’t lose to it. A wound that would kill an ordinary person, I won’t lose to it! To face one who is extraordinary, Hawk Eyes - I can’t allow myself to be ordinary!

For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed.

There aren't any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.

The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.

To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know.

I wouldn't say Musashi is ordinary. But he is. That's what's extraordinary about him. He is not content to rely on whatever natural gifts he may have. Knowing he is ordinary, he is constantly trying to improve himself. No one appreciates the agonizing effort he's had to make. Now that his years of training have yielded such spectacular results, everybody's talking about his 'God-given talent.' That's how men who don't try very hard comfort themselves.