Ordinary Quotes

Men who neglect philosophy while busying themselves with ordinary affairs are like the Suitors [in the Odyssey] who desired Penelope but went to bed with her maids.

Whenever, then, the usual and ordinary rate of the profits of agricultural stock, and all the outgoings belonging to the cultivation of land, are together equal to the value of the whole produce, there can be no rent.

I think a repressive regime always fears people who are awakened – particularly ordinary people. If they are awakened, I think governments all over the world feel uncomfortable about that; they want to be in control.

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

There are no ordinary cats.

The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.

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.

The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal – a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.

Ordinary men, to whom all things are possible, don’t often, if ever, think of Heaven. It is a name, and nothing more, and they are content to wait and let things be, but to those who are doomed to be shut out for ever you cannot think what it means.

A clown needn’t be the same out of the ring as he has to be when he’s in it. If you look at photographs of clowns when they’re just being ordinary men, they’ve got quite sad faces.