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

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

The idea of the extraordinary happening in the context of the ordinary is what's fascinating to me.
Chris Van Allsburg

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

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
Christopher Reeve

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
Michel de Montaigne

I can't believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.
Lou Holtz

I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.
Aleister Crowley

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
Aleister Crowley

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
Aleister Crowley

The government I led gave ordinary people peace, security, dignity, and opportunity to progress.
Benazir Bhutto

But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't.
David Hockney

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
Warren G. Bennis

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.
Dylan Thomas

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Joan Didion

Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.
William Ames

The ordinary ministry is that which receives all of its direction from the will of God revealed in the Scriptures and from those means which God has appointed in the church for its continual edification.
William Ames

The two designs are completely different. The first is totally futuristic, the second is more classical. You can of course get very excited about doing something completely out of the ordinary, just like the Olympic stadium in its time. But each to his or her own taste.
Franz Beckenbauer