Famous quotes containing the word ordinary:
“The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The ordinary man—we have to face it: it is every bit as true of the ordinary Englishman as of the ordinary American—is an Anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)