Anyone who’s read my book Same Old, Same New: The Consolation of the Ordinary will know that it’s full of quotes.
Ever since I published this book last spring, I’ve continued to collect sayings from other authors who have expressed my main idea: the extraordinariness of ordinariness, or the beauty and significance of ordinary things. Here is a selection of new quotes, which those of you who own my book may wish to print and tuck inside it.
“When you love what you have, you have everything you need.” -A.A. Milne
To find enlightenmnet, “you do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” -Franz Kafka
“We don’t really appreciate how miraculous it is just to be alive, to be something that came from nothing. We wonder whether aliens or other worlds exist, but the really unusual thing, the really alien thing, is the life we have.” -Matt Haig
“When you can worship the divinity of life in the rustle of a leaf or the curve of a baby’s cheek, there is no point in ambition. You have already attained to all that there is.” -Elizabeth Goudge
“To divide the holy from the common is a totally false distinction once you understand that everything is a sign of the presence of God.” -Michael Mayne
“We need nothing but open eyes to be ravished like the Cherubim.” -Thomas Traherne
“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” -Isaac Newton
“If you look long enough at anything it will become extremely interesting.” -Delmore Schwartz
“If you can see, for a moment, one flower, one face, one dog, as they are in themselves, you have begun to be free enough to love.” -Andrew Harvey
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” -G.K. Chesterton
“The spiritual life has not so much to do with the supernatural as with realizing what’s going on all the time.” -Eugene Peterson
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” -Albert Einstein
“I saw Eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in a pair of flannel trousers.” -Aldous Huxley
“Right now counts forever.” -R.C. Sproul
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent
Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love.
~Sylvia Plath, from “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”
Next Post: The New Me: Light on Romans 7 & 8
