I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.
If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.
If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much.
I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday - the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden richness - is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.
When you are so full that there is no emptiness in you, that you have started feeling the significance of the ordinary, day-to-day existence, when moment to moment you live totally, intensely, passionately, then God is available.
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
Sometimes during the day, I consciously focus on some ordinary object and allow myself a momentary "paying-attention." This paying-attention gives meaning to my life. I don't know who it was, but someone said that careful attention paid to anything is a window into the universe. Pausing to think this way, even for a brief moment, is very important. It gives quality to my day.
Dream big & have huge ambition, but never forget life is lived in small moments and sustained by simple acts of love.
One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand-to see that heaven lies about us here in this world.
It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees extraordinariness. it's not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way.
Everything has the potential to be extraordinary, whether an old photograph, a book or a life. If you find it ordinary, you simply need to take a closer look.
Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
The simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.
The most interesting lessons often lie in the mundane - those aspects of everyday life that locals take for granted and tourists tend to overlook.
He has no idea how beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.
I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.
This is the great challenge: to maintain passion for the everyday routine and the endlessly repeated act, to derive deep gratification from the mundane.
It's the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is.
