Beyond Usual Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to be a lead singer in a band. I can't sing. I'm almost tone deaf. I still play. Next life, rock'n'roll for sure. — Jorja Fox

It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it. — Madeleine L'Engle

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie ... — Mary Shelley

Story is important but the most important is the theme and how you're going to convey theme cinematically. I'm a believer also — Alfonso Cuaron

If we are going to do anything significant with life, we sometimes have to move away from it- beyond the usual measurements. We must occasionally follow visions and dreams. — Bede Jarrett

One of their last days in unbroken country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said, "There's your gold, Dahlia, the real article." As usual, she threw him a speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none of that shifty crew ever spoke straight - their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the "something else" really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed souls are beyond the world. She watched the invisible force at work among the million stalks tall as a horse and rider, flowing for miles under the autumn suns, greater than breath, than tidal lullabies, the necessary rhythms of a sea hidden far from any who would seek it. They — Thomas Pynchon

The ashram is where everyone lives in the same building or on the same grounds. You feel that it's selfish for you to devote your life to one person. You don't just love the one, you love the many also. — Frederick Lenz

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level. — Lev S. Vygotsky

I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another. — Georges Bataille

Lawmakers in both political parties have often acceded to unions' requests to avoid political confrontations or to curry favor. They have pushed difficult choices into the future. — Charles Duhigg

From the perspective of the consciousness disciplines, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is severely suboptimal. Rather than contradicting the Western paradigm, this perspective simply extends it beyond psychology's dominant concern, at least until very recently, with pathology and with therapies aimed at restoring people to "normal" functioning in the usual waking state of consciousness. At the heart of this "orthogonal," paradigm-breaking perspective lies the conviction that it is essential for a person to engage in a personal, intensive, and systematic training of the mind through the discipline of meditation practice to free himself or herself from the incessant and highly conditioned distortions characteristic of our everyday emotional and thought processes, distortions that, as we have seen, can continually undermine the experiencing of our intrinsic wholeness. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor. — Vivienne Westwood

The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals. — Dave Eggers

The main question to a novel is
did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not
story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing. — Sydney Smith

In the early universe - when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory - there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the "beginning" of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or our mathematics. — Stephen Hawking

To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated - I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . — Alain De Botton

The heart breaks in so many different ways that when it heals, it will have fault lines ... — John Geddes

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it. — Robert Henri

Summer night
even the stars
are whispering to each other. — Kobayashi Issa

And I have exposed myself to art so that my work has something beyond just the usual potter. — Beatrice Wood

She told me she believes that sometimes she comes close to waking; if she sits very, very still, she says she can glimpse beyond the veil; she can see and hear her family going about their usual business, oblivious to her standing on the other side, watching them. At least now I understand why the child exhibits such a profound quiet and stillness. — Kate Morton

Accept that your life is going on beyond your usual understanding. — Dainin Katagiri

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance. — James A. Baldwin

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into. — Dave Brubeck

Fortunately a human being can comprehend only a certain degree of unhappiness; anything beyond it destroys him or leaves him cold. There are situations in which fear and hope become one and the same, cancel one another out, and lose themselves in a dark insensateness. How else could we know the people we love best to be in continual danger and yet go on with our daily lives as usual? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Usually I'm frustrated when I look at my films and I don't believe that I've made a real transformation beyond my usual sets of gestures and expressions. I still have this nagging feeling that it's me, that I didn't create a unique character. — Helena Bonham Carter

The good news is the gospel of God, about Christ, according to Scripture, for the nations, unto the obedience of faith, and for the sake of the Name. — John Stott

The burning bushes, the smoking mountains, ... the Cumorahs, and the Kirtlands were realities; but they were the exceptions ... Always expecting the spectacular, many will miss entirely the constant flow of revealed communication. — Spencer W. Kimball

The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket. — Tom G. Palmer

During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question--how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told. — Hannah Arendt

Faith can cut in so many ways. If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness - that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self criticism aside. There's no reflection. — Jim Wallis

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,
for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,
do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. — Henry David Thoreau

SUCH SILENCE As deep as I ever went into the forest I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old, and around it a clearing, and beyond that trees taller and older than I had ever seen. Such silence! It really wasn't so far from a town, but it seemed all the clocks in the world had stopped counting. So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied. Sometimes there's only a hint, a possibility. What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason. I hope everyone knows that. I sat on the bench, waiting for something. An angel, perhaps. Or dancers with the legs of goats. No, I didn't see either. But only, I think, because I didn't stay long enough. — Mary Oliver

The only limits to prayer are the promises of God and His ability to fulfill those promises. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Time moves in the Amish community without leaving much of a mark. Gray hair grows on some, wrinkles crawl across the faces of others, but the buildings stay mostly the same. — Michelle Eastwood

Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers
and dreams and gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of the usual mistake. — Walt Whitman

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning. — Joseph Campbell

As a manager you know when someone is below his or her usual performance. What is harder to know is whether people are giving everything they have to give. Asking whether people are giving their best gives them the opportunity to push themselves beyond their previous limits. — Liz Wiseman

All we have is here and now. That's why procrastination feels so right. Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. — Ellen DeGeneres