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21 " Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? "
― Milan Kundera , Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
22 " It's perfectly normal that extraordinary things happen to me. I'm an exceptional person. Oh, don't think I'm boasting. I mean to say that, unfortunately, I'm exceptional and that, unfortunately, I can't live by the rules. I must make my own. "
― Jean Cocteau
23 " An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made out of my past, not the elimination of that mess. "
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
24 " Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you’re a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don’t seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys. "
― Pat Conroy , A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
25 " It is 32c today, and the only thing keeping me from hanging myself is the small sense of relief Iglean from attaching my body to the vents of my delicious cooling piece. It is a stunning unit,exquisite in all its forms, exceptional in its application, and effective in all its functions. I wouldmarry it, if only I knew it would not die on me sometime within the next five years. Appliances,like obedient children or silent extroverts, cannot last forever, and while my unbidden affectionkept my other air conditioner alive for the better part of ten years, not all inanimate objects canbe fueled by my love. "
― Michelle Franklin , I Hate Summer: My tribulations with seasonal depression, anxiety, plumbers, spiders, neighbours, and the world.
26 " Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back. "
― G.K. Chesterton , What I Saw in America
27 " Both Obama and Romney ended up in the wrong place: the former thought American exceptionalism was no longer true and should be given up while the latter thought it was still true. Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again. "
― George Packer , The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
28 " If you want to lead a pleasant life, be good to yourself; if you want to lead a happy life, be good to others; and if you want to lead an exceptional life, be good to everyone. "
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29 " To be happy: the simple pursue pleasure, the common pursue riches, the uncommon pursue knowledge, and the exceptional pursue wisdom. "
30 " An exceptional Sensei has traits such as patience and integrity. Otherwise, natural fighting ability, cruelty and aggressive behavior may be observed in most animal predators. "
― Soke Behzad Ahmadi , CHOKI MOTOBU Original MMA Fighter
31 " [Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, " Where is he? Where is he?" " Where is who?" " The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. " There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, " a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such." But Tolstoy saw differently. " Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. " The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war).The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions. "
32 " An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made, not the elimination of it. "
33 " Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. "
― Haruki Murakami , Norwegian Wood
34 " The " show business," which is so incorporated into our view of Christian work today, has caused us to drift far from Our Lord's conception of discipleship. It is instilled in us to think that we have to do exceptional things for God; we have not. We have to be exceptional in ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, surrounded by sordid sinners. That is not learned in five minutes. "
35 " Every exceptional bias against Christianity I find to be evidence for its validity. "
― Criss Jami , Healology
36 " Humility is the greatest shaper of souls and crafter of character, for it wipes away all the grandiose things that we spend so much of our lives pretending to be, so that we can spend all of our lives being the exceptional person that we were actually created to be. "
37 " What separates those who build exceptional lives from others, is the way they use their time. "
― , Why Sell Tacos in Africa?: 16 life-changing business strategies you can use anywhere, from the man who turned $400 into $200 million
38 " ...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing… "
― Primo Levi , Survival in Auschwitz
39 " The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it. "
― Gregory David Roberts , Shantaram
40 " The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative —not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury —strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. "
― Friedrich Nietzsche , The Will to Power
