If I'm half as good as everybody said I am, I'm far too good to be wasting time with ordinary people. But I seem to be spending my life with ordinary people, who are the best people in the world.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the value of appreciating ordinary people despite one's greatness.
Stan Lee expresses a duality in his view of self-worth and the people around him. While he acknowledges a certain level of greatness that others attribute to him, he ultimately finds fulfillment and worth in the company of 'ordinary' people, recognizing them as the most valuable in the world. This observation highlights the importance of connection and relatability over status.
In practice
A motivational speech about valuing relationships over status.
To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
I wanted them to be diverse. The whole underlying principle of the X-Men was to try to be an anti-bigotry story to show there's good in every person.
America is made of different races and different religions, but we're all co-travelers on the spaceship Earth and must respect and help each other along the way.
My mother was the greatest mother in the world. She thought I was the greatest thing on two feet. I'd come home with a little composition I had written at school, and she'd look at it and say, 'It's wonderful! You're another Shakespeare!' I always assumed I could do anything. It really is amazing how much that has to do with your attitude.
For years, kids have been asking me what's the greatest superpower. I always say luck. If you're lucky, everything works. I've been lucky.
Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance.
My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism.
I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there's such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can't imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don't believe there is room for all of it. I really don't.
I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.
We used to think that aging was a lot like, as if we were cars made fresh and youthful and then we've entered this breakdown in diet. What we didn't realize until recently is that we're much more complex than a car. We fix ourselves if we're broken.
She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.
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