Best 347 quotes in «mediocrity quotes» category

I have talked with many pastors whose real struggle isn’t first with the hardship of ministry, the lack of appreciation and involvement of people, or difficulties with fellow leaders. No, the real struggle they are having, one that is very hard for a pastor to admit, is with God. What is caused to ministry become hard and burdensome is disappointment and anger at God. We have forgotten that pastoral ministry is war and that you will never live successfully in the pastorate if you live with the peacetime mentality. Permit me to explain. The fundamental battle of pastoral ministry is not with the shifting values of the surrounding culture. It is not the struggle with resistant people who don't seem to esteem the Gospel. It is not the fight for the success of ministries of the church. And is not the constant struggle of resources and personnel to accomplish the mission. No, the war of the pastor is a deeply personal war. It is far on the ground of the pastor’s heart. It is a war values, allegiances, and motivations. It's about the subtle desires and foundational dreams. This war is the greatest threat to every pastor. Yet it is a war that we often naïvely ignore or quickly forget in the busyness of local church ministry. When you forget the Gospel, you begin to seek from the situations, locations and relationships of ministry what you already have been given in Christ. You begin to look to ministry for identity, security, hope, well-being, meeting, and purpose. These things are already yours in Christ. In ways of which you are not always aware, your ministry is always shaped by what is in functional control of your heart. The fact of the matter is that many pastors become awe numb or awe confused, or they get awe kidnapped. Many pastors look at glory and don't seek glory anymore. Many pastors are just cranking out because they don't know what else to do. Many pastors preach a boring, uninspiring gospel that makes you wonder why people aren't sleeping their way through it. Many pastors are better at arguing fine points of doctrine than stimulating divine wonder. Many pastors see more stimulated by the next ministry, vision of the next step in strategic planning than by the stunning glory of the grand intervention of grace into sin broken hearts. The glories of being right, successful, in control, esteemed, and secure often become more influential in the way that ministry is done than the awesome realities of the presence, sovereignty, power, and love of God. Mediocrity is not a time, personnel, resource, or location problem. Mediocrity is a heart problem. We have lost our commitment to the highest levels of excellence because we have lost our awe.

I'll be honest with you, the number one reason for all of my past break ups was too much complacency. I'm not perfect, but I just know I'm not cut out for mediocrity in any shape or form. Moreover, I think this has a lot to do with my life purpose as well. I believe I was not brought into this world to turn complacent women into passionate women, but rather to turn passionate women into goddesses.

I made a big mistake, and I didn’t use it to make my life better. I used it to be okay with a life less lived. I used it to be okay with mediocrity and the mundane. And I didn’t make myself any better because of it. And that’s not okay with me.

Incrementalism guarantees mediocrity

I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.

In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best beside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance. Yet there remains one sort of political prestige that may still be worn with a certain pathetic dignity; it is that given to the liberal-minded leader of a party of conflicting doctrinaire extremists. His dignity is that of all doomed men: for, whether the two extremes proceed to mutual destruction or whether one of them prevails, doomed he is, either to suffer the hatred of the people or to die a martyr.

Individual talent is an obstruction principally among teams that employ the facade of a synergy to diminish the majorities mediocrity.

In the faculty of failure, mediocrity is never an optional course!

I sat down and found half a dead cigar in the ashtray. I lit it up, took a drag, gagged. Tried it again. Not too bad.

I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.

It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.

It is a belief of the mediocre that extreme effort kills.

It's because I haven't courage,' said Samuel. 'I could never quite take the responsibility. When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called his name - but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It's not an uncommon disease. But it's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.' 'I'd think there are degrees of greatness,' Adam said. 'I don't think so,' said Samuel. 'That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other - cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He's suffering over the choosing right now. It's a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn't that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.

it is not only what we have that enhance our dignity but what we do with what we have also magnifies our reputation to the highest level

I trust that you are aware that today’s success is tomorrow’s mediocrity. This means anything appealing today will be appalling tomorrow.

It's better to do something with quality, no matter how long it takes you rather than do something mediocre, with constant quantity.

man is always equal to his purpose; when you control him, you do half a job but when you control his purpose, you do a total job.

Most people are just a waste of sanity.

Never allow your head to be buried in the grave of the fearful, mediocrity, and purposeless. Get up and begin to produce something great with your life. Stand out and stand tall.

No one gets ahead by striving for mediocrity.

Not being impressed by anyone or anything is one of the surest paths to a life of mediocrity.

Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end.

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

Passion is the essence of sensual living.

People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear

It drives me crazy how quickly the great ones get canonized. 'Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss.' Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

Mediocrity is comfortable, it makes you join the crowd, but would you like to be remembered as part of the crowd or someone followed by the crowd? For rising above the crowd - don't be a slave to procedures, practice more & improvise.

Mediocrity is a choice. I hope you choose to say ‘NO!

Mediocrity is a pit that swallows people who have rested on seats of complacency for long.

Mediocrity is Death.

Mediocrity is always a safe option but never a satisfactory one.

Mediocrity-the artist's hell.

Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind, and, stopping, put his hand on Philip's shoulder. "But if you were going to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it." Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad. "It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it's too late. It does not improve the temper." He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room.

Most people are each just another human being.

My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodolocigal’ pretentions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.

Negotiation is permissible for mediocrity not for excellence.

One thing you need to realize about this lifestyle - the sensual lifestyle, that is - is that it defies all mediocrity. In fact, it was meant to be a container for you to live your most unlimited life; you actually become who you came here to be.

Papini's speech accelerates as he walks toward the morgue, leaving a trail of lemon in his wake. 'It's the so-called qualitative leap, Quintana. At night we come up with daring plans that would change us completely, were they to become a reality. But these plans dissolve in the morning light, and we go back to being the same mediocrities as before, doggedly ruining our own lives. This doesn't happen to you? With these men, it's different. Why do you think they're still around, if they're so inferior to us? It's a question of adaptation. They act. They carry out the plans they make at night. What's more, they're depraved. They wear too much pomade, smell like tobacco, sweat bile, and masturbate frequently. They have no morals. They do, however, have an ethics that neither you nor I could comprehend, which involves eradicating us. Do you understand?' 'How do you know they wear too much pomade?' 'You're taking me very literally, Quintana.

Retaliation retards your excellence. Nelson Mandela would not have been named as a great man if not for his courage to forgive those who schemed and plotted it for him to spend those 10000 bitter days in prison.

...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!

Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.

Social conditioning, accompanied by moral and mental constraints, now serve to render the mediocre mind nearly incapable of unbiased assessment.

Some people are troubled by their mediocrity. Some, by their greatness.

Start lifting your brand off the ground with an excelling mentality becoming best at what you do. You can't afford to be an average person although you may have begun from a level below average

question the status quo; rebuke the existing rules, though it may be at the discomfort of the masses. They may however come to a later realization that it was really worth it and you may now have the status quo

Talent is often suffocated by the desire to be deemed talented.

Reading is a choice. The will to do depends the reader. We may or may not do it but when we kill reading, we kill a purposeful mind. Reading a page of a purposeful book per day is not only a great medicine to the mind but also a powerful antidote to ignorance and mediocrity

That 'power grab' of Netflix has only led to an incridible amount of horrendous mediocrity. They should simply have focussed on collecting the best series in the world instead of producing them. Its as if a poetry collector suddenly thinks he should become the biggest publisher in the world. Cut out the middle men, but what if those middle men are you?