Best 347 quotes in «mediocrity quotes» category

Nobody rises above mediocrity unless they use the brains of other people.

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.

No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.

Once you decide that mediocrity is unthinkable, your only choices are excellence and quitting.

... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

Passionately protest mediocrity.

Our party's most outstanding mediocrity.

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

Perfection, fortunately, is not the only alternative to mediocrity. A more sensible alternative is excellence. Striving for excellence is stimulating and rewarding; striving for perfection--in practically anything--is both neurotic and futile.

Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.

Probability is a kind of penance, which God made, suitable, I presume to that state of mediocrity and probationership he has been pleased to place us in here; wherein, to check our over-confidence and presumption, we might, by every day's experience, be made sensible of our short-sightedness, and liableness to error.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities...

Show me someone content with mediocrity and I'll show you someone destined for failure.

Regulators are power-lusting mediocrities.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

Pumpkin pie is a living symbol of mediocrity. The best pumpkin pie you ever ate wasn't all that much different from the worst pumpkin pie you ever ate.

The goal is to avoid mediocrity by being prepared to try something and either failing miserably or triumphing grandly.

Take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me; leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy, and my plain dealing; 'Tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.

That Monica who's just gonna sit there in mediocrity... That Monica died in Samoa

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.

The only way we can develop muscle is through regular exercise. As soon as we stop stretching and working toward higher ethics, our standards start to sag. The muscle gets soft, and instead of excellence we have to settle for mediocrity. Maybe something even worse.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

The mediocrity with which Africa has been ruled is responsible for its underdevelopment.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.

There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

There are the those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

There is no greater path to mediocrity in life than trying to be realistic.

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is inconsistency.

There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics; that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range.

There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance.

The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconstancy. The signature of greatness is a disciplined and consistent focus on the right things.

The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

Think you are weak, think you lack what it takes, think you will lose, think you are second class - think this way and you are doomed to mediocrity.

The way that I am now, I don't want to accept mediocrity. I don't want to accept the easy road.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity.