Best 347 quotes in «mediocrity quotes» category

for me, to say I yet to begin gives me reasons not to look back and see what I have done but ,to look ahead and see, understand and plan for what I am yet to do

Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity. Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success.

Good leaders always bring about transformation... Bad leaders only maintain and preserve long standing mediocrity!

Greatness begins where mediocrity ends.

Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.

Hesitation or confusion is a test created by my mind, to check my strength in handling a loss, but I keep taking it as a signal to stay away from a challenge. I never give the mind a chance to feel confident on trying something new & losing. Now! My mind has created a permanent barrier towards any competition unless the chances of winning becomes almost certain. Now I never compete. Who am I? I am a mediocre and since I am not tired of remaining one, I will always remain one.

His decision was preordained, and derived from a perverse quirk in his mentality. At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insipid mediocrity, of no intellectual distinction and no particular competence in any direction. This was an insight so shocking that Hack never allowed it past the threshold of consciousness, and he conducted himself as if the reverse were true. So, while his innermost elements winced and grimaced, Hack, outwardly easy and composed, made plans to cope with the situation.

However, Nick acted as much as possible under the circumstances, and that was rectifying — it brought with it enjoyment and a working faith. He had not gone counter to the axiom that in a case of doubt one was to hold off; for that applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it and that if there was essentially a problem in his life it would only grow tougher with keeping. But if doing one's sum to-morrow instead of to-day does not make the sum easier it at least makes to-day so.

Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort is not all that comfortable, even if they see clearly want for something better.

humility must not be equated to mediocrity and cowardice

I cannot waste my time teaching mediocrity," to J. Henry Harper, when he quit teaching an open-to-all illustrating class at Drexel Institute... from Where Your Heart Is...The Story of Harvey Dunn, Artist. page 32.

Idel mekaniska fjädrar och hjul skapade de inre rörelserna hos vår urverksmänniska. Man skulle kunna kalla honom puritan. En grundläggande motvilja, formidabel i sin enkelhet, genomsyrade hans tröga själ: han avskydde bedrägeri och orättvisor. Han ogillade föreningen av dessa - de förekom ständigt i par - med träig lidelse som varken ägde eller krävde några ord för att uttryckas. En sådan motvilja skulle ha förtjänat beröm om den inte hade varit en biprodukt av mannens hopplösa stupiditet. Allt som överskred hans fattningsförmåga kallade han orättvist och bedrägligt. Han dyrkade allmänna föreställningar med pedantisk energi. Det allmänna var gudalikt, det specifika djävulskt. Var den ena människan fattig och den andra rik; själva skillnaden var orättvis, och den fattige som inte fördömde den var lika klandervärd som den rike som ignorerade den. Människor som visste för mycket - vetenskapsmän, författare, matematiker, kristallografer etc. - var inte bättre än kungar och präster: de ägde alla en orättvis andel av makten som de andra hade blivit lurade på. En vanlig hederlig person måste ständigt vara på sin vakt mot någon form av listig svindel från naturens och nästans sida.

I'd rather take risks and walk with dignity into my grave than settle for mediocrity and live like a slave

If life gives you a passport size dream, don't frame it... Order for a reprint... Go for the bigger picture of you! You deserve a bigger and bright image of you... Go and soar like an eagle!

if we are to endure mediocrity, it must be for sometime but not all the time

If you are not going to divorce the status quo, you will give birth to mediocrity.

If you are not angry with your average performance, you can't effect a change! You must get upset to grab the energy to break the fence confining you!

If you stay passionate and committed, mediocrity will never be eager to befriend you.

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!

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 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.

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.

for me, to say that I am yet to begin gives me the real reason not to look back and see what I have done but, to look ahead and see, understand and plan for what I am yet to do

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.

Incrementalism guarantees mediocrity

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

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.

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

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 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 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 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’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.

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.

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 Death.

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 just a waste of sanity.

Negotiation is permissible for mediocrity not for excellence.

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.

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

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.

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