Browsing Topic Best Mediocrity Quotes

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity.

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

Jealousy is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

I wouldn’t say I’m normal. But I’m relatively stable. When I think of normal, I think of mediocrity, and mediocrity scares the f— out of me.

To love what is below the human is degradation; to love what is human for the sake of the human is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of the Divine is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is sanctity.

Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.

The world would hate His followers, not because of evil in their lives, but precisely because of the absence of evil or rather their goodness. Goodness does not cause hatred, but it gives occasion for hatred to manifest itself. The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives.

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

You know you’ve reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.

There’s a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

The amount of financial and imaginative energy that’s put into mediocrity is just amazing, which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.

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

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

Any corporate policy and plan which is typical of the industry is doomed to mediocrity. Where this is not so, it should be possible to demonstrate that all other competitors are at a distinct disadvantage.

Go for the gold: better one great column and some undistinguished ones than constant mediocrity.

Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity.

Mediocrity obtains more with application than superiority without it.

…I am afraid that education is conceived more in terms of indoctrination by most school officials than in terms of enlightenment. My own belief is that education must be subversive if it is to be meaningful. By this I mean that it must challenge all the things we take for granted, examine all accepted assumptions, tamper with every sacred cow, and instill a desire to question and doubt. Without this the mere instruction to memorise data is empty. The attempt to enforce conventional mediocrity on the young is criminal.

I always wanted to be commander-in-chief of my one-woman army, But I can envision the mediocrity of my finest hour.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end… To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.

Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.

I don’t mind the high price of stardom. I just don’t like the high price of mediocrity.

Artists and creative workers – people who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of the way to do things. They haven’t been contented with mediocrity. They haven’t confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others do them, but always a little better. Few are those who see with their own eyesand feel with their own hearts.

Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.

America’s the great conundrum and the great dream and the great fascination: the new land, the new world, the new temple, the new city, and the great mess. The most handguns, bombs, weaponry, violence, the cop of the world etcetera. All the contradictions. Mediocrity versus something like indigenous jazz, one of the most evolved sophisticated musical forms on the planet.