Mediocrity Quotes
Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller
Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
Margot Fonteyn
There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.
Norman Vincent Peale
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Horton Cooley
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Jean de la Bruyere
Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
Warren G. Bennis
All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.
Scott Alexander
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.
Bruce Henderson
The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
William E. Gladstone
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
Victor Hugo
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
Dale Carnegie
There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.
Sean Penn
I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding.
Jackie Cooper
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Herman Melville
A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Go for the gold: better one great column and some undistinguished ones than constant mediocrity.
Allan Sloan
The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake.
Nelson Boswell