Mediocrity famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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If you have to fear something, fear mediocrity.
-- Alex Bogusky -
Go for the gold: better one great column and some undistinguished ones than constant mediocrity.
-- Allan Sloan -
Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.
-- Amelia Barr -
Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.
-- Andrew Keen -
The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
-- Anne Rice -
Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.
-- Anthony Hecht -
What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.
-- Antoine-Augustin Preault -
It's always the same: mediocrities are over-valued and great men are rejected.
-- Anton Webern -
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity.
-- Armand Assante -
Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.
-- Austin Ligon -
Mediocrity's easy, the good things take time, the great need commitment.
-- Bob Seger -
Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.
-- Boris Pasternak -
As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity.
-- Bradford Cox -
For what level of mediocrity will you settle?
-- Brandon Lee -
Rules are foolish, arbitrary, mindless things that raise you quickly to a level of acceptable mediocrity, then prevent you from progressing further.
-- Bruce Barnbaum -
Dividing meager resources across a host of medium term operational goals creates mediocrity on a broad scale.
-- C. K. Prahalad -
Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.
-- Camille Paglia -
The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities
-- Cesare Lombroso -
The absence of risk is a sure sign of mediocrity.
-- Charles de Foucauld -
Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
-- Charles G. Dawes -
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
-- Charles Horton Cooley -
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
-- Charles Lamb -
By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.
-- Charles Saatchi -
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.
-- Claude Monet -
I have a deathly fear of mediocrity and that nips at my heels and gets me into a lot of trouble.
-- Courtney Love -
Focus on competition has always been a formula for mediocrity.
-- Daniel Burrus -
Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.
-- David Bowie -
Be great at what you do, and don't ever settle for mediocrity or else you will always wonder how great you could have been.
-- Debbi Fields -
Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
-- Denise Levertov -
I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
-- Dick Cavett -
The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.
-- Dmitri Shostakovich -
Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
-- Dorothy Day -
The culture has got to be only the best for Collingwood. I reckon Collingwood accepts defeat far too easily and accepts mediocrity far too easily,
-- Eddie McGuire -
Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.
-- Elsa Maxwell -
Mediocrity is gonna kill the world before Armageddon ever does.
-- Emmylou Harris -
You will not experience all life has to offer you or begin to experience life at its fullest as long as you are satisfied with mediocrity. You have to be disgusted with your current circumstances before your circumstances can change.
-- Eric Thomas -
The only way to get out of mediocrity is to keep shooting for excellence.
-- Eric Thomas -
Fear of failure is a ticket to mediocrity. If you’re not failing from time to time, you’re not pushing yourself. And if you’re not pushing yourself, you’re coasting.
-- Eric Zorn -
I sometimes make pictures which are not up to my standard, but then it can only be said of a mediocrity that all his work is up to his standard.
-- Ernst Lubitsch -
Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
-- Eugene Ionesco -
Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
-- Florence King -
Golf asks something of a man. It makes one loathe mediocrity. It seems to say, "If you are going to keep company with me, don't embarrass me.
-- Gary Player -
Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.
-- Gary Shteyngart -
The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.
-- George Lois -
Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.
-- George S. Patton -
When I think of normality I think of mediocrity
-- Gillian Anderson -
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.
-- Gillian Anderson -
Mediocrity will never do. You are capable of something better.
-- Gordon B. Hinckley -
Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.
-- Graham Cooke -
It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.
-- Gustave Courbet -
They say misery loves company, but so does mediocrity. Don't let the limiting beliefs of OTHERS limit what's possible for YOU.
-- Hal Elrod -
Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.
-- Hans Magnus Enzensberger -
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
-- Harold Bloom -
... 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.
-- Harold Bloom -
Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.
-- Henry Fuseli -
Sir, the slowness of genius is hard to bear, but the slowness of mediocrity is insufferable.
-- Henry Thomas Buckle -
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.
-- Horace -
Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.
-- Horace -
I could've just walked away but I never could have forgiven myself to allow Starbucks to drift into mediocrity or not be relevant. I just couldn't be a bystander.
-- Howard Schultz -
Democracy is always, by nature and constitution, the triumph of mediocrity.
-- Indro Montanelli -
An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.
-- Irving Stone -
Nothing is more expensive than mediocrity.
-- J. Irwin Miller -
Fatigue is the price of leadership. Mediocrity is the price of never getting tired.
-- J. Oswald Sanders -
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 -
Parodies are hard to do well, as is shown by the mediocrity of so many recent attempts. No matter how ripe a genre is for satirizing, unless you know how to do it, there are no guarantees.
-- James Berardinelli -
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
-- James C. Collins -
The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is inconsistency.
-- James C. Collins -
The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.
-- James C. Collins -
Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity...are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.
-- James C. Collins -
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
-- James F. Cooper -
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!
-- Jean de la Bruyere -
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-- Jean Giraudoux -
The exhibition has now become no more than a bazaar where mediocrity spreads itself out with impudence. The exhibitions are useless and dangerous... they ought to be abolished.
-- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres -
We often reward mediocrity because it is comforting. If they can do it, anyone can do it.
-- Jessica Zafra -
You know, larger than life is always better than smaller than life in politicians. And, you know, God save us from mediocrities.
-- Joe Klein -
We shouldn't accept mediocrity as the best a politician can do.
-- Joe Manchin -
The way that I am now, I don't want to accept mediocrity. I don't want to accept the easy road.
-- Joe Nichols -
You can’t talk mediocrity and expect to have victory. You are prophesying your future. If you want a shift to occur, you’ve got to think positive.
-- Joel Osteen -
Don't settle for mediocrity; never let good enough be good enough.
-- Joel Osteen -
If you want to earn a million bucks a year, eliminate mediocrity from your thinking and your life.
-- John Assaraf -
Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.
-- John Dewey -
In an age of militant mediocrity, an 'extremist' is anyone who takes a position.
-- John Loeffler -
Show me someone content with mediocrity and I'll show you someone destined for failure.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole -
If you're not passionate, you achieve mediocrity
-- Jon Taffer
