Quotes about Mediocrity

“Little things affect little minds.”

“Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

“Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.”

“In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.”

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

“Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.”

“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.”

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

“Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed.”

“A man trying to sell a blind horse always praises its feet.”

“If you hire mediocre people, they will hire mediocre people.”

“The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.”

“Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.”

“They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.”

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

“The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.”

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

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”

“All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.”

“When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.”

“The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”

“Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.”

“It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.”

“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.”

“Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.”

“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!”

“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.”

“One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.”