Mediocrity's Quotes

#1. We think that boxes take everything that's bad and they lock all that nasty stuff out, when in reality they take everything that we are and they lock all of those great things in.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#2. In the age of mediocrity and clones, John Stowell's uniqueness and originality are a breath of fresh air. I love playing with him.

Paul Horn

#3. 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.

Dan Pearce

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

Auliq Ice

#5. Tears begin to well in my eyes. I have no idea how or if I even deserve him, but there's one thing I know for sure. As long as he's part of it, I'll never live a life of mediocrity.

Colleen Hoover

#6. Things can change only through strong personalities. I am not very good at supporting ignorance and mediocrity, so maybe this leads to arrogant gestures and arrogant responses. So, nobody's perfect.

Edi Rama

#7. The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. 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.

William Hurt

#8. It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

Richard Yates

#9. Often we don't see the majesty of God's design because we're caught up in the mediocrity of our own designs.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#10. Mediocrity has nothing to do with how you compare to other people; it's simply a result of not making the commitment to continuously learn, grow, and improve yourself.

Hal Elrod

#11. ... the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

C.S. Lewis

#12. We must all know that each mediocrity, each surrender, each act of complacency will harm us as much as the enemy's rifles.

Albert Camus

#13. He was a typical specimen of the younger son in avid pursuit of mediocrity with which the Theurgist's teemed:

Zen Cho

#14. There are countless ways of achieving greatness, but any road to achieving one's maximum potential must be built on a bedrock of respect for the individual, a commitment to excellence, and a rejection of mediocrity.

Buck Rodgers

#15. the regime's utter cultural and intellectual mediocrity, and especially its obsession with ensuring a rigid outward conformity to its neo-traditionalist values in public life.

Helen Graham

#16. Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul's possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

Gustave Flaubert

#17. Mediocrity is my biggest fear. I'm not afraid of total failure because I don't think that will happen. I'm not afraid of success because that beats the hell out of failure. It's being in the middle that scares me.

Robert Downey Jr.

#18. In my fantasy world everyone has a happy ending. No one is told who they should be, how they should feel, who they are allowed to love, what they should believe and how they should look. Sadly, everyone in my world can't seem to get along with one another because everyone is so darn different.

Shannon L. Alder

#19. It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.

W. Somerset Maugham

#20. Get used to your mortality.
It will eventually consume you
so why not pick up an addiction.

Pamela August Russell

#21. Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.

Henry S. Haskins

#22. Love It, is to increase by forgetting. It's escape through a single being to mediocrity of all other. It's one more for trying to be less. It's become like everyone else in the belief that we become as a person. It is giving appointment to happiness in the palace of chance.

Abel Bonnard

#23. Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt - it never comes off.

Haruki Murakami

#24. It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one's neighbor.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#25. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#26. But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

Tom Robbins

#27. Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be.

George R R Martin

#28. At independence Kenya's economic indicators were equal to those of South Korea, but 45 years down the road, Korea's economy is 40 times that of Kenya. The mediocrity of leadership is across the continent .

Raila Odinga

#29. Maybe it's an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant side line of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that's far too far away to touch.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#30. The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

Nicolas Chamfort

#31. You don't need a hand-out, you need a hand-up! And that's what we need to portray: 'Look, do you want to live in mediocrity? Because that's all that the entitlements are going to do for you. Keep you living in the lowest socio-economic scale.

Rafael Cruz

#32. There's so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#33. Neat trick: to be roused to ambition and reconciled to one's mediocrity at the same time.

Mason Cooley

#34. Because I have a dog, it's easier to work at home: I sit in a horrible weird 'Mastermind'-style chair and bask in my own mediocrity. Being single, I've no family life to distract me at the end of the day. Apart from taking the dog for a walk, I have no other responsibilities.

Miranda Hart

#35. It's true he was a sinner. But don't pass so final a judgement. Have pity in your heart and don't forget that he may yet be an Augustine, while you remain just another mediocrity.

Josemaria Escriva

#36. Mediocrity is what's left when vision is absent.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#37. When all that's left mediocrity and each day just bleeds into the next.

Andy Carrington

#38. Do what's right. Be on time, be polite, and be honest; remain free from drugs; and if you have any questions, get out your Bible. 2. Do your best. Mediocrity is unacceptable when you are capable of doing better. 3. Treat others as you want to be treated. Practice love and understanding.

Lou Holtz

#39. NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one's competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob's-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending.

Ambrose Bierce

#40. You can either follow your dreams or adjust with your society's expectations ... Either way, consequences are uncertain ... the path to glory or the boulevard of mediocrity, both lead to the grave ... Choose what's worthwhile, for the end is the same.

K. Hari Kumar

#41. Mediocrity has become something that's acceptable," Keller says, "and in many cases, something that is aspirational." To

Dan Charnas

#42. EACH OF US IS BORN INTO GENIUS. Sadly, most of us die amid mediocrity.

Robin S. Sharma

#43. Mediocrity scares me. It's the fear of not being as good as you want to be. If you give over to that fear, it will sabotage you. As much as I can, I try to use that fear to guide me.

Chris Pine

#44. One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical ... for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Soren Kierkegaard

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

George S. Patton Jr.

#46. An achievement-oriented culture is very pro-employee - it's so much more fun than one that isn't. Excellence is a tremendous amount of fun; mediocrity is not.

Kip Tindell

#47. It's not always easy to keep going when faced with indifference or to watch values being defined by a mass infatuation with mediocrity.

Nick Bantock

#48. It is vital to avoid mediocrity - living a life of deadness in someone else's threadbare world.

Miriam A. Walker

#49. It is not the mediocrity of women's education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.

Joseph De Maistre

#50. You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it's getting raised regardless.

Seth Godin

#51. We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake. p. 174

Tom Robbins

#52. I wake up every morning thinking ... this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There's no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.

Anita Roddick

#53. I find mediocrity hard. I find that whole area difficult. I'm a very passionate person; I care very much about what I do. I believe I give it a lot, so it's gotta be good; otherwise, what's the point?

Phoebe Philo

#54. No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.

Muriel Barbery

#55. The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.

T. S. Eliot

#56. There's never been a better time to let the leaves of mediocrity fall from your tree of life.

David Ault

#57. In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.

Mario Batali

#58. It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

Ned Rorem

#59. That Monica who's just gonna sit there in mediocrity ... That Monica died in Samoa

Monica Denise Brown

#60. This was a world where one became outdated before one's time was up. An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly anymore. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.

Fredrik Backman

#61. How sad that we often diminish our best gifts by struggling valiantly to develop in someone else's area of ability. It is better to focus on your uniqueness and do that with excellence than to end up with mediocrity in several areas.

Dan Miller

#62. You are born into genius but have you resigned yourself to mediocrity ?

Robin S. Sharma

#63. 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

#64. People of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon and seldom drive business home to it's conclusion, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

Francis Bacon

#65. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#66. If you don't have the ambition to be the very best at what you do, then what's the point? If you aim for greatness but keep missing -- fine. At least you had the guts to aim. There's honour in failing that way. But there's nothing honourable about settling for mediocrity.

Benjamin Wood

#67. Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet ...

Winifred Holtby

#68. Every advancing step I take toward my goal of comfort is yet another retreating step I take away from God's goal of the impossible.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#69. It's always the same: mediocrities are over-valued and great men are rejected.

Anton Webern

#70. But there's no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We're not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it's hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.

Banksy

#71. There's a perception that British pies suffer from mediocrity, and historically they have. We're trying to re-educate people about what pie is.

James Robertson

#72. Creativity is fragile; if you don't nurture it, it can die, leaving you recycling old ideas and pretending they're fresh. It's a sure road to mediocrity.

Lee Silber

#73. The appearance of mediocrity is often useful in life because it weakens tautly strung strings and sobers up people's self-confident or self-forgetful feelings, reminding them how close they are to mediocrity as well.

Ivan Turgenev

#74. You don't have to settle. It's a choice you get to make every day.

Seth Godin

#75. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.

Ayn Rand

#76. It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

Seth Godin

#77. As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.

Phyllis A. Whitney

#78. It is the mistaken idea that if I reward mediocrity, I will curtail the person's aspirations to be better. That is a commonly held myth that keeps some parents from verbally affirming children. Of course, it's untrue.

Gary Chapman

#79. Music is a place to take refuge. It's a sanctuary from mediocrity and boredom. It's innocent and it's a place you can lose yourself in thoughts, memories and intricacies.

Lisa Gerrard

#80. Don't be intimidated by other people's opinions. Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do.

Paulo Coelho

#81. But if it's tolerable mediocrity, and you're like, 'Well, you know it could be worse. At least I'm getting paid.' Then you wind up in a job that is slowly killing your soul and you're allowing that to happen. Comfort can be a very, very dangerous thing.

Tim Ferriss

#82. Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity. Why would you be realistic? What's the point of being realistic? I'm going to do it. It's done. It's already done. The second I decide it's done, it's already done.

Will Smith

#83. If one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm
but that's a lie ... That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.

Vincent Van Gogh

#84. Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero.

Mike Mentzer

#85. It's a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation.

Roberto Benigni

#86. Not all offers I get are exciting and inspiring. I would rather sit at home and not work than jump into mediocrity for the sake of just moving ahead. If it's a good script, I would sacrifice my personal time and grab it.

Rani Mukerji

#87. Our party's most outstanding mediocrity.

Leon Trotsky

#88. 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.

John Steinbeck

#89. Don't bother getting out of bed.
The world is crowded enough
without you and your big ideas.

Pamela August Russell

#90. As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.

Hunter S. Thompson

#91. Decision is often the difference between greatness and mediocrity. In every man's life there comes a time when he must search for a cause, a work, an ideal to which he can give himself. Whether he says 'Yes' or 'No' to the challenge will determine his future.

Wilferd Peterson

#92. Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity.

C.S. Lewis

#93. Granted, the Scott Paper story is one of the more dramatic in our study, but it's not an isolated case. In over two thirds of the comparison cases, we noted the presence of a gargantuan personal ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.33

James C. Collins

#94. I've come to the conclusion the whole Washington scene represents a diminishment of civilization. Our country's in a free-fall to mediocrity, and Congress is leading the way.

Robert Atkinson

#95. You will always feel insignificant if you never do anything to change the world or another person's life, other than your own.

Shannon L. Alder

#96. Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

Jonathan Kozol

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

Sean Penn

#98. In architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it.

Ayn Rand

#99. Mediocrity's easy, the good things take time, the great need commitment.

Bob Seger

#100. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.

George Eliot