Mediocrity Quotes
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Probability is a kind of penance, which God made, suitable, I presume to that state of mediocrity and probationership he has been pleased to place us in here; wherein, to check our over-confidence and presumption, we might, by every day's experience, be made sensible of our short-sightedness, and liableness to error.
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You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
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Excellence is the accumulation of hundreds of minute decisions; it is execution at the most granular level. Once you accept the idea that you should give in to things that make no sense because other people do those things and you want to appear reasonable, you are on a path towards mediocrity.
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If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose this poem is too soon for you. Return to your mediocrity, plug it into an amplifier and rethink yourself.
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We live in an age of mediocrity. Stars today are not the same stature as Bogie Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart James Stewart.
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Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.
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The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
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Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.
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In our desire to please everyone, it's very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.
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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.
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Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
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Ayn was startled by the fact that while everyone complained indignantely about the physical hardships created by the communists, no one seemed equally indignant about their ideology. When — at the age of twelve — she first heard the communist slogan that man must live for the state, she knew, consciously and clearly, that this was the horror at at the root of all the other horrors taking place around her. Her feeling was one of incredulous contempt: incredulity that such a statement could be uttered in human society, and a cold, unforgiving contempt for anyone who could accept it. She saw, in that slogan, the vision of a hero on a sacrificial altar, immolated in the name of mediocrity — she heard the statement that the purpose of her life was not her own to choose, that her life must be given in selfless servitude to others — she saw the life of any man of intelligence, of ambition, of independence, claimed as the property of some shapeless mob. It was the demand for sacrifice of the best among men, and for the enshrinement of the commonplace — who were granted all rights because they were commonplace — that she held as the unspeakable evil of communism. Her answer to the slogan was that nothing could be higher or more important than an individual's right to his own life, that it was a right beyond the claim of any individual or group or collective or state or the whole population of the globe.
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The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
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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.
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Mediocrity is the most effective mask a superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, which is to say, to the mediocre,it will not suggest a disguise:--and yet it is precisely for their sake that he puts it on--so as not to arouse them, and, indeed, not infrequently to avoid this out of pity and benevolence.
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Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.
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Pride is a personal commitment. It is an attitude which separates excellence from mediocrity.
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If you have to fear something, fear mediocrity.
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Nothing is thoroughly approved but mediocrity. The majority has established this, and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.
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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.
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Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over
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Everyone chooses one of two roads in life - the old and the young, the rich and the poor, men and women alike. One is the broad, well-traveled road to mediocrity, the other road to greatness and meaning.
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Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.
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Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.
