Mediocrity Quotes
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There is no greater consolation for mediocrity than that the genius is not immortal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Our party's most outstanding mediocrity.
Leon Trotsky
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Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
Haruki Murakami
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If you have to fear something, fear mediocrity.
Alex Bogusky
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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.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas
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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.
Barbara Branden
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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.
John Locke
Nazareth
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There is plenty of room at the top because very few people care to travel beyond the average route. And so most of us seem satisfied to remain within the confines of mediocrity.
Nnamdi Azikiwe
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Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller
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Men in general are too material and do not make enough human contacts. If we search for the fundamentals which actually motivate us we will find that they come under four headings: love, money, adventure and religion. It is to some of them that we always owe that big urge which pushes us onward. Men who crush these impulses and settle down to everyday routine are bound to sink into mediocrity. No man is a complete unit of himself; he needs the contact, the stimulus and the driving power which is generated by his contact with other men, their ideas, and constantly changing scenes.
Edward S. Jordan
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Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end... To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.
Blaise Pascal
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Moderation assures mediocrity -- nice, safe. Mediocrity is for the mediocre -- simple, okay. The intense rule; the mediocre follow.
Dave Draper
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Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.
Elena Ferrante
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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
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Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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.
Eva Moskowitz
