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.
John Locke
Nazareth
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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
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Pride is a personal commitment. It is an attitude which separates excellence from mediocrity.
William Blake
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We are the mediocre, we are the half givers, we are the half lovers, we are the savourless salt. Break the hard crust of complacency. Quicken in us the sharp grace of desire.
Caryll Houselander
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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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Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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.
George E. P. Box
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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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In our desire to please everyone, it's very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.
Seth Godin
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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.
Ernst Lubitsch
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Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
Charles G. Dawes
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The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Ezra Pound
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A Christian has no business being satisfied with mediocrity. He's supposed to reach for the stars. Why not? He's not on his own anymore. He has God's help now.
Catherine Marshall
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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.
Stephen Covey
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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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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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
