Quotes on Mediocrity

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

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.

Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.

Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity, but with it you can accomplish miracles.

Be the best, but get ready to be attacked. Only mediocrity is safe.

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.

To punish failure is yet another way to encourage mediocrity.

You can’t think thoughts of mediocrity and expect to excel. The two don’t go together.

Do a few things at mastery versus many things at mediocrity.

When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

Cherish your friends and family as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

In our desire to please everyone, it's very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

You will not experience all life has to offer you or begin to experience life at its fullest as long as you are satisfied with mediocrity. You have to be disgusted with your current circumstances before your circumstances can change.

We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.

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.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.