Mediocrity Quotes (page 8)

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• best
• wants
• better

Do the best you can. But I want to emphasize that it be the very best. We are too prone to be satisfied with mediocre performance. We are capable of doing so much better. Gordon B. Hinckley

• best
• trust
• genius

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs. Max Beerbohm

• path
• realistic
• paths

Being realistic is the quickest path to mediocrity. Will Smith

• little
• business
• contentment

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

• touching
• running
• leaving

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. Ray Bradbury

• world
• excellence
• hell

Possibly the only dismaying aspect of excellence is that it makes living in a world of mediocrity an ongoing prospect of living hell. Harlan Ellison

• different
• accomplishes
• spells

Enthusiasm spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment. Norman Vincent Peale

• boys
• time
• wise

In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few 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

• writing
• poetry
• may

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry. F. Scott Fitzgerald

• sad
• cloth
• destroying

It is a sad mission to cut through and destroy with the scissors of analysis the delicate and iridescent veils with which our proud mediocrity clothes itself. Cesare Lombroso

• adventure
• fear
• achievement

I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve. Edmund Hillary

• evening
• new
• grouping

You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality. Sarah Vowell

• style
• future
• waiting

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembley'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling... Thomas Pynchon

• giving
• enemy
• popular

Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity. Oscar Wilde

• look
• precedent
• marked

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent. Norman Mailer