Quotes about mediocrity

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.

— Scott Alexander

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

— Sir Max Beerbohm

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

— Jean De La Bruyere

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

— Thomas Carlyle

Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.

— Frank Moore Colby

Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.

— Charles G. Dawes

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Little things affect little minds.

— Benjamin Disraeli

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

— Peter F. Drucker

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

— Jean Giraudoux

Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.

— Henry S. Haskins

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

— Joseph Heller

The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

— Eric Hoffer

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

— Robert Green Ingersoll

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

— James Russell Lowell

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

— John Stuart Mill

Take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me; leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy, and my plain dealing; 'Tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.

— Brian Moore

If you hire mediocre people, they will hire mediocre people.

— Tom Murphy

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

— Blaise Pascal

A man trying to sell a blind horse always praises its feet.

— German Proverb

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you.

— Jim Rohn

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

— John Ruskin

Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed.

— Walter Russell

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

— Henry David Thoreau

The best pedigree in the world won't sell a lame race horse.

— Source Unknown

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

— William M. Winans

Mediocrity wants to be your friend. Be unfriendly.

— Leslie Miklosy