Vincent Van Gogh
Painter
"Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it."
Mediocrity quotes
Mediocrity
300 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Robert Downey, Jr.
Actor, Producer
"Mediocrity is my biggest fear. I'm not afraid of total failure because I don't think that will happen. I'm not afraid of success because that beats the hell out of failure. It's being in the middle that scares me."
Marlon Brando
Actor, Director
"Never surrender to the momentum of mediocrity."
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher, Writer
"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."
Frank Lloyd Wright
Architect
"Mechanization best serves mediocrity."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside mediocrity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Mediocrity quotes (page 1 of 15)
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"Once you compromise yourself in one way, you compromise yourself in another way. And you've just opened the door to compromise, mediocrity, settling."
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"Only mediocrity escapes criticism."
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"The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb."
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"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."
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"As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity."
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"Mediocrity is underrated."
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"That's probably one of my biggest gripes with the Internet - that it settles for mediocrity and disinformation, which puts all information on the same level. Everything has the same value, whether it's Albert Einstein speaking, or yoohoo27@msn.com."
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"Today is the most important day of our lives."
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"Don’t be intimidated by other people’s opinions. Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do."
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"Once you decide that mediocrity is unthinkable, your only choices are excellence and quitting."
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"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness."
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"Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity."
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"The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind."
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"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
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"Being realistic is the quickest path to mediocrity"
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"There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity."
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"Mediocrity is the worst enemy of prosperity."
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"The industrial age brought compliance and compliance brought fear and fear brought us mediocrity."
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"Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people."
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"Democracy: a festival of mediocrity."
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