Mediocrity quotes
300 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside mediocrity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity. Why would you be realistic? What's the point of being realistic? I'm going to do it. It's done. It's already done. The second I decide it's done, it's already done."
"Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating."
"It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo."
"It's uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle."
"There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics; that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range."
"To be popular one must be a mediocrity."
"The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it."
"Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness."
"Caution is the path to mediocrity."
"The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums."
"Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good."
"The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed."
"That, however, is - mediocrity, though it be called moderation."
"No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals."
"I've relaxed my feelings about other companies performing my works. I have never in principle been against my ballets being danced by other companies. Rather, it is that we lack the time, space and money to insure that they are done well. To me, the only sin is mediocrity."
"There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy."
"The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity."
"in architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it."
"You don't have to settle. It's a choice you get to make every day."
"Defending mediocrity is exhausting."
