Mediocrity

(119 votes)   A man trying to sell a blind horse always praises its feet.

German Proverbs
Sayings of German Origin

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(113 votes)   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
1811-1896, American Novelist, Antislavery Campaigner

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(106 votes)   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 BruyFre
1645-1696, French Classical Writer

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(102 votes)   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
1819-1891, American Poet, Critic, Editor

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(88 votes)   Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.

Henry S. Haskins

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(86 votes)   In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

Robert Green Ingersoll
1833-1899, American Orator, Lawyer

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(81 votes)   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
1865-1925, American Editor, Essayist

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(80 votes)   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
1689-1762, British Society Figure, Letter Writer

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

John Stuart Mill
1806-1873, British Philosopher, Economist

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(78 votes)   They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

John Ruskin
1819-1900, British Critic, Social Theorist

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(77 votes)   Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed.

Walter Russell

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(76 votes)   The best pedigree in the world won't sell a lame race horse.

Source Unknown

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

Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist

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(74 votes)   If you hire mediocre people, they will hire mediocre people.

Tom Murphy
American Businessman, CEO of Capital Cities, ABC

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(68 votes)   Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

William M. Winans

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