"Mediocrity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continues mediocre, and has neither the highly finished beauty of such work as the Ruskin pottery, nor the genuinely simple lines or colouring of "peasant pottery," such as that from Quimperle in Brittany. The Barum ware has a sort of bourgeois mediocrity between these two different types, and there is room for a bold innovator to reform the present models and methods. It is a pity, perhaps, that he has not yet arisen, for a local industry of this kind adds greatly to ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... side of the ocean with the idea that these social problems appertain only to the effete monarchies of Europe, and have no application with us. But, though I readily admit that the keenest point of this satire is directed against the small States which, by the tyranny of the dominant mediocrity, cripple much that is good and great by denying it the conditions of growth and development, there is yet a deep and abiding lesson in these two novels which applies to modern civilization in general, exposing glaring defects ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... their fathers and husbands, are proud of this accidental favor of fate; they consider themselves as the chosen accomplices and judges of morals and virtue, and cast out from their circles all those who dare to elevate themselves above mediocrity. In this house dwelt an artiste- -the worshipped ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... who was hardly to indent her life and whose interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning, should have been the innocent source of this ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... explain themselves too much.... To what shall we attribute that respectful somnolence which nowadays reigns over the audience during the recitation of Alfieri's tragedies, if they are not sustained by some theatrical celebrity? You will certainly say, to the mediocrity of the actors. But I hold that the tragic effect can be produced even by mediocre actors, if this effect truly abounds in the plot of the tragedy.... I know that these opinions of mine will not be shared by the great majority of the Italian public, and so be it. The contrary ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... mediocrity of the pamphlets for the Union is a curious piece of finesse; for he was known to be the author of an able pamphlet, "Arguments for and against an Union between Great Britain and Ireland." In it he dilated on the benefits gained ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... breaks forth:—"Oh, Richardson! thou singular genius in my eyes! thou shalt form my reading in all times. If forced by sharp necessity, my friend falls into indigence; if the mediocrity of my fortune is not sufficient to bestow on my children the necessary cares for their education, I will sell my books,—but thou shalt remain! yes, thou shalt rest in the same class with MOSES, HOMER, EURIPIDES, and SOPHOCLES, to be ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the battle to the strong. We all know men clearly of secondary ability who nevertheless occupy high positions in business and state. We are acquainted also with men of excellent native endowment who still have never risen above the ranks of mediocrity. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... merit. Dodsley cited his own collection in proof of the contrary. "It is true," said he, "we can boast of no palaces nowadays, like Dryden's Ode to St. Cecilia's Day, but we have villages composed of very pretty houses." Goldsmith, however, maintained that there was nothing above mediocrity, an opinion in which Johnson, to whom it was repeated, concurred, and with reason, for the era was one of the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Life"—the thought of immortality—how the human soul has been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and mediocrity. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western world. There was nothing in him that was great. But he was indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years. Nesselrode, Hardenberg, Talleyrand even—whose Memoirs seem the work of genius beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's—found their designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy. Congress after Congress—Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona—exhibited his triumph to Europe. At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... desire that literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly protected it, and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which, with rare exceptions, pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... are therefore gifted with the greatest merit which can possibly inspire religious writing—we mean deep sincerity. But apart from the spirit,—the sine qua non,—the beauty of the form of these works will always give them a high value to the impartial critic. They are far above the mediocrity into which most religious writers always at first appear to be lost, owing to the vast amount of thoughts and expressions which they are compelled to share in common with others. And as there has been awakened within a few years a spirit of collecting and studying such poetry, we cordially ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... period of its construction (1520); the carve-work is quite like lace, so minutely elaborate. The interior possesses several interesting objects in architecture, and some inconsistencies, the pulpit is extremely curious, and its effect is very striking. There are also some pictures above mediocrity, principally by French artists of the past school. The tower of this church is famed from the desperate resistance which was made from it by a few young men in 1832 against ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... its vigour, its natural grace. It has disciplined it, but it has emasculated. impoverished and rigidified it. It sees in taste, not a sense of the beautiful, but a certain type of correctness, an elegant form of mediocrity. It has substituted pomp for grandeur, school routine for individual inspiration, elaborateness for simplicity, fadeur and the monotony of literary orthodoxy for variety, the source and spring of intellectual life; and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... know I am noways better in practice than my neighors, but I have a taste for religion, an occasional earnest aspiration after perfection, which they have not. I gain, nothing by being with such as myself,—we encourage one another in mediocrity, I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself. All this must sound odd to you; but these are my predominant feelings when I sit down to write to you, and I should put force upon my mind, were I to reject them, Yet I rejoice, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... compulsory addiction to the art of painting, in which nevertheless he was rapidly becoming as much a proficient as in literature. What he would have been if, like the ardent and heroic Chatterton, he had had to fight a single-handed battle for art and bread together against merciless mediocrity in high places,—what he would then have become, I cannot in the least calculate; but we know what Chatterton became. Moreover, C. at his death, was two years younger than Oliver—a whole lifetime of advancement at ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... readings in modern history at Tadmor had informed us of the dominant political position of the middle classes in England, since the time of the first Reform Bill. Mr. Farnaby's guests represented the respectable mediocrity of social position, the professional and commercial average of the nation. They all talked glibly enough—I and an old gentleman who sat next to me being the only listeners. I had spent the morning lazily in the smoking-room of the hotel, reading the day's newspapers. ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... our colleges there is none more needful than that of inspiring ardent young crusaders who shall go forth to contend against the hosts of mediocrity, ugliness, and vulgarity. One encouragement to this warfare is in the fact that these hosts, although legion, are dull as well as gross, and may easily be bewildered and put to rout by the organized ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... gentleman of rhyme, Who having angled all his life for Fame, And getting but a nibble at a time, Still fussily keeps fishing on, the same Small "Triton of the minnows," the sublime Of Mediocrity, the furious tame, The Echo's echo, usher of the school Of female wits, boy bards—in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... nonsense" if they would have acknowledged his paramountcy. He found that to be a social or a literary lion was to be a tame lion, and he was too big for that. His conception of genius was that it had its moods, and mediocrity must ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... people is an effect of the high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... meretricious ornament. They are chastened by good taste and regulated by gentlemanly cultivation. They are written by a scholar, and not by a scribbler; and while reading their magnificent pages we need have no misgiving that we are admiring the flashy ornaments of wordy or half-educated mediocrity. Far the best of them is also the first, 'Guy Livingstone.' The poorest is 'Sword and Gown;' this has the feeblest plot, in fact a mere apology for a story, and contains more passages which seem unfinished, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Teresa. There are deceptions everywhere, in the convent as in the world; and the mediocrity of the Sisters here is tiresome; one longs for a little more intelligence. And, as I was saying just now, everything declines; an idea ravels like a sleeve. Are you happy here?... You are not; I see it ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... 18: From his early youth, it may be even said from his days of boyhood, Napoleon felt an inward presentiment that he was not destined to live in mediocrity. This persuasion soon taught him to treat others with disdain, and to entertain the highest opinion of himself. Scarcely had he obtained a subaltern command in the artillery, when he considered himself as the superior of his equals, and ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... clever, I should doubtless have attracted the jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity of my success in the classes. One little fact I may mention, because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been made in forty years. I was extremely nearsighted, and in consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... by the power of influence. The politicians talk about the soundness of the instincts of the people Something more than instinct is wanted in a democracy. Instincts are not progressive. Individualism, the pleasure of the moment, and mediocrity are represented too much by instincts and in every expression of the mere will of the majority. People in the mass are governed too much by impulse. Conduct and purpose are too discontinuous and fragmentary; or perhaps we had ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... infallibly be crushed. He does all the good of which he is capable in his sphere; he leaves the road free to the wicked, who are willing to wade through its mire; he laments the heavy strokes they inflict on themselves; he applauds mediocrity that affords him security: he pities those nations made miserable by their errors,—rendered unhappy by those passions which are the fatal but necessary consequence; he sees they contain nothing ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... West Point, let them study on and acquit themselves like men, for they will meet, out in the world, a worthy reception among men of worth, who have put by the prejudices of race and the shackles of ignorance. Emerson says somewhere that "Solitude, the nurse of Genius, is the foe of mediocrity." If our young men of ability have the stuff in them to make men out of, they need not fear "to be let alone" for a while; they will ultimately come to the surface and attain ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... the road of faith and duty. The authority entrusted to this man Was unexampled and unnatural 40 It placed him on a level with his Emperor, Till the proud soul unlearned submission. Wo is me; I mourn for him! for where he fell, I deem Might none stand firm. Alas! dear General, We in our lucky mediocrity 45 Have ne'er experienced, cannot calculate, What dangerous wishes such a height may breed In the heart of such ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... spirit that a Russian Czar once laid a ruler across the map of his empire and, drawing a straight line from Moscow to Petersburg, commanded his engineers: "Build me a railroad to run like that." Genius has winged conceptions; it sees things as a completed whole from the first; it is only mediocrity which permits itself ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... he's a dear good man, and I wish we were all like him, but we aren't," answered Mrs. Webster, resigning all hope of anything but moral mediocrity with a gentle sigh. "He says Mr. Lessing is a very nice fellow; but you can't quite rely on his opinion: he's a good word ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... genius from mediocrity. The master man transforms his vast stores of reserve or potential energy into circulating or kinetic energy. His work glows ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... dub them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down the country and constitute, in ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Herrick To Anthea, who may Command him Anything Robert Herrick The Bracelet: To Julia Robert Herrick To the Western Wind Robert Herrick To my Inconstant Mistress Thomas Carew Persuasions to Enjoy Thomas Carew Mediocrity in Love Rejected Thomas Carew The Message Thomas Heywood "How Can the Heart forget Her" Francis Davison To Roses in the Bosom of Castara William Habington To Flavia Edmund Waller "Love not Me for Comely Grace" Unknown "When, Dearest, I but Think of Thee" ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... nation, fattened on mathematics and stuffed with knowledge, have attained the age of fifty years, they have their reward, and receive as the price of their services the third-floor lodging, the wife and family, and all the comforts that sweeten life for mediocrity. If from among this race of dupes there should escape some five or six men of genius who climb the highest heights, is it ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... you have to live up to something you haven't earned. You don't know what to do, and in most cases you slump back into mediocrity." ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... threatened by the advancing tide of middle-class prejudice. It was possible to choose one man out of a thousand, but, amongst three millions, discrimination becomes impossible, when all are moved by the same ambitions and attired in the same livery of mediocrity. No foresight will warn this victorious horde of that other terrible horde, soon to be arrayed against them in the peasant proprietors; in other words, twenty million acres of land, alive, stirring, arguing, deaf to reason, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Vandeleur, one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book. Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a Ministerial statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... some weighty charges to bring against the Parisian society of our day. When Aliette revolts from a world of gossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgar mediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deterioration of moral tone which shocks his sense of honour. As a man of honour, he can hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society which welcomes all the world "to amuse itself ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the Spectator, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor worse than other {362} imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which have won them enduring favor. Such are his famous story of the Whistle, his Dialogue between ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... fine scorn of rhetoric and even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 158) says that 'the mediocrity of knowledge' obtained in the Scotch universities, 'countenanced in general by a national combination so invidious that their friends cannot defend it, and actuated in particulars by a spirit of enterprise so vigorous that their enemies are constrained to praise it, enables ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... taken part with those who vote to each other medals, and, affecting to be tired of the fatigues of office, make to each other requisitions to retain places they would be most reluctant to quit; his great and splendid discovery would long since have been represented to government. Expectant mediocrity would have urged on his claims to remuneration, and those who covered their selfish purposes with the cloak of science, would have hastened to shelter themselves in the mantle of his glory.—But the philosopher may find consolation for the tardy approbation of that ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... more than one way, to our own hurt. We may say cynically, David had his good points and his bad ones, as all your great saints have. Look at them closely, and in spite of all their pretensions you will find them no better than their neighbours. And so we may comfort ourselves, in our own mediocrity and laziness, by denying the existence of all ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... took up in 1877 was a battle ground. The treasury he resigns to his successor in 1881 is a well-ordered machine of red tape and routine, requiring for its future successful administration little else than mediocrity, method and laissez faire. As we said before, we take off our hat to John. He is not a magnetic man like Blaine, not a lovable man like our poor, dear friend Matt. Carpenter, not a brilliant man like our Lamar; not like ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... told, or I have read it somewhere, that Peel was the most successful type of political mediocrity. In accepting this estimate of my departed friend as perfectly true, I ask Heaven to relieve all Ministers, within and without Europe, of their superiority, and to endow them with Peel's mediocrity: ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... attracting temporary admiration. We are not afraid that any, who are really conscious of having acquired accomplishments with these prudent and honourable views, should misapprehend what has been said. Mediocrity may, perhaps, attempt to misrepresent our remarks, and may endeavour to make it appear that we have attacked, and that we would discourage, every effort of female taste and ingenuity in the fine arts; we cannot, therefore, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... be a happiness to have many tastes if I were like other men," said Philip, bitterly. "I might get some power and distinction by mere mediocrity, as they do; at least I should get those middling satisfactions which make men contented to do without great ones. I might think society at St. Ogg's agreeable then. But nothing could make life worth the purchase-money ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... water to the right with jutting promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with contempt. He thought it odious—oppressively odious—in its unsuggestive finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the entrance to the grounds of the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... property-worshiping, cliche-parroting reactionary who made money ranching before he became governor of Wyoming. He tells a few good anecdotes of range days. Numerous better books pertaining to the range are NOT listed here; this mediocrity represents a particular type. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... resistance any attempt to establish unlimited polygyny always provokes, not from the best people, but from the mediocrities and the inferiors. If we could get rid of our inferiors and screw up our average quality until mediocrity ceased to be a reproach, thus making every man reasonably eligible as a father and every woman reasonably desirable as a mother, polygyny and polyandry would immediately fall into sincere disrepute, because monogamy is so much more convenient and economical that nobody would ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... however, often recalled harshly from my dreamy region by the cruel penury of my home, which was partly attributable to the unavailing expense incurred for me. Crops had failed during successive years, and reverses of fortune had changed the humble mediocrity of my parents into comparative want. When on Sundays I went to see my mother, she spoke of her distress, and before me shed tears that she concealed from my father and my sisters. I, too, was reduced ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... events which lifted these commonplace poets suddenly into fame. They do well to amuse an idle hour. The end of both is interesting. That of the first, which begins with stanza lix., discusses the question: "Who cares, how such a mediocrity as Rene lived after the fame of his prophecy died out?"[11] And ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... avail Sordello's frantic impotencies. She saw through the rhetorical trickeries of the music, weighed its cheap splendours, realized the mediocrity of this second-rate poet turned symphonist. Image after image pressed upon her brain, each more pessimistic, more depressing than its predecessor. Alixe could have wept. Her companion placed his hand ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Autobiography. The test of a great piece of literature is, In a hundred years can it be bought in a new edition for ten cents? The New Testament can be bought for ten cents, so can the Autobiography, and the Sketch Book. These emerge from the sea of mediocrity of early American life. They abide while the works of the Michael Wigglesworths and Anne Bradstreets can be found only in the collections ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... discharge the duties of his particular station. The Creator did not intend that every individual human being should be highly cultivated, morally and intellectually, for, as we have seen, he has imposed conditions on society which would render this impossible. There must be general mediocrity, or the highest cultivation must exist along with ignorance, vice, and degradation. But is there in the aggregate of society, less opportunity for intellectual and moral cultivation, on account of the existence of slavery? We must estimate institutions ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... every day. They form a prominent feature in every new literary project, and not unfrequently literature, to use a hackneyed phrase, is made their vehicle—like the namby-pamby of an English opera for the strains of Rossini or Weber. The public are contented with excellence in one department and mediocrity in the other; they cannot be constantly admiring—that is out of the question—and it is probably on this account that much of what appears below par is tolerated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them. All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... "It's only I who could feel it, so deeply as to go so far. All that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would see him as he was, and whose ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... other hand, would the ossified discipline and set rules of a school have shamed him into smirking mediocrity and reduced his native genius ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... to nete, in respect of the irascible; insomuch as it depresses and heightens,—and in fine makes a harmony,—by abating what is too much and by not suffering them to flatten and grow dull. For what is moderate and symmetrous is defined by mediocrity. Still more is it the end of the rational faculty to bring the passions to moderation, which is called sacred, as making a harmony of the extremes with reason, and through reason with each other. For in chariots the best of the team is not in the middle; nor is the skill of driving to ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... superstition to the glorious hope of immortality, they resolved to devote themselves to a life, not only of virtue, but of penitence. The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... this undistinguished and plebeian mediocrity that the Marshall children were introduced when they began going ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... do I. And, in the same way, I prefer my present moderate fortune to my former wealth. Golden mediocrity! cried the adorable ancients; and I subscribe to their enthusiasm. Have I not good wine, good food, good air, the fields and the forest for my walk, a house, an admirable wife, a boy whom I protest I cherish like a son? Now, if ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to sit in the high places," I objected. "I find life precarious enough in my present humble situation. I have no experience. Mediocrity, you see, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... proper grace was vulgarized by an effort to assume the manners or adornments of another sphere. This kind of beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is probably vanishing out of the world, and will certainly never be found in America, where all the girls, whether daughters of the upper-tendon, the mediocrity, the cottage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of dress and deportment, seldom accomplishing a perfectly triumphant hit or an utterly absurd failure. Those words, "genteel" and "ladylike," are terrible ones and do us infinite mischief, but it is because (at least, I hope so) we are in ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... measured march of normal progress, with our assemblies, of which I shall not be suspected to be the detractor, but which, when they are both honest and timid, as is often the case, are disposed to be led only by their average men, that is, by mediocrity; with the committees of initiative, their delays and ballottings, if the 2nd of December had not brought its overwhelming demonstration, if Providence had not taken a hand, France would have remained condemned for an indefinite term to its irremovable magistracy, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of an unequaled mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether indeed there has ever been a respectable composer who has utilized ideas as platitudinous as the ones employed in the first movement of the First Symphony, or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth, or the tune to which in ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... you must take care to be certain that he was at the battle of the Boyne; I conclude so; ind it should be specified the year, when you erect the monument-The latter lines mean to own his having been but a moderate poet, and to cover that mediocrity under his valour; all which is true. Make the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... were put up in 1348; there is no doubt that many of his works still adorn the Cathedral. The names of John Markgraf, James Vischer and the brothers Link were mentioned later. At the latter part of the eighteenth century John Daniel Danegger painted also some, which, however, owing to their mediocrity, have since been removed. For some years past they have undergone considerable repair under the direction of artists of talent and well acquainted with the science of antiquities. The painted windows of the upper galleries of the nave represent the seventy ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... "Hora Novissima," however, which lifts him above golden mediocrity. From the three thousand lines of Bernard of Cluny's poem, "De Contemptu Mundi," famous since the twelfth century, and made music with the mellowness of its own Latin rhyme, Mrs. Isabella G. Parker, the composer's mother, has translated 210 lines. The English is hardly ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... is something outside the classical tradition, outside what imperial Rome with its philistinism and its puritanism has made of the art of Greece and thrust perhaps for ever upon Europe. Here we are free from the overwhelming common-place of Roman art, its mediocrity ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... to construct a focus of power which should control the senate. The young man had not long to look, for within a week after the beginning of the session these others showed themselves to his view, rising above the general level of mediocrity and timidity, party-leaders and chiefs of faction, men who were on their feet continually, speaking half-a-dozen times a day, freely and loudly. To these, and that house at large, he felt it necessary to introduce himself by a speech which must prove him one of the ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue, though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political movement ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... of a religion, if he does not discover something new, he might as well stay at home: nothing near the present standard can take. Two requisites are necessary to found a religion, capacity, and singularity: no fool ever succeeded. If his talents are not above mediocrity, he will not be able to draw the crowd; and if his doctrines are not singular, the crowd ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... system. The students were merely "passed," "not passed," or "conditioned." This undoubtedly stimulated interest in study and scholarship for its own sake in the case of many students, though, in the absence of any of the usual college honors it encouraged a certain level of mediocrity in others. The change in the system and the introduction of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and similar organizations after 1907 resulted in a marked alteration in the attitude toward study and has undoubtedly raised appreciably the ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... the Convention; mediocrity of Gilbert-Liendon Girondists, the; late of the; surrendered by the Convention; vote for Louis' death Glosson, Professor, experiment in crowd psychology Governments, feeble resistance of, to revolution; best tactics to pursue; revolutions effected by Greek Revolution Gregoire Gregory XIII ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... of Fair Women,' or even to 'The Sea-Fairies' and to 'The Lady of Shalott,' will see what labour was expended on their composition. Nothing indeed can be more interesting than to note the touches, the substitution of which measured the whole distance between mediocrity and excellence. Take, for example, the magical alteration in the couplet in the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... right of majorities leads to almost humorous insistence on a dead level of mediocrity. It demands that all people be alike or that they be ostracized. At the same time its greatest accusation against rebels is this same desire to be alike: the suffragette is accused of wanting to be a man, the socialist is accused of envy of the rich, and the black ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... countries, a nobility cannot grow; and so there needs no agrarian, or rather there is one. And for the growth of the nobility in Venice (if so it be, for Machiavel observes in that republic, as a cause of it, a great mediocrity of estates) it is not a point that she is to fear, but might study, seeing she consists of nothing else but nobility, by which, whatever their estates suck from the people, especially if it comes equally, is digested into the better blood of that commonwealth, which is all, or the greatest, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... placed above the wheel." It seems more reasonable to conclude that the youthful discoverer of the law of gravitation intended by the combination of these opposite attractions to produce a balanced movement. It is consoling to the average mediocrity of the race to perceive in these sportive assays, that the mind of Newton passed through the stage of boyhood. But emerging from boyhood, what a bound it made, as from earth to heaven! Hardly commencing bachelor of arts, at the age of twenty-four, ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... mind, this disorder would be rendered much less formidable than we now consider it, and might in its effects be compared to those violent storms of thunder and lightning that purify the atmosphere and dispense salutary refreshment; and it is not improbable, that some, gifted by nature with mediocrity of talent, but of a philosophical turn and aspiring pretensions, might regard the occurrence of such paroxysm as a desideratum, rather than an evil, on account of the extreme soundness they would experience afterwards: it is moreover evident, ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam
... Democracy has a role in the world of great importance,—but the spread of education and opportunity to the mass may make it more difficult for the best ideals and customs to survive in the avalanche of mediocrity that becomes released by the agencies that profit by appealing to the mass. So, too, the rise of the woman and child bring us face to face with new problems, which I think are less difficult problems ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... discovered and could be cultivated. Instead of coming out of school, or going away from apprenticeship, with the most precious part of life for ever gone so far as learning is concerned, chained to some pursuit for which there is no predilection, and which promises nothing higher than mediocrity if not failure—the work for which the mind was peculiarly adapted and for which, therefore, it would have a natural capacity, would not only have been discovered, but the bent of the inclination cultivated, and the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that same interval of time, at ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... causes of non-success in vocal students besides break-down of voice. A fine voice and good musical knowledge are but parts of the equipment of the singer; if he have not the soul of an artist he will never rise above mediocrity. With musical and artistic failures this chapter has nothing to do, but only with preventible causes of break-down, such as have come under my personal observation from close association with the ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... daily life as Madame Cornuel? Buffon was dull company; Newton was never in love; Lord Byron loved nobody but himself; Rousseau was gloomy and half crazy; La Fontaine absent-minded. Human energy, equally distributed, produces dolts, mediocrity in all; unequally bestowed it gives rise to those incongruities to whom the name of Genius is given, and which, if we only could see them, would look like deformities. The same law governs the body; perfect beauty is generally allied with coldness or silliness. Though Pascal was ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... unrefined and uneducated audience, will degenerate and grow slovenly; and from what I have observed of the London stage, I see it is the custom to daub for the galleries, or to creep through the business under cover of a cold, tame mediocrity. Without the slightest patronage from the court or substantial encouragement from the fosterers of literary merit, these luckless personages are expected to attempt the same exertions and intense study, which is rewarded, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... wed that lustre might be added to the glory of the House? "I know a woman," Hagen replies, "the most glorious in the world. On a high rock is her throne; a fire surrounds her abode; only he who shall break through the fire may proffer his suit for Bruennhilde." Gunther's mediocrity and his sense of it stand ingenuously confessed in his question: "Is my courage sufficient for the test?" "The achievement is reserved for one stronger even than you." "Who is this unparalleled champion?" "Siegfried, the son of the Waelsungen.... He, grown in the forest to mighty size ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... this epistle is addressed, was schoolmaster of Ochiltree, and afterwards of New Lanark: he was a writer of verses too, like many more of the poet's comrades;—of verses which rose not above the barren level of mediocrity: "one of his poems," says Chambers, "was a laughable elegy on the death of the Emperor Paul." In his verses to Burns, under the name of a Tailor, there is nothing to laugh at, though they are intended to be laughable ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... well, her mediocrity would have been apparent to every one; but writing absolutely without rhyme or reason, we bow before her supreme assurance. The strongest element in men is inertia—we agree rather than fight about it. We want health—and health is what Mrs. Eddy gives to us—therefore, "Science ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... of his partisans.[17] To the presence of this person the clans are supposed to have been indebted for much of the enthusiasm which led them to glory in the wars of Montrose. His poetry only reaches mediocrity, but the success which attended it led the chiefs to seek similar support in the Jacobite wars; and very animated compositions were the result of their encouragement. Mathieson, the family bard of Seaforth, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... whose haughty and grasping spirit led him to covet distinction and authority in every line, was eagerly soliciting the supreme command of this important armament; and in spite of the general mediocrity of his talents and his very slight experience in the art of war, his partial mistress had the weakness to indulge him in this unreasonable and ill-advised pretension. The title of general of the queen's auxiliaries ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... five hundred years have passed over the country of Dante since the death of his mortal part—years of glory and of shame, of genius and intolerable mediocrity, of turbulent liberty and mortal servitude; but the name of Dante has remained, and the severe image of the poet still rules the destinies of Italian generations, now an encouragement and now a reproach. The splendor of ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... surrender, too weak to match her puny strength against the furies of wind and snow and cold. That scene would live long in the minds of those who saw it; that scene alone would lift his picture above the dead level of mediocrity. But he must ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high motive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... the archives of art, whose principles their officers were bound to maintain, and for the preservation of which they were responsible to posterity, etc. Dr. Waagen was of opinion that the academic system gave an artificial elevation to mediocrity; that it deadened natural talent, and introduced into the freedom of art an unsalutary degree of authority and interference. The late Horace Vernet entertained similar views, recommending the suppression of the French Academy ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... at one of those streets of unimpeachable respectability that may be duplicated a hundred times in London. Its characteristics are monotony and dull mediocrity; a dead sameness makes all the houses appear alike. Before one of ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... in the talking vein. As to clever people's hating each other, I think a little extra talent does sometimes make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... showed off her attainments with her usual self-satisfaction. They were what might be expected from a second-rate old-fashioned young ladies' school, where nothing was good but the French pronunciation. She was evidently considered a great proficient, and her glib mediocrity was even more disheartening than the ungracious carelessness or dulness— there was no knowing which—that made her sister figure wretchedly in the examination. However, there was little time—the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... early mediocrity there remained only a list carpet. The shabby carpet hardly matches with my luxury. I feel it. But I have sworn and I swear that I will keep this carpet, as the peasant, who was raised from the hut to the palace of his sovereign, still kept his wooden shoes. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... sole reward being the intellectual joy of the problem. For this reason the affection and respect of the Scotchman for his amateur colleague were profound, and he showed them by the frankness with which he consulted Holmes in every difficulty. Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, and MacDonald had talent enough for his profession to enable him to perceive that there was no humiliation in seeking the assistance of one who already stood alone in Europe, both in ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Lockhart twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is found the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism. They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Cherubino. This was no other than Pauline Lucca, in the prime of youth and petulance. From her first appearance to the last note she sang, she occupied the stage. The opera seemed to have been written for her. The mediocrity of the troupe threw her commanding merits—the richness of her voice, the purity of her intonation, her vivid conception of character, her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion—into that relief which a sapphire gains ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... complete hack!' objected another of the gentlemen. 'Nothing worse in poetry than mediocrity, and he certainly ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... jarring continually upon the feelings of others, of pandering to the downward tendency in what is popular, and, in education, of debasing the standard of taste and discrimination for children. To be swayed by popularity in matters of taste is to accept mediocrity wholesale. We have left too far behind the ages when the taste of the people could give sound and true judgment in matters of art; we have left them at a distance which can be measured by what lies between the greatest Greek tragedies and contemporary popular ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary excess. Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave the significant title Behemoth, Hobbes lists the reading of classical history among the chief causes of the rebellion. "There ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... year showed me a necessity of departing from my original intention. The task of impartial criticism[4] is now, unhappily, no longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... often had occasion to quote the enthusiastic eulogiums and unmeasured invectives heaped upon him by different parties, to render it necessary to repeat here, that he possessed the strongest proofs against the reproach of mediocrity ever being ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... one strong faculty, the using of which would give delight and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an eagle should become ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... are some nouns, which, though really regular in respect to possessing the two forms for the two numbers, are not free from irregularity in the manner of their application. Thus means is the regular plural of mean; and, when the word is put for mediocrity, middle point, place, or degree, it takes both forms, each in its proper sense; but when it signifies things instrumental, or that which is used to effect an object, most writers use means for the singular as well as for the plural:[156] as, "By ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... or Teniers. At that time Grassou lived at No. 2 rue de Navarin. He became the son-in-law of Vervelle, in 1832, marrying Virginie Vervelle, the heiress of the family, who brought him a dowry of one hundred thousand francs, as well as country and city property. His determined mediocrity opened the doors of the Academy to him and made him an officer in the Legion of Honor in 1830, and major of a battalion in the National Guard after the riots of May 12. He was adored by the middle classes, becoming ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... inferior style may be reasonably preferred to mediocrity in the highest walks of art. A landscape of Claude Lorraine may be preferred to a history of Luca Jordano; but hence appears the necessity of the connoisseur's knowing in what consists the excellence of each class, in order to judge how near it approaches ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... conception of what it means to shape your life to your income. I am poor, and I know. Years ago I had to choose between mediocrity and"—he looked at her peculiarly—"and love, or advancement alone. I had to choose, and fixing my choice upon the higher aim, I had to put everything else out of my life. The thought is intolerable that my name ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... and terse a style." Some Grub-Street hack—a nineteenth-century Tom Brown or Mr. Dash—succeeded in composing these popular and ingenious productions; but the man who wrote the Essays of Elia could not write a successful lottery-puff. At this exult, O mediocrity! and take ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... passes beyond the underpaid stage and is able to live decently and to rise to a position of some responsibility, partly because of her concentration and partly because she has been able to resist the influences about her which make for mediocrity or worse. ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... nervous: he had his limit—his limit was inexorable. He would reserve pure vulgarity for his serial, over which he was sweating blood and water; elsewhere it should be qualified by the prime qualification, the mediocrity that attaches, that endears. Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared for adverse comment, resolute for his ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... free from affectations as it is from passion. When we remember the faults and the splendours of Pauline, it seems incredible that a young poet could write so many pages without stumbling and without soaring; that he could produce a finished work of mediocrity. I suppose that those who read the poem in 1880 felt quite sure that its author would never scale the heights; and they were wrong; because William Watson really has the divine gift, and is one of the most deservedly eminent among ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... spread, too, to an incredible extent, in a prince who, although of intellect beneath mediocrity, was not utterly without sense, and who had had some experience. Without voice or musical knowledge, he used to sing, in private, the passages of the opera prologues that were fullest ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... us unskilled mediocrity is the popular level because it is within the reach of everyone in a democracy. With the German, high skilled, highly instructed efficiency is the ideal. The failure of America to rise into the expert level is due to ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... position in which he was placed, his intelligence on all matters of public concern, his unwearying good-nature, his skill in telling a story, his great athletic power, his quaint, odd ways, his uncouth appearance—all tended to bring him in sharp contrast with the dull mediocrity by ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... needs. I am tired of poverty and all needful discipline. I am tired of seeing babies born to people who don't know how to bring them up. I am tired of folks who smile continuously. I am tired of amiable fools and the platitudes of unintelligent saints. I am tired of mediocrity. I am tired of cats, both human and feline. I am tired of being a soldier and marching with the advance guard. I am tired of girls who giggle and of boys who swear. I am tired of married women who think it charming to be a little giddy, and of married men who ogle young girls and other ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... standing, shook hands with him, and left the ship. Many eyes had followed her with curiosity and interest; and many tongues made remarks about her when she was gone, expressing positive opinions with the confident conceit of mediocrity, although she had not at that time made any sign of what manner of person she really was. She had only been a week amongst them, and her mind had been in a state of passive receptivity the whole time, subject to the impressions which might be made upon it, but not itself producing any. It was her ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and helped him to "win out all right" in the end. The old habit of the showman made him inclined to look on those whom he presented in his various enterprises as material, and sometimes battled with an artistic instinct which often led him to pick out what was good from the seething mass of mediocrity. He believed profoundly in names. But he believed also in "new blood," and was for ever on ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... of the dilettante And idle dreamer; 'tis the poor excuse Of mediocrity. The truly great Know not the word, or know it but to scorn, Else had Joan of Arc a peasant died, Uncrowned by ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... observed, than that the bulk of mankind should injure themselves by too abstemious a temperance. All that can be expected from human weakness, even after working from the most perfect model, is barely to arrive at mediocrity; and, were the model less perfect, or the duties less severe, there is the greatest reason to think, that even that mediocrity would never be attained. Examine the conduct of those who are placed at a distance from all labour and fatigue, and you will find the most trifling exertions act ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... life, my liberty, or my property. I have that inward and dignified consciousness of my own security and independence, which constitutes, and is the only thing which does constitute, the proud and comfortable sentiment of freedom in the human breast. I know, too, and I bless God for my safe mediocrity; I know that if I possessed all the talents of the gentlemen on the side of the House I sit, and on the other, I cannot, by royal favour, or by popular delusion, or by oligarchical cabal, elevate myself above a certain very ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... whom, in common with most Englishmen, the present writer has a sincere respect. It has been said, however, of the "Elegy" by one critic that the subject of the poem gives it an unmerited popularity, and by another—and that quite recently—that it is the "high-water mark of mediocrity." Although Gray's own modest dictum was the foundation of the first of these harsh criticisms, we are unable to allow the truth of the one and must strongly protest against the other. It has been reported that Wolfe, the celebrated general, after reciting the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... wealth of Rome,—decimated, pillaged, trodden under foot by Goths and Vandals, rebuked by Providence, deserted by emperors, abandoned to decay and ruin,—some expedient or new claim to precedency was demanded to prevent the Roman bishops from sinking into mediocrity. It was at this crisis that the pontificate of Leo began, in the year 440. It was a gloomy period, not only for Rome, but for civilization. The queen of cities had been repeatedly sacked, and her treasures ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... from competency to want. If, finally, the utility of the product should increase, or else if its production should become less costly, the balance of exchange would turn to the advantage of the producer, whose condition would thus be raised from fatiguing mediocrity to idle opulence. This phenomenon of depreciation and enrichment is manifested under a thousand forms and by a thousand combinations; it is the essence of the passional and intriguing game of commerce and industry. And this is ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... There are some authors of whom it may be said that they will never better themselves. They are born with a certain rhapsodic gift of commonness, a gift which neither improves nor deteriorates. Richly dowered with crass mediocrity, they proceed from the cradle to the grave at one low dead level. We suspect that Mr. Knight is of these. In saying that it is a pity that he ever took up a pen, we have no desire to seem severe. He is doubtless a quite excellent and harmless person. But he has mistaken his vocation, and that is ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... actor. At length he began to find his true vocation in altering and adapting plays for the stage. This earlier practice, in every capacity, was of great value to him when he began to write plays of his own. As an actor he never rose above mediocrity. It is said that he played such parts as the Ghost in Hamlet, and Adam in As You Like It; but off the stage he became known for a ready ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... "best part" of his education while at school. Such is the judgment of the scholar on the school; as might be expected, it has its counterpart in the judgment of the school on the scholar. The collective intelligence of the staff of Shrewsbury School could find nothing but dull mediocrity in Charles Darwin. The mind that found satisfaction in knowledge, but very little in mere learning; that could appreciate literature, but had no particular aptitude for grammatical exercises; appeared to the "strictly classical" pedagogue to be no mind at all. As a ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sculpture, music, or literature, those works which have pleased the greatest number of people of all classes, for the longest space of time, may without hesitation be pronounced the best; and, however mediocrity may enshrine itself in the admiration of the select few, the palm of excellence can only ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... response to a cry from the child who seemed to be the center of commotion in this house, though so mysteriously inactive. Raven felt the blood mounting to his face, she was so movingly beautiful in this scene of honest but unlovely mediocrity. Even her walk across the room, unconscious of herself, yet with the rhythmic step of high processionals—how strange a part she was of this New England picture! He could not see her now, without turning, and tried to summon his mind ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... along with my apathy is a feeling of dismay that I have spent all these years working to retaliate upon foes that are not worth what it has cost. The worst thing one could wish you is to be yourselves, for there isn't one among you who has the qualities to lift him above his present level of mediocrity." ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... his cousin on account of his superior erudition and more practised delivery; but now his voluble gift of words deserted him. "He was much obliged to them," he said; "though perhaps, on the whole, it was better that men who placed themselves in a mediocre condition should be left to their mediocrity. He had no doubt himself of the justness of the lists. It would be useless for him to say that he had not aspired; all the world"—it was all the world to him—"knew too well that he had aspired. But he had received ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... every country proceeding in a par- ticular way and method, according as their national interest, together with their constitution and clime, in- clined them: some angrily and with extremity; others calmly and with mediocrity, not rending, but easily dividing, the community, and leaving an honest possi- bility of a reconciliation;—which, though peaceable spirits do desire, and may conceive that revolution of time and the mercies of God may effect, yet that judg- ment that shall ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... wonder that so few persons find their true vocations in the world, when it is remembered the random, haphazard way in which children are brought up—educated for the most part in some scholastic mill that grinds down all to the same dead level of mediocrity, and then turns them into the Army, the Church, or ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... him in important matters." Say also: "I hope you will not have the romantic folly to wait for what the French call 'une grande passion.' My good girl, 'une grande passion' is 'une grande folie.' Mediocrity in all things is wisdom; mediocrity in the sensations is superlative wisdom." Say to her: "When you are as old as I am (I am sixty at least, being your grandmother), you will find that the majority of those ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... unfavourable in a socialistic state with its acknowledged need of rigid regulation and bureaucracy. We see all around us the flabby routine work, stale and uninspiring, wherever sharp rivalry has no chance. It is the great opportunity for mediocrity, while the unusual talent is made ineffective and wasted. Our present civilization shows that in every country really decisive achievement is found only in those fields which draw the strongest minds, and that they are drawn only where the greatest premiums are tempting them. To-day even the monopolist ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg |
