"Mediocrity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Nouveaux Lundis," IV. 263): "A young lawyer at Paris, at first received in a few houses on the Ile St. Louis, he soon withdrew from this inferior world of attorneys and pettyfoggers, whose tone oppressed him. The very thought of the impression this gallant and intensely vulgar mediocrity made upon him, still inspired disgust. He much preferred to talk with longshoremen, if need be, than with these scented limbs ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... predecessors were his partners in the business. If there had been any element of passion in the transaction he would have felt less deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her change of husbands like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity. He could have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses; for resisting Hackett, for yielding to Varick; for anything but her acquiescence and her tact. She reminded him of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt and she knew they ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... his entree into Dover with great pomp, as he afterwards did in London. He had sent for his brothers; he had brought over his mother and sister. England had been for so long a time given up to herself—that is to say, to tyranny, mediocrity, and nonsense—that this return of Charles II., whom the English only knew as the son of the man whose head they had cut off, was a festival for the three kingdoms. Consequently, all the good wishes, all the acclamations which accompanied his return, struck the young king so forcibly that he stooped ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... polyandry a great many women, to the celibacy of neglect. Hence the 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 ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... which Beethoven wrote was stamped with his dominating personality. But the fire of genius burns more steadily in some of the Sonatas than in others. It is the very essence of genius to have its transcendent moments; only mediocrity preserves a dead level. It is therefore no spirit of fault finding which leads us to centre our attention upon those Sonatas which have best stood the test of time and which never fail to convince us of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... to individuals;—just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... of his religious profession was only one 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 [188] 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 aim of our culture should ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... more difficult to handle. "Son coeur est toujours serre," Vauvenargues exclaims. But he nourished a deep and ever-deepening affection for this sensitive lad, and became desirous, almost passionately desirous, to lead him up to better things from out of the mediocrity of his present associations. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Some distinguishing quality, as, for example, the bel air or brillant of Mr. Brisk; the solemnity, yet complaisance of my lord, or something of his own that should look a little Je-ne-sais-quoish; he is too much a mediocrity, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... prison of that state, but in others, depraved appetites and corrupt habits, which have led to the commission of crime, are usually found with the ignorant, uninformed, and duller part of mankind. Of 276 at one time in that institution, nearly all were below mediocrity, and 175 are represented as grossly ignorant, and, in point of education, scarcely capable of transacting the ordinary business ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... correction: he will remember that if some portions be below the rest, which is a disadvantage, it follows that some portions must be above the rest, which is an advantage. The only practical level, if {286} level there must be, is that of mediocrity, if not of absolute worthlessness: any attempt to secure equality of strength will result in equality of weakness. Efficient development may be cut down into meager brevity, and in this way only can apparent equality of plan ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... be very wide of the mark if in our estimation of youthful productions we place more reliance on their departures from what has been already done, than on their resemblances to the best artists. An energetic crudity, even a riotous absurdity, has more promise in it than a clever and elegant mediocrity, because it shows that the young man is speaking out of his own heart, and struggling to express himself in his own way rather than in the way he finds in other men's books. The early works of original writers are usually very bad; then succeeds a short interval of imitation in which the influence ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... returned to business. Lucy 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
... never do!" said my host; "I know myself too well to think of applying for assistance to any one. Were I to become a parliamentary orator, I should wish to be an original one, even if not above mediocrity. What pleasure should I take in any speech I might make, however original as to thought, provided the gestures I employed and the very modulation of my voice were not my own? Take lessons, indeed! why, the fellow who taught me, the professor, might be standing in the gallery whilst I spoke; and, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... it. The divine flame passes from one mind to another similarly constituted. Thence the clusters of great men who, at intervals, have appeared simultaneously and close to each other in the world, and the long intervening periods of mediocrity or imitation. Did the immortal genius of Dante destroy subsequent poetic excellence in Italy? Let Tasso, Ariosto, Metastasio, and Alfieri, answer. Homer did not extinguish AEschylus—he created him. Greek tragedy is little more than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... 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 place ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... to me to have qualified himself for Parliament as others do for the bar, and that he will probably be considered in the House for some time merely as a political adventurer. But if he has the talent and prudence requisite to ensure distinction in the line of his profession, the mediocrity of his original condition will reflect honour on his success, should he hereafter acquire influence and consideration as a statesman. Of his literary talents I know you do not think very highly, nor am I inclined to rank the powers of his mind ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... this emergency comes, is something more than an expert who gives an opinion upon a professional exploit. The special piece of work may contain technical flaws, and yet there may be within it a soul worth all the "icily regular and splendidly null" achievements that ever were possible to proficient mediocrity. That soul is visible only to the observer who can look through the art into the interior spirit of the artist, and thus can estimate a piece of acting according to its inspirational drift and the enthralling and ennobling personality out of which it springs. The acting of Mary Anderson, from ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... secured his B.A., and articled himself to a local architect with the firm intent of stopping the insane drift for modern mediocrity, and bringing about a just regard for the stately dignity of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... attitude against his bureau. He had discovered his reply. "You know you are bitten by the fashion for originality. Why should I make my room hideous with the work of third-rate mediocrity, or of men who are still learning to paint, simply in order to be unlike ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no uniform coat, he was, I believe, a plumber by his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drawings, they are not in general to be admired as specimens of the art; and several of them, as we have been assured by eye-witnesses of the scenes which they describe, do not compensate for their mediocrity in point of execution, by any extraordinary fidelity of representation. Others, indeed, are more faithful, according to our informants. The true reason, however, for this costly mode of publication is in course to be found in a desire ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... is a bourgeois fulfilment of inescapable duties. In such, cases the flower droops; the dream vanishes; the free-born spirit has the choice of fighting day in and day out against the collective demons of pettiness and mediocrity, or of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... been praised at least equally to its merit. In "The Dispensary" there is a strain of smooth and free versification; but few lines are eminently elegant. No passages fall below mediocrity, and few rise much above it. The plan seems formed without just proportion to the subject; the means and end have no necessary connection. Resnel, in his preface to Pope's Essay, remarks that Garth exhibits ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... your example is held out to shame us. I know that we are supposed a dull, sluggish race, rendered passive by finding our situation tolerable, and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from ever attaining to its full perfection. Your leaders in France began by affecting to admire, almost to adore, the British Constitution; but as they advanced, they came to look upon it with a sovereign ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... defended the taste of London, praised it as loyal, constant, faithful; to which his interlocutor retorted with some vivacity that it was faithful to sad trash. He justified this sally by declaring the play in rehearsal sad trash, clumsy mediocrity with all its convenience gone, and that the fault was the want of life in the critical sense of the public, which was ignobly docile, opening its mouth for its dose like the pupils of Dotheboys Hall; not insisting on something different, on a fresh brew altogether. Dashwood asked him if he ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... outside in. He has only to be studious of the very best literature, observant, careful, original, he has only to be himself and not an imitator, to aim at excellence, and not be content with falling a little lower than mediocrity. He needs but bestow the same attention on this art as others give to the other arts and other professions. With these efforts, and with a native and natural gift, which can never be taught, never communicated, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... inflated, no more than that of ordinarie conversations; that the more facile it is, the more excellent it is; that it ought to glide along like the Rivers, and not rebound up like Torrents; and that the less constraint it hath, the more perfection it hath; I have endeavoured then to observe a just mediocrity between vicious Elevation, and creeping Lowness; I have contained my self in Narration, and left my self free in Orations and in Passions, and without speaking as extravagants and the vulgar, I have laboured to speak ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... What is reputation? If it is deserved, it originates with a few score of people among the many millions who would never have recognised the merit they at last applaud. That's the lot of a great genius. As for a mediocrity like me—what ludicrous absurdity to fret myself in the hope that half-a-dozen folks will say I am "above the average!" After all, is there sillier vanity than this? A year after I have published my last book, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... sire, bewilders and makes me apprehensive, for, in doing for my family what your kindness urges you to do, your majesty will raise up enemies for us, and enemies for yourself too. Leave me in my mediocrity, sire; of all the feelings and sentiments I experience, leave me to enjoy ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... you write themes about to tell me that it is perfect. The college is made up of men who worship mediocrity; that is their ideal except in athletics. The condition of the football field is a thousand times more important to the undergraduates and the alumni than the number of books in the library or the quality of the faculty. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... thought which I deem indispensible (sic) in a Sonnet—and (not a very honorable motive perhaps) I was fearful that the title "Sonnet" might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W. L. Bowles—a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the Earl of Burlington's vault, is interred the celebrated Kent, a painter, architect, and father of modern gardening. "In the first character," says Mr. Walpole, "he was below mediocrity; in the second, he was the restorer of the science; in the last, an original, and the inventor of an art that realizes painting and improves nature. Mahomet imagined an Elysium, but Kent created many." He frequently declared, it is said, that he caught his taste in gardening from reading the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... earl of Leicester, 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 in Holland was conferred upon him, and with it ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... faint type of Mr. Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor fellow's craven abjuration of his "former friend," Friar John, is magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as effectually in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... authors eminent for almost every other species of literary excellence, has been hitherto remarkably barren of historical genius; and so far has this defect raised prejudices against us, that some have doubted whether an Englishman can stop at that mediocrity of style, or confine his mind to that even tenour of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... 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 limited point, so as to endanger my ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... It placed him on a level with his emperor, Till the proud soul unlearned submission. Woe is me! I mourn for him! for where he fell, I deem Might none stand firm. Alas! dear general, We in our lucky mediocrity Have ne'er experienced, cannot calculate, What dangerous wishes such a height may breed In the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the will to stand alone, and even the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called EVIL, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the MEDIOCRITY of desires, attains to moral distinction and honour. Finally, under very peaceful circumstances, there is always less opportunity and necessity for training the feelings to severity and rigour, and now every form of severity, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... like the appearance of measuring myself against Marshire.... But—but he certainly seems, in character, the culminating point of mediocrity! In fact, Mr. Disraeli, whom I seldom ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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 ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... owe their rank to 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 prima donna, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... proposal seemed to show an intervening hand in his favour, that sent her distraught at the right moment. He entirely trusted her to be discreet; but she was a miserable creature, who had lost the one last chance offered her by Providence, and furnished him with a signal instance of the mediocrity of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... has 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 ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... was soon to take the place of Winwood. Sir Dudley Carleton was a diplomatist of respectable abilities, and well trained to business and routine. Perhaps on the whole there was none other, in that epoch of official mediocrity, more competent than he to fill what was then certainly the most important of foreign posts. His course of life had in no wise familiarized him with the intricacies of the Dutch constitution, nor could the diplomatic profession, combined with a long residence ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... shoddy crew, this crowd of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!—since they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian. Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all—on that collective face something of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... one hand, the infinitely ramified division of society into the most varied races, which confront each other with small antipathies, bad consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and precisely because of the ambiguous and suspicious positions which they occupy towards each other, such positions being devoid of all real distinctions although coupled with various formalities, are treated by their lords as existences ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the joyous and lepid consul, he jokes upon neutral flags and frauds, jokes upon Irish rebels, jokes upon northern and western and southern foes, and gives himself no trouble upon any subject; nor is the mediocrity of the idolatrous deputy of the slightest use. Dissolved in grins, he reads no memorials upon the state of Ireland, listens to no reports, asks no questions, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... courageous, but they are cunning, and would conquer you. For the sake of the nineteenth century you must not be vanquished. Do not come; in your simplicity you would be caught in the spider's web of clever mediocrity, and your grand efforts to tear yourself free would only be laughed at. Great man, you would be treated ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... me such good service," she said laughing, "and shown that mediocrity is my musical position, let us have some old-fashioned ballads, and all sing them together ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... the average does not vary much. A mediocrity, not disagreeable, always rules; supremity has been, is, and always will be the stick in the riffle around which the little whirlpool will always centre. This year it happens to be Jose Querida who stems the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... would share the fate of the great majority and attain only mediocrity; having missed that one great blinding shaft of pain or joy that might have stabbed him into tense, pulsing life, and spurred him up the heights of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... flower-borders, where the primroses were beginning to wither, and glanced over her life of the past and that of the future, which were divided by this moment like the two beds of flowers; one homely, not very distinguished, simple enough—the other exalted by wealth to something quite above mediocrity. Her heart swelled, full as it was with so many emotions of a totally different kind. She had gained a great prize, though it might not be very much to look at; more or less, she was conscious this ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... close of the battle sung the triumph or the wail, on the side 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, Macvuirich, the pensioner ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to a thing, most always I can manage somehow. You yourself have engineered for me every profitable commission I've ever had. What's more, Kenny, if ever once you'd put into real art the dreadful energy I've put into my mediocrity—" ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... few self-sacrificing heroes and heroines whose love of children and of mankind reconciles them to an humble lot and ill-requited labors, the class of school-teachers throughout the whole civilized world barely reaches the level of that mediocrity which in all other callings suffices to obtain not merely a comfortable maintenance in the present, but a provision against sickness and for ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... 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 on her arm. His fingers burned; she moved, but she felt his will ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the re-establishment of the European balance of power or rejoice in the victory of wretched mediocrity over power and genius. The upheavals of the age will soon affect us all—at least ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Pendragon, lying at the foot of the "House of the Flutes," had little of this survival of former custom about it; it was rapidly developing into that temple of British middle-class mediocrity, a modern watering-place. It had, in the months of June, July, and August, nigger minstrels, a cafe chantant, and a promenade, with six bathing-machines and two donkeys; two new hotels had sprung up within ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... themselves as very clearly defined traits. During the first years of his service the singular grasp of his mind was not appreciated, but it was easy to see that he was growing, and that a man of his political ambition and great industry could not be satisfied with any position of political mediocrity. His situation as a Representative of the Nineteenth Ohio District was exceedingly favorable to his aspirations, as it was the custom of that district to continue a man in its service when once installed, and its overwhelming majority relieved him of all concern about ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... him.[3] Locke, again, did not understand himself. His distinguishing characteristics are feebleness and precipitancy of judgment. Vagueness and irresolution reign in his expressions as they do in his thoughts. He constantly exhibits that most decisive sign of mediocrity—he passes close by the greatest questions without perceiving them. In the study of philosophy, contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge.[4] Condillac was even more vigilantly than anybody else on his guard against his own conscience. But Hume was perhaps the most dangerous ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... that Sam Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted from the ranks of the scoffers. Accordingly it was appropriate that he should come as the guest of Eben ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... did they attract her—school groups, Watts' "Sir Percival," a dog running after a rabbit, a man running after a maid, a cheap brown Madonna in a cheap green frame—in short, a collection where one mediocrity was generally cancelled by another. Over the door there hung a long photograph of a city with waterways, which Agnes, who had never been to Venice, took to be Venice, but which people who had been to Stockholm knew ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compound employments of both; for that will be good for the present, because the virtues of either age, may correct the defects of both; and good for succession, that young men may be learners, while men in age are actors; and, lastly, good for extern ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... know nothing," thought John Effingham, "except by his own passing declarations, and the evident fact that, as regards station, it can scarcely have reached mediocrity. He is one of those who appear to live for the most vulgar motives that are admissible among men of any culture, and whose refinement, such as it is, is purely of the conventional class of habits. Ignorant, beyond the current opinions of a set; prejudiced ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... culture. Into the measure of his life, the comparatively short span of thirty-five years, had been crowded a wealth of incident and experience that seldom falls to the lot of the most fortunate men in this commercialized era whose tendency is to pull nations like individuals down to a common level of mediocrity, and seems bent upon extinguishing even their few remaining national traits ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Juggernaut car that crushes all originality and independence out of action, this breathes more and more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen. Hedda Gabler condemns the old order, in its dulness, its stifling mediocrity, but she is unable to adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new ideas, and she sinks into deeper moral dissolution. She hates all that has been done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... by a little the general progress of thought, as our hill-tops catch first by a little the beams of the rising sun, before they fill the intervening valleys; that men's superiority in profound thought or liberal ideas, in one direction, affords no security for their attaining to mediocrity in others; and that one familiar with the history of thought, may pronounce, with moral certainty, that such and such ideas were never entertained in such or such society, where due preparation did not exist. ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... lowest; and you may safely flatter any woman from her understanding down to the exquisite taste of her fan. Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered, upon the score of their understandings; but those who are in a state of mediocrity, are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces; for every woman who is not absolutely ugly thinks herself handsome; but not hearing often that she is so, is the more grateful and the more obliged to the few who tell her so; whereas ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... was 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 poor fellow we spoke of, who always ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... child, and will have no more idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... means that, I think," he said, "unless it be mediocre—then one is safe; one has scores of friends, and scarce a foe. Mediocrity succeeds wonderfully well nowadays—nobody hates it, because every one feels how easily they themselves can attain to it. Exceptional talent is aggressive—actual genius is offensive; people are insulted to have a thing held up for their admiration which is entirely out of their reach. They become ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... other 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 work of my late husband, and also in my ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... the incidence of the annual wakes, the bankruptcy of the draper next door, and her own sciatica, all in the same tone of metallic tender solicitude. Mr Brindley adopted an entirely serious attitude towards her. If I had met him there and nowhere else I should have taken him for a dignified mediocrity, little better than a fool, but with just enough discretion not to give himself away. I said nothing. I was shy. I always am shy in a bar. Out of her cold, cold roving eye Miss Brett watched me, trying to add me up and ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... technique, press notices, or his fee, shows that he has not appreciated the elements of his task. Being thus in search of all the things that really do not matter, he is putting himself into a position that will ensure him a more or less comfortable mediocrity, provide he is lucky ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... am dedicated for all my future to mediocrity. And what has mediocrity to do with you, who have "never turned your back, but marched ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... you succeed after years of labor and anxiety and harassing fears, you will become a target for envy and malice, and, possibly, for slander. Your own sex will be jealous of your eminence, considering your superiority an insult to their mediocrity; and mine will either ridicule or barely tolerate you; for men detest female competitors in the Olympian game of literature. If you fail, you will be sneered down till you become embittered, soured, misanthropic; a curse to ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the pick of the youth of the 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 ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... symbols and allegories of Oriental books as to ante-historical matters, is willfully to close our eyes against the Light. To translate the symbols into the trivial and commonplace, is the blundering of mediocrity. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... this state of things, this world of despondency, mediocrity, selfishness, and chicanery, and at the precise crisis when the disasters which attended the opening campaigns of the Seven Years' War—and particularly the loss of Minorca—seemed to confirm the gloomiest prognostications of the most hopeless pessimists, came William Pitt; and in eighteen months ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... born with faculties that are naturally adapted to the situation of a general, and if his talents do not fit the extraordinary casualties of war, he will never rise beyond mediocrity." ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... think he would because we underrate gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of mediocrity. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... 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 the vitality ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... has been strongly stated as "the prevailing mediocrity of manners," a study of the manners of the past would seem to reveal to us the fact that in those days of ceremony a man who was beset with shyness need then have suffered less than he would do now in these days of ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... repetition, chief among which was the notion that a man was the better representative of the democratic principle who had contrived to push himself forward to popularity by whatever means, and who represented the average instead of the highest culture of the community, thus establishing an aristocracy of mediocrity, nay, even of vulgarity, in some less intelligent constituencies. The one great strength of democracy is, that it opens all the highways of power and station to the better man, that it gives every man the chance of rising to his natural level; and its great ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... used; yet cautiously and haughtily,—and will yield their best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it farther than ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... with the years that passed, he had come to see that his place would only have been among the multitude of little talents, whose destiny it is to imitate and vulgarise the strivings of genius, to swell the over-huge mass of mediocrity. And so, he had chosen that his life should be a failure—a failure, that is, in the eyes of the world; for himself, he judged otherwise. The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth. Failure! ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... He was below mediocrity in mind, and had received scarcely any education. He had been taught to utter a few phrases, more or less intelligible, in French, Italian, and Flemish, but was quite incapable of sustaining a conversation in either of those languages. When a child, he had learned and subsequently ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,) —poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of us, but the boredom of their souls appeared in their manner of dreary submission to the fads of their commander. It was only his apprenticed boys whose irrepressible spirits were not affected by the solemn and respectable mediocrity of that artist. There were four of these youngsters: one the son of a doctor, another of a colonel, the third of a jeweller; the name of the fourth was Twentyman, and this is all I remember of his parentage. But not one of them seemed to possess the smallest spark of gratitude ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and "Dead Souls," that classic work which de Voguee judges worthy of being given a place in universal literature, between "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas," and which, in a series of immortal types, flagellates the moral emptiness and the mediocrity of life in high ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... we Americans always say," retorted Philip. "Everything is in the future. What guaranty have we for that future? I see none. We make no progress towards the higher arts, except in greater quantities of mediocrity. We sell larger editions of poor books. Our artists fill larger frames and travel farther for materials; but a ten-inch canvas would tell all they have ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... as little part or lot in the complaisant spirit of the man of the world, who from the depths of his mediocrity and ease presumes to promulgate the law of progress, and as dictator to fix its speed. Who does not know this temper of the man of the world, that worst enemy of the world? His inexhaustible patience of abuses that only torment others; his apologetic word for beliefs that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... fossil botanist finds puzzles and enigmas with which hitherto at least he has been able to deal with only indifferent success. There is a view, however, sufficiently simple, which may be found somewhat to lessen, if not altogether remove, the difficulty. Nature does not dwell willingly in mediocrity; and so in all ages she as certainly produced trees, or plants of tree-like proportions and bulk, as she did minute shrubs and herbs. In not a few of the existing orders and families, such as the Rosaceae, the Leguminosae, the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... likewise many reformations; 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 consider the present antipathies ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... 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 ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... good number of things," he wrote towards the end of his life, "but there is scarcely a man who doesn't know his own thing better than I do. This mediocrity in every sort is the consequence of insatiable curiosity and of means so small, that they never permitted me to devote myself to one single branch of human knowledge. I have been forced all my life to follow pursuits for which I was ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... You fancy we are all jealous of one another. No protests of ours can take that notion out of your heads. My dear Pen, I do not intend to try. We are not jealous of mediocrity: we are not patient of it. I dare say we are angry because we see men admire it so. You gentlemen, who pretend to be our betters, give yourselves such airs of protection, and profess such a lofty superiority over us, prove it by quitting the cleverest ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of 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 assaults of the children of light. So may it be said of our institutions of culture, as Matthew ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... He would Love Her" George Etherege To Aenone Robert 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • 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 ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... habit of expression may chance to differ from its own. Goethe was so apt to discover something good in poems which others dismissed as wholly worthless, that it was said of him, "his commendation is a brevet of mediocrity." Perhaps it was his "many-sidedness" that made him so accurate a "detective" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... classes and all sizes, in water-colour and in oils. Clever sketches by clever unknowns, rest beside sprawling frescos by youths whose ambition is vaster than their genius; and finished and accomplished works of art are set off by the foils of unnumbered pieces of unformed and not very promising mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or careful academical studies of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... and the rest were given up, the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund Burke for advocating free ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... obtaining his triple crown; he does not follow in the steps of Sixtus the Fifth merely to become head of a bureau. No one comes or stays in the government offices but idlers, incapables, or fools. Thus the mediocrity of French administration has slowly come about. Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands as an obstacle to the prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years, by its machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated the production of a province; is afraid ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... picturesque; it is the original hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or, indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity who rule over the earth ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... reflect the generous confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the man never yet existed, who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full vigour, in the midst of this kind of solitariness. He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity. I believe that nothing which Mary produced during this period, is marked with those daring flights, which exhibit themselves in the little fiction she composed just before its commencement. Among effusions of a nobler cast, I find occasionally interspersed some of that homily-language, ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... patriotic posturing. He is a Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally comprehensible. What is wanting to his universal success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tenderness. He neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs. The disregard of these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism, hardness. And yet it can be safely affirmed ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... over-rated, but his great fertility, and the real excellence of a few of his books, have made him a widely-spread reputation. His early efforts were less successful than those of Sue; and his first thirty volumes scarcely attained mediocrity. At last he made a start, and took his place on the first line of his class, in virtue of a few masterpieces, scanty diamonds glittering in a cinder-heap. Over-production, the crying vice of the literature of the day, and an over-weening conceit, prevented ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... serviunt, hominesque sui admoneant officii, quam qui quasvis citra, delectum recipiunt, &c. Wherefore, because a transition from idolatry and superstition is more easy to Atheism and the profanation of holy things, than to the golden mediocrity, he saith, he could have wished that Beza had not generally condemned all ceremonies without ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... reputation which the novelist had acquired. Percival was a man of a good deal of ability, of a great deal of knowledge, and of an inexhaustible (p. 061) capacity of spinning out verse, never rising much above, nor falling much below mediocrity, which, if mere quantity were the only element to be considered, would have justified him in contracting to produce enough to constitute of itself a national literature. As he invariably proved himself ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the wives of dull and steady mediocrity. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... spontaneity, 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 in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... concours of the Conservatoire there is always some other pupil of immense promise, who does as well as, if not better than, the future star at the moment of the competition, but who afterward disappears into the mists of mediocrity or of oblivion. Thus, in the year in which the elder Coquelin obtained his prize the public loudly protested against the award of the jury, declaring that the most gifted pupil of the class was a certain M. Malard, who now holds a third-rate position ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... that Gerty had rejected, in the gentle home of the good sisters. The secret of her birth, whatever it was, never came to light but, she took kindly, as Madam Delia had predicted, to "living genteel," and grew up into a well-behaved mediocrity, unregretful of the show-tent. Yet probably no one reared within the smell of sawdust ever quite outgrew all taste for "the profession," and Anne, even when promoted to good society, never missed seeing a performance when her wandering friends came by. If I told you under what name Gerty became ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... recognized, will be 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, insatiable ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... on hand a very few drawings and painings by Richard Tinto, Esquire, which those of the nobility and gentry who might wish to complete their collections of modern art were invited to visit without delay. So ended Dick Tinto! a lamentable proof of the great truth, that in the fine arts mediocrity is not permitted, and that he who cannot ascend to the very top of the ladder will do well not to put his foot ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... instance, King William and Helmholtz. The king is one of the anointed by the Most High, as they claim—one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare this king with Helmholtz, who towers an intellectual Colossus above the crowned mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria. The queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius. And so it is the world over. The time is coming ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... for a moment. He'd never thought about it that way. "You're right, Tallis," he said at last. "You're right. We do know. And because I loved the human race, in spite of its stagnation and its spirit of total mediocrity, I did ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... not think any less of the ladies for the ease of my conquests: I know how impossible it is for the poor dears to resist my charms; but oh the happiness of mediocrity! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... could hardly enter into my uncle's feelings. Albany is certainly a very good sort of a place, and relatively a more respectable-looking town than the "commercial emporium," which, after all, externally, is a mere huge expansion of a very marked mediocrity, with the pretension of a capital in its estimate of itself. But Albany lays no claim to be anything more than a provincial town, and in that class it is highly placed. By the way, there is nothing in which "our people," to speak idiomatically, more deceive ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... a point where toleration sinks into sheer baseness and poltroonery. The toleration of the worst leads us to look on what is barely better as good enough, and to worship what is only moderately good. Woe to that man, or that nation, to whom mediocrity has ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... and in consequence of this lawsuit, a certain Barot, an uncle of Mignon and his partner as well, got up a dispute with Urbain, but as he was a man below mediocrity, Urbain required in order to crush him only to let fall from the height of his superiority a few of those disdainful words which brand as deeply as a red-hot iron. This man, though totally wanting in parts, was very rich, and having ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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
... a few days at Mrs Budd's, she was sufficiently recovered to walk about Swanage. One day she was even strong enough to get as far as the Tilly Whim caves, where she was both surprised and disgusted to find that some surpassing mediocrity had had the fatuousness to deface the sheer glory of the cliffs with improving texts, such as represent the sum of the world's wisdom to the mind of a successful grocer, who has a hankering after the natural science which is retailed in ninepenny popular ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... nineteen-six Brodrick found himself planted with apparent security on the summit of his ambition. He had a unique position, a reputation for caring, caring with the candid purity of high passion, only for the best. He counted as a power unapproachable, implacable to mediocrity. Authors believed in him, adored, feared, detested him, according to their quality. Other editors admired him cautiously; they praised him to his face; in secret they judged him preposterous, but not absurd. They all prophesied ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... compensation; but it must not be supposed that they had fallen into the plight of the sluggard Merovingians or the last Carlovingians, wandering almost without a refuge. A profound change had come over society and royalty in France. In spite of their political mediocrity and their indolent licentiousness, Robert, Henry I., and Philip I., were not, in the eleventh century, insignificant personages, without authority or practical influence, whom their contemporaries could leave out of the account; they were great lords, proprietors of vast ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... age, 10,449 under twenty years, and 25,580 under twenty-five years of age. But it is not the actual delinquency of which the law takes account that most impresses one; it is rather the weight of failure and mediocrity, the host of "seconds" and "culls" that the city treatment of ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... emerged from this equality, not by the splendid talents of any illustrious man, for among her early bishops none rose above mediocrity, but partly from her political position, partly from the great wealth she soon accumulated, and partly from the policy she happened to follow. Her bishop was not present at the Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, nor at that of Sardica, A.D. 345; perhaps ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... they had, during their lifetime, endeavored to place aught within the reach of such but doubt and destitution. I feel the necessity of protesting earnestly against the reaction set on foot by certain thinkers against the mighty-souled, which serves as a cloak for the cavilling spirit of mediocrity. There is something hard, repulsive, and ungrateful in the destructive instinct which so often forgets what has been done by the great men who preceded us, to demand of them merely an account of what more might have been done. Is the pillow of scepticism ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... failed to find any trace of conversions among the still hostile working men of the towns, and the bred-in-the-bone Socialists. The rallying of the conservative classes about the Cross is also due to the fact that the war has exposed the mediocrity and sterile windiness of the old socialistic governments; this misgovernment the upper classes have determined to end once they return from the trenches, and remembering that the Church of Rome was the enemy of the past administrations, cannot help regarding her with a certain friendliness. ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... from the mediaeval to the modern epoch of Catholicism. He was no Cromwell, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck; only a politic old man, contriving by adroit avoidance to steer the ship of the Church clear through innumerable perils. This scion of the Italian middle class, this moral mediocrity, placed his successors in S. Peter's chair upon a throne of such supremacy that they began immediately to claim jurisdiction over kings and nations. Thirty-eight years before his death, when Clement VII. was shut up in S. Angelo, it seemed as though the Papal power might be abolished. Forty-five ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... sink to oblivion's rest Self-sought, 'midst careless acquiescence, seems Strange fate, e'en for a thing of schemes and dreams; But CAESAR's simulacrum, seen by day, Scarce envious CASCA's self would stoop to slay, And mounting mediocrity, once o'erthrown, Need fear—or hope—no dagger save ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... In her way to material luxury, poverty of spirit, the shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral mediocrity of the world. I would to God I could be that stumbling block! I have heard her—I have seen the light in her that may so possibly ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... for this temporary edifice with its complete stage apparatus. It required all the love of his friends, especially of that rarest of all friends, to dispel at times his deep anger when he was compelled to see how mediocrity, even actual vulgarity, again and again held captive the minds of his people to whom he had such high and noble things to offer. "In the end I must accept the money of the Jews in order to build a theatre for the Germans," he said, in the spring of 1873, to ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... this Peace handed to Brion as the price of the latter's precious forgiveness and a token of the sincerity of his colleague's repentance. Thus, as has often happened in this sad world, was disreputable genius exploited once again by smug mediocrity. Mr. Brion, having got all he wanted, left the prison, assuring the Governor that Peace's repentance was "all bunkum," and advising, with commendable anxiety for the public good, that the warders in the condemned cell ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... present 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
... Jews set up to be—God's witnesses!" interrupted Strelitski. "This mediocrity may pass in the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... itself to politicians, but from its own point of view, a point of view which it cannot avoid taking up, it is absolutely right. What is a politician? He is a man who, in respect of his personal opinions, is a nullity, in respect of education, a mediocrity, he shares the general sentiments and passions of the crowd, his sole occupation is politics, and if that career were closed to him, he would ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... obtain a sufficiency of prominent and distinctive features to compose an entertainment founded on American character. The whole nation struck him as being destitute of salient points, and as characterized by a respectable mediocrity, that, however useful it might be in its way, was utterly without poetry, humour, or interest to the observer. For one who dealt principally with the more conspicuous absurdities of his fellow-creatures, Mr. Mathews was certainly right; we also believe him ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... privileged few of education and fortune. But do not misunderstand me. I do not ask poets, novelists, and painters to descend from the heights and walk along the mountain-sides, finding their satisfaction in mediocrity; but, on the contrary, to mount higher. The truly popular is not that which appeals to a certain class of society ordinarily called the common people; the truly popular is what is common to all classes ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... case 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 ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... a single comedy. Marmontel's Memoirs live; his tales have a faded glory; as for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed as the curtain fell on his Cleopatre, was a sound critic of their mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, wrote ill; as the love of spectacle grew, he permitted his William Tell to shoot the apple, and his widow of Malabar to die ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... regret the performances of Henry VIII. by our very valiant friend St. Saens, which were to have taken place at Weimar and Budapest, are put off. Mediocrity, as Balzac said, governs even theaters. Anyhow its power must sometimes be intermittent. Please say many cordial things to your ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... lines in the poem, but not enough to rescue it from that fate which poetical mediocrity ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... modest, honourable man who saw his duty to the nation and the emergency never more clearly than he knew his own defects. Canada never before had a mediocrity of such eminence; a man who without a spark of genius devoted a high talent to a nation's work so well that he just about wins a niche in our Valhalla—if we have one. It was the war that almost finished Borden; and it was ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... each class must be divided into what are termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. In the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull leveling to mediocrity.(6) ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... execution, which cannot be otherwise acquired. The finest singers are ever found to be those, who have best studied and developed the powers of the instrument which nature had bestowed upon them. This is the first grand requisite for the singer; without it, respectable mediocrity may occasionally be attained, but real excellence never can be gained. We know of no English-taught singer who possesses it. So little are the voice and its capabilities understood in this country, that instances might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... due to the feelings of his family, and he did not wish to be hurried; on this ground, he intrenched himself and defied the world to move him. When Cecil made a point, he held to it with the obstinacy characteristic of mediocrity, and Ethel, not being exactly in a position to dictate, and requiring moreover some portion of the Cumberland countenance, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland |
