#mediocrity

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #mediocrity




We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.


Susan Sontag


#ambition #democracy #egalitarianism #equality #essence

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" "I've felt it all my life," she said.


Ayn Rand


#atlas-shrugged #inspirational #mediocrity #objectivism #second-handers

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.


Eric Hoffer


#idea #into #mediocrity #original #original idea

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.


Armand Assante


#i #literature #mediocrity #suffocating

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.


Max Beerbohm


#best #mediocrity #only #trusted

It's a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation.


Roberto Benigni


#gratitude #mediocrity #moderation #sign #you

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.


Warren G. Bennis


#better #everywhere #excellence #exemplary #found

Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire...They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.


Ayn Rand


#greatness #mediocrity #dreams

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.


Jean de la Bruyere


#certain things #endured #mediocrity #music #painting

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.


James F. Cooper


#democracies #mediocrity #tendency #things