#mediocrity

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

Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great. ↗

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

#artists #colossal #creative #extraordinary #great

The only sin is mediocrity. ↗

— Martha Graham

#only #sin

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. ↗

— Margot Fonteyn

#any #art #artists #find #great

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

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#admire #appalling #assembly #easy #everything

The world would hate His followers, not because of evil in their lives, but precisely because of the absence of evil or rather their goodness. Goodness does not cause hatred, but it gives occasion for hatred to manifest itself. The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#faith #life #mediocrity #p #faith

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

— Armand Assante

#i #literature #mediocrity #suffocating

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

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#mediocrity #observe #talk