Mediocre Quotes - Page 8

• Herein lies a riddle: How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic?

  Philip Berrigan

  Lying, Tyrants, People

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• Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

  Ezra Pound

  Psychics, Empowerment

  Ezra Pound (1992). “A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours”, p.61, New Directions Publishing

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• Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Gratitude, Strong, Prayer

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• Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered - delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.

  Knut Hamsun

  Men, Soul, Genius

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• Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.

  James Hillman

  Hands, White, Understanding

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• Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence. -Diligentia maximum etiam mediocris ingeni subsidium

  Seneca the Younger

  Intelligence, Mediocrity, Helping

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• Now, today, some children are enrolled in excellent programs. Some children are enrolled in mediocre programs. And some are wasting away their most formative years in bad programs....That's why I'm issuing a challenge to our states: Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs; show us how you'll work to ensure that children are better prepared for success by the time they enter kindergarten. If you do, we will support you with an Early Learning Challenge Grant that I call on Congress to enact.

  Barack Obama

  Children, Cutting, Years

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• A mediocre season for Nelson Piquet as he is now known and always has been.

  Murray Walker

  Funny, Racing, Motor

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• I'd like to get to the point where I can be just as mediocre as a man

  Juanita M. Kreps

  Men, Achievement, I Can

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• Mediocrity is excellence in the eyes of the mediocre.

  Joseph Joubert

  Inspirational, Eye, Excellence

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• Fear, safety, and conformity make you mediocre and average

  Alonzo King

  Average, Safety, Conformity

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• Eat, drink, and be merry is perfectly good in itself; nothing is wrong in it. But it is not enough. Soon you will get tired of it. One cannot just go on eating, drinking, and merrying. Soon the merry-go-round turns into a sorry-go-round - because it is repetitive. Only a very mediocre mind can go on being happy with it.

  Rajneesh

  Sorry, Drinking, Tired

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• The big win is when you refuse to settle for average or mediocre.

  Seth Godin

  Winning, Average, Settling

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• Making mistakes is the privilege of the active. It is always the mediocre people who are negative, who spend their time proving that they were not wrong.

  Ingvar Kamprad

  Mistake, Ikea, People

  "The miracle of Älmhult" by Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. June 17, 2004.

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• The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters - small, small differences - but it’s essential. I didn’t think there is such a big difference between photographers. Very little difference. But it is that little difference that counts, maybe

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Thinking, Differences, Essentials

  "Henri Cartier-Bresson: 'There Are No Maybes'". Interview with Sheila Turner-Seed, lens.blogs.nytimes.com. 1971.

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• In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mistake, Artist, Men

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL - Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: The Critique of the Traditional Morality and the Philosophy of the Past”, p.52, e-artnow

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• 'Media' is the plural for 'mediocre'.

  Rene Saguisag

  Media, Political

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• We must see that we are afraid of the thing we most desire,
  and so we live a mediocre life,
  never bringing to consummation
  the primary impulse of our heart.

  David Deida

  Heart, Desire, Mediocre Life

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• But to paraphrase Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, ignorance and mediocrity are forever busy, and the forces of mediocrity aren't content with being mediocre; they'll do everything in their power to prevent even the humblest of teachers and children from accomplishing anything extraordinary. For good work shines a light on the failures of the mediocre, and that is a light which terrifies those who conspire to keep our nation's children, like themselves, ordinary.

  Rafe Esquith

  Teacher, Children, Ignorance

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• Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.

  Dorothy Day

  Thank God, Problem

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• I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hate, Home, Cities

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (2005). “Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940”, p.108, Cambridge University Press

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• In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Dream, Horse, Dark

  Gustave Flaubert (1999). “Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO - aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo - all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.

  Warren Buffett

  Business, Bingo, Gob

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• We don't become mediocre all at once, and we rarely do it on purpose.

  Seth Godin

  Entrepreneur, Purpose

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• It is the habit of mediocre minds to condemn all that is beyond their grasp.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Wise, Mind, Habit

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