Mediocre Quotes - Page 9

• Virtually every subject is most effectively learned directly from the greatest thinkers, historians, artists, philosophers, scientists, prophets and their original works. Great works inspire greatness. Mediocre or poor works inspire mediocre or poor learning. The great accomplishments of humanity are the key to quality education.

  Oliver DeMille

  Artist, Greatness, Keys

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• Madame Bovary is one my favorite novels. Emma Bovary will always be an enigma, but as the years pass, I feel that I understand her better. She has a violent nostalgia, almost an infantile nostalgia, to be understood by the men surrounding her. I like her relentless fight for independence, her rebellion against the mediocre, and her quest for the sublime, even if she burns her wigs in the process. I like that Flaubert never judges her morally for her self-destructiveness, for her desperate attempt to satisfy her wildest desires and appetites.

  Sophie Barthes

  Fighting, Men, Self

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I think art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through politics.

  Harlan Ellison

  Art, Night, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.

  Fred Brooks

  Design, Important, World

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• There is only good art and mediocre art.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Good Art

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• I couldn't give you something mediocre even if that's all you asked for.

  Michelangelo

  Giving, Ifs

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• ...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.

  Georges Bernanos

  Underestimate, Dangerous

  Georges Bernanos (1944). “Plea for Liberty: Letters to the English, the Americans, the Europeans”

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• One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Writing, Numbers

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, November 10, 2010.

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• Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.

  Al Kooper

  Opportunity, Player, Ambitious

  "Rock and Roll". "Shakespeares in the Alley", openvault.wgbh.org. September 1995.

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• A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees. They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

  Jacob Epstein

  Artist, Wife, Chance

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• I was in school for jazz voice, which is the dumbest way to spend $35,000 a year. I just felt like a rip-off of good jazz singers. I didn't feel like I was being anything special, and I always wanted to be special. It's like you know you have something inside you that's gonna make you different than everybody else and make you somebody in this life, but you wish you could figure out what it is, because at most things, you're either mediocre or really, really bad.

  Nellie McKay

  School, Special, Wish

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I make a lot of pots in a year's time and some of them are good and some of them are mediocre and some of them are bad. If they're really bad and I'd be ashamed of them, I throw them out, but if they're mediocre and they'll serve the purpose for which they're designed, that is, a mixing bowl or a soup bowl or a plate or whatever, I sell them. And this income from the sale of these pots permits me to go on and make other pots. It's even more important now that I've quit teaching, because I do not have a teacher's salary to fall back on.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Teacher, Fall, Teaching

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• If we remove desire to be better, we become mediocre.

  Rafael Cruz

  Desire, Remove, Ifs

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• I do know that the best way to make a mediocre movie is to just transcribe the book.

  Andy Weir

  Book, Way, Knows

  Source: variety.com

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• I didn't want to play a mediocre villain. I wanted to go full-on.

  Casper Crump

  Play, Want, Villain

  Source: collider.com

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• I have painted enough to have a lot of respect for mediocre painters. It's really hard.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Enough, Painter, Hard

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip. ...Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements.

  James Hillman

  Mean, Class, Clothes

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• Ninety percent of films are pretty mediocre, but they have a built-in audience and open on 3,000 screens.

  George Clooney

  Film, Ninety, Audience

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.

  Edward Burtynsky

  Photography, People, Stuff

  "Edward Burtynsky's best shot". Interview with Leo Benedictus, www.theguardian.com. August 21, 2008.

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• The difference between the top performers and the average or mediocre performers is not a great, massive difference. It is just a tiny difference because the top performers do things just a tiny bit.

  Brian Tracy

  Average, Differences, Tiny

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• To be mediocre, when only application and diligence would have netted superiority, is an error akin to sin.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Errors, Sin, Diligence

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• I can't think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he's the worst American President of all time.

  Randall Robinson

  Thinking, President, Talent

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

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• Great spirits often meet violent oppisition with mediocre minds.

  Albert Einstein

  Mind, Spirit, Violent

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• You must always remember, because the mediocre mind you encounter may be your own.

  Gilberto Hernandez

  Mind, Encounters, May

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• One of the great things with comedy is that there's no such thing as a mediocre comedy; it's either uproarious or crap. That's the problem.

  Michael Caine

  Comedy, Problem, Great Things

  Interview with Ken P., www.ign.com. March 18, 2003.

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