#mediocrity

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best. ↗

— Victor J. Banis

#artist #excellence #mediocrity #writer #writing

Apathetic people sit back and wait for things to get better before they move. Radical people make things get better by how they move. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#apathy #inspiration #mediocrity #passiveness #success

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy. ↗

— Scott Alexander

#cheating #dying #easy #evil #good

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#genius #mediocrity #pays #tribute

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

Often people that settle in life are those that only do what they can with what they have and where they are. Never settle for someone that didn't know your worth from the beginning or build a life without God in it. Live beyond your low expectations. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#purpose #settling #life

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

Media, the plural of mediocrity. ↗

— Jimmy Breslin

#mediocrity #plural

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice. ↗

— Rutherford B. Hayes

#either #extreme #mediocrity #vice #virtue

Being famous is not something that would make me feel successful - unless one was striving for mediocrity. ↗

— William Hurt

#being famous #famous #feel #make #me