#mediocrity

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

It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity. ↗

— Richard Yates

#mediocrity #comfort

A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius. ↗

— Charles Horton Cooley

#genius #likely #mediocrity #more #rise

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#major-major #mediocre #mediocrity #men

We shouldn't accept mediocrity as the best a politician can do. ↗

— Joe Manchin

#best #mediocrity #politician

A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence. ↗

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

#common #communism #concord #danger #excellence

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be. ↗

— Roland Merullo

#denial #love #mediocrity #settling #tragedy

The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve. ↗

— Hugh Trevor-Roper

#function #genius #give #mediocrity #new

...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night! ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#giftedness #mediocrity #communication

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith. ↗

— Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans

#faiths #mediocrity #paris #sceptic #courage