#mediocrity

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents. ↗

— Andrew Carnegie

#how #impressive #matter #mediocrity #motivate

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. ↗

— Dale Carnegie

#age #business #consult #content #drive

Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#born #mediocre #mediocrity #people #some

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly? ↗

— George Eliot

#mediocrity #ministry #life

We don't want to think about our weaknesses. We don't want to talk about them, and we certainly don't want anyone else to point them out. This is a classic sign of mediocrity, and this mediocrity has a firm grip on the Church and humanity at this moment in history. ↗

— Matthew Kelly

#mediocrity #p #life

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best. ↗

— Victor J. Banis

#artist #excellence #mediocrity #writer #writing

my academic career was indifferent to the point of beauty- I was so unremarkable, in every way, that the unvarying precision of my mediocrity achieves a kind of loveliness ↗

— Mil Millington

#humor #mediocrity #beauty

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions. ↗

— William E. Gladstone

#among #commonly #dangerous #even #exceptions

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

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