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More "Mediocre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this department of mankind are noted for the beauty of their features, and their fine stature and proportions. Adanson has made this observation of the Negroes on the Senegal. He thus describes the men. "Leur taille est pour l'ordinaire au-dessus de la mediocre, bien prise et sans defaut. Ils sont forts, robustes, et d'un temperament propre a la fatigue. Ils ont les yeux noirs et bien fendus, peu de barbe, les traits du visage assez agreables." They are complete Negroes, for it is added that their complexion is of a fine black, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... without travel we (at least men of the arts and sciences) are miserable creatures. A man of mediocre talent will remain mediocre whether he travel or not; but a man of superior talent (which I can not deny I am, without doing wrong) deteriorates if he remains continually ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... hard-headed and discreet lawyer friend; John Blair, George Wythe, and James McClurg. From South Carolina went three unusual orators, John Rutledge, C.C. Pinckney and Charles Pinckney, and Pierce Butler. Georgia named four mediocre but useful men. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... order; it must result if it wishes that individuals in the exercise of special aptitudes should gain in depth what they are permitted to lose in extension. We are aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius does not shut up its activity within the limits of its functions; but mediocre talents consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their feeble energy; and if some of their energy is reserved for matters of preference, without prejudice to its functions, such a state of things at once bespeaks ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... an interrogative comment on the strange mental vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, "A Song to David," was produced in a mad-house[126]. Of this "Song" Rossetti has said (I quote the "Athenaeum" of Feb. 19, 1887) in a published letter to Mr. Caine, "This wonderful poem of Smart's is the only great accomplished poem of the last ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... uncultivated—that is, the unspoiled—public, and often is worth more than any cultivation. The cultivated public should be willing to accept only the best; it should ruthlessly condemn the bad and the mediocre. ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... especially great, because the study of it from the living—or dying—model is so easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... therein; and striving to become very excellent in order to put to shame, in some sort, those by whom they have been outraged, they become very often great men, whereas, by staying quietly in their country, they would peradventure have had little more than a mediocre success in their arts. Antonio Viniziano, who betook himself to Florence in the wake of Agnolo Gaddi in order to learn painting, grasped the good method of working so well that he was not only esteemed ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... open act of rebellion in order to bring him under still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it than the French, with their partiality for tableaux and sensation; and in De Lamennais its presence was ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... praise—oh, yes; the faint praise that kills. There was some adverse criticism, too; but it was of the light, insincere variety that is given to mediocre work by unimportant artists. Then, here and there, appeared the signed critiques of the men whose opinion counted—and Bertram knew that he had failed. Neither as a work of art, nor as a likeness, was the portrait the success that ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... not die. For the secret of Amiel's malady is sublime, and the expression of it wonderful." So ran one of the last paragraphs of the Introduction, and one may see in the sentences another instance of that courage, that reasoned rashness, which distinguishes the good from the mediocre critic. For it is as true now as it was in the days when La Bruyere rated the critics of his time for their incapacity to praise, and praise at once, that "the surest test of a man's critical power is his judgment of contemporaries." M. Renan, I think, with that exquisite ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... crest stood the Kremlin, containing several ancient churches, the governor's house, and so forth. On a lower terrace, to right and left, stood monasteries and churches intermingled with shops and mediocre dwellings. The only noteworthy church was that in front of us, with its picturesque but un-Russian rococo plaster decoration on red brick, crowned by genuine Russian domes and crosses ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... of the faun took one day a livelier and more assured turn, the joyousness became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial performance at an East End hall. Dressed as a jockey, for no particular reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the gay ...
— When William Came • Saki
... who can tell at once, my dear fellow," continued the latter, in a quick voice. "They have only to cast their eyes on a face and they know whether it is handsome, ugly, or mediocre." ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... for dragging voices up, and out of their legitimate tessitura, has become a very grave evil, the consequences of which, in many instances, have been most disastrous. Tolerable baritones have been transformed into very mediocre tenors, capable mezzo-soprani into very indifferent dramatic soprani, and so on. That this process may have answered in a few isolated cases, where the vocal organs were of such exceptional strength and resistance as ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... accustomed to play duets with his cousin, soon resumed the practice, and though I had not encouraged him as a solo-player, I liked well enough to listen to his violin with a piano accompaniment. Anne's playing was only mediocre, but as she did not attempt anything above her skill, it was pleasant enough; she accompanied all the French songs I had brought with me, and they were numerous, for at that time there was no soiree in Paris—homely or fashionable—without romances; the public taste was not ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... quality of his work down to the level of hopeless hackery. For yielding to this influence; for stooping, in his necessity, to the service of Bagley, who had wronged him; for failing to find a way out of the slough of mediocre production, poor pay, and company inferior to him in mind, he ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the arrival of the French, Napoleon had sent a financier, M. Budin, to put order into the country's resources. M. Budin was a commonplace, middle-aged little man, of mediocre ability, whose personality was not calculated to impress one with an idea of intellectual force. I was told, by those who were in a position to judge of his ability as a specialist, that, although a first-class administrative officer, he was lacking in initiative, and was in no way qualified ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... one definite, unmistakable success. Gerard Hamilton did more for himself by that single brilliant speech than if he had delivered a whole multitude of less striking orations. There is nothing more fatal to a man than middlingness—a sort of dead level of mediocre performance. The world loses count of merely respectable outcome. To obtain its regard you must take its imagination captive at least once. You may be a very excellent person, and do very useful work; but, if you desire to be ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... Lousteau answered coolly. "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he is writing political ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that Shelley's mind is even yet its own master in the firmer and maturer picture which concludes the third act of Prometheus Unbound. He is still repeating a lesson, and it calls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture of perfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius of the poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act to sing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb in eternity," while they circle in lyrical joy around ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... opinion, if we may with any truthfulness attribute a creative power to animals, we must seek it elsewhere. Generally speaking, we attribute only a mediocre importance to a manifestation that might very well be the proper form of animal fancy. It is purely motor, and expresses itself through the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... white cravat, his customary attire every evening, and still had time to show himself in a political salon on the left side, where he met Moichod, the author of that famous Histoire de Napoleon, in which he proves that Napoleon was only a mediocre general, and that all his battles were gained by his lieutenants. Jocquelet wished to go to the Odeon and hear, for the tenth time, the fifth act of a piece of the common-sense school, in which the hero, after haranguing against money for four acts in badly rhymed verse, ends ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... country, could your smoker Boast your "shag," or even "twist," Every man were mediocre Save the blest tobacconist! He will point immortal morals, Make all common praises mute, Who shall win our grateful laurels ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... things than our people (which, however, we doubt), but certainly a better language than the Greek man cannot have invented in either planet. Falling back from cases so low and so lofty (Venus an inferior, Jupiter a far superior planet) to our own case, the case of poor mediocre Tellurians, perhaps the reader thinks that other nations might have served the purpose of Providentia. Other nations might have furnished those Providential models which the great drama of earth required. No. Haughtily and despotically we say it—No. Take France. There is a noble nation. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... society were quite the reverse; sources of my materials; they are mutually corroborative. Analysis of returns from 100 persons mostly of some eminence; extracts from replies of those in whom the visualising faculty is highest; those in whom it is mediocre; lowest; conformity between these and other sets of haphazard returns; octile, median, etc., values; visualisation of colour; some liability to exaggeration; blindfold chess-players; remarkable instances of visualisation; the faculty is not necessarily connected with ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only with the eye of a poet, but also with that of a naturalist. His favorite pastime was ornithology, and he made fine collections of specimens ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... gentlemen of the Army were less satisfied than ever. There had been three "first appearances," of poor quality, and they accused the management of having filled the hall with civilians in order to secure a good reception for these mediocre performers. Hussars and cuirassiers joined forces and made ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... of Judah, and that journal was out of the question. Teaching—the last resort of the hopeless—alone remained. Maybe even in the Ghetto there were parents who wanted their children to learn the piano, and who would find Esther's mediocre digital ability good enough. She might teach as of old in an elementary school. But she would not go back to her own—all the human nature in her revolted at the thought of exposing herself to the sympathy of her former colleagues. Nothing was to be gained by lying sleepless in bed, gazing ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... who make life nobler. It must call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society. It must awaken new tastes ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... new mingled gaily. The old timers with their indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... that contained revulsion, if not actually horror and disgust. They were outrageous. I felt hot for my sister, and it was a relief to know she had moved across the room on some pretence or other, and did not examine them with me. Her talent, of course, is mediocre, yet she has her moments of inspiration—moments, that is to say, when a view of Beauty not normally her own flames divinely through her. And these interpretations struck me forcibly as being thus "inspired"—not her own. They ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... spring morning, came over me—a fit of poetry. From that time the disorder increased, for I indulged it; and though such of my performances as have been seen by friendly eyes have been looked upon as mediocre enough, I still believe, that if ever I could win a lasting reputation, it would be through that channel. Love usually accompanies poetry, and, in my case, there was no ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... between Jackson and Calhoun was widened by the disclosure of an old political secret, probably by Crawford of Georgia, a disappointed Presidential aspirant. Jackson's administration naturally fell more and more into the hands of mediocre men. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist.... Indeed when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Without confessing it to himself too bluntly, this preference had a great deal to do with his low opinion of the widow's intellect; for, though he loved his brother, he could not help thinking him somewhat mediocre and believing himself the superior. However, he was not going to sit there till nightfall; and as he had done on the previous evening, he anxiously asked himself: "What am I going ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... Your book is not a good book. There are dozens like it published every year. The Sensation reviews them six-a-time in three or four hundred words. You may write good books some day, but The Enchanted Lover is just an ordinary, mediocre book. I think ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... capitalist economy with the public sector accounting for roughly half of GDP. Tourism is a major source of foreign exchange, and agriculture is self-sufficient, except for meat, dairy products, and animal feedstuffs. Macroeconomic problems include mediocre GDP growth, the huge public sector, substantial budget deficits, and 10% unemployment. The government's hard drachma policy and public sector wage restraint are largely responsible for the downward trend in inflation, now at the lowest level in 22 years. Investment is likely to be the primary ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pointed to the footprint in the dust, which was apparently none too fresh, they took up the work of tracking. It is astonishing to see how a dog can tell which way a track leads. If in doubt, he runs quickly back and forth on the scent, and thus gauges the way the animal has progressed. A mediocre dog cannot do this, but we had dogs with ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... quantity of the results. The one may be busy all the while but slouch through the minutes. The other may be taut and intensive, working at white heat, and the output will be more extensive and of better quality. The mind that ambles through the period shows forth results that are both meager and mediocre; but the mind whose impact is both forceful and incisive produces results that serve to magnify the work of the school. Thus we have placed before us two basic considerations, one of which is the time itself, in actual minutes, and the other is the ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... the duchess, with a gleam in the hawk eye, and a raising of the hooked nose-which Mrs. Parker Bangs of Chicago, who had met the duchess once or twice, described as "genuine Plantagenet"—"but they will go away wise in their own conceits, and satisfied with their own mediocre performances. My idea is to let them do it, and then show them ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... artistes were no good but the committee, he said, had decided to let the first three concerts go as they pleased and reserve all the talent for Saturday night. Mrs. Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items followed one another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert. There was something she didn't like in the look of things and Mr. Fitzpatrick's vacant smile irritated her very much. However, ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... shown in Fig. 9. It is evident that some of the children were good in arithmetic, some were poor in it; the bulk of them were neither good nor bad but half way between, or, in statistical language, mediocre. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Monsieur Rousseau. Indeed, there was something so unusual, so forceful in this large, almost masculine woman, that Calvert was as much impressed with her as he had been disappointed in Monsieur Necker. It seemed as if the mediocre talents of the Minister of Finance had flamed into genius in this leonine creature who was as much her mother's inferior in looks as her father's superior in intelligence. Mingled with this masculinity of mind and appearance was an ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... down her face, for this was perhaps the bitterest moment she had known. To be beaten by Kathleen, and Irene, was bearable, but—Dorothy! Easy-going, mediocre Dorothy, who had so little ambition that she could laugh at her own shortcomings, and contentedly call herself a "tortoise." Well, the tortoise had come off victor once more, and the poor, beaten hare sat quivering with mortified grief. ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:—SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... writers to be heaven-sent teachers, to be prophets, to be discoverers, what do we ask of them? Is it to write in a particular style, in a given lucid style, a given figurative style, or a given dignified style? Nay, it is only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... fond of 'rich stuffs and costly accessories' he should study the Middle Ages; if he wishes to paint beautiful people, 'untrammelled by any considerations of historical accuracy,' he should turn to the Greek and Roman mythology; and if he is a 'mediocre painter,' he should choose his 'subject from the Old and New Testament,' a recommendation, by the way, that many of our Royal Academicians seem already to have carried out. To paint a real historical picture one requires the assistance of a theatrical costumier and a photographer. From ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... statesmen than could get into the House of Lords; and all the biographies that have ever been written could not furnish more illustrations of the ups and downs of life, especially the downs, nor of more illustrious men. The names of all the great and mediocre people who visited the famous rendezvous would fill a respectable Court guide, and the money transactions that have taken place would pay off the National Debt. All this is a pleasant outcome of ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very high—but ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... illumination. There are those who are born to throw light on the creations of the poets, just as there are others born to be poets. These interpreters give a new life to the works of the masters, AEschylus, Congreve, Tchekhov. When, as more frequently happens, they are called upon to play mediocre parts it is with their own personal force, their atmospheric aura that they create something more than the author himself ever intended or dreamed of. How could Joseph Jefferson play Rip Van Winkle for thirty years (or longer) with scenery in tatters ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the life of a great man, I mean a man eminently successful, you will perceive all the qualities given to him are the qualities necessary even to a mediocre rogue. "He possessed," saith the biographer, "the greatest address [namely, the faculty of wheedling]; the most admirable courage [namely, the faculty of bullying]; the most noble fortitude [namely, the faculty of bearing to be bullied]; ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... chose in the crucible, heat it, throw in a grain or two of some mysterious powder, pronounce a few equally mysterious phrases to impress his audience, and, behold, a lump of precious metal would be found in the bottom of his pot. This was the favorite method of mediocre performers, but was, of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... him to remember that many other men are working, and have worked all their lives, with probably as much effort and assiduous application, as much self-abnegation as he, but have not succeeded in raising themselves above mediocre stations in life, because to them has not been granted the possession of those peculiar gifts which beget conspicuous success, and to which, because they are very rare and because they are needed for the world's work, is given the incentive of ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... accompanied him to the United States with a vague idea that he would be thrown in contact with warlike tribes of Indians, the aborigines of the soil, whose novel and barbarous usages might afford him some mediocre measure of excitement. We need hardly picture ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... general assessment: mediocre service; local and long distance service provided throughout all regions of the country, with services primarily concentrated in the urban areas; major objective is to continue to expand and modernize long-distance network to keep pace ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... were none other than the Goncourts, whose insignificance approached at times imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful of mediocre books—a truly French diet, feeble, but well seasoned. These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with time, that nobody is able any longer to make them out, even ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the feeble and irresolute Directory, composed for the moment of the voluptuous Barres, the intriguing Sieyes, the brave Moulins, the insignificant Roger Ducos, and the honest but somewhat too ingenuous Gohier. The result was a mediocre dignity before the world at large and a very questionable tranquillity ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... friends—in order to preserve peace in the family. A wife may be fiercely jealous of her husband's success and reputation, and cases are not unknown where the wife put every possible obstacle in her husband's way, in order to make him fail in his work, to make him turn out mediocre work, all from fear that his success would gain him admirers, which might perhaps take him away from her. Wives have been known to do everything in their power to exhaust and weaken their husbands, to make them physically unattractive, only to keep ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a shallow box (a device employed more frankly and usefully with an outer flight of steps on the East Side), there is nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre architecture there is, of course—the same applies inevitably to every long street in every capital—but the general effect is homogeneous and fine, and, above, all, grandly generous. And the alternation of high and low buildings produces not infrequently ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... poems I find myself turning automatically to his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of our poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its texture can bear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere richness of diction ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... by this triumph of the liberal party were men of moderate principles; and they were only tolerated by the king as a necessary evil At the head of them was M. Roy, who possessed a considerable knowledge of finance; but the rest were of very mediocre talent. At this time the priests and Jesuits were striving in France for the absolute control of public education, as the most effectual means of recovering their domination. This attempt was resisted by the people, who raised a loud cry of "No Jesuitism!" ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... pretensions, wrote him a letter in which he said: 'You came into my diocese like a St. Bernard; such is the reputation you have for holiness and preaching that my people pay me no respect, and only look on me as a man of common virtue and mediocre talents. Although I hope I am not jealous, still, I must remind you that you act as ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through whose ineptitudes he ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... to be—a thing of permanent beauty. The publishers intend to bring out the edition quite rapidly. Five volumes are ready, and the others will follow at the rate of one each month. The present is the great era of mediocre men. A horde of novel writers gain their living successfully enough, and we take them up and talk about what they are doing, and how their works compare with each other, as if their doings had real importance. But what are they ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... on one side timid and mediocre minds, satisfied to shut themselves up and safeguard what they already have; and on the other more daring and able spirits who are tempted beyond the line of safety in a thirst for discovery and adventure, and ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... noble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as one might say—the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering—we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives—money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; that out of experience there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part, the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... truths of the greatest importance to the common happiness be the object of its zeal, the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which they propose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kind always have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocre mortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown. Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would be prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... commonplace article; but the formula for a genius remains a secret with Deity. The great man becomes great in spite of teachers and parents: and his near kinsmen, being color-blind, usually pooh-pooh the idea that he is anything more than mediocre. At Oxford, William Morris fell in with a young man of about his own age, by the name of Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was studying theology. He was slender in stature, dreamy, spiritual, poetic. Morris was a giant in strength, blunt in speech, bold in manner, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... handsome and amiable man in the world there could not come mediocre offspring. M. du Maine is your idol; the King has given him his noble bearing, with his intelligence; and you have inoculated him with your wit. Is it true that Madame de Montespan is no longer your friend? That is a rumour which has credit in the capital; and if the thing is true I regret it, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... to defeat those who stand most in his way, the tendency will be general to place the more popular candidates, those whose success is most feared, at the bottom of the list, so as to give them as few marks as possible. The result would be to favour mediocre men, or even in ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... charming houses, enchanting gardens, beautiful cities, cultivated people, created in thousands upon thousands of instances in the short span of one generation. Certain great houses abroad have consummate quality, it is true, but for every one of these, there are a thousand that are mediocre, even offensive. In our own country, beautiful houses and appointments flourish like field flowers in summer; not merely in the occasional gardens of the very ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... tarnished their prestige and turned toward other colleges the players emulous of football glory. The "Greys" and "Maroons" had "gobbled" the most likely "future greats" and the Blues had been replenished by a number limited in quantity and mediocre in quality. Of his veterans, the right guard and left tackle had graduated that summer, and their places in the line would be ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... can scrawl a few lines which they accept as a symbol of an engine, an elephant or a pussy cat, so long will the great army of invaders who are our predestined conquerors be content to laugh anew at the request of any one, be he good or mediocre, who ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... undertaking to do so much that after a little the magnitude of the work discourages them, and, as a natural result, the garden suffers seriously, and often proves a sad failure. Bear in mind that a few really good plants will give a hundredfold more pleasure than a great many mediocre ones. Therefore concentrate your work, and aim at quality rather than quantity. Never set out to have so large a garden that the amount of labor you have to expend on it will be likely to prove a burden rather than a ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... some magic in the walls, so great is the similarity of colouring in these chefs d'oeuvres, the clear, the subdued, the pearly tints, a variety of delicious colour, and none of the dirty hues you see in mediocre old paintings. ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... shower of original remarks, paradoxes, and brilliant criticism. She knew exactly where to scoff and where to be enthusiastic, jeered with all the ruthless slang of the Paris gamins at the pompously mediocre sights recommended to the tourists' admiration by Baedeker, and gave evidence of deep and true comprehension of all that ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... starvation basis, there can be no doubt. The general indignation and agitation caused by the summary proceedings during the strike, compelled President Cleveland to appoint a commission to investigate. Cleveland was a mediocre politician who, by a series of fortuitous circumstances, had risen from ward politics to the Presidency. After using the concentrated power of the Federal Government to break the strike, he then decided to ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in the annals ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mustard Seed," "Mary Rose" (which they found sentimental), and to the "Beggar's Opera" again Gerda had her own ideas, very definite and critical, about dramatic merit. Barry enjoyed discussing the plays with her, listening to her clear little silver voice pronouncing judgment. Gerda might be forever mediocre in any form of artistic expression, but she was an artist, with the artist's love of merit and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... properly proportioned and balanced. I began to wonder what this man with such a lavish natural endowment would have done had he been trained. Perhaps he wouldn't have done anything at all; he might have become, at best, a mediocre imitator of the great masters in what they have already done to a finish, or one of the modern innovators who strive after originality by seeing how cleverly they can dodge about through the rules of harmony and at the same time avoid melody. It is ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... fellow-artists, "What his eyes have lost seems to benefit his tongue." The sculptor answered: "At any rate, the impetuous young artist might succeed better in proving himself, by its assistance, a good entertainer, than in creating more mediocre ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one speech which gave glory and a nickname to Single-Speech Hamilton was written by Burke. It was wise, witty and profound—and never again did Hamilton do a thing that rose above the dull and deadly mediocre. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... says of the Capitol: "The general composition of the edifice is certainly worthy of Buonarroti's powerful conception. The balustrade which crowns the facade is indeed bad and vulgar; the great pilasters are very poor in invention, and the windows of the first story are extremely mediocre in style. Nevertheless, there is a great simplicity of lines in these palaces; and the porticoes of the ground-floor might be selected for the beauty of their leading motive. The opposition of the great pilasters to the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of Genius to the Mediocre. Eugenics. Euthenics and Eudemics. Only Men in Lists of Geniuses. Social Need to Learn What Children Are. "Charting Parents." New "Observation Records" for Children. What to Do with the Specially Gifted Child. Genius Universal in Nature. Genius Its Own School-master. Varieties ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... chance of success. His capacity, education and environment deny him the gambler's chance of a prize. As an honest man, he may raise a family, always be in debt, live a life of poverty and hardship and see nothing ahead but drudgery and defeat. This is why so many mediocre men are found in the mountains and oil fields prospecting for hidden wealth. With the chance of a fortune just before them, and no other opportunity to win, they spend their lives without a family or home, urged on ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... many—chatted together familiarly, the well-pleased Masons thought confidentially, by the fireside in the family parlor. It must not be inferred from their constant intercourse that he had the field entirely to himself. Gallants of divers pretensions—first-class, mediocre, and contemptible—considered with a practical eye to "settlement," hovered about the fascinating witch as moths about a gas-burner, and had no citable cause of complaint of non-appreciation, inasmuch ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells, Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the Republic of Letters—a state, let ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Bursley, and a solicitor. It is well known that all bureaucracies are honey-combed with intrigue. Denry Machin left school to be clerk to Mr Duncalf, on the condition that within a year he should be able to write shorthand at the rate of a hundred and fifty words a minute. In those days mediocre and incorrect shorthand was not a drug on the market. He complied (more or less, and decidedly less than more) with the condition. And for several years he really thought that he had nothing further to hope for. Then he met ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the three strange phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in the legends of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... towards ensuring that endowment for the university must provide not only for "teaching adolescents the rudiments of Greek and Latin" and erecting imposing buildings, but also for the furtherance of scientific research. The public readily appreciates a great educational mill for the manufacture of mediocre learning, and it always appreciates a showy building, but it is slow to realize that that which urgently and at all times ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... His Heart. He comes to us in search of rest—to forget the unceasing complaints of His friends in the world, who, instead of appreciating the value of the Cross, receive it far more often with moans and tears. Would you then be as the mediocre souls? Frankly, this is not disinterested love. . . . It is for us to console our Lord, and not for Him to console us. His Heart is so tender that if you cry He will dry your tears; but thereafter He will go away sad, since you did not suffer Him to repose tranquilly within you. Our Lord loves ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... pleased with them; for all these works appeared indeed at a happy and favorable time. They were all written in the spirit which we have developed above. Frequently the fortunate poet undertook the artistic task of giving a high value to very mediocre materials by revising them; and though it cannot be denied that he sometimes permits reason to triumph over the higher powers, and at other times allows sensuality to prevail over the moral qualities, yet we must also grant that, in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the mildest, most innocent men I ever knew. He had a wife to whom he was devoted with a dog-like devotion; he went to church; he was shy and reserved, and he held a mediocre position in a firm of envelope-makers in the City. But he had a romantic soul, and whenever the public craving for envelopes fell off—and that is seldom—he used to allay his secret passion for danger, devilry and excitement by writing sensational ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... publishing a good book is solid capital,—an established house, in the long run, makes more money on "Standards" than on "Catchpennies"; and to the public the possession of the best literature is the breath of life, as that of the bad and mediocre is moral and intellectual decadence. But in practice the interests of the three do not harmonize. The author, even supposing his efforts are stimulated by the highest aspirations for excellence and not by any commercial instinct, is compelled by his circumstances to get the best ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and gifted than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages. His voice was limited in compass, inferior in quality, and habitually out of tune, his power of musical execution mediocre, his physical appearance entirely without grace, picturesqueness, or dignity. Yet Ronconi, by sheer force of a versatile dramatic genius, delighted audiences in characters which had been made familiar to the public through the splendid personalities of Tamburini and Lablache, personalities which ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... and found a mediocre sunset on an easel. Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust. He knew ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... order by the best operator at Rome. Are you be-laced, bepowdered, and be-feathered, as other young fellows are, and should be? At your age, 'il faut du brillant, et meme un peu de fracas, mais point de mediocre; il faut un air vif, aise et noble. Avec les hommes, un maintien respectueux et en meme tems respectable; avec les femmes, un caquet leger, enjoue, et badin, mais toujours ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the literature of any country, into epics moulded upon the Henriade, and tedious odes in the style of Boileau and Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Oustrialov, the historian, truly characterizes most of the voluminous writers of this epoch, as mediocre verse makers, for claiming merits in the cases of Bogdanovich, Khemnitzer, Von Vizin, Dmitriev, and Derzhavin. Bogdanovich wrote a very pretty lyric piece, styled Dushenka based on the story of Cupid and ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... room needs all that to be filled. Being the source of all preferment and of every favor, it is natural that it should overflow[2129]. It is the same in our leveling society (in 1875), where the drawing room of an insignificant deputy, a mediocre journalist, or a fashionable woman, is full of courtiers under the name of friends and visitors. Moreover, here, to be present is an obligation; it might be called a continuation of ancient feudal homage; the staff of nobles is maintained as the retinue of its born general. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mistress, my kind aunt, to recognise the notes and keys, and to play, first short pieces, then sonatas, alone, then as duets. But alas! Neither in the arts of sight nor hearing did I ever prove myself more than mediocre. I never attained, either in drawing or piano-playing, to more than a soulless accuracy. And I hardly showed much greater aptitude when, on bright Sunday mornings, which invited not at all to the delights ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Selwyn was known as a younger member of New York's writing fraternity. He had done one or two good things and several mediocre ones, but promised to reach the doubtful altitude of best-sellership without difficulty. To-day Selwyn is the mouthpiece of neutrality. He has preached it in a language that will not permit of indifference. He has succeeded in surrounding his doubtful idealism with a vigour that commands ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the more common and shallow theatrical production, lighting and color effects have many times saved the day, and, although these effects are not of the deeper emotional type, they may add a spectacular beauty which brings applause where the singing is mediocre and the comedy isn't comedy. The potentiality of lighting effects for the stage has been barely drawn upon, but as the expressiveness of light is more and more utilized on the stage, the art of mobile light will be advanced just so much more. Light, color, and darkness have many ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... shall we endeavor, with our small insight into the bosoms of men and women, to divide them into the good and the bad. There are mediocre intellects; there are mediocre morals. This woman was always more inclined to good than evil, yet at times temptation conquered. She was virtuous till she succumbed to a seducer whom she loved. Under his control she deceived Walter Clifford, and attempted an act ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... the eighteenth century, published in the Third Series of the Documentos para la Historia de Mexico. Father Niel was a Jesuit who visited New Mexico shortly after the reconquest. His observations are of comparatively mediocre value, yet his writings should not be overlooked. The journal of the Brigadier Pedro de Rivera, in 1736, of his military march to Santa Fe, is a dry, matter-of-fact account, but is nevertheless valuable owing to his concise and utterly unembellished description of the Rio Grande valley ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
... mankind. The question whether they have shaped it well would remain open, however. But it would be hardly worth discussing. It is very probable that, had the Battle of Salamis never been fought, the face of the world would have been much as we behold it now, fashioned by the mediocre inspiration and the short-sighted labours of men. From a long and miserable experience of suffering, injustice, disgrace and aggression the nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear—fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory turns easily to rage, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... European university circles; and in America the explorers Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong human testimony to the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... the Ottoman army, an English officer in its service, Lieutenant W.V. Herbert, states that the artillery was very good, despite the poor supply of horses; that the infantry was very good; the regular cavalry mediocre, the irregular cavalry useless. He estimates the total forces in Europe and Asia at 700,000; but, as he admits that the battalions of 800 men rarely averaged more than 600, that total is clearly fallacious. An American authority believes ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... at Maxine when he answered. He looked at Johnny and said, "I'll be frank, kiddo. You have the talent, but you don't have the salesmanship to promote it. Do you want a mediocre job while the weather boys exploit you for the rest of your life or—do you want ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase
... a consistent, an intelligent guidance; operating, as it were, out of some completer survey of the facts at a given moment than my own abilities could possibly have compassed; my mediocre faculties seemed gathered together and perfected—with the result, in time, that my "intuition," as others called it, came to be regarded with a respect that in some cases amounted to half reverence. The adjective "uncanny" was applied ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... so magnificent in all art qualities, that the world was delighted with them. After him, however, the lowered aim had its influence; poorer artists tried to follow in his footsteps, and the world of art soon became flooded with mediocre examples of these meaningless pictures. All this hastened rapidly the ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... does a mediocre thing he is unnoticed; if his work is a masterpiece, jealousy wags its tongue and untruth uses ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... necessary adjuncts to "marrying well," had not been among her advantages for many years. There remained on her horizon only the friendly youths of mediocre attainments that she met in her daily life. She liked them individually and collectively in business, but socially, outside of the office, they made ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... course, middle state; neutrality. mediocrity, least common denominator. V. split the difference; take the average &c n.; reduce to a mean &c n.; strike a balance, pair off. Adj. mean, intermediate; middle &c 68; average; neutral. mediocre, middle-class; commonplace &c (unimportant) 643. Adv. on an average, in the long run; taking one with another, taking all things together, taking it for all in all; communibus annis [Lat.], in round numbers. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... happened to be, themselves retreating into the background with the pathetic humility and self-abnegation of parents who believe and desire their offspring to be of a higher order than themselves,—does the highest culture of which he seems capable make him more than the peer of the mediocre white? I and hundreds of others have read with pleasure the speech of Rev. William D. Johnson, A.M., colored delegate to the Methodist Episcopal Conference which some months ago met in Georgia. It was a good speech ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Music as taught at present in the non-elementary schools is largely a snare and a delusion. A few are turned out with a musicianly equipment, largely in spite of the system rather than by its aid, but the vast majority have little more than a smattering of musical knowledge and a mediocre standard of executive ability as the result of years of study. But the growth of the artistic soul is not accomplished through the fingers, and indeed it is not infrequently strangled at ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... you don't give up poetry and magazine work and get a position as poster-writer for a circus. You are only a mediocre magazinist, but in the poster business you'd ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... corridor in the Law Courts, like the other main corridors, is a place of strange meetings and interviews. A man may receive there a bit of news that will change the whole of the rest of his life, or he may receive only an invitation to a mediocre lunch in the restaurant underneath; he never knows beforehand. Priam assuredly did not receive an invitation to lunch. He was traversing the crowded thoroughfares—for with the exception of match and toothpick sellers the corridor has the characteristics of a Strand ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... at a show in this country was Mr. Berrie's Flo. This was, however, such a mediocre specimen that it did not appeal to the taste of the English dog-loving public. In 1888 Dr. Seelig brought over Skip, Drieske, and Mia. The first-named was purchased by Mr. E. B. Joachim, and the two others by Mr. G. R. Krehl. Later on Mr. Joachim became the owner of Mr. Green's ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... roguishness into the role of the cherub. Even her parents were surprised at the unexpected wealth of her natural ability. Moreover, her voice was velvety and well trained. Accustomed as he had been for years to the mediocre accomplishments of sore throats, Daniel nodded approval when ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... fruits and vegetables and dairy produce he was striving to improve and increase. I did not visit many theatres; it struck me that the Paris stage, like that of London, was undergoing a war phase—unsophisticated, ready-to-be-pleased audiences bringing prosperity to very mediocre plays. ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... greatness in "Robinson Crusoe" is compressed within two hundred pages, the other four hundred being about as mediocre trash as you could purchase anywhere between ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... marks the internal execution of this book marks also its externals. The plates of eggs—four in number, comprising thirty eggs—are admirable; while the plates representing birds are Of the most mediocre description, and do discredit to the work. With all these merits and demerits, the book is of much value, because an unsatisfactory manual is far better than none. It does not take the place of that revised edition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... you Holy Willie for the sake of giving you a little further information of the affair than Mr. Creech[42] could do. An elegy I composed the other day on Sir James H. Blair, if time allow, I will transcribe. The merit is just mediocre. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes, their short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity in horror, whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre run and leap and drive, whipped on by an inexorable goddess, Necessity—the necessity for money, glory, and amusement. Thus, any face which is fresh and graceful and reposeful, any really young face, is in Paris the most extraordinary of exceptions; ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... never love her as you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other city of Italy. We do not love the living as we love the dead. They press upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only our love. Genoa has never asked it, and never will. She is one of us, her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has dared to look. She is like ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Southern Journey and a well-written serious article on the Geological History of our region by Taylor. Except for editorial and meteorological notes the rest is conceived in the lighter vein. The verse is mediocre except perhaps for a quaint play of words in an amusing little skit on the sleeping-bag argument; but an article entitled 'Valhalla' appears to me to be altogether on a different level. It purports to describe the arrival of some of our party at the gates ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... did he even think of becoming a connoisseur. His whole experience in the art of design might be included within twelve months, and his original basis was nothing better than his wife's water-color painting and the mediocre pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; but he brought to his subject an eye that was trained to the closest observation of Nature and a mind experienced beyond all others [Footnote: At least at that time.] in the mysteries of human life. He begins tentatively, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... and Senator Wigfall, of Texas, denounced the President yesterday as mediocre and malicious—and that his blunders had ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... in some cases correct defects and develop abilities which we might otherwise neglect." (b) "Many opinions have been given on the value of life. Some call it good, others call it bad. It would be nearer correct to say that it is mediocre; for on the one hand, our happiness is never as great as we should like, and on the other hand, our misfortunes are never as great as our enemies would wish for us. It is this mediocrity of life which prevents it from being ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... right. Our so-called representative system is unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents in the interest of a mediocre regularity. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery; the generation of artists who arose at ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs—apart from discernment—a certain greatness to find him. The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything. I have never met a woman of supreme beauty with more than a mediocre intellect, by which I do not mean intelligence. There may be some, but I am only writing my own life, and I have not met them. A person of magnetism, temperament and quick intelligence may have neither intellect ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... the Almanack seems to me very successful. But the historical Calendar might gain in interest by omissions and additions. Mediocre local celebrities such as "H.S. in E., T.D. in B., L.A. in L.," etc., etc., do not need to figure as historical. As little do a couple of first performances that were given in Weimar under my conductorship. See to it, dear friend, that ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... as an ignoramus, outraging science. In self-defence, and in order to show how unstable a ground to base one's opinions upon are the conclusions even of such a great authority as Mr. Fergusson, I must mention the following instance. This great architect, but very mediocre archeologist, proclaimed at the very beginning of his scientific career that "all the cave temples of Kanara, without exception, were built between the fifth and the tenth centuries." This theory became generally accepted, when suddenly Dr. Bird found a brass plate in a certain Kanara monument, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... was a very kind man and never mistreated his slaves. He was a man of mediocre means, and instead of having a large plantation as was usual in those days, he ran a boarding house, the revenue therefrom furnishing him substance for a livelihood. He had a small farm from which fresh produce was obtained to supply the needs of his lodgers. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... year to Bengal, the Coromandel coast, Malabar, etc., etc. Consequently the loss of men will be much less, and you will easily realise the advantage that will accrue to a power like England, when it contemplates the invasion, with a mediocre population, of archipelagos, islands, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... which an irregular and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates which ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... themselves artists and entering into competition with us, as if we had not already quite enough competition among our own sex! I honestly believe that with very rare exceptions woman's work is decidedly inferior and mediocre as compared to man's." ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... victim of the craze stops at nothing. He puns in Latin. He quips and quirks in Ionic and Doric. In the worst stages of the disease he will edit Greek plays and say that Merry quite misses the fun of the passage, or that Jebb is mediocre. Think, I beg of you, paterfamilias, and you, mater ditto, what your feelings would be were you to find Henry or Archibald Cuthbert correcting proofs of The Agamemnon, and inventing 'nasty ones' for Mr Sidgwick! Very well ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... other side of the hotel we are in Pau. There is not very much that is impressive in its general appearance. We go by a patch of park and through a mediocre street, and find ourselves in the public square,—the Carfax of the city. From this run east and south its two chief streets. All of the buildings are low and most of them dingy. We expected newer, higher, more ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... assumed the reins of government, nominally at least, for the regent had taken care to give him Dubois for prime minister. Both these illustrious personages, however, died in the course of the year, and were succeeded by the Duc de Bourbon, "ugly and one-eyed, low, mediocre, hypocritical, a man of little led by a woman of nothing, Madame de Prie," and who renewed the persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists. The young king contented himself with "showing at the council table his ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... a keen sense of humor and greatly appreciates a joke. Most of the puns were too involved for me to follow, but there was always a certain amount of slap-stick comedy that could be readily understood. Then there was dancing—as a whole monotonous and mediocre; but there was one old man who was a remarkable performer, and would have been appreciated on any stage in the world. The topical songs invariably amused me—they were so universal in spirit. The chorus of one which was a great hit ran: "Haido, haido, rahweni ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... school—I've caned him frequently this term, and that keeps a boy green in one's memory; but Blenkinsopp minor, Cyril Anastasius Guy Thingumbob Whatyoumaycallit,—I don't remember HIM a bit. I suppose he's one of those inoffensive, mildly mediocre sort of boys who fail to impress their individuality upon one in any way. My experience is that you can always bear in mind the three cleverest boys at the top of each form, and the three stupidest or most mischievous boys at the bottom; but the nine or a dozen meritorious nobodies in the middle ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... second cousin, daughter of the Duchess Sophia of Brunswick, and a descendant of William. Frederick William I married his first cousin, Dorothea, granddaughter of Sophia, and also a descendant of William the Silent. Unfortunately the Hohenzollern line was continued by a mediocre brother of Frederick II, but through his sister, Queen Ulrica, the line of genius lasted still another generation ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... me that you are going a little too far. Children should respect their parents' wishes as far as possible; but when it is a question of their own future, they have a right to present their side of the case. If my uncle Darbois's father had had his way, my uncle Darbois would probably now be a mediocre engineer, instead of the brilliant philosopher who is admired and recognized by the ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... had an enervating effect on his morality. Mediocre in capacity as these persons appeared to him, he felt proud of knowing them, and internally longed for the respectability that attached to a wealthy citizen. A mistress like Madame Dambreuse would give him ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Boulangism,' he said, 'is Boulanger.' 'He has no strength with the officers of the army. They have no confidence either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very high—but such as the work ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... has been the saddest of all our experiences during this war. We knew man to be stupid, mediocre, selfish: we knew that on occasions man could be extremely cruel. But though we had few illusions, we had never believed that man could remain so monstrously indifferent to the cries of millions of victims. We had never ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Twain a sort of professional veneer, but it could not give him fine instincts or nice discriminations or elevated tastes. His works are pure and suitable for children, just as the work of most shallow and mediocre fellows. House dogs and donkeys make the most harmless and chaste companions for young innocence in the world. Mark Twain's humor is of the kind that teamsters use in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the gruff "haw-haw" of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... House of Lords; and all the biographies that have ever been written could not furnish more illustrations of the ups and downs of life, especially the downs, nor of more illustrious men. The names of all the great and mediocre people who visited the famous rendezvous would fill a respectable Court guide, and the money transactions that have taken place would pay off the National Debt. All this is a pleasant ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the same shelf? He only who reads neither the one nor the other. True religion worships God; true taste worships the beautiful without regard of person or nation. German? French? Italian? or English? All the same! But nothing mediocre. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... may be further illustrated by its declaration that the election campaign of 1860 was dominated by a "small section of ultra-abolitionists who make anti-slavery the beginning, middle and end of their creed." As for Lincoln he was characterized as "a mediocre man and a fourth-rate lawyer,"[12] but then some of the prominent American newspapers made quite as mistaken an estimate of Lincoln ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... second. One moment her delicious presence filled the drawing-room (he was relieved to hear her call it a pretty, old-fashioned drawing-room, because, as the drawing-room of a person important enough to be interviewed, it had seemed to him somewhat less than mediocre), and the next moment she had gone. By a singular coincidence, Aunt Annie was descending the stairs just as Henry showed Miss Foster out of the house; the stairs commanded the lobby and ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... guide human development. We may thus in some cases correct defects and develop abilities which we might otherwise neglect." (b) "Many opinions have been given on the value of life. Some call it good, others call it bad. It would be nearer correct to say that it is mediocre; for on the one hand, our happiness is never as great as we should like, and on the other hand, our misfortunes are never as great as our enemies would wish for us. It is this mediocrity of life which prevents ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... hostess who has a talent for assembling the right people has a great asset. Taste in house furnishings or in clothes or in selecting a cook, is as nothing compared to taste in people! Some people have this "sense"—others haven't. The first are the great hosts and hostesses; the others are the mediocre or the failures. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... lowest class and ascended by regular rotation to the highest. The examination of these classes passed off fairly enough to satisfy a reasonable audience. Among the pupils there was the usual proportion of "sharps, flats, and naturals"—otherwise of bright, dull, and mediocre individuals. After the examination of the three classes was complete, there remained the two youths, Walter Middleton and Ishmael Worth, who, far in advance of the other pupils, were not classed with them, and, being ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... furthered the cause of civil service reform and had protected his employees from political party assessments. These acts brought him into collision with the politicians, who had the ear of the President, and Cox had to retire. Both Hoar and Cox were succeeded by mediocre men. ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages. His voice was limited in compass, inferior in quality, and habitually out of tune, his power of musical execution mediocre, his physical appearance entirely without grace, picturesqueness, or dignity. Yet Ronconi, by sheer force of a versatile dramatic genius, delighted audiences in characters which had been made familiar to the public through the splendid personalities of Tamburini ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... us mediocre—authors like Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot are the exception—and so are artists like Millais and Landseer, but when books and paintings give pleasure they fulfil their purpose, ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... those of the Great Fates, as one might say—the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering—we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives—money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... unhappy victim of a fate which in spiteful mood gifted me beyond my fellow-men. I might have had my share of enjoyment in the world, as mediocre people have, but my perfections are in my way at every turn, continually marring my prospects. A superficial observer might think that these advantages would have the contrary effect—that I should be more fortunate than others—but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... to Amager every New Year's eve. All the bad poets and poetesses, newspaper writers, musicians, and artists of all sorts, who come before the public, but make no sensation—those, in short, who are very mediocre, ride—on New Year's eve, out to Amager: they sit astride on their pencils or quill pens. Steel pens don't answer, they are too stiff. I see this troop, as I have said, every New Year's eve. I could name most of them, but it is not worth while to get into a scrape with them; they do not like ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... of love and two glad lips of song have lifted many a mediocre soul up the slopes of happiness to ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... of truth, many fantastic accusations were invented against Las Casas, and diligently circulated. The most frugal and abstemious of men was accused of gluttony and intemperance; his learning, which was certainly varied if not vast and was by no means mediocre, was declared to be superficial and insufficient to enable him to properly weigh nice questions of theology and law, and finally it was insinuated that some of his opinions were heretical and that his refusal to allow the sacraments of penance ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... and mediocre, is amusing because so absolutely destitute of humor, and her style, a feminine Johnsonese, is absurdly hifalutin ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... talent etait fort mediocre, embrassa la profession de medecin. Comme on lui en demandait la raison: "Dans la peinture, repondit-il, toutes les fautes sont exposees a la vue; mais dans la medecine, elles sont ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... of the Capitol: "The general composition of the edifice is certainly worthy of Buonarroti's powerful conception. The balustrade which crowns the facade is indeed bad and vulgar; the great pilasters are very poor in invention, and the windows of the first story are extremely mediocre in style. Nevertheless, there is a great simplicity of lines in these palaces; and the porticoes of the ground-floor might be selected for the beauty of their leading motive. The opposition of the great pilasters to ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... a terre, trouva les tentes brisees en pieces, et l'on ne decouvrit pas un seul homme dans tout le pais. La surprise ne fut pas mediocre. On regarda partout si l'on ne verroit point de traces qui marquassent qu'on eut construit quelque petit batiment: mais il n'y avoit ni tarriere, ni hache, ni couteaux, ni cloux, etc. Il n'y avoit ni ecrit ni indication ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... drawing on foreign parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small territorial extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e.g., Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restraint and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial isolation and "self-sufficiency,"—as has, e.g., appeared in the present war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... destined for the comic press, her wisest course is to collaborate with an artist. A joke may be the best and most original joke in the world, but it will not have a very safe chance of acceptance unless it is illustrated. The illustration per se may be without talent; no matter; mediocre pictures have certainly been instrumental in selling innumerable jokes. And as with jokes, so with "skits," satires, and parodies: the writer must combine with the artist if ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... leader, and there, by his consummate acting, succeeded in obtaining the province of Murcia, together with seven cities which he was to hold under the kalif, on condition of a yearly tribute. Such was the defence of Orihuela, and while it involved no strenuous fighting, it was at the same time no mediocre test of womanly daring. After the first few trying hours of the masquerade had been passed, however, and it was evident that the ruse had been successful, it may well be imagined that these feminine warriors were not slow to see the humor of the situation, and many ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... blessings. Among civilized nations at the present day, it does not seem possible for natural selection to act in any way, so as to secure the permanent advancement of morality and intelligence; for it is indisputably the mediocre, if not the low, both as regards morality and intelligence, who succeed best in life and multiply fastest. Yet there is undoubtedly an advance—on the whole a steady and a permanent one—both in ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... undoubtedly a man of genius and of considerable originality, and a close study of his writings shows conclusively his mental eccentricity. Judging wholly from his printed utterances, Mr. Ingersoll was only a superficial scientist and mediocre scholar. His power lay in his wonderful word imagery, and his intricately constructed verbal arabesques. He was a verbal symbolist. Symbolism, wherever found, and in whatever art, if carried to any extent, must necessarily be an evidence of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... born at Wantage, Berkshire, in the year Eight Hundred Forty-nine. He was the grandson of Egbert, a great man, and the son of Ethelwulf, a man of mediocre qualities. Alfred was shrewd enough to inherit the courage and persistence of his grandfather. Our D. A. R. friends are right and Mark Twain is wrong—it is really more necessary to have a grandfather ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... heat it, throw in a grain or two of some mysterious powder, pronounce a few equally mysterious phrases to impress his audience, and, behold, a lump of precious metal would be found in the bottom of his pot. This was the favorite method of mediocre performers, but was, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... here, and this in contrast to Italy, which reckons itself the "only saving Church." But the people here are really deeply cultured in music. It is true that they are pleased with everything, but only the best music survives. They listen gladly to a mediocre opera which is well cast; but a first-class work, even if not given in the best style, remains ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the relict of John Merrick's only brother, was endowed with a mediocre mind and a towering ambition. When left a widow with an only daughter she had schemed and contrived in endless ways to maintain an appearance of competency on a meager income. Finally she divided her capital, derived ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... Rothenmoor, then to Morgnitz, Dabergotz, and Kroschentin, where they made their duty call at the Ahlemanns', the Jatzkows', and the Grasenabbs'. Further down the list came, among other families, that of Baron von Gueldenklee in Papenhagen. The impression that Effi received was everywhere the same. Mediocre people, whose friendliness was for the most part of an uncertain character, and who, while pretending to speak of Bismarck and the Crown Princess, were in reality merely scrutinizing Effi's dress, which some considered too pretentious for so youthful ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Laura is most affecting, the author did not fully reach the goal he had set for himself, yet "no mediocre mind or ordinary imagination could ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... simply the final decomposition of impoverished, tainted, bourgeois blood, the sudden disappearance of a poor, mediocre being who, despite a facade of seeming health, had been ailing since childhood. But what an overwhelming blow it was both for the mother and for the father, all whose dreams and calculations it swept away! The only ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... apparently leading the life of a saint, but his most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul—whose name is veritably Balzac-ian—tells us some different stories; even Gustave Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand,—as was Countess d'Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better known as "Daniel Stern,"—that lasted from 1846 to 1854, according to Emile Faguet. Here then was a medium which was the other side of good and ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... wasn't as highly impressed as his batman. In fact, he'd often stayed in the larger cities, in hostelries as sumptuous as this, though only of Middle status. Kingston's best was on the mediocre side. He said, "They'd probably tell you they were ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... one autumn. Then try to remember the necessity of concentrating forces, and of bringing your heaviest action to bear on one point: too many undertakings dissipate strength and prostrate work. There is a great deal of poor work done now; and it is said to have been somewhat mediocre so far through the nineteenth century, because time enough has not been taken to do thorough work. The strong desire is to get to the end of toil. We have hardly time to think what to get for dinner or what to wear; but we get something to ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... heaven-sent teachers, to be prophets, to be discoverers, what do we ask of them? Is it to write in a particular style, in a given lucid style, a given figurative style, or a given dignified style? Nay, it is only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, how his abrupt, crabbed, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... don't see why you don't give up poetry and magazine work and get a position as poster-writer for a circus. You are only a mediocre magazinist, but in the poster business you'd ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... student 'activities' are neither active in the true sense, nor fit for students. There has grown up a small clan of intellectual athletes who win victories while thousands of mediocre students, six feet and over and having an average weight of 195 pounds, stand around and cheer. Our student-managers have become men of business, purely. The receipts at the last Harvard-Yale debate on the popular election of United States senators amounted ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... April he was elected a member of the Commune by the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and forthwith appointed Director of the Beaux Arts. Until this time his life had been purely professional, and consequently of mediocre interest for the general public. He was born at Ornans, department of the Doubs, in 1819, and received his primary instructions from the Abbe Gousset, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims. He first applied himself to the study of mathematics, painting the while, and apparently aiming at a fusion ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... philosophers in America, and it is no accident if the influence of Kant soon became dominant here. To embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound metaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no difficulty in embracing it. In truth it was a sign of having been brought up in the genteel tradition, of feeling it weak, and ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the publisher, the right of publishing a good book is solid capital,—an established house, in the long run, makes more money on "Standards" than on "Catchpennies"; and to the public the possession of the best literature is the breath of life, as that of the bad and mediocre is moral and intellectual decadence. But in practice the interests of the three do not harmonize. The author, even supposing his efforts are stimulated by the highest aspirations for excellence and not by any commercial instinct, is compelled by his circumstances to get the best ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... good-humoured air of affront, 'you thought me serious? Don't you know I'm the ninth, instead of the nineteenth-century man, under your wing? I'd promise you to be a bishop, only, you see, I'm afraid I couldn't be mediocre enough.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... higher order of importance, or a strong point in another class. It may be more beneficial, for instance, to drill an ineffective turret crew than to try to reduce friction in a training gear already nearly frictionless; or it may be more beneficial to overcome the faults of a mediocre gun-pointer than to develop still more highly the skill already great of another gun-pointer; but, on the other hand, it may be less beneficial to drill boat crews at boat-sailing, even if they need it, than to ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... sing,' she warned him as a gaunt girl went towards the piano; and sinking on to a convenient and sheltered couch, they resigned themselves to listen—or to endure. From that corner Rose had a view of the long room, mediocre in its decoration, mediocre in its occupants. She could see her host standing before the fire, swinging his eyeglasses on a cord and gazing at the cornice as the song proceeded. She could see Christabel's neck and ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... not made for me, and I was not made for morality. I am a man apart, and I accept nobody's conditions. I tell you always, Josephine, that these are the foolish phrases of mediocre people who wish to fetter the great. They do not apply to me. I will never consent to frame my conduct by ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fill your eighth of a column, and add, that the performance is not equal to the promise. You must never feel nor shew the faintest interest in the work reviewed, that would be fatal. Never praise heartily, that is the sign of an intelligence not mediocre. Be vague, colourless, and languid, this deters readers from approaching the book. If you have glanced at it, blame it for not being what it never professed to be; if it is a treatise on Greek Prosody, censure the lack of humour; if it is a volume of gay verses, lament the author's indifference ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... by the accident which happened to the man he seemed to love most. Too happy if one had only said that of him! He was supposed to be jealous of the merit of Schwerin and of Keith, and delighted to have got them killed. It is thus that mediocre people seek to lower great men, to diminish the immense space that lies between themselves ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the phrase he adds to every one of the phrases his rival recites, he chooses it to insinuate that the work of Euripides is labour lost, and that he would have done just as well not to meddle with tragedy. The joke is mediocre at its best and is kept up far ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the rains are nearly due, and great masses of cloud begin to gather on the horizon, there is again and again a pageant of wonder and colouring to steep man's senses afresh at every renewal, as if it was the first time of beholding. Nothing banal, nothing mediocre in the actual phenomenon—just a riot of colouring, a riot of splendour, a riot of revelation. It is not a glory in the west spreading a little way overhead. It is an all around, north, south, east, and west, colouring beyond all telling—something aloof, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... chief might approve. The breach between Jackson and Calhoun was widened by the disclosure of an old political secret, probably by Crawford of Georgia, a disappointed Presidential aspirant. Jackson's administration naturally fell more and more into the hands of mediocre men. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to propose to penetrate the motives of such withdrawal, but what I did deny was that it could possibly be caused—as its strangely late announcement seemed sweetly to insinuate—by the strong determination to tolerate no longer the mediocre work that had hitherto habitually swarmed the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... aroma of West Point lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... rationally believe ourselves able to trace in great part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of The Jew of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess or default in emotion, of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... off the nose of the man; the girl received at the same time a third of the man's fortune, as a compensation. Seduction, if not followed by marriage, was expiated by a pound of gold, if the party were rich; half a pound of gold, if the party were in mediocre circumstances; and cutting off the nose if the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... in 67 performed strange sacrifices on Olympus, a volcano of Lycia, and practiced occult rites, among others those of Mithra which, he says, "exist to the present day and were first taught by them."[14] Lactantius Placidus, a commentator on Statius and a mediocre authority, also tells us that the cult passed from the Persians to the Phrygians and from the Phrygians to ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... all these works appeared indeed at a happy and favorable time. They were all written in the spirit which we have developed above. Frequently the fortunate poet undertook the artistic task of giving a high value to very mediocre materials by revising them; and though it cannot be denied that he sometimes permits reason to triumph over the higher powers, and at other times allows sensuality to prevail over the moral qualities, yet we must ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... may with any truthfulness attribute a creative power to animals, we must seek it elsewhere. Generally speaking, we attribute only a mediocre importance to a manifestation that might very well be the proper form of animal fancy. It is purely motor, and expresses itself through the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of the lack of a sense of beauty has been brought against nearly all original novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre novelist. Even in the extreme cases it is untrue; perhaps it is most untrue in the extreme cases. I do not mean such a case as that of Zola, who never went to extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... domestic system is mediocre, but adequate for government and business use, in part because major businesses have established their own private systems; since 1988, the government has promoted investment in the national telecommunications system on a priority ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... friends to be seated side by side in the concert hall, listening to the performance of a violin sonata by an artist of about mediocre ability. Suppose one of the friends to be a highly trained musical critic, the other to be almost unacquainted with music of this class. Let us now inquire how the tones of the violin will impress these two hearers; and further, ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... Then he was the obedient student. Now he was an acknowledged master. He painted The Sortie of the Company of Frans Banning Cocq as an artist who was profoundly interested in problems of light and shade, with strong views as to the composition of a picture, not as a methodical and mediocre painter desirous of carrying out the commission in a way to please his patrons. They wanted a presentment of the face and figure of each member of the company who had subscribed a hundred florins. Rembrandt ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... fond of that droll fable, the hare and the tortoise,—it really believes because (I suppose the fable to be true!) a tortoise once beat a hare that all tortoises are much better runners than hares possibly can be. Mediocre men have the monopoly of the loaves and fishes; and even when talent does rise in life, it is a talent which only differs from mediocrity by being more energetic ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the cargo of mules and horses. Cappy was particularly interested in the ventilating system below decks, for he was fond of horses and had resolved to deliver the cargo without the loss of a single animal. Of no mediocre turn of mind mechanically, he, assisted by Terry Reardon, made a few suggestions that the British veterinaries in charge were very ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Ruskin writes a scathing letter, which was what he had played for. He had got something for nothing cheaply. The few who knew and despised him did not matter, for they were able and learned and obscure, and, in the world where he moves, most people are superficial, mediocre, and 'tuppence coloured.' It was all very brilliant. He pursued his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... doubt), but certainly a better language than the Greek man cannot have invented in either planet. Falling back from cases so low and so lofty (Venus an inferior, Jupiter a far superior planet) to our own case, the case of poor mediocre Tellurians, perhaps the reader thinks that other nations might have served the purpose of Providentia. Other nations might have furnished those Providential models which the great drama of earth required. No. Haughtily and despotically we say it—No. Take France. There is a noble ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... apt to take account merely of their ability, and do not reckon this personal atmosphere or magnetic power as a part of their success-capital. Yet this individual atmosphere has quite as much to do with one's advancement as brain-power or education. Indeed, we constantly see men of mediocre ability but with fine personal presence, superb manner, and magnetic qualities, being rapidly advanced over the heads of those who are infinitely their superiors in ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... "Mendacity and insincerity—- in these I found the effects, the sure and only sure effects, of an English university education." He wrote a Latin ode on the death of George II., which was much praised. In later years he himself said of it, "It was a mediocre performance on a trumpery subject, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Pons. There were a "Chevalier de Malte en Priere," by Sebastian del Piombo; a "Holy Family," by Fra Bartolommeo; a "Landscape," by Hobbema; and a "Portrait of a Woman," by Albert Durer. Apparently they were in reality mediocre as works of art, but they were a source of the utmost pride and delight to their owner, who said enthusiastically of one of them—the Sebastian del Piombo—that "human art can go no further." When we know that in the novel Balzac is speaking ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... obtained the feeble and irresolute Directory, composed for the moment of the voluptuous Barres, the intriguing Sieyes, the brave Moulins, the insignificant Roger Ducos, and the honest but somewhat too ingenuous Gohier. The result was a mediocre dignity before the world at large and a ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... tale was mediocre, And his face of yellow ochre Took a tinge of saffron sorrow in his fright; Yet he rose to the occasion, Without anger or evasion, And did his best ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... General McClellan drew from him the satiric broadside,—"Tardy George"—privately printed in 1865—Boker's thoughts were concerned with poetry. His official laureate consciousness did not serve to improve the verse. His "Our Heroic Themes"—written for the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa—was mediocre in everything but intent, recalling what Taylor wrote to him: "My Harvard poem, [he had read it in 1850 before the same fraternity] poor as it is, was received with great applause; but, alas! I published it, and thus killed the tradition ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... together familiarly, the well-pleased Masons thought confidentially, by the fireside in the family parlor. It must not be inferred from their constant intercourse that he had the field entirely to himself. Gallants of divers pretensions—first-class, mediocre, and contemptible—considered with a practical eye to "settlement," hovered about the fascinating witch as moths about a gas-burner, and had no citable cause of complaint of non-appreciation, inasmuch as she shed equal light upon all, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... these days of constant defeat and declining enthusiasm Congress too often fell to the level of a wrangling body of mediocre men. After the first years the ability that might have given it dignity was largely employed in the army, on diplomatic missions, or in the establishment and administration of the new State Governments. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... think you will have to insist forcibly on assuming charge of your own social and financial affairs in your own home. It may not be easy, with such a man as you describe, but you will accomplish it. However, many mediocre women have proved their ability to attend to their own fortunes, and do good business for themselves; but your battle is to be fought on still higher grounds. You are to rise and establish with your fellow-man a plane of common citizenship. You ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the sport of it; I am really poor and grateful for any work. It is only fair that I should tell you this much, that I am running away from no one. Beyond the fact that I am the son of a very great but unknown scholar, a farmer of mediocre talents who lost his farm because he dreamed of humanity instead of cabbages, I have nothing to say." He said it gravely, without pride ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... the tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist.... Indeed when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours with my ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... heavy expenses are already met, and the state, the manager-general of the service, furnishes simply a very small quota; and this quota, mediocre as a rule, is found almost null in fact, for its main largess consists in 6,400 scholarships which it establishes and engages to support; but it confers only about 3,000 of them, and it distributes ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later on in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... to his plans, and in his mind he shuffled them and their values for him or against him as a gambler arranges and rearranges the cards in his hand. He saw himself plainly as his own highest card, and Barrat and Erhaupt as willing but mediocre accomplices. In Father Paul and Kalonay he recognized his most powerful allies or most dangerous foes. Miss Carson meant nothing to him but a source from which he could draw the sinews of war. What would become of her after the farce was ended, ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... spite of her physical charms, had found life hard during the earlier years of her career. She had become a mediocre actress merely for the sake of having some profession, and had frequented the night restaurants in quest of a wealthy lover. It was only after a long delay that fortune had smiled upon her, and she ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... far surpasses himself. Had all else that he wrote been merely mediocre, this one short poem would have given him a claim on the grateful memory of posterity. The note it strikes is one that has never been heard before in Latin poetry and is never heard again. We have wavered before as to Statius' title to the name of true poet; this should ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... is thus that we judge a man, when we wish to fix his ethical status; it is thus that the Rational Social Will judges a nation. The language in which the proposals are made is a matter of no moment. It may fairly be called professional slang, and can quickly be acquired, even by men of mediocre intelligence, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... it with interest, and few will fail to read it with advantage. Upon the ordinary rules of whist, Pembridge supplies much sensible and thoroughly amusing comment. The best player in the world may gain from his observations, and a mediocre player can scarcely find a better counsellor. There is scarcely an opinion expressed with which we do not coincide."—London ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... in the Law Courts, like the other main corridors, is a place of strange meetings and interviews. A man may receive there a bit of news that will change the whole of the rest of his life, or he may receive only an invitation to a mediocre lunch in the restaurant underneath; he never knows beforehand. Priam assuredly did not receive an invitation to lunch. He was traversing the crowded thoroughfares—for with the exception of match and toothpick sellers ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... a mediocre consolation at best,—permission to be interred at a special hour and in a special corner in the ancient Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land which had formerly belonged to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... piling up the empty shells became daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through whose ineptitudes he justly ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... three strange phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in the legends of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had blundered. But all alike to-night, irrespective ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... when he could be severed from his innumerable manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last wish that ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... cunning villain who planned this thing," I said, "has overstepped himself, as you say, Gatton. If the murder was planned artistically, in his attempt to throw the onus of the crime upon innocent shoulders he has been guilty of a piece of very mediocre work. It ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... beyond them; and is not the shining star of human wisdom always situate on the horizon? If we could see these things as nature sees them, with her thoughts and feelings, we should realise that the uniform mediocrity that runs through these lives cannot truly be mediocre, from the mere fact of its uniformity. And indeed this matters but little; we can never judge another soul above the high-water mark of our own; and however insignificant a creature may seem to us at first, as our own soul emerges from shadow, so does the shadow lift from ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Government despatches every year to Bengal, the Coromandel coast, Malabar, etc., etc. Consequently the loss of men will be much less, and you will easily realise the advantage that will accrue to a power like England, when it contemplates the invasion, with a mediocre population, of archipelagos, islands, and ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... of subject is especially great, because the study of it from the living—or dying—model is so easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute of observant faculty ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... public sector accounting for roughly half of GDP. Tourism is a major source of foreign exchange, and agriculture is self-sufficient, except for meat, dairy products, and animal feedstuffs. Macroeconomic problems include mediocre GDP growth, the huge public sector, substantial budget deficits, and 10% unemployment. The government's hard drachma policy and public sector wage restraint are largely responsible for the downward trend in inflation, now at the lowest level in 22 years. ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Chia Cheng added with a smiling countenance, "that I've been, even in my young days, very mediocre in the composition of stanzas on flowers, birds, rockeries and streams; and that now that I'm well up in years and have moreover the fatigue and trouble of my official duties, I've become in literary compositions ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... would wash his hands of the entire business, and the sly swindlers must look elsewhere, in order to unload their property. The extravagant claims they had made for its richness could not be justified, because it was after all a very mediocre discovery, which would never pay for the working, so far away ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the most mediocre understanding are quite sensible enough to select the right implements to carry on any work that they have undertaken. A woman about to sew a fine piece of muslin does not dash haphazard into her work-basket and pick ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... sentimental), and to the "Beggar's Opera" again Gerda had her own ideas, very definite and critical, about dramatic merit. Barry enjoyed discussing the plays with her, listening to her clear little silver voice pronouncing judgment. Gerda might be forever mediocre in any form of artistic expression, but she was an artist, with the artist's love of merit and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Geraldini, an Italian, preceptor of the royal children, who was standing behind Cardinal Mendoza at the time, "represented to him that Nicholas de Lyra and St. Augustine had been, without doubt, excellent theologians but only mediocre geographers, since the Portuguese had reached a point of the other hemisphere where they had ceased to see the pole-star and discovered another star at the opposite pole, and that they had even found all the countries situated under the torrid zone fully ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... mediocre intellect and boundless self-conceit happened to be the commander-in-chief of the government army when the insurrection collapsed. The politicians, whose nefarious scheming had prolonged the war, saw their opportunity for furthering their own ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... dia, with miniatures, were first sold off at mediocre prices. Needless to say, the illuminations of these books ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... he reads Nietzsche, he ponders over many things, but he does not know how to think for himself. The fact that there are people who can find a way to express themselves appears to him as an inaccessible ideal; while mediocre minds have no attraction for him at all. It is from this feeling that all his sufferings come. So "a horse, carrying a heavy burden, breathes hard, falls to the ground, but is forced to rise and proceed by stinging lashes from ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... tapers in the place of those that had burnt out, and then he looked at his mother, revolving in his brain those apparently profound thoughts, those religious and philosophical commonplaces which trouble people of mediocre intelligence in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... than's in the catecheesm," remarked Salemina, yawning a little as she put away her darning-ball. "It is pathetic to see you waste your time painting mediocre pictures, when as a lecturer upon love you ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... am stronger than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' Its grown up form is: 'I am cleverer than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not satisfied with being sought after and admired because his hands can do more than ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... of the play, which allots the parts as arbitrarily as in the Midsummer Night's Dream does Peter Quince, who says to highly respectable people: "You play the Lion, and you play the Ass," necessitates making a victim of a man who was a mediocre diplomat, but for a time, at least, a fairly good soldier. The author feels no compunction on this score. Stupidity, as Comus artlessly thinks, is not wickedness; the Lion or the Ass—each is necessary to different moments in the play. A Brandenburg-Prussian comedy of 1733 can, a priori, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... which would be ridiculous were they not so inexcusable. There is a certain half-feudal glamour about England yet which appeals strongly to the callow author: it lends that rosy haze of romance and unreality which is popularly associated with fiction; but it was long ago done to death by mediocre writers and laughed out of good literary society, and to-day America will not suffer any such ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... themselves, but still by no means unknown in their general characteristics; four hundred American families who were, on the whole, industrious, law-abiding, who loved their children, who were quite tasteless in matters of art, and quite sound though narrow in matters of morals, utterly mediocre in intelligence and information, with no breadth of outlook in any direction; but who somehow lived their lives and faced and conquered all the incredible vicissitudes of that Great Adventure, with an unconscious, cheerful fortitude which many an acuter ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the highest power is simply the uniting of the outer agencies of expression with the Power that works from within. Are you a painter? Then in the degree that you open yourself to the power of the forces within will you become great instead of mediocre. You can never put into permanent form inspirations higher than those that come through your own soul. In order for the higher inspirations to come through it, you must open your soul, you must open it fully to the Supreme Source of all inspiration. Are you an orator? ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... project was this: He knew that the editor of the Hearthstone relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin's judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction. Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type. The central idea and keynote of "Love Is All" was love at first sight—the enrapturing, irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart. Suppose he should ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... prelude, illusory /Lux, lucis light lucid, luminary Lumen, luminis / *Magnus great magnate, magnificent *Malus bad, evil malaria, malnutrition Mando order mandatory, commandment Manus hand manual, manufacture *Mare sea maritime, submarine *Mater mother maternal, alma mater *Medius middle mediocre, intermediate *Mens mind mental, demented *Miror wonder mirror, admirable Mitto, missum send commit, emissary *Mordeo, morsum bite mordant, morsel, remorse Mors, mortis death mortal, mortify Moveo, motum move remove, locomotive *Multus many multiform, multiplex Muto, mutatum change ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... system is mediocre, but improving; service is adequate for government and business use, in part because major businesses have established their own private systems; since 1988, the government has promoted investment in the national telecommunications ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... poets,' I said encouragingly, 'who have ended far less creditably. For even an indifferent photographer is in closer harmony with nature than a mediocre poet.' ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... essay. And yet, with this coherence, there must always be stimulating and refreshing variety; for a too constant insistence on the main material produces intolerable monotony, such as the "damnable iteration" of a mediocre prose work or the harping away on one theme by the hack composer. In no art more than music is this dual standard of greater importance, and in no art more difficult to attain. For the raw material of music, fleeting rhythms and waves of sound, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... I adore good music, I hate bad, and I despise mediocre. Silence is golden, indeed, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the systematization which an irregular and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates which has made their institutions the centre of revolutionary ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... self-defence, and in order to show how unstable a ground to base one's opinions upon are the conclusions even of such a great authority as Mr. Fergusson, I must mention the following instance. This great architect, but very mediocre archeologist, proclaimed at the very beginning of his scientific career that "all the cave temples of Kanara, without exception, were built between the fifth and the tenth centuries." This theory became generally accepted, when suddenly Dr. Bird found a brass plate in a certain Kanara monument, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... by an extremely dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains, with tombstones in the foreground. This lugubrious frontispiece positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque costumes of old times. The following stanza, for instance, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... striking quotations on this subject might be made from Roger Bacon. Indeed, Bacon was quite impatient with the scholars around him who talked over-much, did not observe enough, depended to excess on authority, and in general did as mediocre scholars always do, made much fuss on second-hand information—plus some filmy speculations of their own. Friar Bacon, however, had one great pupil whose work he thoroughly appreciated because it exhibited the opposite ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... thought or action, whether in the council-chamber of the statesman, on the battle-field of the warrior, in the study of the writer, or in the laboratory of the scientist—all have been men of genius. No mediocre man ever was a great leader ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... who have missed the mark which they or kindly intimates thought them certain of attaining, this is mostly not for want of economy, but for want of the great qualities which were imputed to them by mistake. To be mediocre, to be sterile, to be futile, are the three fatal endings of many superbly announced potentialities. Such an end nearly always comes of exaggerated faculty, rather than of bad administration of natural gifts. In Diderot were splendid talents. It was the art of prudent stewardship that lay beyond ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Theosophical Society, so weak, is yet so strong—weak in its numbers, weak in the qualifications of its members, not numbering amongst its adherents the most learned and the most mighty of the earth, made up of very mediocre, average people, not the great leaders of the civilisation of the day; but in them all, else would they not be members of the Theosophical Society, is the dawning aspiration after a nobler condition, and some willingness to sacrifice themselves in order that the coming ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... the other hand, I am bound to urge in the Pope's behalf that the colleges are numerous, well endowed, and provided with ample means for turning out mediocre priests. The monasteries devote themselves to the education of little monks. They are taught from an early age to hold a wax taper, wear a frock, cast down their eyes, and chant in Latin. If you wish to admire the foresight of the Church, you should see the procession ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin, and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in knowledge of mediocre verse. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... sixteen, my mother died, and I went on the stage. I didn't inherit her talent as an actress, having only mediocre ability, but I had a carrying voice, personality, and could dance, so I soon left the legitimate stage for vaudeville where I made ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Mass. Don Melchior Maldonado, a quiet man of no pretensions, wrote him a letter in which he said: 'You came into my diocese like a St. Bernard; such is the reputation you have for holiness and preaching that my people pay me no respect, and only look on me as a man of common virtue and mediocre talents. Although I hope I am not jealous, still, I must remind you that you act as ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... some difficulty to avail one's self of its resources. In the Piazza di Spagna there are two circulating libraries, but although one of these claims twenty-five thousand volumes, the majority are of mediocre fiction and almost none, if any, of the important modern works are to be found here. The visitor who is a subscriber to this library passes into a small, dark room, where one window looking on the street hardly does more than make the ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... content to be ignorant. All that we can see is, that either personal merit or official rank and position must have enabled him to establish himself; for he certainly did not derive any assistance from his birth, which must have been mediocre, if not actually obscure. It is the custom of the Babylonian and Assyrian kings to glory in their ancestry, and when the father has occupied a decently high position, the son declares his sire's name and rank at the commencement of each inscription, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... qualities, that the world was delighted with them. After him, however, the lowered aim had its influence; poorer artists tried to follow in his footsteps, and the world of art soon became flooded with mediocre examples of these meaningless pictures. All this hastened rapidly ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind. But that does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts, or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... righteousness—the men of genius in all fields who make life nobler. It must call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society. It must awaken ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... been expended on Alice's musical education, yet she could do no more than rattle through some mediocre composition, ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... say that perhaps he is neither just what his friends or his foes think him. One must make allowances for his training and temperament, and for that quality of bigness in him. 'Mediocre men go soberly on the highroads, but saints and scoundrels meet in the jails,'" ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Samuel Peters Jarvis, his hands yet red with the blood of young John Ridout, ruthlessly shed by him in a duel two years before, and never to be effaced from the tablets of his memory. There, too, sat Henry John Boulton, a young man of much pretension but mediocre intellect, who had been appointed acting Solicitor-General during the previous year, and who united in his own person all the bigotry and narrow selfishness of the faction to which he belonged. He, also, had been concerned in the shedding ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... table, and his eye mechanically resting on the open manuscript lighted by chance upon a sentence—an aphorism—embodying a very delicate sentiment in very felicitous diction,—one of those choice condensations of thought, suggesting so much more than is said, which are never found in mediocre writers, and, rare even in the best, come upon us like truths ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... question of putting up a state ticket, its council divided. The Silver-Grays, it was said, favoured candidates in order to defeat Clark; while the Whigs and Softs preferred making no nominations. In the end, Daniel Ullman, a reputable New York lawyer of mediocre ability, received the nomination for governor. The great overmastering passion of Ullman was a desire for office. For many years he had been a persistent and unsuccessful knocker at the door of city, county and state Whig conventions, and when the Know-Nothings appeared ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... as they went the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the world knows by now, is the world's No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but perfection satisfies him. He hates compromise, loathes the half-baked and mediocre, refuses to put up with "something almost ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... unmarried woman in the whole world to marry him, while his refined and much more accomplished sister must make no motion towards any choice of her own except to sit still and wait for some other girl's mediocre brother to make a ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... the artist a very much wider field. If he is fond of 'rich stuffs and costly accessories' he should study the Middle Ages; if he wishes to paint beautiful people, 'untrammelled by any considerations of historical accuracy,' he should turn to the Greek and Roman mythology; and if he is a 'mediocre painter,' he should choose his 'subject from the Old and New Testament,' a recommendation, by the way, that many of our Royal Academicians seem already to have carried out. To paint a real historical picture one requires the assistance of a theatrical costumier and a photographer. From the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart—how very little which is absolutely new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks, after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seems quite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on or listener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similar sequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding and enjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to us; and, while we expatiate on the creative originality of artists ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Alixe—" the familiarity brought with it no condescending reverberations—"has bothered me more than once. I shall be just as frank on my side. No, your husband has but little talent; original talent, none. He is mediocre—wait!" She started, her cheeks red with the blood that fled her heart when she heard this doleful news. "Wait! There are qualifications. In the first place, what do you expect ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... to view in the city of odors—Coleridge's city of "two and seventy" smells. Only the cathedral. Although the museum is mediocre Gard dropped in there at noon to fill in his time. After wandering about he became aware that there was, in the distance, another visitor whose occasional shuffling footsteps first attracted his attention among the eye-obstructing ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... are inseparable from speculation. Thus the production of a musical composition, even though it be very mediocre, will furnish to our co-religionists a plausible reason for elevating on a pedestal and surrounding with a halo the Jew who will be the author of it. As for the sciences, medicine and philosophy, they must equally be a part of our ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... in her sitting-room with Old Jimmie and Miss Grierson—and of that dinner, mediocre and sloppy, and chilled by its transit of twelve stories from the kitchen, Miss Grierson, by way of an introductory lesson, made an august function, almost diagrammatic in its educational details. After the dinner, with Miss Grierson's slow and ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... measures are given by Apicius in some instances. But just such figures can be used artfully to conceal a trap. Any mediocre cook, gaining possession of a choice collection of detailed and itemized recipes would have been placed in an enviable position. Experimenting for some time (at his master's expense) he would soon reach that perfection when ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... furniture and the tools and bench of his craft. There were two windows with shabby red curtains. On nails hung a few odd garments, one of which, the doublet anciently pierced by the fanatic's dagger, merely served as a memento, though not visibly older than the rest of his wardrobe. "Who puts a mediocre article into a costly envelope?" was the philosopher's sartorial standpoint. Over the mantel (on which among some old pipes lay two silver buckles, his only jewellery) was pinned a charcoal sketch of Masaniello in shirt-sleeves, with a net on his shoulder, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest, and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'If God made man in His own image, man has certainly ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... long, large fingers; Kreisler is a larger man than I am but his fingers are small. It stands to reason that there must be a difference in the way in which we hold and use the bow. The difference between a great and a mediocre teacher lies in the fact that the first recognizes that bowing is an individual matter, different in the case of each individual pupil; and that the greatest perfection is attained by the development of the individual's capabilities within ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... of experience there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part, the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which we are forced to fall back upon ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... consistent, an intelligent guidance; operating, as it were, out of some completer survey of the facts at a given moment than my own abilities could possibly have compassed; my mediocre faculties seemed gathered together and perfected—with the result, in time, that my "intuition," as others called it, came to be regarded with a respect that in some cases amounted to half reverence. The adjective ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... I had been boys together, and of all the comrades of my youth I should have selected him the last to distinguish himself in statecraft. He was a quiet, unobservant, and, as previously noted, self-absorbed man, with a sense of the picturesque, which took the form of mediocre water-colour sketching. His appearance was in his favour, for he was visibly a gentleman; a man, moreover, of refined thought and habit, whom burly Norfolk squires ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... number of the Almanack seems to me very successful. But the historical Calendar might gain in interest by omissions and additions. Mediocre local celebrities such as "H.S. in E., T.D. in B., L.A. in L.," etc., etc., do not need to figure as historical. As little do a couple of first performances that were given in Weimar under my conductorship. See to it, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... mouthed that bit about cursing being the audible manifestation of a mediocre mind ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... speaking in its entirety. And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalisation does not apply exactly to Mrs Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... policy that his chief might approve. The breach between Jackson and Calhoun was widened by the disclosure of an old political secret, probably by Crawford of Georgia, a disappointed Presidential aspirant. Jackson's administration naturally fell more and more into the hands of mediocre men. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else—but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of Cezanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have lain hid for ever. I doubt we exaggerated. We were much too kind, I fancy, to a number of perfectly commonplace young people, and said a number of foolish ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... weaving; the pottery has always been of the cheaper, coarser kind, and although some attempt was made at the close of the last century, when the industry was revived, to bring it to a higher artistic level of colour and glaze, it still, to my mind, continues mediocre, and has neither the highly finished beauty of such work as the Ruskin pottery, nor the genuinely simple lines or colouring of "peasant pottery," such as that from Quimperle in Brittany. The Barum ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... by regular rotation to the highest. The examination of these classes passed off fairly enough to satisfy a reasonable audience. Among the pupils there was the usual proportion of "sharps, flats, and naturals"—otherwise of bright, dull, and mediocre individuals. After the examination of the three classes was complete, there remained the two youths, Walter Middleton and Ishmael Worth, who, far in advance of the other pupils, were not classed ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... famous for her appreciation of Monsieur Rousseau. Indeed, there was something so unusual, so forceful in this large, almost masculine woman, that Calvert was as much impressed with her as he had been disappointed in Monsieur Necker. It seemed as if the mediocre talents of the Minister of Finance had flamed into genius in this leonine creature who was as much her mother's inferior in looks as her father's superior in intelligence. Mingled with this masculinity ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... reading anything at all, except Shakespeare, whom am going through from beginning to end. That tones you up and puts new air into your lungs, just as if you were on a high mountain. Everything appears mediocre ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... two glad lips of song have lifted many a mediocre soul up the slopes of happiness to the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... Mr. Joseph Sexton of Santa Barbara, planted a sack of walnuts bought in the markets of San Francisco, which he had reason to believe had been grown in Chili. Of the resulting trees some were very good, others mediocre, and some worthless. Later on, nuts from the best of these trees were planted, and second generation seedlings produced. In this way the famous Santa Barbara Papershell type of walnut was evolved. With it developed an industry which among the tree products of southern California is now ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... coolly. "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he is writing political ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... level, say a play of Shakespeare's, is translatable without too great a loss of character. If it moves in the upper rather than in the lower level—a fair example is a lyric of Swinburne's—it is as good as untranslatable. Both types of literary expression may be great or mediocre. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... The cacique reminded them, however, that Guarionex was a hero, and had rendered him services when he fled to him for protection, for he had brought him royal presents. Moreover, he had taught both the cacique himself and his wife to sing and dance, a thing not to be held in mediocre consideration. Maiobanexius was determined never to surrender the prince who had appealed to his protection, and whom he had promised to defend. He was prepared to risk the gravest perils with him rather than to merit the reproach of having betrayed his guest. Despite the complaints ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... went the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the world knows by now, is the world's No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but perfection satisfies him. He hates compromise, loathes the half-baked and mediocre, refuses to put up with "something ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... want to hear the latest news, Coello? Your pupil Navarrete has become faithless to you and the noble art of painting. Don Juan gave him the enlistment money fifteen minutes ago. Better be a good trooper, than a mediocre artist! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Meddle enmiksigxi. Medival mezepoka. Mediate peri. Mediate pera. Mediator perulo. Medical medicina. Medicament kuracilo. Medicinal medicina. Medicine kuracilo. Medicine (art) medicino. Mediocre malboneta. Meditate mediti. Meditation medito. Mediterranean Mezomaro. Medium (spiritualism) mediumo. Medium meza. Meek humilega. Meet renkonti. Meeting renkonto. Meeting (of club, etc.) kunveno. Meeting-place kunvenejo. Melancholy melankolio. Melancholy melankolia. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Woronzoff, built in the Italian style, with a tasteful garden adjoining. At the opposite end of the boulevard is the Exchange, also built in the Italian style, and surrounded by a garden. Not far from this is the Academy of Arts, a rather mediocre one-story building. The Theatre, with a fine portico, promises much outside, but is nothing great within. Next to the theatre is the Palais Royal, which consists of a pretty garden, round which are ranged large handsome shops, filled with costly goods. Many ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Orange and other nobles, had demanded it for the Count de Roeulx, a gentleman of the Croy family, who, as well as his father, had rendered many important services to the crown. The appointment was, however, bestowed, through Granvelle's influence, upon the Seigneur d'Helfault, a gentleman of mediocre station and character, who was thought to possess no claims whatever to the office. Egmont, moreover, desired the abbey of Trulle for a poor relation of his own; but the Cardinal, to whom nothing in this way ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ask our superlative writers to be heaven-sent teachers, to be prophets, to be discoverers, what do we ask of them? Is it to write in a particular style, in a given lucid style, a given figurative style, or a given dignified style? Nay, it is only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the other she fired off a rocket-like shower of original remarks, paradoxes, and brilliant criticism. She knew exactly where to scoff and where to be enthusiastic, jeered with all the ruthless slang of the Paris gamins at the pompously mediocre sights recommended to the tourists' admiration by Baedeker, and gave evidence of deep and true comprehension of all that was ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Melbourne, of English parents, she came at an early age from Australia to San Francisco. Her father was connected in a business capacity with one of the local theatrical companies, and the young girl naturally drifted to the stage. She had only a mediocre histrionic talent, but what was perhaps more important, she had uncommon good looks, and she soon found that beauty was not only a valuable asset, but a sure lever to success. The critics praised her, not because she acted well, but because she dressed exquisitely, and pleased the eye. Managers ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... discuss the charge that he sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable government, of new laws, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... dressed in the extreme of the English fashion. He was probably excessively thin, to judge by his face and neck and hands, but he was made up admirably. He removed his hat and showed a forehead of mediocre proportions, over which his dark hair was conscientiously parted in the middle. Though not in appearance robust, he wore a moustache that would not have disgraced a Cossack, his eyes were small, gray, and near together, and his complexion ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... your smoker Boast your "shag," or even "twist," Every man were mediocre Save the blest tobacconist! He will point immortal morals, Make all common praises mute, Who shall win our grateful laurels With a ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... and beautifying, rather than subduing it. His work formed a palace, with a ruinous castle annexed as a curiosity. To Havill the conception had more charm than it could have to the most appreciative outsider; for when a mediocre and jealous mind that has been cudgelling itself over a problem capable of many solutions, lights on the solution of a rival, all possibilities in that kind seem to merge in ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist.... Indeed when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... than the Goncourts, whose insignificance approached at times imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful of mediocre books—a truly French diet, feeble, but well seasoned. These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with time, that nobody is able any longer to make them out, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... of useful, mediocre ability, eyed the younger man with curiosity, thinking that doubtless he had private means; that it was a pity he and Lindsay had fallen out, for he was a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and fifty dollars out of the deal, and Evan Adam Baldwin only got a few mediocre and amateur kisses, which he shared with me, for all his hard labor in plowing and tilling and restoring Elmnest and me to the point of being of value in the scheme of things. I got the best of that deal and why should I sulk?" I said to ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a pretty little thing, but utterly mediocre and uninteresting, was clinging to the officer's arm, a second lieutenant in the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... appropriate arms and costumes would entail the putting of all mediaeval European history upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task. It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre. There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... making a class and then having that class receive the same wages, and it does nothing to encourage individual effort by consenting to the payment of higher wages to the man of experience, industry and skill than to the mediocre and lazy. It will in some way have to obviate that difficulty which works against the cause of labor and the interest of society. Moreover, its leaders do not discourage, as they should, lawlessness as a means of achieving their industrial ends. The history of the dynamiters in California and ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... small section of the population amongst whom, moreover, many must be able to afford the whole, or at least a larger proportion, of the cost of their children's education? Is it wise by making higher instruction so cheap to tempt parents to educate children often of poor or mediocre abilities out of their own plane of life? Would it not be better at any rate to raise the fees generally and to devote the sums yielded by such increase to exhibitions and scholarships for the benefit of the few amongst the humbler classes who ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... style about it and was overwrought and exaggerated. In shadows he seemed to have borrowed from Caravaggio. Vouet (1590-1649) was a student in Italy of Veronese's painting and afterward of Guido Reni and Caravaggio. He was a mediocre artist, but had a great vogue in France and left ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... He caught his father's arm, and whispered in his father's ear, and they plunged together into a side street broader than the asphalt thoroughfare, but with scarcely a break in either phalanx of drab mediocre dwellings, and not a creature stirring except themselves and a few who followed. The hog's back of a still more deserted bridge arched itself at the foot of the street, its suspension cables showing against the sky in foreshortened curves. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is due to low payment. It is a result, I believe, of a wrong conception of what a book-review should be. My own opinion is that a review should be, from one point of view, a portrait of a book. It should present ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... popular legend that he had at one time joined a troop of banditti, and indulged in their excesses. The legend seems to have a familiarity with mountain passes, and his love of peopling them appropriately with banditti in action. Salvator Rosa was a dashing battle painter, a mediocre historical painter, and an excellent portrait painter as well as landscape painter. But it is chiefly by the savage grandeur of his mountain or forest landscapes, with their fitting dramatis personae, that he has won his renown. Mr Ruskin, while he allows Salvator's gift of imagination, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... indecision of General McClellan drew from him the satiric broadside,—"Tardy George"—privately printed in 1865—Boker's thoughts were concerned with poetry. His official laureate consciousness did not serve to improve the verse. His "Our Heroic Themes"—written for the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa—was mediocre in everything but intent, recalling what Taylor wrote to him: "My Harvard poem, [he had read it in 1850 before the same fraternity] poor as it is, was received with great applause; but, alas! I published it, and thus killed the tradition of its excellence, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... twenty-nine, while the thirtieth, indicted for murder, was convicted of manslaughter. In 1805 Martin was the acknowledged head of the American Bar, but at the same time he was undoubtedly a drunkard and a spendthrift. With an income of $10,000 a year, he was always in need. His mediocre stature, thinning locks, and undistinguished features created an impression which was confirmed by his slovenly attire and ungrammatical speech, which seemed "shackled by a preternatural secretion of saliva." Here, indeed, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... but not to be mistaken—remained in his attitude toward her. He found indirect means for conveying his idea and that of her friends that she was wasting herself upon a folly, and was destined, if she persisted in it, to only the most mediocre success. An exhibition of her works, undertaken with the avowed wish to know "just where she stood," had been discouraging in its results. The art critics either refused to take her seriously or expressed the opinion that there were already in the world too many sculptors of distinguished ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... concludes the third act of Prometheus Unbound. He is still repeating a lesson, and it calls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture of perfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius of the poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act to sing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb in eternity," while they circle in lyrical joy around the liberated earth. There sings Shelley. The picture itself is a faithful illustration ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... her. "Although the mediocre support and execrable direction spoiled most of your opportunities. Now if I had directed that picture, you would have ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to the State-House be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... victorious, and henceforth had nothing but disdain for his rival. But when, later on, Barbicane substituted simple howitzers of 600 lbs. for conical shots, the captain was obliged to go down in his own estimation. It fact, these projectiles, though of mediocre velocity, drilled with holes and broke to pieces ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... temptation, to weak writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study of it from the living—or dying—model is so easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Kaiser's own idea—with the great men of the time on their right and left hands. People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized in marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors, O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... from the Piraeus reconciled us to the very mediocre vessel which carried us to Smyrna. Our visit to Asia Minor we had inadvertently timed to the opening of the International College at Paradise near Smyrna. This college is the gift of Mrs. John Kennedy of New York. Mr. Ralph Harlow, our ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... questions; he reads Nietzsche, he ponders over many things, but he does not know how to think for himself. The fact that there are people who can find a way to express themselves appears to him as an inaccessible ideal; while mediocre minds have no attraction for him at all. It is from this feeling that all his sufferings come. So "a horse, carrying a heavy burden, breathes hard, falls to the ground, but is forced to rise and proceed by stinging lashes ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... an artist of mediocre creative talent but great aims and amazing belief in himself. He had a fine critical faculty which was shown in his appreciation of the Elgin marbles, in opposition to the most respected authorities of his day. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... and intrigued in politics the rest of their lives, with frequent spice-work of duels. Esteeming personal courage as a supreme human virtue, and never wearying of prating their devotion to the highest standard of intrepidity, they never produced a General who was even mediocre; nor did any one ever hear of a South Carolina regiment gaining distinction. Regarding politics and the art of government as, equally with arms, their natural vocations, they have never given the Nation a statesman, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... interest, and few will fail to read it with advantage. Upon the ordinary rules of whist, Pembridge supplies much sensible and thoroughly amusing comment. The best player in the world may gain from his observations, and a mediocre player can scarcely find a better counsellor. There is scarcely an opinion expressed with which we ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... There is a certain half-feudal glamour about England yet which appeals strongly to the callow author: it lends that rosy haze of romance and unreality which is popularly associated with fiction; but it was long ago done to death by mediocre writers and laughed out of good literary society, and to-day America will not ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... drawing room needs all that to be filled. Being the source of all preferment and of every favor, it is natural that it should overflow[2129]. It is the same in our leveling society (in 1875), where the drawing room of an insignificant deputy, a mediocre journalist, or a fashionable woman, is full of courtiers under the name of friends and visitors. Moreover, here, to be present is an obligation; it might be called a continuation of ancient feudal homage; the staff of nobles is maintained as the retinue of its born general. In the language ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... fame; to the publisher, the right of publishing a good book is solid capital,—an established house, in the long run, makes more money on "Standards" than on "Catchpennies"; and to the public the possession of the best literature is the breath of life, as that of the bad and mediocre is moral and intellectual decadence. But in practice the interests of the three do not harmonize. The author, even supposing his efforts are stimulated by the highest aspirations for excellence and not by any commercial instinct, is compelled by his circumstances to get the best price ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... many tourists, in their desire to appear singular, now take the nil admirari of Horace for their motto. To this dissatisfied class the colonel's only daughter, Miss Lydia, belonged. "The Transfiguration" has seemed to her mediocre, and Vesuvius in eruption an effect not greatly superior to that produced by the Birmingham factory chimneys. Her great objection to Italy, on the whole, was its lack of local colour and character. My readers must discover the sense of these expressions as best they may. A few years ago ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... school for a more advanced position which she would probably not be allowed to take on account of her youth and inexperience. Students in this department need to be watched with especial care to determine whether they are well adapted for their occupation, and the mediocre worker would better enter some other field where the opportunities for her are more encouraging. As the advance is slow the girl also whose poverty is hurrying her into wage-earning would better not elect ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... two young men, of whom one will be admitted to be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, a ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... with their indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had blundered. But all alike to-night, irrespective of pasts ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... ivory I feel, and improvised, but his themes are pluralistic, the immedicable and colossal ennui of life the chiefest. Woman—the "Eternal Madame," as Baudelaire calls her—is a being both magical and mediocre; she is also an escape from the universal world-pain. La fin de l'homme est proche ... Antigone va passer du menage de la famille au menage de la planete (prophetic words). But when lovely woman ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... that the familiar sounds echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms—it was when she was ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the gifted:— ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... desired government, the country obtained the feeble and irresolute Directory, composed for the moment of the voluptuous Barres, the intriguing Sieyes, the brave Moulins, the insignificant Roger Ducos, and the honest but somewhat too ingenuous Gohier. The result was a mediocre dignity before the world at large and a very questionable tranquillity ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... monuments throw no light, and on which we must therefore be content to be ignorant. All that we can see is, that either personal merit or official rank and position must have enabled him to establish himself; for he certainly did not derive any assistance from his birth, which must have been mediocre, if not actually obscure. It is the custom of the Babylonian and Assyrian kings to glory in their ancestry, and when the father has occupied a decently high position, the son declares his sire's name and rank at the commencement of each inscription, but Sargon ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... a good-humoured air of affront, 'you thought me serious? Don't you know I'm the ninth, instead of the nineteenth-century man, under your wing? I'd promise you to be a bishop, only, you see, I'm afraid I couldn't be mediocre enough.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and his rediscovery of the sprites, forgotten during his twenty years of business life. And these sprites were as familiar to them now as those of their own childhood. They little knew that at night they met and talked with them. Daddy had put them all into the Wumble Book, achieving mediocre success with the rhymes, but amply atoning with the illustrations. The Woman of the Haystack was evidently a monster pure and simple, till Jinny announced that she merely had 'elephantitis,' and thus ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... not aware," Chia Cheng added with a smiling countenance, "that I've been, even in my young days, very mediocre in the composition of stanzas on flowers, birds, rockeries and streams; and that now that I'm well up in years and have moreover the fatigue and trouble of my official duties, I've become in literary compositions ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... months of guesswork and silly-season gush, bounced and ricochetted among the newspapers with astonishing ado. With the Whig in the forefront the local press began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which, true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special correspondents, biographical dictionary solicitors, photographers, and worshipping ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... maintained that the qualities of higher forms of man are exhausted in a few generations, while the mass of mediocrities continually produce new genius. The fact that the descendants of distinguished men are often mediocre and that remarkable men suddenly arise from the common people, appears at first sight to support this superficial assertion. It is forgotten, however, that in a people whose average mass consists of thousands or millions of individuals, while men of higher powers are only counted by units ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... they make their works therein; and striving to become very excellent in order to put to shame, in some sort, those by whom they have been outraged, they become very often great men, whereas, by staying quietly in their country, they would peradventure have had little more than a mediocre success in their arts. Antonio Viniziano, who betook himself to Florence in the wake of Agnolo Gaddi in order to learn painting, grasped the good method of working so well that he was not only esteemed and loved by the Florentines, but also greatly cherished by reason of this talent and of his other ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... wash his hands of the entire business, and the sly swindlers must look elsewhere, in order to unload their property. The extravagant claims they had made for its richness could not be justified, because it was after all a very mediocre discovery, which would never pay for the working, so far ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... life and death and the business of the world. You will never love her as you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other city of Italy. We do not love the living as we love the dead. They press upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only our love. Genoa has never asked it, and never will. She is one of us, her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... bring him under still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it than the French, with their partiality for tableaux and sensation; and in De Lamennais its presence ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... from bondage, these songs may at first seem to some readers trivial and almost wholly devoid of literary merit. In phraseology they may appear crude, lacking in that elegance and finish ordinarily associated with poetic excellence; in imagery they are at times exceedingly winter-starved, mediocre, common, drab, scarcely ever rising above the unhappy environment of the singers. The outlook upon life and nature is, for the most part, one of imaginative simplicity and child-like naivete; superstitions crowd in upon a worldly wisdom that is elementary, practical, ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... mestizos, but today's study is showing that trouble maker meant man who would stand up for his rights; one must not forget that mestizo was used as a reproach, that the leaders of the people were really typical of the people. By the old injustice those who were mediocre were called natives and whoever rose above his fellows was claimed as a Spaniard, but a fairer way would seem to be to consider Filipinos all ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... individual instances—Kant, Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart—how very little which is absolutely new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks, after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seems quite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on or listener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similar sequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding and enjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to us; and, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... There have been only a few lyric actors more versatile and gifted than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages. His voice was limited in compass, inferior in quality, and habitually out of tune, his power of musical execution mediocre, his physical appearance entirely without grace, picturesqueness, or dignity. Yet Ronconi, by sheer force of a versatile dramatic genius, delighted audiences in characters which had been made familiar to the public through ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society. It must awaken new tastes and ambitions ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... well compares Cicero, "De Amicitia," xviii.: "Accedat huc suavitas quaedam oportet sermonum atque morum, haudquaquam mediocre condimentum amicitiae. Tristitia autem et in omni re severitas, habet illa quidem gravitatem: sed amicitia remissior esse debet, et liberior, et dulcior, et ad ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... common sense; besides, did she not seem to prefer Jean? Without confessing it to himself too bluntly, this preference had a great deal to do with his low opinion of the widow's intellect; for, though he loved his brother, he could not help thinking him somewhat mediocre and believing himself the superior. However, he was not going to sit there till nightfall; and as he had done on the previous evening, he anxiously asked himself: "What ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... that the one speech which gave glory and a nickname to Single-Speech Hamilton was written by Burke. It was wise, witty and profound—and never again did Hamilton do a thing that rose above the dull and deadly mediocre. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... rigidity to allow measurements to be made. It must be allowed that, unfortunately, no physicist or chemist has been as lucky as these two botanists; and the attempts to reproduce semi-permeable walls completely answering to the definition, have never given but mediocre results. If, however, the experimental difficulty has not been overcome in an entirely satisfactory manner, it at least appears very probable that ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... back, for in former times he had been intimate with a certain number of ecclesiastics, and had found them so mediocre, so lukewarm, above all so hostile to Mysticism, that he was revolted at the very notion of laying before them the schedule of his requirements ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... prodigiously, and the boy's vanity was correspondingly flattered; but the father stepped in and discouraged such work, warning Benjamin that "verse-makers were generally beggars." So, perhaps, we were spared a mediocre poet and given a first-rate prose writer, for the stuff of poetry was not in ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... coin with it, and in his grandfather's hands——! His grandfather had been a man of renown, a famous man. Pepet had never seen him, but he talked of him with admiration, giving him a higher place in his esteem than that evoked by his mediocre father. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... almost a completed volume. There is yet one chapter to be added and I want to talk about it to the public. One man, Baron Singer, did more for midgets—little people—than any other person, in all time. He lifted them out of the mediocre; gave them standing and personality. I never met the Baron, but I want the public to know what great work he did for an underprivileged group. And I will ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... appeared at a show in this country was Mr. Berrie's Flo. This was, however, such a mediocre specimen that it did not appeal to the taste of the English dog-loving public. In 1888 Dr. Seelig brought over Skip, Drieske, and Mia. The first-named was purchased by Mr. E. B. Joachim, and the two others by Mr. G. R. Krehl. Later on Mr. Joachim became the owner of Mr. Green's Shtoots, and bought ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... to have been written by an impecunious and mediocre penman called Villemarest, who also wrote "Memoires de Constant" (the Emperor's valet), and both books have been very extensively read and believed. Men have got up terrific lectures from them, authors have quoted from them whenever they ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... footprint in the dust, which was apparently none too fresh, they took up the work of tracking. It is astonishing to see how a dog can tell which way a track leads. If in doubt, he runs quickly back and forth on the scent, and thus gauges the way the animal has progressed. A mediocre dog cannot do this, but we had dogs ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... have returned his salute with brass-hatted majesty, but now he smiled his broad ear-to-ear smile, thrust out his long arm and gripped the young man's hand. It was Smithson, one of his brigade staff—a youth of mediocre efficiency, on whom, as the youth remembered, he was wont most austerely to frown. But all ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... a safer line of defence.—Ten battles lost, he retorted, would scarcely force him to that last step. True, he now exposed his line of communications with France; but if the art of war consisted in never running any risk, glory would be the prize of mediocre minds. He must have a complete triumph. The question was not of abandoning this or that province: his political superiority was at stake. At Marengo, Austerlitz, and Wagram, he was in greater danger. His forces now were not in the air; they rested on the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... windows with shabby red curtains. On nails hung a few odd garments, one of which, the doublet anciently pierced by the fanatic's dagger, merely served as a memento, though not visibly older than the rest of his wardrobe. "Who puts a mediocre article into a costly envelope?" was the philosopher's sartorial standpoint. Over the mantel (on which among some old pipes lay two silver buckles, his only jewellery) was pinned a charcoal sketch of Masaniello in shirt-sleeves, with a net on his shoulder, done by Spinoza ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... charts and papers were made for use and are therefore of the greatest utility when most available. When I am at work I like my tools around me; if they are not handy, my work is interrupted, and an interruption often breaks the train of thought and renders impotent or at least mediocre an endeavor which elsewise would be excellent. In their ambition to "put things in shape," and to give me an object lesson in order and method, Alice and her vandal hired girl hide my tools of trade, disposing of ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... means that, I think," he said, "unless it be mediocre—then one is safe; one has scores of friends, and scarce a foe. Mediocrity succeeds wonderfully well nowadays—nobody hates it, because every one feels how easily they themselves can attain to it. Exceptional talent is aggressive—actual ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... promise of a battle to the end between Goshonne and Das Lan. Goshonne well knew that if the new cult gained a firm footing he would lose his influence and at best be but a mediocre medicine-man. Das Lan, on the other hand, knew that he must break the power of such a man as Goshonne, if he was to assume the leadership. Goshonne scoffed and scorned, and would have none of the new belief. Still, he was an Indian, and the prophecies of his rival gradually ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... instead of being jealous of it, and skillful in making this merit conduce to his own glory, will always be a good general, and may even pass for a great man. Unfortunately, the disposition to do justice to merit in others is not the most common quality: mediocre minds are always jealous, and inclined to surround themselves with persons of little ability, fearing the reputation of being led, and not realizing that the nominal commander of an army always receives almost all the glory of its success, even when ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... cathedral is his portrait along with that of his second wife, Jeanne de Laval. In the place is his statue, a mediocre work, holding a bunch of Muscat grapes, a species he first introduced to Europe. I sought in vain at Aix for a photograph of the Merry Monarch taken from the authentic picture, and was offered one from the characterless statue, which I declined. Poor king Rene's poems ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... breaths, counting the winkfuls of light, counting the final wrestles of her breaking heart, had been the belle of her section, and many good men had courted her hand. She had led a pleasant life, and children had been born to her—who shared her mediocre ambition and the invincibility of her will. If the charge of her guilt were proven, she was the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Danes, to whom they primarily appealed. They added nothing to the development of the drama, except in the person of N. K. Bredal (1733-1778), who became director of the Royal Danish Theatre, and the writer of some mediocre plays. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... conventionalized history as you—yourself a man of conventionality and a vulgarian—will digest easiest of all. Because by itself life is either exceedingly humdrum and tedious to you, or else as exceedingly improbable as only life can be improbable. And so you have the eternal mediocre history about an officer, about a shop clerk, about a baby and a superannuated father, who there, in the provinces, bewails his strayed daughter and implores her to return home. But mark you, Lichonin, all that I'm saying doesn't apply to you; in you, upon my word ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... energetic, but shakes his head a little too much. In the pulpit he never gets either fast asleep or hysterical. He can preach good original sermons—carefully worked out, well-balanced, neatly arranged; and he can give birth to some which are rather dull and mediocre. His action is easy, yet earnest—his style quiet yet dignified; his matter often scholarly, and never stolen. He is not a, "gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff," like some clerical greengrocers: what he says is his own, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... account of his superior erudition and more practised delivery; but now his voluble gift of words deserted him. "He was much obliged to them," he said; "though perhaps, on the whole, it was better that men who placed themselves in a mediocre condition should be left to their mediocrity. He had no doubt himself of the justness of the lists. It would be useless for him to say that he had not aspired; all the world"—it was all the world to him—"knew too well that he had aspired. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Foinet, who was coming towards them with Mrs. Otter. Mrs. Otter, meek, mediocre, and self-satisfied, wore an air of importance. Foinet sat down at the easel of an untidy little Englishwoman called Ruth Chalice. She had the fine black eyes, languid but passionate, the thin face, ascetic but sensual, the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Prussia of insensibility, that he was not touched by the accident which happened to the man he seemed to love most. Too happy if one had only said that of him! He was supposed to be jealous of the merit of Schwerin and of Keith, and delighted to have got them killed. It is thus that mediocre people seek to lower great men, to diminish the immense space that lies ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... there is often in the public mind this poorer type of teacher; and when an idea or an ideal, however low, becomes once established, it is changed only with difficulty. The commonplace individual, the mediocre type of man or of woman, is by many regarded as a fairly typical representative of what the teacher usually is; or, as the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than the average. The "mode" in any class of ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... entire people. Bernini expressed in this manner a whole age of Italian society; and even now his spirit haunts you as you read the gorgeous sins of Roman noblemen in the pages of Gabriele d'Annunzio. And Murillo, though the expert not unjustly from their special point of view, see in him but a mediocre artist, in the same way is the very quintessence of Southern Spain. Wielders of the brush, occupied chiefly with technique, are apt to discern little in an old master, save the craftsman; yet art is no more than a link in the chain of life ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... fusion. The beautiful varieties of porphyry — green, red, striped — which are obtained, often in big monoliths, near Kolyvan, are cut at the imperial stone-cutting factory into vases and other ornaments, familiar in the art galleries and palaces of Europe. Aquamarines of mediocre quality but enormous size (up to 3 in. in diameter) are found in the Korgon mine. The northern, or Salair, mining region is rich in silver ores, and the mine of this name used formerly to yield up to 93,300 oz. of silver in the year. But the chief wealth ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... arrive a few days before, each on a month's leave. As Happy was one of the moving spirits of the show, he was up to his eyes in business. Clever in everything he undertook, he was especially talented in music, playing well and composing in no mediocre manner. He had written practically all the score of the musical comedy to be given by the Masqueraders, and among other features, a ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... a breath of relief. The first arrival was only Lady Lundie's solicitor—invited to attend the proceedings on her ladyship's behalf. He was one of that large class of purely mechanical and perfectly mediocre persons connected with the practice of the law who will probably, in a more advanced state of science, be superseded by machinery. He made himself useful in altering the arrangement of the tables and chairs, ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... for me.' Its grown up form is: 'I am cleverer than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not satisfied with being sought after and admired ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... L'ENCLOS.—From the most handsome and amiable man in the world there could not come mediocre offspring. M. du Maine is your idol; the King has given him his noble bearing, with his intelligence; and you have inoculated him with your wit. Is it true that Madame de Montespan is no longer your friend? That is a rumour which has credit in the capital; ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... there can be no doubt. The general indignation and agitation caused by the summary proceedings during the strike, compelled President Cleveland to appoint a commission to investigate. Cleveland was a mediocre politician who, by a series of fortuitous circumstances, had risen from ward politics to the Presidency. After using the concentrated power of the Federal Government to break the strike, he then decided to "investigate" its ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... unusually flabby musculature, who showed a couple of signs that might possibly be regarded as stigmata of inferiority. Mentally, the main showing was irregularity of abilities; in some things he was distinctly subnormal, in others mediocre, but in language ability he was surprisingly good. No evidence of mental aberration was discovered. The diagnosis could be made, in short, that the boy was a subnormal verbalist. His character traits might be enumerated in part by saying that he was aggressive, unscrupulous, boastful, ambitious, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Nietzsche called "the Philistine of culture." It is against this fat milch cow of wisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a Huneker. He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention from poor or mediocre workmanship—the traps of sentimentalism, of false feeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of those pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths, mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as I say, he seems to have made ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... like all parents, Duane's had been terribly excited over his infantile efforts at picture-making—one of the commonest and earliest developed of talents, but which never fails to amaze and delight less gifted parents and which continues to overstock the world with mediocre artists. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... responded Valdor promptly; "Only it happens that they are not! They treat me merely as a laquais de place,—just as they would treat Zouche, had he accepted his Sovereign's offer. But this I will admit,—that mediocre musicians always get on very well with Royal persons! I have heard a very great Majesty indeed praise a common little American woman's abominable singing, as though she were a prima-donna, and saw him give a jewelled cigar-case to an amateur pianist, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... far wrong in politics because they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents in the interest of a mediocre regularity. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... nothing could save his speech from failure as a speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare distinction. It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to be as honest in ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... this heavenly awe-inspiring object sailing through the skies, you will have trials of an unexpected nature to beset you, but by bravely combating these foes you will rise above the mediocre in ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... her early experience, it was a life of energy and excitement, of splendour and power, with a total absence of petty vexations and miseries, affording neither time nor cause for the wearing chagrin of a monotonous and mediocre existence. But the crowning joy of her emancipation was the prospect it offered of frequent enjoyment of the society ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... written in 1834 against the Emperor of Russia and the Russian system were from the pen of M. Girardin.—The maitre d'etude of former days became professor at the College of France—became deputy, and exhibited himself, able writer and dialectician as he was and is, as a mediocre speaker, and ultimately became academician and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... artificial excrescence, like the buttress in a fives court. If the ball hit him, as it frequently did, the player waiting for it was at liberty either to play it or claim a let. This arrangement added a piquant and pleasing variety to what is too often—especially when indulged in by mediocre players—a very dull game. ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... calculated to turn out a good, fairish, commonplace article; but the formula for a genius remains a secret with Deity. The great man becomes great in spite of teachers and parents: and his near kinsmen, being color-blind, usually pooh-pooh the idea that he is anything more than mediocre. At Oxford, William Morris fell in with a young man of about his own age, by the name of Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was studying theology. He was slender in stature, dreamy, spiritual, poetic. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all economical, intellectual, moral, and political functions of ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... As the daughter and pupil from childhood of her famous mother, she was supposed to be an ideal exponent of the Marchesi method. Professional singers and instructors flocked to her first concert. It was to be an experience, an object-lesson. Well—it was. They saw a fine-looking woman with a mediocre voice and a worse method, a method so hopelessly bad that even her undoubted musicianship ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... more statesmen than could get into the House of Lords; and all the biographies that have ever been written could not furnish more illustrations of the ups and downs of life, especially the downs, nor of more illustrious men. The names of all the great and mediocre people who visited the famous rendezvous would fill a respectable Court guide, and the money transactions that have taken place would pay off the National Debt. All this is a pleasant outcome of ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... pages are entirely Bode's own, and the individual alterations in word, phrase, allusion and sentiment are more numerous and unwarranted. The more significant of Bode's additions are here noted. "Die Moral" (pages 32-37) contains a fling at Collier, the author of a mediocre English translation of Klopstock's "Messias," and another against Klbele, acontemporary German novelist, whose productions have long ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... the Hundred Days and after Waterloo, remained in his dungeon, forgotten of earth and heaven. Danglars comprehended the full extent of the wretched fate that overwhelmed Dantes; and, when Napoleon returned to France, he, after the manner of mediocre minds, termed the coincidence, "a decree of Providence." But when Napoleon returned to Paris, Danglars' heart failed him, and he lived in constant fear of Dantes' return on a mission of vengeance. He therefore informed M. Morrel of his wish to quit ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men. The cultured Pharisees, the philosophical Sadducees seem to have much less attraction to Him than the rude fisherman and the toiler. These men were often weak, sometimes cowardly, obstinate, dull, mediocre; yet He committed His kingdom to them; He believed in them. Before they had faith in Him He had faith in them; and ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... has this life for us to-day, we the commonplace, the mediocre, the unknown to fame and fortune? Shall we fold our hands when we read of such heroes and say, "Ah, yes, he could be great, but I? I am weak and humble, I have not the opportunity?" Who was more humble than the poor boy spinning in the cotton-mill; ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... therefore only to stretch out his hand to win stone of a sufficiently varied nature from the soil of his own country or the flanks of its mountains. It was, of course, mediocre in quality but it had powers of resistance that fitted it for use in certain positions. At the first glance it is difficult to understand why so little use was made of it. But in truth stone was for ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... boats until I built them; and I have surprised three secrets that are more than technical discoveries, in the unexpected hiding-places of Nature. I have come nearer flying than any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a turn for obeying those rather mediocre professors at the college who proposed to train my mind? If I had been trained in research—that ridiculous contradiction in terms—should I have done more than produce additions to the existing store of little papers ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always under examination, and by committees little suspected,—a police in citizen's clothes,—but are awarding or denying you very high prizes ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of The Jew of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... felicities. These seem to grow spontaneously in the soil of his mind; and there is no American writer whose style is more wholly free from worn and wasted images, phrases, and forms of expression. He is neither mediocre ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... his editor wants him to say, he must have as his background a thorough knowledge of the stage upon which he may base a comparison or a contrast and with which he may make intelligent statements. The following illustrates what may be done with a paid report of a mediocre vaudeville show in which every act must be praised—the report was written on Monday of a week's run and is intended to induce people to ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... the other's brows contract for a second as though in keen annoyance or disappointment at this mediocre turn in a promising situation. He ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the same bone and marrow as the drone who is always counseling halfspeed. "Don't sweat; just get by; extra work means short life; you're better off if they don't notice you." This chant can be heard by anyone who cares to listen; it's the old American invitation to mediocrity. But while mediocre, as commonly used, means "indifferent, ordinary," it also has in old English the odd meaning "a young monk who was excused from performing part of a monk's duties." And that, too, fits. It is always worthwhile to ask a few very senior officers what they think of these jokers who refuse ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... sides the plain, dull-red imprint of a hand, as if the corpse had made some post-mortem effort to rise from the grave. The portrait of the transplanted scion of Austria shows a haughty, I-am-of-superior-clay man, of a distinctly mediocre grade of intellect, with a forest of beard that strives in vain to conceal an almost ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... friendship, is permitted, and love's dictionary is as much prohibited, as at first sight one should think his ritual was. All you hear, and that pronounced with nonchalance, is, that Monsieur un tel has had Madame un telle. The Duc de Nivernois has parts, and writes at the top of the mediocre, but, as Madame Geoffrin says, is manqu'e par tout; guerrier manqu'e, ambassadeur manqu'e, homme d'affaires manqu'e and auteur manqu'e—no, he is not homme de naissance manqu'e. He would think freely, but has some ambition of being governor to the Dauphin, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... met his, her soul gave a little half-humorous "Oh!" of surprise; for photography, which seems to have been invented to flatter the mediocre and belittle the exceptional, had indeed given Londonderry an "interesting face," as we have heard, but missed all the rest—"all the rest" of a large, mobile, talking face, not exactly handsome perhaps, but decidedly good-looking and full of various commands ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... verse 7 of the second paragraph (as in verse I of paragraph 19 in "The Old and New Tables") Nietzsche gives us a reason for his occasional obscurity (see also verses 3 to 7 of "Poets"). As I have already pointed out, his philosophy is quite esoteric. It can serve no purpose with the ordinary, mediocre type of man. I, personally, can no longer have any doubt that Nietzsche's only object, in that part of his philosophy where he bids his friends stand "Beyond Good and Evil" with him, was to save ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... countersign-constitution, everything proceeds in military form. The French people consult the order of the day to know how they must get up, how they must go to bed, how they must dress, in what toilette they may go to the sitting of the court, or to the soiree of the prefect; they are forbidden to make mediocre verses; to wear beards; the frill and the white cravat are laws of state. Rule, discipline, passive obedience, eyes cast down, silence in the ranks; such is the yoke under which bows at this moment the nation ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... and of bringing your heaviest action to bear on one point: too many undertakings dissipate strength and prostrate work. There is a great deal of poor work done now; and it is said to have been somewhat mediocre so far through the nineteenth century, because time enough has not been taken to do thorough work. The strong desire is to get to the end of toil. We have hardly time to think what to get for dinner or what to wear; but we get something ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... her stupidity is ever a foil for his brilliancy. He soon grows to a point where he does not mentally defer to her in the slightest degree, but goes his solitary way, making good that maxim of Kipling, "He travels the fastest who travels alone." He learns to love the ideal. The mediocre quality of Parker's wife was, no doubt, a prime factor in bringing out the self-reliant qualities in his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved, hung round with portraits up to its curious ceiling—vaulted and ribbed like the inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, more absolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even more good-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round with whips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were being carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave the embers a nervous kick ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the Danish Prison Department at the Stockholm Prison Congress. "Give me," he said, "the best possible regulations and a bad director, and you will have no success. But give me a good director, and, even with mediocre regulations, I will answer for it that everything will go on marvellously." In a recent handbook on prison management by Herr Krohne, an eminent prison director in the German service, the qualifications requisite for successful prison work ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
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