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More "Mediocrity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... generally known as the Ars Poetica—Horace confines himself almost exclusively to purely literary topics. The dignity of literature was never better vindicated than in these Epistles. In Horace's estimation it was a thing always to be approached with reverence. Mediocrity in it was intolerable. Genius is much, but genius without art will not win immortality; "for a good poet's made, as well as born." There must be a working up to the highest models, a resolute intolerance of anything slight or slovenly, a fixed purpose to put what ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... been praised at least equally to its merit. In "The Dispensary" there is a strain of smooth and free versification; but few lines are eminently elegant. No passages fall below mediocrity, and few rise much above it. The plan seems formed without just proportion to the subject; the means and end have no necessary connection. Resnel, in his preface to Pope's Essay, remarks that Garth exhibits no discrimination ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... critics have said that he touches everything, and penetrates nothing. His first three volumes greatly pleased: the rest are inferior. Plutarch, Seneca, and Pliny, were his favourite authors. He lived in philosophical mediocrity; and in the last years of his life retired to his native country, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... system condemned to speak much, and to explain themselves too much.... To what shall we attribute that respectful somnolence which nowadays reigns over the audience during the recitation of Alfieri's tragedies, if they are not sustained by some theatrical celebrity? You will certainly say, to the mediocrity of the actors. But I hold that the tragic effect can be produced even by mediocre actors, if this effect truly abounds in the plot of the tragedy.... I know that these opinions of mine will not be shared by the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... pressure than there has been at any time before. The brain has attained practically full size and weight. The addition now will be mainly in the very highest area, where the addition of fibres might make all the difference between the possibility of genius and the possibility of mediocrity. The sensory and the nervous areas are fully matured. The higher mental area and the higher mental power are now coming on ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not alone through the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 genius is offensive; people are insulted to have a thing held up for their admiration ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... it is persistent study which enables their possessor to arrive at perfection. Serious and lasting results are obtained only by constant practice. It is a curious fact that many people more than usually gifted arrive only at mediocrity. Certain things, such as the trill or scales, come naturally easy to them. This being the case, they neglect to perfect their agilita, which remains defective. Others, although but moderately endowed, have arrived at eminence by sheer persistence and rightly ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... faith and duty. The authority entrusted to this man Was unexampled and unnatural 40 It placed him on a level with his Emperor, Till the proud soul unlearned submission. Wo is me; I mourn for him! for where he fell, I deem Might none stand firm. Alas! dear General, We in our lucky mediocrity 45 Have ne'er experienced, cannot calculate, What dangerous wishes such a height may breed In the heart of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism. They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... suicide, or attempted suicide, of Olivier after a life of fastidiousness and frivolity. The proem gives us Dominique as—after his passion-years, and his as yet unmentioned failure to achieve more than mediocrity in letters—a quiet if not cheerful married man with a charming wife, pretty children, a good estate, and some peasants not in the least like those of La Terre; while in the epilogue the tutor Augustin, who has made his way at ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... who have cannon? You are courageous, but they are cunning, and would conquer you. For the sake of the nineteenth century you must not be vanquished. Do not come; in your simplicity you would be caught in the spider's web of clever mediocrity, and your grand efforts to tear yourself free would only be laughed at. Great man, you would be treated ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... him," she said in an odd voice. And, looking at it, Craven realised that the cleverness of the painted head on the large canvas paled to mediocrity beside the brilliance of the sepia sketch he held. It was the same head—but marvellously different—set on the body of a faun. The dancing limbs were pulsing with life, the tiny hoofs stamping the flower-strewn ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... effort, and the debate, for a while revived by his interposition, continued to languish until this hour (nine o'clock), with successive relays of mediocrity, until it yielded its last gasp in the arms of ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... commonplace nature of the subject, the poverty of the light effects, for the light is equally diffused and everything is placed in relief without the contrast of shadow,—the stiffness of the legs of the bull, the crude coloring of the plants and animals in the background; the mediocrity of the shepherd's figure. But, for all this, Paul Potter's bull was crowned with glory as one of the noblest examples of art, and Europe considers it as the greatest work of the prince of animal-painters. An illustrious critic ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... some good lines in the poem, but not enough to rescue it from that fate which poetical mediocrity ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... the blood, for one of her sisters murdered her own son, and a brother murdered his own sister, As Richard Edwards, his grandfather, had 5 sons and 1 daughter, by a second wife, but none of their numerous progeny rose above mediocrity, and their descendants gained no abiding reputation, Jonathan Edwards must have owed his remarkable mental qualities largely to his grandmother rather than his grandfather. He was evidently a new creation in Christ Jesus and was cured by grace of all inherited immoralities, so ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... 1840, the theatre at Wiesbaden was a poor affair even externally, and its company, for affected and pitiful mediocrity, for studious and vulgar commonplaceness, not one hair's-breadth above the level, which might be regarded up to now as the normal one in all German theatres, and which has been displayed in perfection lately ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... faithless, and Jane much more attached to him than in reality—which this correspondent said was good, though the subject was hackneyed, but on all the others the sweeping scythe of censure fell unsparingly. "Her poems," he said, "were very tolerable, and not to be endured;" mediocrity was insufferable in poetry. The tone of them was unhealthy, and would feed the sentimentalism of the age, which was only another name for discontent. If poetesses went on as they were doing now-a-days, and only extracted a wail from life, the sooner they gave up their lays the better. ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... my father calls 'real life'—and look what I've made of it! All that winter I seemed to be waking up to beauty and splendour and I don't know what; and when the spring came, I wanted to fight against the things I hated—mediocrity and dulness and spitefulness and society. I actually hated society for a day or two at Monteriano. I didn't see that all these things are invincible, and that if we go against them they will break us to pieces. Thank you for listening ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... great deal of poetry and such matters last night; and, as usual, differed—and I think more than ever. He affects to patronise a system of criticism fit only for the production of mediocrity; and, although all his finer poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this system, yet I recognise the pernicious effects of it in the Doge of Venice; and it will cramp and limit his future efforts, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... had sudden bursts of greatness followed by general mediocrity, with occasional great writers whose advent could not possibly have been predicted by anything in art preceding them. Even the exception to this in France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was apparently a flash ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... competence to live on—is that enough for one like you? is the well-balanced good-breeding of common politeness enough to fill a heart that should be fed on passionate devotion? You may link yourself to mediocrity, but can you humble your nature to resemble it. Do you believe you can plod on the dreary road of life without an impulse or an ambition, or blend your thoughts with those of a man ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... theatre of his exercises, the repositories of the materials, the archives of art, whose principles their officers were bound to maintain, and for the preservation of which they were responsible to posterity, etc. Dr. Waagen was of opinion that the academic system gave an artificial elevation to mediocrity; that it deadened natural talent, and introduced into the freedom of art an unsalutary degree of authority and interference. The late Horace Vernet entertained similar views, recommending the suppression of the French Academy ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... fine scorn of rhetoric and even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to be the first of a little cluster of proverbs bearing on domestic life. It prefers modest mediocrity of station, such as Agur desired. Its successor shows how the contrasted qualities come out in the two men's relation to their domestic animals. Goodness sweeps a wide circle touching the throne of God and the stall of the cattle. It was not Coleridge who found out that 'He prayeth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... what the general would say when the news of his son's desertion of his wife and four year old boy reached him. He knew that he never could explain to his father the absolute torture of the last four years of enervating domesticity and business mediocrity—the torture of the Beauty within him crying for expression, half satisfied by the stolen evenings at the art school but constantly growing stronger in its all-consuming appeal. No, life to his father was a simple problem in army ethics—a problem in which ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... Ode to the Passions and other of his lyrics—none of that happy personification of abstract conceptions which is the characteristic of his genius. The majority of the lines lag and move heavily, and do not seem to me to rise much above mediocrity in the expression. The subject was attractive, and might have afforded space for the wild excursions of Collins's creative powers. As to the edition of Bell, in which it is pretended that the lost stanzas have been recovered, I have no more doubt that they are spurious than ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... interpretation we can never excuse. We give mediocrity fair common-place words, generally of commendation unaccompanied by censure. But when we come to deal with a divine inspiration, our words must have their ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... his partisans.[17] To the presence of this person the clans are supposed to have been indebted for much of the enthusiasm which led them to glory in the wars of Montrose. His poetry only reaches mediocrity, but the success which attended it led the chiefs to seek similar support in the Jacobite wars; and very animated compositions were the result of their encouragement. Mathieson, the family bard of Seaforth, Macvuirich, the pensioner ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... as the price of the latter's precious forgiveness and a token of the sincerity of his colleague's repentance. Thus, as has often happened in this sad world, was disreputable genius exploited once again by smug mediocrity. Mr. Brion, having got all he wanted, left the prison, assuring the Governor that Peace's repentance was "all bunkum," and advising, with commendable anxiety for the public good, that the warders in the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... set up to be—God's witnesses!" interrupted Strelitski. "This mediocrity may pass in the rest ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... tavern, according as they find good wine, and only think of joyous living; the latter in their homes, with the frugality of merchants, who for the most part make but do not spend money, or with the moderation of orderly burghers, never exceed mediocrity. Nevertheless there are not wanting families, who keep a splendid table and live like nobles, such as the Antinori, the Bartolini, the Tornabuoni, the Pazzi, the Borgherini, the Gaddi, the Rucellai, and among the Salviati, Piero ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... author practically unknown even to the critics. A noticeable feature was the frankness with which experienced bookmen laid aside stock phrases, and dealt with this book as in response to a strong personal appeal. To the reviewer, aged with much knowledge, hardened by much handling of mediocrity, it is a relief to meet with a book that can and ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of Leicester, whose haughty and grasping spirit led him to covet distinction and authority in every line, was eagerly soliciting the supreme command of this important armament; and in spite of the general mediocrity of his talents and his very slight experience in the art of war, his partial mistress had the weakness to indulge him in this unreasonable and ill-advised pretension. The title of general of the queen's auxiliaries ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... or Teniers. At that time Grassou lived at No. 2 rue de Navarin. He became the son-in-law of Vervelle, in 1832, marrying Virginie Vervelle, the heiress of the family, who brought him a dowry of one hundred thousand francs, as well as country and city property. His determined mediocrity opened the doors of the Academy to him and made him an officer in the Legion of Honor in 1830, and major of a battalion in the National Guard after the riots of May 12. He was adored by the middle ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... this world, when a man so gifted as Mackintosh has failed completely in public life, never having attained honours, reputation, or wealth, while so many ordinary men have reaped an abundant harvest of all. What a consolation this affords to mediocrity! None can approach Mackintosh without admiring his extraordinary powers, and at the same time wondering why they have not produced greater effects in the world either of literature or politics. His virtues are obstacles to his success; he has not the art of pushing or of making himself feared; he ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... sufficiency of prominent and distinctive features to compose an entertainment founded on American character. The whole nation struck him as being destitute of salient points, and as characterized by a respectable mediocrity, that, however useful it might be in its way, was utterly without poetry, humour, or interest to the observer. For one who dealt principally with the more conspicuous absurdities of his fellow-creatures, Mr. Mathews was certainly right; we also believe him to have been right in the main, in ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... some authors of whom it may be said that they will never better themselves. They are born with a certain rhapsodic gift of commonness, a gift which neither improves nor deteriorates. Richly dowered with crass mediocrity, they proceed from the cradle to the grave at one low dead level. We suspect that Mr. Knight is of these. In saying that it is a pity that he ever took up a pen, we have no desire to seem severe. He is doubtless a quite ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... acknowledged plays. Now it seems to us that the juvenile efforts of the world's master-mind would give some evidence of his powers, however imperfect might be the form of their expression; and especially that they would not resemble the matured products of contemporary mediocrity. Of the plays in the present volume, the only one which has the character of youthful genius is the tragedy of Lecrine, and this is the youth of Marlowe rather than of Shakspeare. The London Prodigal and the Puritan, Lord Cromwell and Sir John Oldcastle, have no trace of youthful fire or even ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... 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. But he had received a lesson which might probably be useful ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... respectable [Footnote:— "nam bene gesti rebus, vel potius feliciter, etsi nori summi—medii tamen obtinuit ducis famam."] character; as an orator he was more than respectable; and in other qualifications less interesting to the populace, he had that happy mediocrity of merit which was best fitted for his delicate and difficult situation—sufficient to do credit to the emperor's preference—sufficient to sustain the popular regard, but not brilliant enough to throw his patron into the shade. For the rest, his vices were of ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... of other poets whose career has been less placid, we may say that he was perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it was his constant endeavour to avoid all excitement, save of the purely poetic kind; and that the outward circumstances of his life,—his mediocrity of fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence of striking personal charm,—made it easy for him to adhere to a method of life which was, in the truest sense of the term, stoic—stoic alike in its practical abstinences and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Terence; and, if nevertheless the critics of the true literary age of Rome—the Varronian and Augustan epoch—assigned to Caecilius the first place among the Roman editors of Greek comedies, this verdict appears due to the mediocrity of the connoisseur gladly preferring a kindred spirit of mediocrity in the poet to any special features of excellence. These art-critics probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more regular than Plautus and more vigorous than Terence; notwithstanding which ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... so much alike. Omsk and Whitehall are true to type; they each first exhaust the possibility of error, and when no wrong course is left, the right road becomes quite easy. The only difference is in the motive. Ours is mostly because social influence is always on the side of educated mediocrity, and theirs because self, coupled with corruption, is their natural incentive to all exertion. We have a different standard; all our theories of Government preclude the possibility of hidden personal advantage in ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... vigour, its natural grace. It has disciplined it, but it has emasculated. impoverished and rigidified it. It sees in taste, not a sense of the beautiful, but a certain type of correctness, an elegant form of mediocrity. It has substituted pomp for grandeur, school routine for individual inspiration, elaborateness for simplicity, fadeur and the monotony of literary orthodoxy for variety, the source and spring of intellectual life; and in the works produced under ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... you understand. I oughtn't to show it to you; but I can trust your honor. Here's Walker's idea. It isn't an idea at all, in fact, it's just the ordinary old stone viaduct, with the ordinary dangers, and the ordinary iron girders—nothing in any way new or original. It's respectable mediocrity. On an affair like that, and with this awkward curve, too, just behind taking-off point, the liability to accident is considerably greater than in a construction like Le Neve's, where nothing's left to chance, and where every source of evil, such as land-springs, or freshets, or ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... though, alas! here the resemblance fails also, for I do no good. Dear me! I wish sometimes that I could have been one of the one-sided men; it is so easy to run in one groove! and it 's all the fashion in these days. But, avaunt expediency! Let me stick to my principles, and be a rounded mediocrity, pelted on every hand, and pleasing [302] nobody. By the bye, Mrs. Gibbons [Mrs. James Gibbons of New York, daughter of Isaac T. Hopper] I has just sent me a fine medallion of her, father, beautifully mounted. It is a remarkable face, for its massive strength and the fun ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... restless vulgarity of the architecture along the most splendid of her favourite thoroughfares, and the ludicrousness of much of the sculpture that cumbered the public parks; and with the mercilessness of youth for mediocrity in his seniors, the arrives, he would run through the canvases of current exhibitions, displaying an abrupt arrogance, a bald, raw, cursory cruelty that only the Uebermensch of art would have ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... instanced as works of excellence. Mola, we are surprised to find ranked as Swiss; for he is altogether, in art, Italian. The influence of the school and precepts of the Caracci, produced in France an abundant harvest of mediocrity. In France was the merit of Michael Angelo first questioned. There are, however, names that rescue France from the entire disgrace of the abandonment of the true principles of art: Nicolo Poussin, Le Sueur, Le Brun, Sebastian Bourdon, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... self-estimate. The fit of inspiration came upon him suddenly; it was like the flowering of the orchards in spring; there was little or no hint of it till almost the very hour of the event. Up to the time of the appearance of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass," he had produced nothing above mediocrity. A hack writer on newspapers and magazines, then a carpenter and house-builder in a small way, then that astounding revelation "Leaves of Grass," the very audacity of it a gospel in itself. How dare he do it? how could he do it, and not betray hesitation or self-consciousness? It is one of ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... keep, none the less. The stimulus and impetus and inspiration are not lost, and shall not be. No one has counted the youngsters he has hauled, by the scruff of the neck as often as not, out of a slough of middle-class mediocrity, and sent careering off into some welter or current of ideas and conjecture. Carl didn't know where they would end, and no more do any of the rest of us. He knew he loathed stagnation. And he stirred things and stirred people. And the end of the stirring is far from being yet known ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... and dispositions of Sheridan; and if the vanity of talent too often turned him aside from their influence, it is but another proof of the danger of that "light which leads astray," and may console those who, safe under the shadow of mediocrity, are unvisited by such ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... England made his entree into Dover with great pomp, as he afterwards did in London. He had sent for his brothers; he had brought over his mother and sister. England had been for so long a time given up to herself—that is to say, to tyranny, mediocrity, and nonsense—that this return of Charles II., whom the English only knew as the son of the man whose head they had cut off, was a festival for the three kingdoms. Consequently, all the good wishes, all the acclamations which accompanied his return, struck the young king so forcibly ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... explanation of the modes of formation of these coral-reefs, the scientists have long been propounding theories which are sometimes amusing. Strangely enough they have nearly all explained that coral-polypes aggregate themselves in the forms of atolls and barrier-reefs by a mysterious "instinct," mediocrity's only term for screening its ignorance, and which is also given as the cause for their secreting lime. Flinders says that they form a great protecting reef in order that they may be protected by its shelter, and that the ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Baireuth itself, and its petty Court, the picture she gives of it is exceedingly curious. Her father-in-law, the reigning Margrave, was a narrow-minded mediocrity, whose conversation 'resembled that of a sermon read aloud for the purpose of sending the listener to sleep,' and he had only two topics, Telemachus, and Amelot de la Houssaye's Roman History. The Ministers, from Baron ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... would suppose Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the prince in especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... durability of hue. The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so many subjects of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... as to repay many times over the relatively small expense. We should not rest satisfied with what has been done, however. The only people who are contented with a system of promotion by mere seniority are those who are contented with the triumph of mediocrity over excellence. On the other hand, a system which encouraged the exercise of social or political favoritism in promotions would be even worse. But it would surely be easy to devise a method of promotion from grade to grade in which the opinion of the higher officers ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... right requires, and it is often the deficiencies of a character that give it its reputation for distinguished excellence in some one form of virtue, the vigilance, self-discipline, and effort which might have sustained the character in a well-balanced mediocrity being so concentrated upon some single department of duty as to excite high admiration and extended praise. There may be a deficient sensitiveness to some classes of obligations, while yet there is no willing or conscious violation of the right, and in such cases the character must be ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... conversation it appeared that Mademoiselle and her family hold decided opinions upon the subject,—something more than mere lack of admiration. She was familiar with the novels, and thought that, while they exhibit a talent certainly not above mediocrity, they reflect the injustice, the untruthfulness, and the ingratitude of their creator. We were obliged to confess to ourselves that the family have apparent reason for this view, when we reflected that in the books Miss Bronte has assailed their religion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... limited capacity hard on her. Some of these called her a cold, ambitious, unsympathetic woman; and perhaps, from their point of view, she was so. She certainly aspired to something far above them, and had nothing but scorn for the dead level of dull mediocrity from which they would ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... this state of things, this world of despondency, mediocrity, selfishness, and chicanery, and at the precise crisis when the disasters which attended the opening campaigns of the Seven Years' War—and particularly the loss of Minorca—seemed to confirm the gloomiest prognostications of the ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... girl and the bourgeois of the terrace, can only result from love or interest. Now between these two there could be no love; and as to interest, the thing was still less probable; for, if they were not in absolute poverty, their situation was certainly not above mediocrity—not even that gilded mediocrity of which Horace speaks, with a country house at Tibur and Montmorency, and which results from a pension of thirty thousand sestercia from the Augustan treasury, or a government annuity of six thousand francs—but that poor and miserable mediocrity which ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... From his early youth, it may be even said from his days of boyhood, Napoleon felt an inward presentiment that he was not destined to live in mediocrity. This persuasion soon taught him to treat others with disdain, and to entertain the highest opinion of himself. Scarcely had he obtained a subaltern command in the artillery, when he considered himself as the ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... exhibition of the Royal Academy is now open. Its general character is mediocrity, unrelieved by any works of extraordinary or striking merit. There are some clever landscapes by the younger Danbys, and one by the father, which is by no means among his happiest—a dark picture, which in half a dozen years will be one mass of black paint. Cooper, almost equal to Paul ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... "Nouveaux Lundis," IV. 263): "A young lawyer at Paris, at first received in a few houses on the Ile St. Louis, he soon withdrew from this inferior world of attorneys and pettyfoggers, whose tone oppressed him. The very thought of the impression this gallant and intensely vulgar mediocrity made upon him, still inspired disgust. He much preferred to talk with longshoremen, if need be, than with these scented limbs of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... successful mystification, the Arch- Mediocrity who presided, rather than ruled, over this Cabinet of Mediocrities, became hourly more conscious that the inevitable transition from fulfilling the duties of an administration to performing the functions of a government could not be conducted ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... necessary comforts and conveniences; a laugh, involuntary, and not without tenderness, crossed her face as she recalled a tale he had told her at Camaldoli, of the contempt excited in a young footman of a smart house by the mediocrity and exiguity of his garments and personal appointments generally. "I felt I possessed nothing that he would have taken as a gift," said Delafield, with a grin. "It ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expanded by scientific understanding of the freedom essential to intellectual evolution, the very same moral policy is that through which the highest and happiest results may be obtained. But as actually practised it was not favourable to originality; it rather tended to enforce the amiable mediocrity of opinion and imagination which still prevails. Wherefore a foreign dweller in the interior cannot but long sometimes for the sharp, erratic inequalities Western life, with its larger joys and pains and its more comprehensive sympathies. But sometimes only, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... of it? [1755]"In prosperity we are insolent and intolerable, dejected in adversity, in all fortunes foolish and miserable." [1756]"In adversity I wish for prosperity, and in prosperity I am afraid of adversity. What mediocrity may be found? Where is no temptation? What condition of life is free?" [1757]"Wisdom hath labour annexed to it, glory, envy; riches and cares, children and encumbrances, pleasure and diseases, rest and beggary, go together: as if a man were ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... befitting the fame, wealth, prestige, and power of its parent foundation. The church itself is a tolerable structure of the Renaissance—costly marble incrustations and mosaics, meaningless Neapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in the mediocrity of art adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro dei Medici. Expelled from Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in the Garigliano. Clement VII. ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. erected, this marble monument—the handicraft, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... No neighbour mind serves as a mirror to reflect the generous confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the man never yet existed, who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full vigour, in the midst of this kind of solitariness. He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity. I believe that nothing which Mary produced during this period, is marked with those daring flights, which exhibit themselves in the little fiction she composed just before its commencement. Among effusions of a nobler cast, I ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... shaken. But the better-informed have given up the Johnsonian theory of mind as a pair of legs able to walk east or west according to choice. Intellect is no longer taken to be a ready-made dose of ability to attain eminence (or mediocrity) in all departments; it is even admitted that application in one line of study or practice has often a laming effect in other directions, and that an intellectual quality or special facility which is a furtherance in one medium of effort is a drag in another. ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... of the Royal Academy in the present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original intention. The task of impartial criticism[4] is now, unhappily, no longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... singers are ever found to be those, who have best studied and developed the powers of the instrument which nature had bestowed upon them. This is the first grand requisite for the singer; without it, respectable mediocrity may occasionally be attained, but real excellence never can be gained. We know of no English-taught singer who possesses it. So little are the voice and its capabilities understood in this country, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Zealand with the Maori King; in South Africa with CETEWAYO; in Egypt with ARABI; in the Soudan with ZEBEHR. "In India," said GORST, leaning his elbow lightly on the table, "they have always hated and discouraged independent and original talent; always loved and promoted mediocrity." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 27, 1891 • Various
... a semblance of an orator, rambling with facility, and making mistakes with authority, a reputed statesman. What constitutes the statesman is a certain superior mediocrity. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... dignity of human life. Democracy has a role in the world of great importance,—but the spread of education and opportunity to the mass may make it more difficult for the best ideals and customs to survive in the avalanche of mediocrity that becomes released by the agencies that profit by appealing to the mass. So, too, the rise of the woman and child bring us face to face with new problems, which I think are less difficult problems than ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... names in letters, it was an age generally of contented dullness, well represented in the good-natured mediocrity of Queen Anne herself. During her reign the first daily newspaper (SS422, 443) appeared in England,—the Daily Courant (1703); it was a dingy, badly printed little sheet, not much bigger than a man's hand. The publisher said he made it so small "to save the Publick ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... I have attained something, perhaps, but attaining is not achieving—that is where people make the mistake. Perhaps I attempt the impossible. It may be that I have shot at the highest and hit mediocrity. I think that is ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... joy of the problem. For this reason the affection and respect of the Scotchman for his amateur colleague were profound, and he showed them by the frankness with which he consulted Holmes in every difficulty. Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, and MacDonald had talent enough for his profession to enable him to perceive that there was no humiliation in seeking the assistance of one who already stood alone in Europe, both in his gifts and in his ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... crowded a wealth of incident and experience that seldom falls to the lot of the most fortunate men in this commercialized era whose tendency is to pull nations like individuals down to a common level of mediocrity, and seems bent upon extinguishing even their few remaining national traits ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... hat or a petticoat. The door had not only all its parts entire, but was embellished with mouldings and a pediment. I gathered from these tokens that this was the abode not only of rural competence and innocence, but of some beings raised by education and fortune above the intellectual mediocrity of clowns. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... the same time to the manager and superintendent also. In other words, he proposes to take away all the incentives to the acquirement or exercise of superior and signal ability in every work of life, the result of which would inevitably lead to a deadening extension of mediocrity. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically. Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no bearing on the problems of contemporary life, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... saloons, nor rallying to lost causes, nor flaming on the adventure-paths, nor loving as God's own mad lovers. They are too busy keeping their feet dry, conserving their heart-beats, and making unlovely life-successes of their spirit-mediocrity. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... your heart, and made the treachery still more horrible by the contrast between the riches that eluded your outstretched hand and the ignoble mediocrity in which you were doomed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... aunt died in England, leaving him a few thousand a year, and he returned to spend his income upon a stud and pack and printing office, sending from the latter two or three volumes of pleasant-enough mediocrity every season. His last work, with the imprint of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... some danger of a traditionary mediocrity following after a great epoch in art. Superstition of style, technical rules in composition, and all the pedantry of art, too often fill up the ranks vacated by veteran genius, and of this there are examples enough in Flanders, Spain, and even Italy. The schools may, and often do, make men scholastic ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Teresa. There are deceptions everywhere, in the convent as in the world; and the mediocrity of the Sisters here is tiresome; one longs for a little more intelligence. And, as I was saying just now, everything declines; an idea ravels like a sleeve. Are you happy here?... You are not; I ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... to the common notion that they are always third-raters. Those sons inherit from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the bad strain is often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain. Mediocrity, as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and extraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between an able man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given child will resemble the mother are, roughly ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... where shabby class rivalry is unknown, where each man endeavours to rise by his own intelligence, worth, and energy, but where no one desires to drag others down to the level of his own idleness or mediocrity. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... moose-horns, and his brawny limbs rolled carelessly in the warm but somewhat unsavory skin of the dead monarch of the forest. I gloried in his calm repose; for the day was yet young, and I flattered myself that a three-hours' snooze would restore his muddled intellects to their normal mediocrity of useful instinct, and that I might still achieve my triumphal entry into the city,—a procession I had been so much in the habit of picturing to myself over the nocturnal camp-fire, that it had become a sort of nightmare with me. Indeed, I had idealized ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... during the Revolution, says of Washington: "The sound judgment of Washington, his steadiness and ability, had long since elevated him above all his rivals and far beyond the reach of envy. His enemies still labored, however, to fasten upon him, as a general, the reproach of mediocrity. It is true that the military career of this great man is not marked by any of those achievements which seem prodigious, and of which the splendor dazzles and astonishes the universe, but sublime virtues unsullied with the least stain are a species ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... himself wondering how Martel could ever leave this spot for the artificialities of Paris. The Count was amply able to live where he chose, and it was no love for art which had kept him in France these many years. On the contrary, they had both recognized the mediocrity of his talent and had often joked about it. It was perhaps no more than a youthful restlessness and craving for ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... of France, of all the living French novelists. We hold him much over-rated, but his great fertility, and the real excellence of a few of his books, have made him a widely-spread reputation. His early efforts were less successful than those of Sue; and his first thirty volumes scarcely attained mediocrity. At last he made a start, and took his place on the first line of his class, in virtue of a few masterpieces, scanty diamonds glittering in a cinder-heap. Over-production, the crying vice of the literature of the day, and an over-weening ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... now that it is too late to change; that he might have attained supreme excellence in some other calling. He toils with heavy heart and sinking spirit at the plodding pace of dull mediocrity. His work is drudgery and wearies him body and soul. Those who once smiled upon him pass him by. Men of far inferior capabilities distance him in the race. Perhaps too he has made another misstep, and has a wife who sympathizes neither with his tastes nor his ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... empire and, drawing a straight line from Moscow to Petersburg, commanded his engineers: "Build me a railroad to run like that." Genius has winged conceptions; it sees things as a completed whole from the first; it is only mediocrity which permits itself to be lost ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... coming out of school, or going away from apprenticeship, with the most precious part of life for ever gone so far as learning is concerned, chained to some pursuit for which there is no predilection, and which promises nothing higher than mediocrity if not failure—the work for which the mind was peculiarly adapted and for which, therefore, it would have a natural capacity, would not only have been discovered, but the bent of the inclination cultivated, and the life's work ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... arts, as well as in literature, a levelling principle is going on, fatal, perhaps, to excellence, but favourable to mediocrity. Such facilities are afforded to imitative talent, that whatever is imitable will be imitated. Genius will often be suppressed by this, and when it exerts itself, will find it far more difficult to obtain notice than in former times. There is the evil here that ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... days, amid what has been strongly stated as "the prevailing mediocrity of manners," a study of the manners of the past would seem to reveal to us the fact that in those days of ceremony a man who was beset with shyness need then have suffered less than he would do now in these days of impertinence ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... is now witnessed on all the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, and I was rather disappointed in finding the present Romans a race of fully average capacities, intellectual and physical. A face indicating mental imbecility, or even low mediocrity, is very rarely met in those streets where the greater portion of the Romans seem to work and live. The women are brown, plain, bare-headed, and rather careless of personal appearance, but ready at repartee, self-possessed, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... of the daughter. But the equal succession of independent matrons supported their pride and luxury, and might transport into a foreign house the riches of their fathers. While the maxims of Cato were revered, they tended to perpetuate in each family a just and virtuous mediocrity: till female blandishments insensibly triumphed, and every salutary restraint was lost in the dissolute greatness of the republic. The rigor of the decemvirs was tempered by the equity of the praetors. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the canvas loses its pasty mediocrity. How soon the paint and the brush-marks and the niggly little touches fade away and the THING ITSELF comes out and says "How do you do?" and that it is so glad to see him, and that it has been lurking behind these colors all day, trying to make his acquaintance, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to as some folks. With such an influence in every house, either exerted actively, or operating all the more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder that people in general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... splendid character, great moral qualities for after-ages to admire, he had beyond any man of modern times. But to suppose that in other respects he belonged to the ranks of mediocrity is not only a contradiction in terms, but utterly false. It was not character that fought the Trenton campaign and carried the revolution to victory. It was military genius. It was not character that read the future of America ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... but they were mostly bred up in adversity, succeeded to the throne by the unexpected failure of nearer heirs, or had to contend with great difficulties in the commencement of their reign. Since European life assumed a settled aspect, any thing above mediocrity in an hereditary king has become extremely rare, while the general average has been even below mediocrity, both in talent and in vigor of character. A monarchy constitutionally absolute now only maintains itself in existence (except temporarily ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... good and evil, excellence and mediocrity, in any nation, can only be fairly estimated by a comparison with those of the same kind in others, wherever a similitude or a contrast in the Chinese character or customs with those of any other people ancient or modern ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... am especially impressed by Cicero's dramatic power. But for the mediocrity of his poetic genius, he might have won pre-eminent honor from the Muse of Tragedy. He here so thoroughly enters into the feelings of Laelius with reference to Scipio's death, that as we read we forget that it is not Laelius himself ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... "There are but few, gently born. They are generous and broad-minded. They could not be mine own people otherwise. They are all I care about. I shun mediocrity as I would the plague. I refuse to permit it to touch me, either with words or with deeds. The good opinion of those I love is dear to me; as for the rest of the world!" She snapped her fingers to illustrate how ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... get there somehow. That's Potter, again. And that's where Jane and Johnny amuse me. They're up against what we agreed to call Potterism—the Potterism, that is, of second-rate sentimentalism and cheap short-cuts and mediocrity; they stand for brain and clear thinking against muddle and cant; but they're fighting it with Potterite weapons—self-interest, following things for what they bring them rather than for the things in themselves. John would never write the ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is the Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... looked about him for a few other strong spirits with whom to construct a focus of power which should control the senate. The young man had not long to look, for within a week after the beginning of the session these others showed themselves to his view, rising above the general level of mediocrity and timidity, party-leaders and chiefs of faction, men who were on their feet continually, speaking half-a-dozen times a day, freely and loudly. To these, and that house at large, he felt it necessary to introduce himself by ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... of duty he will be required to assort, is selected at the first; it is not expected that it will be memorized understandingly, or the location of each office fully known at once, but it forms the basis of inquiry, and develops either future excellence or mediocrity, or total incapacity. The room in which these examinations are usually conducted (excepting when a clerk on a route in a remote part of the division is the subject, in which case he is visited by the examining clerk) is kept quiet, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... these men, the pick of the youth of the nation, fattened on mathematics and stuffed with knowledge, have attained the age of fifty years, they have their reward, and receive as the price of their services the third-floor lodging, the wife and family, and all the comforts that sweeten life for mediocrity. If from among this race of dupes there should escape some five or six men of genius who climb the highest ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... as he held the paper up close to his face to see something or other better. It was his mediocrity as a teacher of arithmetic that the imps were always aiming at, but he would not be drawn into a discussion with them. Nilen repeated his question, while the others tittered; but Fris did not hear—he was too deep in his paper. So ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Fair Women,' or even to 'The Sea-Fairies' and to 'The Lady of Shalott,' will see what labour was expended on their composition. Nothing indeed can be more interesting than to note the touches, the substitution of which measured the whole distance between mediocrity and excellence. Take, for example, the magical alteration in the couplet in the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... account for Burke's exclusion, and jealous as we naturally and properly are of genius being snubbed by mediocrity, my reading at all events does not justify me in blaming any one but the Fates for the circumstance that Burke was never a Secretary of State. And after all, does it matter much what he was? Burke no doubt occasionally felt his exclusion a little hard; but he is the victor ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!—since they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian. Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all—on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... than one way, to our own hurt. We may say cynically, David had his good points and his bad ones, as all your great saints have. Look at them closely, and in spite of all their pretensions you will find them no better than their neighbours. And so we may comfort ourselves, in our own mediocrity and laziness, by denying the existence of all ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... about the tabernacle of flesh; in short, that flower of life which Raphael and Titian culled. Start from the point you have now attained, and perhaps you may yet paint a worthy picture; you grew weary too soon. Mediocrity will extol your work; but the true artist smiles. O Mabuse! O my master!" added this singular person, "you were a thief; you have robbed us of your life, your knowledge, your art! But at least," he resumed after a ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... progress is ever made in the execution of any purpose: When excessive, it engages us in precipitate and ill-concerted measures and enterprises: By such reasonings, we fix the proper and commendable mediocrity in all moral and prudential disquisitions; and never lose view of the advantages, which result from any character or habit. Now as these advantages are enjoyed by the person possessed of the character, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... I utter to the closest examination, you weigh it carefully, you try it by the plumb-line and the file, you test it by the polish of the lathe and the sublimity of the tragic buskin. Such is the indulgence accorded to mediocrity, such the severity meted out to distinction. I recognize, therefore, the difficulty of the task that lies before me, and I do not ask you to alter the opinions you entertain of me. Yet I would not have you deceived by false and petty resemblances, for, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... genius in any of the allied countries towered above the dead level of mediocrity. Great Frenchmen, Britons and Russians were said to be available, but there was no great man in evidence. And this want proved disastrous. In Germany, on the other hand, it was hardly felt. For it was compensated by the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... charges and lectures, still remain; and it is impossible to conceive any thing more commonplace in style, weaker in conception, or more thoroughly marked with mediocrity of mind. And yet it is perfectly possible to conceive such a man popular. What the multitude call eloquence, in the pulpit, is palpably different from eloquence any where else. At the bar, or in the legislature, it evidently consists ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... was clear as to his unrivalled fitness for the post. Yet all ended in nothing. The race was not to the swift. The first favourite was beaten, and more than one outsider has carried ofil the prize for which he strove in vain. Did any mortal ever dream, during his days of mediocrity at the bar, or his time of respectability as a Baron of the Exchequer, that Sir R. M. Rolfe was the future Chancellor? Probably there is no sphere in which there is more of disappointment and heartburning than the army. It ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... never so many centuries is impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb tone-mellowness from age, and that a baptismal register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... craven abjuration of his "former friend," Friar John, is magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as effectually ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... sound sense and knowledge of mankind. It is especially worth noticing how he considers virtue and religion to be immediately connected with knowledge—the confusions in the world appear to him for the most part to arise from mediocrity of knowledge[382]—and how highly moreover he estimates a sense for truth. He finds the most material difference between virtue and vice in the greater inward truthfulness of the former. King James delivers many other well-weighed principles ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... The result of the conference must be highly gratifying. To have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's relatives cannot but be satisfactory—to the electors. The outcome of this ballot, like that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best unobjectionable mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite to fulfil one's ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes of impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is well known, matrimony among these same upper ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... far, but he assured me that I needn't be nervous: he had his limit—his limit was inexorable. He would reserve pure vulgarity for his serial, over which he was sweating blood and water; elsewhere it should be qualified by the prime qualification, the mediocrity that attaches, that endears. Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared for adverse comment, resolute for his noble ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... annals, Moses, David, and Solomon, were three of their most distinguished poets. The hymns of David excel no less in sublimity and tenderness of expression than in loftiness and purity of religious sentiment. In comparison with them the sacred poetry of all other nations sinks into mediocrity. They have embodied so exquisitely the universal language of religious emotion, that (a few fierce and vindictive passages excepted, natural in the warrior-poet of a sterner age,) they have entered with unquestioned propriety into the ritual of the holier and more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... Desire mediocrity in all things, even in beauty. A pleasant attractive countenance, which inspires kindly feelings rather than love, is what we should prefer; the husband runs no risk, and the advantages are common to husband and wife; charm is less ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... ideas of the French Revolution. When the King's refusal to yield on the question of Catholic emancipation (1801) compelled Pitt to resign, Canning went out of office with him. Addington, the stupid mediocrity who succeeded Pitt, provoked Canning's pen to fresh lampoons, some of them long remembered ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... round a court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selected our table. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated than the first violin began to speak, to assert itself, as if it were suddenly done with mediocrity. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... conviction, was only the symptom of contemptuous pity—the proof that she deemed the understanding of her opponent beneath all fair competition with her own. The understanding of Mad. de Coulanges had, indeed, in the space of a few months, sunk far below the point of mediocrity, in Mrs. Somers' estimation—she had begun by overvaluing, and she ended by underrating it. She at first had taken it for granted that Mad. de Coulanges possessed a "very superior understanding and great strength of mind;" then she discovered that la comtesse was "uncommonly superficial, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... moderate but not painfully restricted means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic humanity exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in the story of a career. Their poetic home was built upon all the philistine virtues. Mrs Jameson laughed at their ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of the Convention; mediocrity of Gilbert-Liendon Girondists, the; late of the; surrendered by the Convention; vote for Louis' death Glosson, Professor, experiment in crowd psychology Governments, feeble resistance of, to revolution; best tactics to ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... tolerance of concubinage, the slight emphasis which he lays on the virtue of veracity—of which indeed he does not seem himself to have been particularly studious in his historic writings—place him low down in the rank of moralists. Yet he taught what he felt the people could receive, and the flat mediocrity of his character and his teachings has been stamped forever upon a people who, while they are kindly, gentle, forbearing, and full of family piety, are palpably lacking not only in the exaltation of Mysticism, but in ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... book-market was never more wide-awake than it is now, the publishers are all as eager as possible for the least sign of new power; and besides that, the magazines afford outlet—not only for talent, but for mediocrity as well. You are entirely mistaken in your idea that literary excellence is not equivalent to commercial availability. If you could write one paragraph as noble as the average of Dr. ——, or one stanza ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... people of both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about him or her, busy with some useful calling,—too ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... novel, when it suddenly appeared, it is not surprising that "Waverley" should at once have attained an unexampled popularity when we consider the mediocrity of all works of fiction at that time, if we except the Irish tales of Maria Edgeworth. Scott received from Constable L1000 for this romance, then deemed a very liberal remuneration for what cost him but a few months' work. The second and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Death. The young have grown old,—have thrown off youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The inspired young prophet who protested week by week against mediocrity in paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against which his protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of journalism accepted the patronage of the titled promoter of the half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to the professional ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... that the bulk of mankind should injure themselves by too abstemious a temperance. All that can be expected from human weakness, even after working from the most perfect model, is barely to arrive at mediocrity; and, were the model less perfect, or the duties less severe, there is the greatest reason to think, that even that mediocrity would never be attained. Examine the conduct of those who are placed at a distance ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... literature. We talked a great deal of poetry and such matters last night, and, as usual, differed, I think, more than ever. He affects to patronize a system of criticism fit only for the production of mediocrity; and, although all his finer poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this system, yet I recognize the pernicious effects of it in the Doge of Venice." Again, on the 15th: "Lord B. is greatly improved in every respect—in ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... to my aid in all the difficulties of life; and the recollection that, having embraced the character of an honest man and a friend to rational liberty, I have no business to repine at that mediocrity of fortune which I knew ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... comedian, confessed the hopelessness of success, in his endeavours to obtain a sufficiency of prominent and distinctive features to compose an entertainment founded on American character. The whole nation struck him as being destitute of salient points, and as characterized by a respectable mediocrity, that, however useful it might be in its way, was utterly without poetry, humour, or interest to the observer. For one who dealt principally with the more conspicuous absurdities of his fellow-creatures, Mr. Mathews was certainly right; we also believe him to ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... man who saw his duty to the nation and the emergency never more clearly than he knew his own defects. Canada never before had a mediocrity of such eminence; a man who without a spark of genius devoted a high talent to a nation's work so well that he just about wins a niche in our Valhalla—if we have one. It was the war that almost finished Borden; and it was the war that ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... gymnasiums with an excellent certificate, went to Dorpat, where he maintained a perpetual struggle with poverty, but succeeded in completing his three years' course. Pigasov's abilities did not rise above the level of mediocrity; patience and perseverance were his strong points, but the most powerful sentiment in him was ambition, the desire to get into good society, not to be inferior to others in spite of fortune. He had studied diligently and gone to the Dorpat University from ambition. Poverty exasperated ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... masses of men; but, in translating this universal sentiment into an intelligent form, the intellectual element of his wonderful nature is as much depressed as the moral element is exalted, and consequently we are apt to misunderstand both. Mediocrity has a bad trick of idealizing itself in eulogizing him, and drags him down to its own level while assuming to lift him to the skies. How many times have we been told that he was not a man of genius, but ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... Mean. — N. mean, average; median, mode; balance, medium, mediocrity, generality; golden mean &c. (mid-course) 628; middle &c. 68; compromise &c. 774; middle course, middle state; neutrality. mediocrity, least common denominator. V. split the difference; take the average ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... like a spoiled child, and will have no more idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... midnight, solitude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws its beams ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Liebknecht, apostle of a creed that would save the world by the gospel of mediocrity, were human nature other than it is. But, in considering this Liebknecht, let us not forget that he has no more love for England, or for any of the Allies, than the giant whom he attempts so vainly to oppose: he is an apostle, not of peace, but of mere obstruction, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... horror. By the side of the conceptions of Gustave Dore—teste for instance the weird pictures of "The Wandering Jew" already mentioned—George Cruikshank sinks at times into insignificance; and yet side by side with George Cruikshank, as a purely comic artist or caricaturist, Dore is beneath mediocrity. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... man was one of his pet abominations, embodying all the complacent, little-headed mediocrity of this new generation; natty fellows all turned out of the same mould, sippers and tasters, chaps without drive or capacity, without even vices; and he did not intend to gratify the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to whom this epistle is addressed, was schoolmaster of Ochiltree, and afterwards of New Lanark: he was a writer of verses too, like many more of the poet's comrades;—of verses which rose not above the barren level of mediocrity: "one of his poems," says Chambers, "was a laughable elegy on the death of the Emperor Paul." In his verses to Burns, under the name of a Tailor, there is nothing to laugh at, though they are intended to be ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... duty was to fill his lordship's tankard, and hear, with indications of admiration, his lordship's long stories about himself. Such is Monroe's military experience. I was with my regiment in the same division at the time. As a lawyer, Monroe was far below mediocrity. ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Surgeon George Metcalf, with the rank of junior lieutenant, was ordered to the torpedo-boat above mentioned, and with him as executive officer a young graduate of the academy, Ensign Smith, who with the enthusiasm and courage of youth combined the mediocrity of inexperience and the full share of the ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... of thirty-five years, had been crowded a wealth of incident and experience that seldom falls to the lot of the most fortunate men in this commercialized era whose tendency is to pull nations like individuals down to a common level of mediocrity, and seems bent upon extinguishing even their few remaining ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... useful, and that the mere artisan or chemical manufacturer has done more for society than the chemical philosopher. Besides, it has always appeared to me that it is in the nature of this science to encourage mediocrity and to attach importance to insignificant things; very slight chemical labours seem to give persons a claim to the title of philosopher—to have dissolved a few grains of chalk in an acid, to have shown that a very useless ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... within, and who does not ardently desire that literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly protected it, and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which, with rare exceptions, pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... very premature excitation, can manifest themselves only in awkwardness, crudeness, and grotesque features,—in short, their individuality is reproved and rejected by the teacher in favour of an unoriginal decent average. On the other hand, uniform mediocrity gets peevish praise; for, as a rule, it is just the class of work likely to bore the ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... undoubtedly accomplishing much good, but the spheres and degrees of their influence would be greatly enlarged under a central organization. In such a design, the initiative should be taken by men of nerve as well as men of abilities, so that the dead weights of mediocrity so constantly obtruding into and making ridiculous the present ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... failure, he has only to turn the advice outside in. He has only to be studious of the very best literature, observant, careful, original, he has only to be himself and not an imitator, to aim at excellence, and not be content with falling a little lower than mediocrity. He needs but bestow the same attention on this art as others give to the other arts and other professions. With these efforts, and with a native and natural gift, which can never be taught, never communicated, and with his mind set not on his reward, but on excellence, on style, on ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... community who are really happy in their life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial ruffians whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by—as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity—in the streets ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... asking? Not help, nor money, nor material assistance of any kind. Nothing but understanding. Hassler had been persecuted like him. Hassler was a free man. He would understand a free man, whom German mediocrity was pursuing with its spite and trying to crush. They ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... why excel, When mediocrity does quite as well? 'Tis women buy the books,—and read 'em, say, What time a person nods, en negligee, And in default of gossip, cards, or dance, Resolves t' incite ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,) —poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... more tastes and aspirations in common with trappers and frontiersmen than with the toilers of civilized life; giving no hint nor token, by word or act, of the possession of any intellectual gift that could raise him above mediocrity, or even up ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... itself to politicians, but from its own point of view, a point of view which it cannot avoid taking up, it is absolutely right. What is a politician? He is a man who, in respect of his personal opinions, is a nullity, in respect of education, a mediocrity, he shares the general sentiments and passions of the crowd, his sole occupation is politics, and if that career were closed to him, he ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... strong faculty, the using of which would give delight and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an eagle should become a competitor in a walking race and if the fawn should ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... at least equally to its merit. In "The Dispensary" there is a strain of smooth and free versification; but few lines are eminently elegant. No passages fall below mediocrity, and few rise much above it. The plan seems formed without just proportion to the subject; the means and end have no necessary connection. Resnel, in his preface to Pope's Essay, remarks that Garth exhibits no discrimination of characters; and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... belonging to the lower part of the head measures thirteen and a half inches by seven and a half. I have remarked, in my little work on the Old Red Sandstone,—founding on a large amount of negative evidence, that a mediocrity of size and bulk seems to have obtained among the fish of the Lower Old Red, though in at least the Upper formation, a considerable increase in both took place. A single piece of positive evidence, however, outweighs whole volumes of a merely ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... contradiction, every limitation appeared more striking, every discord more violent, and every achievement more astonishing. This State could apparently produce everything that was strange and unusual, but could not endure one thing—peaceful mediocrity, which elsewhere may ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... years before the foundation of Rome, (about 800 before the Christian aera,) the Tuscans built Capua and Nola, at the distance of twenty-three miles from each other; but the latter of the two cities never emerged from a state of mediocrity.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... is a complete hack!' objected another of the gentlemen. 'Nothing is worse in poetry than mediocrity, and he certainly does not go ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... Mr. Wentworth of Illinois. His height was such that he was already known as "Long John." We sat together in the train for Quincy on the day of the funeral. He was a good natured man, whose greatness was not altogether in the size of his body. His talents were far above mediocrity, indeed, nature had endowed him with powers of a high order, as I had the opportunity to learn when we were ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... still more horrid cruelty which reduced unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of the mediaeval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on political reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political reform. But the course of events afterwards owed ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... infallibly be crushed. He does all the good of which he is capable in his sphere; he leaves the road free to the wicked, who are willing to wade through its mire; he laments the heavy strokes they inflict on themselves; he applauds mediocrity that affords him security: he pities those nations made miserable by their errors,—rendered unhappy by those passions which are the fatal but necessary consequence; he sees they contain nothing but wretched ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... possible tongue. He showed her the tawdry, restless vulgarity of the architecture along the most splendid of her favourite thoroughfares, and the ludicrousness of much of the sculpture that cumbered the public parks; and with the mercilessness of youth for mediocrity in his seniors, the arrives, he would run through the canvases of current exhibitions, displaying an abrupt arrogance, a bald, raw, cursory cruelty that only the Uebermensch of art would have ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the history of all nations. But nowhere else is the difference between the higher and lower levels so pronounced and the intervals between the acts so protracted. As we have already said, the country passes suddenly from the brightest limelight of fame to the darkest recess of mediocrity and oblivion. Some of these contrasts, such as those existing between Charlemagne's united Empire and feudal divisions, are shared by the rest of Europe. Others, at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... better not known at all than learned at the expense of better things, not to speak of its being a burden to the mind which gradually will lose the ability to judge excellence, and so, becoming accustomed to mediocrity, will be unable to attempt anything higher. There is no more useful motto for a man in quest of solid learning than Grotius' line: "Not to know some things is a large ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... of the several States, will be so great as to repay many times over the relatively small expense. We should not rest satisfied with what has been done, however. The only people who are contented with a system of promotion by mere seniority are those who are contented with the triumph of mediocrity over excellence. On the other hand, a system which encouraged the exercise of social or political favoritism in promotions would be even worse. But it would surely be easy to devise a method of promotion from grade to grade in which the opinion of the higher officers ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... they were best fitted. It may well be understood, therefore, what a medley my classes presented, and how unlikely it was, in the face of all these drawbacks, that their acquirements should be above mediocrity. On the score of natural abilities, however—in quickness of perception, facility in generalization, readiness and coherence of expression, and clearness of head generally—it would not be at haphazard one could find an equal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... make the local numerical majority supreme, and any one is considered competent to legislate. He can do that, even if by common knowledge he is incompetent or untrustworthy in every other capacity. Localization thus becomes the stronghold of mediocrity, the sure avenue to office of the second-and third-rate man,—he who wishes always to enjoy his share of a little brief authority, to have, he also, a taste of public life. In this respect our American system is, I submit, manifestly and incomparably inferior to the system ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... his cousin on 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. But he had received a lesson which might probably be useful to him for the rest ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... first thing he saw now was Minks, his friendly, ridiculous little confidential secretary. From all the crowds of men and women he knew, respected, and enjoyed in London, as from the vast deluge of human mediocrity which for him was London, he picked out suddenly—little Minks—Herbert Montmorency Minks. His mind, that is, darting forward in swift, comprehensive survey, and searching automatically for some means whereby it might continue the happiness and sweetness recently enjoyed, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... merits of the saints and prayers of those holy men (of whom two lie buried before the high altar), it were destined that the daughter church should be founded in superfluities, whilst the mother continued in that laudable state of mediocrity which she had always affected and coveted. Let the active therefore reside there, the contemplative here; there the pursuit of terrestrial riches, here the love of celestial delights; there let them enjoy the concourse of men, here the presence of angels; there let ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... to the Moon" - was again manifested in him by the production of numberless poetical effusions, in which his own poignant anguish and Miss Patty's incomparable attractions were brought forward in verses of various degrees of mediocrity. They were also equally varied in their style and treatment; one being written in a fierce and gloomy Byronic strain, while another followed the lighter childish style of Wordsworth. To this latter class, perhaps, belonged the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... (Sainte-Beuve, "Nouveaux Lundis," IV. 263): "A young lawyer at Paris, at first received in a few houses on the Ile St. Louis, he soon withdrew from this inferior world of attorneys and pettyfoggers, whose tone oppressed him. The very thought of the impression this gallant and intensely vulgar mediocrity made upon him, still inspired disgust. He much preferred to talk with longshoremen, if need be, than with these scented limbs of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... abandoned. Either the appropriation had given out, or the polyps had gotten to squabbling among themselves and left their work to be slowly worn away by the erosive action of sea and shipwrecked bottoms. [Footnote: In Micronesia it was even worse, the islands offering a dead-level of mediocrity which I have never seen equalled except in the workingmen's cottages of Ampere, New Jersey, the home of the General Electric Company.] Add to the geographic sameness the universal blight of white civilization with its picture post-cards, professional hula and ooh-la dancers, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... what it means to shape your life to your income. I am poor, and I know. Years ago I had to choose between mediocrity and"—he looked at her peculiarly—"and love, or advancement alone. I had to choose, and fixing my choice upon the higher aim, I had to put everything else out of my life. The thought is intolerable that my name ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... indeed plainly indicates to us that he was guilty of this. But it was pride, we think, that was honorable and not a vice, a pride of which a lesser light, Lacordaire says, "By the grace of God, I abhor mediocrity." In the dark wood Dante represents the Lion (Pride) as preventing him from ascending the mountain—"He seemed to be coming to me with head upreared and with such raging hunger, that the air appeared to be in fear of ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... as that experience demonstrates it, that the reigning head or heads of such a community should be medical, and not that medical mediocrity either which covets and accepts political preferment ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... published; it was merely printed to satisfy the senescent vanity of a property-worshiping, cliche-parroting reactionary who made money ranching before he became governor of Wyoming. He tells a few good anecdotes of range days. Numerous better books pertaining to the range are NOT listed here; this mediocrity represents a particular type. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... John Bull will open his inartistic eyes, and see that mediocrity in oil is not equal to excellence in water, and that those who originate with the pencil are far before copyists with the graver ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... passed, he had come to see that his place would only have been among the multitude of little talents, whose destiny it is to imitate and vulgarise the strivings of genius, to swell the over-huge mass of mediocrity. And so, he had chosen that his life should be a failure—a failure, that is, in the eyes of the world; for himself, he judged otherwise. The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth. Failure! success!—what ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... failure of "Mortimer Stant" for the first time, this awful question—"What if, after all, you should be an Ordinary Creature? What if you are no better than that army who fights happily, contentedly, with mediocrity for its daily bread and butter? That army, upon whose serried ranks you have perhaps, unconsciously, but nevertheless with pity, looked down?... What if you are never to write a word that will be remembered, never even to cause a decent attention, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... studio and closed the door. In the mellow light the smile faded from his face. Perhaps he was thinking of the unsuccessful, from whose crowded ranks he had risen—comrades preordained to mediocrity, foredoomed to failure—industrious, hopeful, brave young fellows, who must live their lives to learn the most terrible of all lessons—that bravery alone wins ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... manners. They're the hallmark of mediocrity. And as for impudence—that is the one sin a man may ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... owe their rank to their fathers and husbands, are proud of this accidental favor of fate; they consider themselves as the chosen accomplices and judges of morals and virtue, and cast out from their circles all those who dare to elevate themselves above mediocrity. In this house dwelt an artiste- -the worshipped prima donna, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... was fully conscious, added to the feeling of my unfitness for the world around me. The skill required on a farm was above my reach, where efficiency in driving oxen was one of the most valued of accomplishments. I keenly felt my inability to acquire even respectable mediocrity in this branch of the agricultural profession. It was mortifying to watch the dexterous motions of the whip and listen to the torrent of imperatives with which a young farmer would set a team of these stolid animals in motion after they had failed to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... this reputation for a long time, as it often happened that I was compelled to give inferior performances of repertoire pieces, including Mozart's operas. The mediocrity of these was particularly disappointing to those who, after my success in Armida, had expected a great deal from my rendering of these pieces, and were much disappointed in consequence. Even sympathetic hearers sought to explain their disappointment on the ground that I did ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... say, that, of PICCINI'S works, no opera is now played but his Didon, and that his other productions, which, to the best of my recollection, are Alys, an opera called Iphigenie en Tauride, and Penelope, have fallen. This was ascribed to the mediocrity of the language; a part of an opera somewhat essential, though no great attention seems to be bestowed on it. But if people here are not very difficult as to the style of the language, they require at least ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... too many talents, too many differing inclinations, too much impetuosity, too much vanity, too little concentration and will-power, and they fail in ordinary walks of life from the lack of resolution to lay the foundations necessary to successful mediocrity. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... upon remembered glory. We cannot afford to drift. We reject the prospect of failure or mediocrity or an inferior quality of life for any person. Our Government must at the same time be both competent ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... with the noblest, is not so unnatural or improbable but that the history of every nation affords us abundant examples of such men; while the middle class, who are neither stimulated by the calls of penury, nor pushed forward by hereditary interest, naturally retain a contented mediocrity of renown and honor. ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... those of men! Let the earth guard them, and let them be moved on a level with its baseness. They now have hearts of slaves; they forget injuries, ancestors, oaths; and everywhere the folly of mobs, the mediocrity of the individual, and the hideousness of races ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... poetry. This was manifold. In the first place, a number were encouraged by his success to collect and publish their poems, although few of them possessed much merit; and he complained that some were a wretched "spawn" of mediocrity, which the sunshine of his fame had warmed and brought forth prematurely. Lapraik, for instance, was induced by the praise of Burns to print an edition of his poems, which turned out a total failure. There was only one good piece in it all, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for had failed me. Success—I despised it. Recognition—it was dead ashes. Society, men and women above the ruck and the muck of the water-front and the forecastle—I was appalled by their unlovely mental mediocrity. Love of woman—it was like all the rest. Money—I could sleep in only one bed at a time, and of what worth was an income of a hundred porterhouses a day when I could eat only one? Art, culture—in the face of the iron facts of biology such things ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... exhilaration in her work. She is the girl who passes beyond the underpaid stage and is able to live decently and to rise to a position of some responsibility, partly because of her concentration and partly because she has been able to resist the influences about her which make for mediocrity or worse. ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... difficult to match "God save the King," the mediocrity of which, especially as regards the words, has been the butt of countless satirists. Beethoven wrote in his diary that he "must show the English what a blessing they have" in that "national disgrace." If ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... unfeigned contempt of self breathed at last in every act and thought of her life, inspiring a love and desire of humiliation which secured for those who tried her, the warmest gratitude of her heart, and the most devoted of her services. Not satisfied with mediocrity in any virtue, she carried mortification to an absorbing love of the cross; charity, to the sacrifice of every natural feeling; obedience, to child-like submission, spiritualized by faith; reverence for the rule, to most minute observance of its least prescription. She also attained an eminent ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... year showed me a necessity of departing from my original intention. The task of impartial criticism[4] is now, unhappily, no longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... as I see him," she said in an odd voice. And, looking at it, Craven realised that the cleverness of the painted head on the large canvas paled to mediocrity beside the brilliance of the sepia sketch he held. It was the same head—but marvellously different—set on the body of a faun. The dancing limbs were pulsing with life, the tiny hoofs stamping the flower-strewn earth in an ecstasy of movement; ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Diderot then breaks forth:—"Oh, Richardson! thou singular genius in my eyes! thou shalt form my reading in all times. If forced by sharp necessity, my friend falls into indigence; if the mediocrity of my fortune is not sufficient to bestow on my children the necessary cares for their education, I will sell my books,—but thou shalt remain! yes, thou shalt rest in the same class with MOSES, HOMER, EURIPIDES, and SOPHOCLES, to be ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... wondering how Martel could ever leave this spot for the artificialities of Paris. The Count was amply able to live where he chose, and it was no love for art which had kept him in France these many years. On the contrary, they had both recognized the mediocrity of his talent and had often joked about it. It was perhaps no more than a youthful restlessness and craving for excitement, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... was hanging a ravishing Botticelli—a Madonna and Child bending over like a wind-blown tree to be kissed by St. John:—a composition that takes you up in its arms and rocks you as you look at it. Andrea del Sarto is to me only a big mediocrity: there is nothing here to touch his chortling ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... from any other work ever written on Will Power. The culmination of over twenty years of research and study, it deals in simple language with the possibilities of every man—how you and everyone else may rise from the slough of mediocrity to the pinnacle of wealth ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... meantime, and in consequence of this lawsuit, a certain Barot, an uncle of Mignon and his partner as well, got up a dispute with Urbain, but as he was a man below mediocrity, Urbain required in order to crush him only to let fall from the height of his superiority a few of those disdainful words which brand as deeply as a red-hot iron. This man, though totally wanting in parts, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the dilettante And idle dreamer; 'tis the poor excuse Of mediocrity. The truly great Know not the word, or know it but to scorn, Else had Joan of Arc a peasant died, Uncrowned by glory ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fact constituted his father's one escape from the impenetrable element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in. To a man so enamoured of beauty, and so little qualified to add to its sum total, it was a wonderful privilege to have bestowed on the world such a being. Ronald's resemblance to Mr. Grew's early conception of what he himself would have ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and pass-words of its ignorances ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... dramatists as well as novelists—that they neglect what Shakespeare calls "the middle of humanity," and deal in eccentric characters above or below the people one really meets. Let those who are serious in this objection enjoy moral mediocrity in the ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue, though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political movement takes place, it ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter Wheeler and his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among the furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain mediocrity their own outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed in the home as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had devoted their lives ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... likely to supply these advantages; and which, participating immediately in transactions with foreign nations, ought to be exercised by none who are not thoroughly weaned from the prepossessions and habits incident to foreign birth and education. The term of nine years appears to be a prudent mediocrity between a total exclusion of adopted citizens, whose merits and talents may claim a share in the public confidence, and an indiscriminate and hasty admission of them, which might create a channel for foreign influence ...
— The Federalist Papers
... audacious intention to live his own life; and in less tragic fashion, but none the less along the same lines, the world tends to pick at, and to fray the moral garments of, its leaders still to-day. When such a one succeeds through sheer simplicity, then that last feeble epitaph of mediocrity is applied to him: "He is lucky," because so few people realize that "luck," is merely not ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... about our own efforts and optimistic about the working of the legislature. I think we do right to expect great things from the State, but we ought to expect still greater things from ourselves. We ought to know full well that, if the State did twice as much as it does, we shall never rise out of mediocrity among the nations unless we have unlimited faith in the power of our personal efforts to raise and transform Ireland, and unless we translate the faith into works. The State can give a man an economic holding, but only the man himself can make it into Earthly Paradise, ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... forgiveness of his depredation, Shaw's bias is evident wherever he discusses the action and qualities of Great Britain. Thus he contrasts Bernhardi's brilliant with our own very dull militarists' facts, the result being that the intense mediocrity of Bernhardi leaps to the eye on every page, and that events have thoroughly discredited all his political and many of his military ideas, whereas we possess ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... thus at times be saved from themselves, and an editorial retrospect of half a century presents a sad record of the newspaper work of making bricks without straw. Justly excepting the comparatively few public men who tower over mediocrity in public place, journalism gives the position and fashions the fame of most of them. It is not done arbitrarily nor from choice, as public and political necessities are often paramount with journalists, as with others, in awarding ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... attempt to establish unlimited polygyny always provokes, not from the best people, but from the mediocrities and the inferiors. If we could get rid of our inferiors and screw up our average quality until mediocrity ceased to be a reproach, thus making every man reasonably eligible as a father and every woman reasonably desirable as a mother, polygyny and polyandry would immediately fall into sincere disrepute, because monogamy is so much ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... triumph or the wail, on the side of his partisans.[17] To the presence of this person the clans are supposed to have been indebted for much of the enthusiasm which led them to glory in the wars of Montrose. His poetry only reaches mediocrity, but the success which attended it led the chiefs to seek similar support in the Jacobite wars; and very animated compositions were the result of their encouragement. Mathieson, the family bard of Seaforth, Macvuirich, the pensioner of Clanranald, and Hector the Lamiter, bard of M'Lean, were pre-eminent ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the borders of a vice. His very faults were middling—he was not very ungrammatical. It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless, indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity. If there was any one point on which he showed an inclination to be excessive, it was confidence in his own shrewdness and ability in practical matters, so that he was very full of plans which were something like ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... is some danger of a traditionary mediocrity following after a great epoch in art. Superstition of style, technical rules in composition, and all the pedantry of art, too often fill up the ranks vacated by veteran genius, and of this there are examples enough ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... crime, since it is always punished sooner or later. I do not understand. We are a pitiful lot; and everywhere about us—in our movements, within our walls, and from hour to hour, there is a stifling mediocrity. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... group, the liberals, was much more numerous; men of mediocrity to whom monastic life appeared the most facile existence, vagrant monks happy to secure an aftermath of success by displaying the new Rule, formed in this country the greater part of ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the soul. The end is infinite, the aim must be the highest. Not to know this, not to hear the heavenly invitation, is to be shut out from communion with the best; is to be cut off from the source of growth; is to be given over to modes of thought which fatally lead to mediocrity ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and mediocrity. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the public; and, moreover, every instrumental noise—every kind of preluding between the acts—constitutes a real offence to all civilized auditors. The bad training of an orchestra, and its musical mediocrity is to be inferred from the impertinent noise it makes during the periods of quiet at ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... would not be told but for the fact that I have learned by an Experience mixed with some bitterness, that all such things are governed by fixed business laws and rules and move always in obedience to them. There is as I know, a law of failure and a law of success. There is even a law of mediocrity. Every man is controlled by that one of these three laws which he elects to ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... to the Passions and other of his lyrics—none of that happy personification of abstract conceptions which is the characteristic of his genius. The majority of the lines lag and move heavily, and do not seem to me to rise much above mediocrity in the expression. The subject was attractive, and might have afforded space for the wild excursions of Collins's creative powers. As to the edition of Bell, in which it is pretended that the lost stanzas have been recovered, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high motive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... that we hold France. It is not because of our numbers, since there are only 25,000 Freemasons in this country [this was in 1889]. Nor is it because we are the brains, for you have been able to judge of the intellectual mediocrity of the greater number of these 25,000 Freemasons. We hold France because we are organized and the only people who are organized. But above all, we hold France because we have an aim, this aim is unknown; ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... school. Such is the judgment of the scholar on the school; as might be expected, it has its counterpart in the judgment of the school on the scholar. The collective intelligence of the staff of Shrewsbury School could find nothing but dull mediocrity in Charles Darwin. The mind that found satisfaction in knowledge, but very little in mere learning; that could appreciate literature, but had no particular aptitude for grammatical exercises; appeared to the "strictly classical" ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and more rapidly being reached by the greater number of Negroes there is still more prejudice to be found. It is here where the Negro has his fiercest battle ground; it is here where he finds his greatest opposition. It is only following out the idea of the French writer who said, "Mediocrity alone is jealous." The constant desire of this class of white people to rise to the highest level aggravates them upon seeing a Negro reaching out for or obtaining in any way that which they may have or may be seeking, and they "take it out" by greater assumption of superiority especially over those ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... abandonment of all existing traditions necessitating the residence of the representative in the district he represents. This American political practice always has and always will tend to give mediocrity to the American popular representation, but it corresponds to one of the most fundamental of American political prejudices, and for the present its abandonment is out of the question. The work of improving the quality ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compound employments of both; for that will be good for the present, because the virtues of either age, may correct the defects of both; and good for succession, that young men ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. We all know men clearly of secondary ability who nevertheless occupy high positions in business and state. We are acquainted also with men of excellent native endowment who still have never risen above the ranks of mediocrity. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... the Weak. Let the condition of mediocrity be safe from the arrogance of the rich. Let the madness of bloodshed be avoided. To take the law into your own hands is to wage private war, especially in the case of those who are fortified by the authority of our tuitio. If anyone attempts with foul presumption ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... poverty, ignominy, death, and pain. But while they argue thus, they allow indeed of these feelings being retrenched, though they deny that they either can or should be plucked up by the roots; so that their opinion is that mediocrity is best in everything. When they reason in this manner, what think you—is what they say worth attending to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... but hardly a great writer, though as a writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the Spectator, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor worse than other {362} imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which have won them enduring favor. Such are his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of narration, the purposeful irrelation of parts, the use of anecdote and episode, which to the stumbling reader reduce his books to collections of disconnected essays and instances, gave to German mediocrity a sanction to publish a mass of multifarious, unrelated, and nondescript thought and incident. It is to be noted that the spurious books such as the Koran, which Germany never clearly sundered from the original, were direct examples in ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... and was now a political refugee; who had written part of the Ring and had Tristan "already planned in his head"; a conductor whose ideal was nothing lower than perfection—this gentleman came from Zurich to conduct a society whose membership was compact of trim and prim mediocrity, and whose directors were mostly duffers. Can we wonder that both sides were disappointed? These amiable directors never quite recovered from the honour of having Mendelssohn to conduct for them; and they undoubtedly looked upon Wagner as scarcely a next-best. The ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... conditions for that maximum strain are unfavourable in a socialistic state with its acknowledged need of rigid regulation and bureaucracy. We see all around us the flabby routine work, stale and uninspiring, wherever sharp rivalry has no chance. It is the great opportunity for mediocrity, while the unusual talent is made ineffective and wasted. Our present civilization shows that in every country really decisive achievement is found only in those fields which draw the strongest minds, and that they are drawn only where the greatest premiums ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... everything now appear in which he was concerned! His attentions to Miss King were now the consequence of views solely and hatefully mercenary; and the mediocrity of her fortune proved no longer the moderation of his wishes, but his eagerness to grasp at anything. His behaviour to herself could now have had no tolerable motive; he had either been deceived with regard to her fortune, or had been gratifying his vanity by encouraging the preference ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... machinery, all irregular organizations, which are unknown to the Constitution, he regarded as dangerous to public liberty. He had noticed that this machinery had been deadly to the great men of the nation and productive only of mediocrity. Obedience to them, he contended, was infidelity to popular rights. "This system," said he, "has produced none of those illustrious men who have become so distinguished in their country's history; none of those political ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... complexioned, too. She overshadowed them not only by sheer beauty, but by exuberance of spirit. And they followed her with hating eyes and whispered scandalous things behind their fans and wondered what had possessed the Marchesa to invite the bold thing: so does mediocrity pay homage to beauty and genius. As for the men, though madness lay that way, eagerly as ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... buildings; lights are her diamond ornaments, and her perfume is the cool fragrance of night air. Almost all cities, and almost all women, look their best at night, and there are those which, though beautiful by night, sink, in their daylight aspect, to utter mediocrity. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... some information. Our readings in modern history at Tadmor had informed us of the dominant political position of the middle classes in England, since the time of the first Reform Bill. Mr. Farnaby's guests represented the respectable mediocrity of social position, the professional and commercial average of the nation. They all talked glibly enough—I and an old gentleman who sat next to me being the only listeners. I had spent the morning lazily in the smoking-room of the hotel, reading the day's ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... giants of an heroic age, which could not have been real. Profound error! Those men were our brothers; they were of our stature, felt and thought as we do. But the breath of God was free in them; with us, it is restrained by the iron bonds of a mean society, and condemned to an irremediable mediocrity. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted from the ranks of the scoffers. Accordingly it was appropriate that he should ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... a point where toleration sinks into sheer baseness and poltroonery. The toleration of the worst leads us to look on what is barely better as good enough, and to worship what is only moderately good. Woe to that man, or that nation, to whom mediocrity ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Mademoiselle and her family hold decided opinions upon the subject,—something more than mere lack of admiration. She was familiar with the novels, and thought that, while they exhibit a talent certainly not above mediocrity, they reflect the injustice, the untruthfulness, and the ingratitude of their creator. We were obliged to confess to ourselves that the family have apparent reason for this view, when we reflected that in the books Miss Bronte has assailed their religion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... a suffering body. Take a view of the saints of God in history, sacred or profane, and compare your own individual suffering with theirs: I am apt to think that, great as it is, it will not rise to mediocrity. I could expatiate on this subject, from what comes every day within my own knowledge. The Lord is working in this way all around me; but of that another time. In your own case, try for a moment to shut out of view every thing without your own family, what you ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... some people, while others with all possible labor never acquire it. As in billiard-playing, shooting, cricket, and all these other facilities which are partly mental and partly physical, many never can pass a certain point of mediocrity; but still even those who have the talent must practise it, and only become really distinguished after hard work. So it is in art. Music and painting are not to be attained by the crowd. Not even the just criticism of these arts is attainable ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... deeds lead us on to the horizon 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 ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... subsequent centuries. They are closely similar to the foregoing, but they tend to become more learned and less simple. Yet, though as literature they are often quite insignificant, as ethics they rarely sink below mediocrity. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his Conjectures on Original Composition for the first time. It is a bold and masculine essay on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if old-fashioned, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... alas! here the resemblance fails also, for I do no good. Dear me! I wish sometimes that I could have been one of the one-sided men; it is so easy to run in one groove! and it 's all the fashion in these days. But, avaunt expediency! Let me stick to my principles, and be a rounded mediocrity, pelted on every hand, and pleasing [302] nobody. By the bye, Mrs. Gibbons [Mrs. James Gibbons of New York, daughter of Isaac T. Hopper] I has just sent me a fine medallion of her, father, beautifully mounted. It is a remarkable face, for its massive strength and the fun ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... whose haughty and grasping spirit led him to covet distinction and authority in every line, was eagerly soliciting the supreme command of this important armament; and in spite of the general mediocrity of his talents and his very slight experience in the art of war, his partial mistress had the weakness to indulge him in this unreasonable and ill-advised pretension. The title of general of the queen's auxiliaries ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... with her of the untrustworthiness of the so-called history of to-day, although we had every facility for recording facts, and he pointed out how utterly unreliable it was when tradition was the only means of transmission. Mediocrity, he felt sure, had oftentimes been exalted into genius, and brilliant and patriotic exclamations attributed to great men, were never uttered by them, neither was it easy he thought, to get a true historic picture of the human intellectual giant. ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... already shown, of government or official judgment and initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of mediocrity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised through equality ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and determining "which grain will grow, and which ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... United States in 1850 is true of the United States to-day. It would be hard to find a civilized people who are more timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It is easy to-day for the educated man who has read Bryce and Tocqueville to account for the mediocrity of American literature. The merit of Emerson was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason. He felt he was a cabined, cribbed, confined creature, although every man about him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... old and respected Irish family, being a younger son of General Power of Kilfenora. He was educated at Harrow and afterwards at Trinity College. He was called to the Irish bar and might have achieved in time the comfortable mediocrity of a County Court judgeship if he had not become Conroy's private secretary. The post was secured for him by an uncle who had known Conroy in New York in the days before he became a millionaire, while it was still possible for an ordinary man to do him a ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... it is done in those countries, a nobility cannot grow; and so there needs no agrarian, or rather there is one. And for the growth of the nobility in Venice (if so it be, for Machiavel observes in that republic, as a cause of it, a great mediocrity of estates) it is not a point that she is to fear, but might study, seeing she consists of nothing else but nobility, by which, whatever their estates suck from the people, especially if it comes equally, is digested into the better blood of that commonwealth, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... and the quantity of blackened paper. Gabriel Naude and your Abbe Bignon, both librarians of fame, are, compared to me, indolent shepherds of a vile herd of sheep-like books. I concede that the Benedictines are diligent, but they have no high spirit and their libraries reveal the mediocrity of the souls by whom they have been collected. My gallery, sir, is not on the pattern of others. The works I have got together form a whole which doubtless will procure me knowledge. My library is gnostic, oecumenic and spiritual. If all the lines traced on ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... looks upon the Senate and the House, "the cream of the land, the culled darlings of fifteen millions," and observes that "the remarkable phenomenon that they present is the level of intellect and of morals upon which they stand; and this universal mediocrity is the basis upon which the liberties of this nation repose." In July, 1840, he ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... the one hand, the infinitely ramified division of society into the most varied races, which confront each other with small antipathies, bad consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and precisely because of the ambiguous and suspicious positions which they occupy towards each other, such positions being devoid of all real distinctions although coupled with various formalities, are treated by their lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The fact that ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... and gratitude as long as memory lasts. Between these two is a third and a larger group: those who are forgotten, because they failed to stamp a lasting impression on their pupils. This group represents the mediocrity of the profession, not bad enough to be actively forgiven, not good enough to claim a ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... widely sympathetic and compassionate heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is possible, and no mediocrity golden." ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... under the nom de plume of George Eliot was alive, there was much appreciative interest and much unlawful curiosity felt regarding her private life. This as a matter of course. No such striking personality as hers could project itself into a time of dulness and mediocrity without exciting unusual interest and attention. And the half-knowledge which had been gained of her life and character served as an active stimulus to this curiosity. One or two leading facts in her history had become ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... partially by the event. You will take in the whole of the past, you will consider times, persons, and probabilities, and you will feel that they were not least your friends who were educating and preparing you for that mediocrity of condition which seemed to be your lot. Though their caution may prove eventually unnecessary, it was kindly meant; and of this you may be assured, that every advantage of affluence will be doubled by the little privations and restrictions that ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... restless was the chair; the back erect Distressed the weary loins that felt no ease; The slippery seat betrayed the sliding part That pressed it, and the feet hung dangling down, Anxious in vain to find the distant floor. These for the rich: the rest, whom fate had placed In modest mediocrity, content With base materials, sat on well-tanned hides Obdurate and unyielding, glassy smooth, With here and there a tuft of crimson yarn, Or scarlet crewel in the cushion fixed: If cushion might be called, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Persius, translated wholly by Dryden. This work, though like all the other productions of Dryden it may have shining parts, seems to have been written merely for wages, in an uniform mediocrity without any eager endeavour after excellence, or ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... is not exhausted. For the question arises whether one ought to mention at all any acting that is not extraordinarily good or bad. As a rule, mediocrity has to pass unnoticed in this world; in most professions the person whose worth is not above or below the average is rarely mentioned. Why should an exception be made in case of a player? If we know that the performance of Miss X. is no better or worse than would have been that ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Cuningham, he said to himself, was now the type of busy, pretentious mediocrity, the type which eternally keeps English art below the level ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mese to hypate, in respect of the concupiscent; as mese to nete, in respect of the irascible; insomuch as it depresses and heightens,—and in fine makes a harmony,—by abating what is too much and by not suffering them to flatten and grow dull. For what is moderate and symmetrous is defined by mediocrity. Still more is it the end of the rational faculty to bring the passions to moderation, which is called sacred, as making a harmony of the extremes with reason, and through reason with each other. For in chariots the best of the team is not in the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... action, and by the dialogue. The style of Aristophanes is no less pleasing than his fancy; for, besides its clearness, its vigour and its sweetness, there is in it a certain harmony, so delightful to the ear, that there is no pleasure equal to that of reading it. When he applies himself to vulgar mediocrity of style, he descends without meanness; when he attempts the sublime, he is elevated without obscurity; and no man has ever had the art of blending all the different kinds of writing so equally together. After having studied ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... distinguished gifts should have been able to say: "Ich bin der erste Diener des Staates" (I am the first servant of the State.) To this utterance of the great sovereign, verse 24 undoubtedly refers. "Cowardice" and "Mediocrity," are the names with which he labels modern ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... constantly doing, to their own ruin and the justifiable ill-humor of critics, namely, working against the grain. A sweet, generous, and beautiful Patroness, seeing me on the high road to brain fever or hopeless mediocrity, stepped forward in time, and sent me to the Desert. If ever I achieve anything excellent, it will be owing to that lady, the Vittoria Colonna of her humble Michael Angelo. My little sister Mary came with me, and, when I tell you ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... baffled desires. Weary of a struggle without an adversary, she had reached in her despair to the point of preferring good to evil, if it came in the form of enjoyment; evil to good, if it offered her some poetic emotion; misery to mediocrity, as something nobler and higher; the gloomy and mysterious future of present death to a life without hopes or even without sufferings. Never in any heart was so much powder heaped ready for the spark, never were so many riches for love to feed on; no daughter of Eve was ever moulded, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... disappointment, yet I must confess it is true I could not witness the social achievements of my companion without pangs of remorse; the indifference of the world to merit, to much pure gold in the ore, convinced me that a varnished label in six colors maintains the market for mediocrity. Driven to desperation, I might yet seek a beauty doctor and obtain the glazed surface so essential to social success. Bachelorhood with Jim seemed to have been due to his lack of appreciation of others, for according to the favorable comment ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
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