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mediocrity
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  • I remembered those moments because there were so few of them and because the sport had tamed me with the knowledge of my own limitations, my earnest mediocrity.†   (source)
  • But after a time their unrelenting mediocrity palled, and I became weary of the sameness of the job, weary too of chain-smoking and the smog-shrouded view of Manhattan, and of pecking out such callous reader's reports as the following, which I have salvaged intact from that dry and dispiriting time.†   (source)
  • They weren't afraid of him any more, for he did not seduce their wives or lure them out of sweet mediocrity.†   (source)
  • Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx.†   (source)
  • Pleasantries, self-satisfied mediocrity will serve us badly.†   (source)
  • They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity.†   (source)
  • My unhappiness is due to my mediocrity at the craft in which I once felt I was born to excel.†   (source)
  • There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity.†   (source)
  • I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?†   (source)
  • More than eight thousand of Art's pilgrims seeking escape from the tyranny of mediocrity and searching for a renewal of vision on this rough-hewn world.†   (source)
  • It had been his fancy that danger, there, was more real, more open, than danger was downtown and that he, having chosen to run these dangers, was snatching his manhood from the lukewarm waters of mediocrity and testing it in the fire.†   (source)
  • With the departure of Randolph the brilliant cabinet that Washington had started with was entirely gone, replaced by men who were by and large mediocrities.†   (source)
  • It was all right for a disreputable mediocrity like Simon Pritchett to drool it as some sort of woozy mysticism-nobody listened to him.†   (source)
  • By observing this brilliant athlete, with his classical moves and his effortless grace, I could judge the depth and tenor of my own mediocrity.†   (source)
  • No, I did not love him, but he and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us.†   (source)
  • From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe.†   (source)
  • Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind-and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun.†   (source)
  • He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors.†   (source)
  • They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity.†   (source)
  • I saw them reaching into my soul, just as they reach into Mulligan's pocket, reaching to expropriate the value of my person, just as they reach to expropriate his wealth-I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters-I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan's money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to…†   (source)
  • Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him,, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.†   (source)
  • …a voice telling her by means of a feeling: If she had held onto Ouentin Daniels, with no hope of a chance to use the motor, for the sole sake of knowing that achievement had not died on earth-if, like a weighted diver sinking in an ocean of mediocrity, under the pressure of men with gelatin eyes, rubber voices, spiral-shaped convictions, noncommittal souls and non-committing hands, she had held, as her life line and oxygen tube, the thought of a superlative achievement of the human…†   (source)
  • …to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure-and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue.†   (source)
  • Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top.†   (source)
  • And that monster of mediocrity is busy dashing about in the mythical byways of Asia known only to stamp collectors, and not one of those who are near to me and whom I need is left.†   (source)
  • This glorious holiday, this liberation from the curse of mediocrity, this soaring flight above the dullness of a humdrum existence, was first achieved in their land, proclaimed in their language, and belonged to their racel And they actually saw and heard it and let it gol How could they allow a spirit of such overwhelming power and beauty to leave them, how could they think that after it triumphed and established its reign, they would remain as the empty husk of that miracle they had…†   (source)
  • Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.†   (source)
  • It is a mistake to glorify mediocrity by an effort at serious criticism.†   (source)
  • That's what I have to put on an act for all my life—for mean little mediocrities like you.†   (source)
  • I could shriek aloud at the smug self-satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral ornaments hanging from their watch-chains.†   (source)
  • I don't know who lives here, but behind that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life's little habits and tasks.†   (source)
  • He exulted in his popularity among the students, his heart pounded with pride under all the pins and emblems, but he resented being considered an eccentric, and he envied those of his fellows who were elected to office for their solid golden mediocrity.†   (source)
  • In this respect they had adapted themselves to the very condition of the plague, all the more potent for its mediocrity.†   (source)
  • In fact, I thought you were behaving like a tramp only to emphasize the mediocrity of the saps whose works you had to write about.†   (source)
  • For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.†   (source)
  • Usually, these dignities—the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.'s, and the managerships of athletic teams—were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions.†   (source)
  • It became a rigid set of new rules—the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.†   (source)
  • But to be beaten by the man who has always stood as the particular example of mediocrity in his eyes, to start by the side of this mediocrity and to watch it shoot up, while he struggles and gets nothing but a boot in his face, to see the mediocrity snatch from him, one after another, the chances he'd give his life for, to see the mediocrity worshipped, to miss the place he wants and to see the mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, to be ignored, to be beaten,…†   (source)
  • Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity?†   (source)
  • Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations.†   (source)
  • I assure you we can't bear mediocrities.†   (source)
  • You have an unerring instinct for mediocrity.'†   (source)
  • "It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.†   (source)
  • Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires.†   (source)
  • Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought.†   (source)
  • Greatness and power are for him—for them, mediocrity and dependence.†   (source)
  • If you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what wretchedness!†   (source)
  • Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there.†   (source)
  • Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.†   (source)
  • As if twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity.†   (source)
  • He had not the knack of surrounding himself with nice people—indeed, for a man of ability and virtue his choice had been singularly unfortunate; he had no guiding principle beyond a certain preference for mediocrity; he was content to settle one of the greatest things in life haphazard, and so, while his investments went right, his friends generally went wrong.†   (source)
  • This man would have been notable anywhere: among the thin-hammed, flat-chested mediocrities of Chandrapore he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish heaps.†   (source)
  • That was one manifestation of fear, that voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.†   (source)
  • Which brings us back to our previous question about his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, to which we do not wish to give a conclusive answer.†   (source)
  • …for a moment, when she kissed his hand, regretted, envied him even, remembered possibly (for he saw her look it) something he had said—how they would change the world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it was this; it was middle age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself with her indomitable vitality to put all that aside, there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like…†   (source)
  • To be popular one must be a mediocrity.†   (source)
  • Oh, there's nothing that attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn't help a little …. and probably there's nothing that helps very much.†   (source)
  • Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a Ministerial statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape.†   (source)
  • And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear.†   (source)
  • Two of the people he had never seen before, and the others consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; Lady Ruxton, an over-dressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly plain that to her great disappointment no one would ever believe anything against her; Mrs. Erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a…†   (source)
  • The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening roots to crack their wall of mediocrity.†   (source)
  • Democracy is all right theoretically, and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity.†   (source)
  • But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance.†   (source)
  • 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.†   (source)
  • This low abject brood, That fix their seats in mediocrity, Become your servile minds; but we advance Such virtues only as admit excess, Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, All-seeing prudence, magnanimity That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue For which antiquity hath left no name, But patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Theseus.†   (source)
  • But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success.†   (source)
  • Like exceptional emphasis in the tone of a genius, that which would have made mediocrity ridiculous was an addition to recognised power.†   (source)
  • Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.†   (source)
  • She could not admit at once that she might have overestimated Wildeve, for to perceive his mediocrity now was to admit her own great folly heretofore.†   (source)
  • 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.†   (source)
  • It seems probable that mediocrity of fortune would have been disposed to be less magnanimous than the Collegians, who lived from hand to mouth—from the pawnbroker's hand to the day's dinner.†   (source)
  • Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.†   (source)
  • I might get some power and distinction by mere mediocrity, as they do; at least I should get those middling satisfactions which make men contented to do without great ones.†   (source)
  • I confess that I apprehend much less for democratic society from the boldness than from the mediocrity of desires.†   (source)
  • I told you long ago that I had never been resigned even to the mediocrity of my powers; how could I be resigned to the loss of the one thing which had ever come to me on earth with the promise of such deep joy as would give a new and blessed meaning to the foregoing pain,—the promise of another self that would lift my aching affection into the divine rapture of an ever-springing, ever-satisfied want?†   (source)
  • …his family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that imprudence;…†   (source)
  • Amongst the public men of democracies there are hardly any but men of great disinterestedness or extreme mediocrity who seek to oppose the centralization of government: the former are scarce, the latter powerless.†   (source)
  • All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions.†   (source)
  • If I were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who are stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth or the mediocrity of their fortune, I could discover none more peculiarly appropriate to their condition than this love of physical prosperity.†   (source)
  • But they have rarely an opportunity of displaying what they can do; they are scrupulously sparing of their powers; they remain in a state of accomplished mediocrity, which condemns itself, and, though it be very well able to shoot beyond the mark before it, aims only at what it hits.†   (source)
  • It would be to waste the time of my readers and my own if I strove to demonstrate how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the absence of superfluous wealth, the universal desire of comfort, and the constant efforts by which everyone attempts to procure it, make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of the beautiful in the heart of man.†   (source)
  • 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 on the national councils.†   (source)
  • LADY P: Me thought, the golden mediocrity, Polite and delicate— VOLP: O, if you do love me, No more; I sweat, and suffer, at the mention Of any dream: feel, how I tremble yet.†   (source)
  • But the Writers of Morall Philosophie, though they acknowledge the same Vertues and Vices; Yet not seeing wherein consisted their Goodnesse; nor that they come to be praised, as the meanes of peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living; place them in a mediocrity of passions: as if not the Cause, but the Degree of daring, made Fortitude; or not the Cause, but the Quantity of a gift, made Liberality.†   (source)
  • For in these times, I do not know one man, that ever saw any such wondrous work, done by the charm, or at the word, or prayer of a man, that a man endued but with a mediocrity of reason, would think supernaturall: and the question is no more, whether what wee see done, be a Miracle; whether the Miracle we hear, or read of, were a reall work, and not the Act of a tongue, or pen; but in plain terms, whether the report be true, or a lye.†   (source)
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