"Mediocre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of Cezanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else—but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of Cezanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have lain hid for ever. I doubt we exaggerated. We were much too kind, I fancy, to a number of perfectly commonplace young people, and said a number of foolish things about them. What ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... of sailing from the Piraeus reconciled us to the very mediocre vessel which carried us to Smyrna. Our visit to Asia Minor we had inadvertently timed to the opening of the International College at Paradise near Smyrna. This college is the gift of Mrs. John Kennedy of New ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... plans, and in his mind he shuffled them and their values for him or against him as a gambler arranges and rearranges the cards in his hand. He saw himself plainly as his own highest card, and Barrat and Erhaupt as willing but mediocre accomplices. In Father Paul and Kalonay he recognized his most powerful allies or most dangerous foes. Miss Carson meant nothing to him but a source from which he could draw the sinews of war. What would become of her ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... and prose, perhaps, it should have remained. Yet for this precious "Pucelle," in the age when "Paradise Lost" was sold for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand. Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a wise man who first spoke of aurea mediocritas. At length the great work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden to whom France owes all, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... the dogmatist possesses that amount of intelligence and position which legitimately place him above most of the company into which he may go, he is seldom or ever welcomed as an acceptable conversationalist. But when he is a man below mediocre—a pedant—he ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... people after six years of radical revolutionary upheavals required hard and honest labor on the part of men of distinct genius. Yet the Directors were, almost without exception, men of mediocre talents, [Footnote: Carnot, upright and sincere, and the only member of first-rate ability, was forced out of the Directory in 1797.] who practiced bribery and corruption with unblushing effrontery. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... little in the novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary exile; and this may ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that I think I must have read in that curious collection of fantasies and observations, Hawthorne's Note Book. It was to be the story of a man who found life dull and his circumstances altogether mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human being. He had begun life with high hopes—and life was commonplace. He was to grow fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action, some irrevocable ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... of the French, Napoleon had sent a financier, M. Budin, to put order into the country's resources. M. Budin was a commonplace, middle-aged little man, of mediocre ability, whose personality was not calculated to impress one with an idea of intellectual force. I was told, by those who were in a position to judge of his ability as a specialist, that, although a first-class administrative officer, he was lacking in initiative, and was ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Bosworth would wash his hands of the entire business, and the sly swindlers must look elsewhere, in order to unload their property. The extravagant claims they had made for its richness could not be justified, because it was after all a very mediocre discovery, which would never pay for the working, so far away from ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... and the boy's vanity was correspondingly flattered; but the father stepped in and discouraged such work, warning Benjamin that "verse-makers were generally beggars." So, perhaps, we were spared a mediocre poet and given a first-rate prose writer, for the stuff of poetry was not in Franklin's ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... talent etait fort mediocre, embrassa la profession de medecin. Comme on lui en demandait la raison: "Dans la peinture, repondit-il, toutes les fautes sont exposees a la vue; mais dans la medecine, elles ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... or figures are noble, others mediocre, others again may be sensual and degrading, but they have one quality in common—for good or bad, they are ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... savages. The schoolboy proposition is: 'I am stronger than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' Its grown up form is: 'I am cleverer than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not satisfied ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... another, how they hid one another and revealed themselves, in perspective; from my music mistress, my kind aunt, to recognise the notes and keys, and to play, first short pieces, then sonatas, alone, then as duets. But alas! Neither in the arts of sight nor hearing did I ever prove myself more than mediocre. I never attained, either in drawing or piano-playing, to more than a soulless accuracy. And I hardly showed much greater aptitude when, on bright Sunday mornings, which invited not at all to the delights of dancing, with many another tiny lad and lass I was marshalled up to dance in the dancing ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... mania for dragging voices up, and out of their legitimate tessitura, has become a very grave evil, the consequences of which, in many instances, have been most disastrous. Tolerable baritones have been transformed into very mediocre tenors, capable mezzo-soprani into very indifferent dramatic soprani, and so on. That this process may have answered in a few isolated cases, where the vocal organs were of such exceptional strength and resistance as ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... which were of the first importance to him in the phase through which he was now passing. Merck was keenly interested in literature, especially in English literature, and had all Goethe's enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Though his own original productions were of mediocre quality, he had an insight into the character and genius of others which Goethe fully recognised and to which he acknowledges his special obligation. His general attitude in criticism was "negative and destructive," but this attitude was entirely wholesome for Goethe at a period when instinct ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weak writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study of it from the living—or dying—model is so easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... gifted than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages. His voice was limited in compass, inferior in quality, and habitually out of tune, his power of musical execution mediocre, his physical appearance entirely without grace, picturesqueness, or dignity. Yet Ronconi, by sheer force of a versatile dramatic genius, delighted audiences in characters which had been made familiar to the public through the splendid personalities of Tamburini and Lablache, ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... when Jenny Fagette came to join her there; Jenny Fagette, slender and fragile, the incarnation of Alfred de Musset's Muse, who at night wore out her eyes of periwinkle-blue by scribbling society notes and fashion articles. A mediocre actress, but a clever and wonderfully energetic woman, she was Nanteuil's most intimate friend. They recognized in each other remarkable qualities, qualities which differed from those which each discovered ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... to the Mediocre. Eugenics. Euthenics and Eudemics. Only Men in Lists of Geniuses. Social Need to Learn What Children Are. "Charting Parents." New "Observation Records" for Children. What to Do with the Specially Gifted Child. Genius Universal in Nature. Genius Its Own School-master. Varieties ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... cap in hand, clambered to the sill of the mediocre artist's window. And the mediocre artist tossed into his cap a peanut. The monkey, putting the peanut in his mouth, ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in the annals ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... to have been written by an impecunious and mediocre penman called Villemarest, who also wrote "Memoires de Constant" (the Emperor's valet), and both books have been very extensively read and believed. Men have got up terrific lectures from them, authors have quoted from them whenever they desired an ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... first reflection on entering Mr. Pfeifer's drawing-room, while in my heart I begged the proprietor's pardon for the patronizing attitude I found myself assuming toward him. The heavy, solid furniture, the grave and decorously mediocre pictures, and the very tint of the walls wore an air of substantial, though somewhat lugubrious comfort. His niece, too, although her form was by no means lacking in grace, seemed somehow to partake of this all-pervading air of Teutonic solidity and homelike comfort. She ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... strange phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... been kept the fact would have amazed a public whom long experience had taught to put no more faith in the promises of impresarios than in those of princes. As a matter of fact, barring the extravagant attributes alleged to be due to the singers, the majority of whom were worse than mediocre, more than half were kept, and the deficiency more than counterbalanced by new elements which were introduced from time to time, as happy emergencies called for them. Chief of these was the engagement of Luisa Tetrazzini; of which ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... another, have clustered round his name, as was inevitable. He is supposed to have preached in Asia Minor; to have died as a young man, in his convent; to have become a hermit, a cobbler, a bishop (of Nicomedia), a eunuch, a politician. Two volumes of mediocre sermons in the Byzantine tongue have been ascribed to him. These and other crudities may be dismissed as apocryphal. Even his name has given rise to controversy, although its origin from the Greek word DODEKA, signifying twelve and alluding to the twelve morsels ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... thus formulated her admiration of her brilliant friend did not, in her own person, suggest such happy possibilities. Miss Gertrude Farish, in fact, typified the mediocre and the ineffectual. If there were compensating qualities in her wide frank glance and the freshness of her smile, these were qualities which only the sympathetic observer would perceive before noticing that her eyes were of a workaday grey and her lips without haunting curves. Lily's ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... reminded them, however, that Guarionex was a hero, and had rendered him services when he fled to him for protection, for he had brought him royal presents. Moreover, he had taught both the cacique himself and his wife to sing and dance, a thing not to be held in mediocre consideration. Maiobanexius was determined never to surrender the prince who had appealed to his protection, and whom he had promised to defend. He was prepared to risk the gravest perils with him rather than to merit the reproach of having betrayed his guest. Despite ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... this is not possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred, and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all economical, intellectual, moral, and political functions ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... mediaeval European history upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task. It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre. There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own guide through the trackless deserts, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... for 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 ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... unjustly charges Shelton with having translated not from the Spanish, but from the Italian version of Franciosini, which did not appear until ten years after Shelton's first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too, seems to have attached to him because he was by profession a painter and a mediocre one (though he has given us the best portrait we have of Swift), and this may have been strengthened by Pope's remark that he "translated 'Don Quixote' without understanding Spanish." He has been also charged with ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... take great care of your teeth? Pray have them put in order by the best operator at Rome. Are you be-laced, bepowdered, and be-feathered, as other young fellows are, and should be? At your age, 'il faut du brillant, et meme un peu de fracas, mais point de mediocre; il faut un air vif, aise et noble. Avec les hommes, un maintien respectueux et en meme tems respectable; avec les femmes, un caquet leger, enjoue, et badin, mais ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Pour chaque 500 grammes de champignons coupes en morceaux d'assez mediocre grandeur, il faut un litre d'eau acidulee par deux ou trois cuillerees de vinaigre, ou deux cuillerees de sel gris. Dans le cas ou l'on n'aurait que de l'eau a sa disposition, il faut la renouveler une ou deux fois. On laisse les champignons macerer dans le liquids pendant deux heures entieres, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... debut, as has been said, with le Pere prudent in 1706. This was followed a few years later by three mediocre novels. The first of these, written in 1712, though not published" until 1737, appeared under the several titles of Pharsamon, les Folies romanesques, and le Don Quichotte moderne, and was, as one of the titles discloses, an attack ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... last allowed to manipulate (with accompanying lecture) a marvellous bivouac-tin containing a compound called beef a la mode, which came provided with its own spirits of wine and wick, both of which proved ineffectual to raise the temperature of the beef above a mediocre tepidity. Parker, having heard that the remains of this toothsome dish were intended for his breakfast, wisely hid it with such care that the dog stole it and consumed it, with results which cannot be ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... views. 'They cannot do without me,' he said to himself in his secret heart. He was met by disappointment. The party chiefs made no overtures to him to reconsider his decision, to withdraw his resignation. Another man was immediately put in his place, a man of mediocre ability, of commonplace mind, a man of routine, methodical, absolutely lacking in brilliancy or originality, a man who would do exactly what the Government wanted in the Government way. There was a more bitter blow still for Sir Rupert. ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... present at a ball that she was giving. These despatches, as we have said, contained the wish that Mary Stuart should espouse Leicester; but this proposal could not be taken seriously. Leicester, whose personal worth was besides sufficiently mediocre, was of birth too inferior to aspire to the hand of the daughter of so many kings; thus Mary replied that such an alliance would not become her. Meanwhile, something strange and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... succeeded in obtaining the province of Murcia, together with seven cities which he was to hold under the kalif, on condition of a yearly tribute. Such was the defence of Orihuela, and while it involved no strenuous fighting, it was at the same time no mediocre test of womanly daring. After the first few trying hours of the masquerade had been passed, however, and it was evident that the ruse had been successful, it may well be imagined that these feminine warriors ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... are more agreeable than the neatest drawings in China ink, or the most graceful curves done in chalk upon a blackboard. But however the eye may admire a severe and simple unity, it relishes still more a harmonious complexity; and a very mediocre little pensee in water colors, will prove more generally attractive than the monochromatic copies in ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... systematization which an irregular and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates which has made their institutions ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... was one of the mildest, most innocent men I ever knew. He had a wife to whom he was devoted with a dog-like devotion; he went to church; he was shy and reserved, and he held a mediocre position in a firm of envelope-makers in the City. But he had a romantic soul, and whenever the public craving for envelopes fell off—and that is seldom—he used to allay his secret passion for danger, devilry and excitement by writing sensational novels. One of these ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... were men of moderate principles; and they were only tolerated by the king as a necessary evil At the head of them was M. Roy, who possessed a considerable knowledge of finance; but the rest were of very mediocre talent. At this time the priests and Jesuits were striving in France for the absolute control of public education, as the most effectual means of recovering their domination. This attempt was resisted by the people, who raised a loud cry of "No ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the rest of us. Nothing is more striking in the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men. The cultured Pharisees, the philosophical Sadducees seem to have much less attraction to Him than the rude fisherman and the toiler. These men were often weak, sometimes cowardly, obstinate, dull, mediocre; yet He committed His kingdom to them; He believed in them. Before they had faith in Him He had faith in them; and ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... at the head of his class in mathematics. Waller was a class-mate and friend of the ill-fated Prince Imperial of France, killed by the Zulus, and afterwards spent three years in Franz Liszt's house as the master's pupil. Strangely enough, too, Waller's piano performances on the stage were almost mediocre, but to private audiences of those known to be appreciative, he was a tireless marvel. Allison was a frequent visitor at Waller's quarters and here his idea germinated for an American opera. At that time he had no intention of writing ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... official matters. It was not well advised; though probably the great blunderers were the Admiralty, in sending as second a man who had shown himself so exceptionally and uniquely capable of supreme command, and so apt to make trouble for mediocre superiors. If Lord St. Vincent's surmise was correct, Parker, who was a very respectable officer, had been chosen for his present place because in possession of all the information acquired during the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... those men whom it is a life-long pleasure to remember. I can record his existence the more easily that there is not the slightest chance of his ever reading these lines. He was a fat, large man of forty-five, obviously in business, and probably of a mediocre success. His eyes were light-coloured, very small, always watery, and perpetually roving. The lower part of his face was clean-shaven and very broad; his mouth wide, with thin, moist, colourless lips; his nose fat and Hebraic. He was rather bald. He had respect for Montreal, because, though ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... whole school—I've caned him frequently this term, and that keeps a boy green in one's memory; but Blenkinsopp minor, Cyril Anastasius Guy Thingumbob Whatyoumaycallit,—I don't remember HIM a bit. I suppose he's one of those inoffensive, mildly mediocre sort of boys who fail to impress their individuality upon one in any way. My experience is that you can always bear in mind the three cleverest boys at the top of each form, and the three stupidest ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... in contrast to Italy, which reckons itself the "only saving Church." But the people here are really deeply cultured in music. It is true that they are pleased with everything, but only the best music survives. They listen gladly to a mediocre opera which is well cast; but a first-class work, even if not given in the best style, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... be better so, that Babel noises, Losing all course and ken, And grief that wails and gladness that rejoices Should never wake again To shock a world of modulated voices And mediocre men, ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... reverse; sources of my materials; they are mutually corroborative. Analysis of returns from 100 persons mostly of some eminence; extracts from replies of those in whom the visualising faculty is highest; those in whom it is mediocre; lowest; conformity between these and other sets of haphazard returns; octile, median, etc., values; visualisation of colour; some liability to exaggeration; blindfold chess-players; remarkable instances of visualisation; the faculty is not necessarily ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... offered then little in the way of amusement. The Adelphi Theatre was opened that winter for the first time, and presented a variety of mediocre plays. At the Olympia were "lively and beautiful exhibitions of model artists." Herz and Sivori, the pianists, then touring in the United States, played several times in the season; and there was a Chinese Museum. Add the exhibitions of Brown's paintings of the heroes of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... had told her so himself; his life would be that of a beast of burden, and that too, before he had learned to bear the yoke. If he had to work, to feed so many people, he might strain himself to the uttermost, he would still remain mediocre. They would both suffer under this, be disappointed and discontented. He must not pay so heavy a price for an indiscretion for which she was ten times more to blame than he. What did she imagine people would say? He who was so popular, so sought after. ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... plodder. The world is so fond of that droll fable, the hare and the tortoise,—it really believes because (I suppose the fable to be true!) a tortoise once beat a hare that all tortoises are much better runners than hares possibly can be. Mediocre men have the monopoly of the loaves and fishes; and even when talent does rise in life, it is a talent which only differs from mediocrity by being ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Turkish cadi. During his whole period in office he contrived to use language which was a medley of commonplaces mixed with maxims and computations served up in flowing phrases mildly put forth, which sounded to the ears of superficial people like eloquence. Thus he pleased that great majority, mediocre by nature, who are condemned to perpetual labor and to views which are of the earth earthy. Cesar, however, lost so much time in court that his wife obliged him finally ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... aware," Chia Cheng added with a smiling countenance, "that I've been, even in my young days, very mediocre in the composition of stanzas on flowers, birds, rockeries and streams; and that now that I'm well up in years and have moreover the fatigue and trouble of my official duties, I've become in literary compositions ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... architect had therefore only to stretch out his hand to win stone of a sufficiently varied nature from the soil of his own country or the flanks of its mountains. It was, of course, mediocre in quality but it had powers of resistance that fitted it for use in certain positions. At the first glance it is difficult to understand why so little use was made of it. But in truth stone was for the Assyrian no more ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... don't see why you don't give up poetry and magazine work and get a position as poster-writer for a circus. You are only a mediocre magazinist, but in the poster business you'd ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... sought and found a mediocre sunset on an easel. Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust. He knew how ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... friendship, is permitted, and love's dictionary is as much prohibited, as at first sight one should think his ritual was. All you hear, and that pronounced with nonchalance, is, that Monsieur un tel has had Madame un telle. The Duc de Nivernois has parts, and writes at the top of the mediocre, but, as Madame Geoffrin says, is manqu'e par tout; guerrier manqu'e, ambassadeur manqu'e, homme d'affaires manqu'e and auteur manqu'e—no, he is not homme de naissance manqu'e. He would think freely, but has some ambition of being governor to the Dauphin, and is ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... faint praise that kills. There was some adverse criticism, too; but it was of the light, insincere variety that is given to mediocre work by unimportant artists. Then, here and there, appeared the signed critiques of the men whose opinion counted—and Bertram knew that he had failed. Neither as a work of art, nor as a likeness, was the portrait the success that Henshaw's former work would seem to indicate that it should have ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... of ephemera or journalists. A man writes either to please the hour or to produce something to last, relatively a long time, several generations—what we call 'permanent.' The intermediate position is necessarily insecure. It is not really wanted. What is lost by society when one of these mediocre masterpieces is overlooked? A sensation, a single ray in a sunset, missed by a small literary coterie! The circle is perhaps eclectic. It may seem hard that good work is overwhelmed in the cataract of production, while ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... installation of the accommodations for the cargo of mules and horses. Cappy was particularly interested in the ventilating system below decks, for he was fond of horses and had resolved to deliver the cargo without the loss of a single animal. Of no mediocre turn of mind mechanically, he, assisted by Terry Reardon, made a few suggestions that the British veterinaries in charge were very ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he is writing political articles ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Amando Niel, in the early part of the eighteenth century, published in the Third Series of the Documentos para la Historia de Mexico. Father Niel was a Jesuit who visited New Mexico shortly after the reconquest. His observations are of comparatively mediocre value, yet his writings should not be overlooked. The journal of the Brigadier Pedro de Rivera, in 1736, of his military march to Santa Fe, is a dry, matter-of-fact account, but is nevertheless valuable owing to his concise and utterly ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
... swiftly the possibilities of the next half hour, and paid tribute in one expressive word of four letters before he went crawling over half a dozen pairs of knees to do battle for his picture. His picture, you understand. For since he had made it irresistible comedy instead of very mediocre drama, he felt all the pride of creation in his work. That was his picture that had set the Acme people laughing,—they who had come to carp and to talk knowingly of continuity and of technique and dramatic values, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... wrote very few sonnets—Browning fewer than Tennyson—and neither ever wrote a great one. Longfellow, so inferior in most respects to his two great English contemporaries, was an incomparably superior sonnetteer. Tennyson's sonnets are all mediocre: Browning did not publish a single sonnet in the final complete edition of his works. He did however print a very few on special occasions, and when he was twenty-two years old, between the composition of Pauline ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... carried on during most of the year 1587. It was the "comptroller's peace;", as Walsingham contemptuously designated the attempted treaty; for it will be recollected that Sir James Croft, a personage of very mediocre abilities, had always been more busy than any other English politician in these transactions. He acted; however, on the inspiration of Burghley, who drew his own ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... over Putney way, set up a regular 'bachelor establishment,' and started in the business of bread-winning together. Carboys succeeded in getting a clerk's position in town; Van Nant set about modelling clay figures and painting mediocre pictures, and selling both whenever he could ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... whether in the fields of thought or action, whether in the council-chamber of the statesman, on the battle-field of the warrior, in the study of the writer, or in the laboratory of the scientist—all have been men of genius. No mediocre man ever was a great leader ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Velleius Paterculus, xxxvi.: "Consulatui Ciceronis non mediocre adjecit decus natus ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... the tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist.... Indeed when ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... was there with a scarf across it, and back of the table three steps leading up to a little platform on which were ranged two or three mediocre statues of saints, once brilliant with blue and scarlet and tinsel, but tarnished and ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... rose the steep green hills on whose crest stood the Kremlin, containing several ancient churches, the governor's house, and so forth. On a lower terrace, to right and left, stood monasteries and churches intermingled with shops and mediocre dwellings. The only noteworthy church was that in front of us, with its picturesque but un-Russian rococo plaster decoration on red brick, crowned by genuine Russian domes and crosses ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... mother, she was supposed to be an ideal exponent of the Marchesi method. Professional singers and instructors flocked to her first concert. It was to be an experience, an object-lesson. Well—it was. They saw a fine-looking woman with a mediocre voice and a worse method, a method so hopelessly bad that even her undoubted musicianship could ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... from failure as a speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare distinction. It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... uncultivated—that is, the unspoiled—public, and often is worth more than any cultivation. The cultivated public should be willing to accept only the best; it should ruthlessly condemn the bad and the mediocre. ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... from the bosom of the same family, two young men, of whom one will be admitted to be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... ever had about him seemed to have been merged in his American citizenship, and he looked more like a Yankee cultivator than a King of Spain and the Indies. Though there was nothing to see in Joseph, who is, I believe, a very mediocre personage, I could not help gazing at him, and running over in my mind the strange events in which he had been concerned in the course of his life, and regarding him as a curiosity, and probably as the most extraordinary living instance ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... their forbidding aspect tenfold. He could not see a foot before him, and could only worm his way among them, testing each before he trusted it, and finding at times monsters become but mediocre when his hand was on them. More than once he had to rest his hands on cautiously-tried ledges and swing his legs forward and grope with his feet for foothold, and whether the space below was trifling, or whether it ran to incredible depth, he ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... timers with their indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had blundered. But all alike ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... built, according to her own design, a place which is one of the finest in the world; she has found the art of constructing a palace of vast extent in a situation of mediocre grandeur. Order, harmony, and elegance are in all the apartments, and in the furniture also; everything is magnificent, even unique; the lamps are different from those of other palaces, her cabinets are full of objects which show the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... therefore be content to be ignorant. All that we can see is, that either personal merit or official rank and position must have enabled him to establish himself; for he certainly did not derive any assistance from his birth, which must have been mediocre, if not actually obscure. It is the custom of the Babylonian and Assyrian kings to glory in their ancestry, and when the father has occupied a decently high position, the son declares his sire's name and rank at the commencement of each inscription, but ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knew how to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expression of relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius we mean qualities that compared with those of mediocre souls deserve these high names, that greatness and happiness are comparative terms, and that there is nothing to be said of the estate of man except relatively. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... been formed in 1689 by the treaty of Vienna was, in the first years of the war which then broke out, attended with but mediocre success. The French armies laid waste the Palatinate with great barbarity, and then turned their attentions to the southern Netherlands. The attempted invasion was, however, checked by an allied force (August 25) in a sharp encounter near Charleroi. The next year, 1690, was ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... 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 ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... I should have selected him the last to distinguish himself in statecraft. He was a quiet, unobservant, and, as previously noted, self-absorbed man, with a sense of the picturesque, which took the form of mediocre water-colour sketching. His appearance was in his favour, for he was visibly a gentleman; a man, moreover, of refined thought and habit, whom burly ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... this life-work and pleasure. It is necessary to make a choice, to economize one's time and strength, and to work with either the heart or the brain alone. The result is that the neglected organ wastes away, and that men of pleasure remain all their lives mediocre workers, while hard workers are pitiful lovers. The former sacrifice the dignity of existence, the latter that which is the charm of existence. So that, in decisive moments, when the man of pleasure appeals to his intelligence, he finds he is unfit ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... themselves well, and are much liked, generally speaking. At present Ligier is considered their best tragedian, but principally owes what fame he has, to their actors in that department being of so mediocre a description, some people prefer Beauvallet but not the majority, their abilities are very nearly of the same stamp. Guyon is a fine young man, and plays the parts of young heroes very fairly. Geffroy ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... straw &c. n. make light of &c. (underestimate) 483; catch at straws &c. (overestimate) 482. Adj. unimportant; of little account, of small account, of no account, of little importance, of no importance &c. 642; immaterial; unessential, nonessential; indifferent. subordinate &c. (inferior) 34; mediocre &c. (average) 29; passable, fair, respectable, tolerable, commonplace; uneventful, mere, common; ordinary &c. (habitual) 613; inconsiderable, so-so, insignificant, inappreciable. trifling, trivial; slight, slender, light, flimsy, frothy, idle; puerile &c. (foolish) 499; airy, shallow; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... and self-sacrificing project was this: He knew that the editor of the Hearthstone relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin's judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction. Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type. The central idea and keynote of "Love Is All" was love at first sight—the enrapturing, irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... I said encouragingly, 'who have ended far less creditably. For even an indifferent photographer is in closer harmony with nature than a mediocre poet.' ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry." ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... trace in great part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of The Jew of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is a good reader, is clear and energetic, but shakes his head a little too much. In the pulpit he never gets either fast asleep or hysterical. He can preach good original sermons—carefully worked out, well-balanced, neatly arranged; and he can give birth to some which are rather dull and mediocre. His action is easy, yet earnest—his style quiet yet dignified; his matter often scholarly, and never stolen. He is not a, "gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff," like some clerical greengrocers: what he says is his own, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... the point! I am talking about Sunday," babbled Pyotr Stepanovitch. "Why, what was I on Sunday? What would you call it? Just fussy, mediocre stupidity, and in the stupidest way I took possession of the conversation by force. But they forgave me everything, first because I dropped from the moon, that seems to be settled here, now, by every one; and, secondly, because I told them a pretty little story, and got you all out ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the parts as arbitrarily as in the Midsummer Night's Dream does Peter Quince, who says to highly respectable people: "You play the Lion, and you play the Ass," necessitates making a victim of a man who was a mediocre diplomat, but for a time, at least, a fairly good soldier. The author feels no compunction on this score. Stupidity, as Comus artlessly thinks, is not wickedness; the Lion or the Ass—each is necessary ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Japan towards national greatness is at times uncertain, it is due no doubt to the fascinations of many will-o'-the-wisps. There can be one basis only for the enlightened judgment of the world on the Japanese people: the degree to which they are able to distinguish the true from the mediocre and the resolution and common-sense with which they take their ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... he said, "and I'm very largely concerned in seeing what Daniel Harwood, a poor young lawyer of mediocre abilities, can do with this thing we hear ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... tasteful garden adjoining. At the opposite end of the boulevard is the Exchange, also built in the Italian style, and surrounded by a garden. Not far from this is the Academy of Arts, a rather mediocre one-story building. The Theatre, with a fine portico, promises much outside, but is nothing great within. Next to the theatre is the Palais Royal, which consists of a pretty garden, round which are ranged large handsome shops, filled with ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... say in taking the Presidency. With a tact which amounted to genius, which never failed him during his administration, which in its results showed itself equivalent to the highest statesmanship, Mr. Arthur, a man to whom his opponents had been unwilling to concede more than mediocre abilities, rose to the occasion, disarmed factional oppositions, mitigated the animosity of partisanship, and during his administration did more than had been done before him to re-unite the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... had mused over, and which was founded on the tradition of her early experience, it was a life of energy and excitement, of splendour and power, with a total absence of petty vexations and miseries, affording neither time nor cause for the wearing chagrin of a monotonous and mediocre existence. But the crowning joy of her emancipation was the prospect it offered of frequent enjoyment of the society of ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... we not coming to him soon? Ah, but we have come to him. You shall hear the truth. Never believe that sham story about More of More Hall, and how he slew the Dragon of Wantley. It is a gross fabrication of some unscrupulous and mediocre literary person, who, I make no doubt, was in the pay of More to blow his trumpet so loud that a credulous posterity might hear it. My account of the Dragon ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... great masters. It would not be right to judge a Gainsborough by his landscapes any more than it would be to judge a modern landscape painter by his portraits. But no matter how uninteresting these old landscapes are, their brown tonality insures them a certain dignity of inoffensiveness which a mediocre modern work of art never possesses, I would rather any time have a bad old picture than a bad one of the very recent schools. Modesty is not one of the chief attributes of modern art, and the silent protest of a gallery such as the one we are now in, the ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... travels. As Europe grew peaceful again he resumed his indefatigable wanderings, visiting Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Bohemia, and England; printing between 1852 and 1862 nine little volumes of stories, the mediocre but successful 'In Spain' (1860), and his last novel, 'To Be or Not To Be' (1857), which reflects the religious speculations of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... their art or a higher development of their powers, never contented with what they have achieved, beyond the idea that it has been another step toward their goal. Knowing this, it is always a shock on meeting the mediocre people who form such a discouraging majority in any society, to discover that they are all so pleased with themselves, their achievements, their place in the world, and their ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory |
