"Mediocre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... true of even mediocre poetry, for how much more are we indebted to the best! Like the fabled fountain of the Azores, but with a more various power, the magic of this Art can confer on each period of life its appropriate blessing: on ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... with the usual ceremonies. The Duc de Beauvilliers and Madame de Saint-Simon drew the curtains of the couple when they went to bed; and laughed together at being thus employed. The King, who had given a very mediocre present of diamonds to the new Duchesse de Berry, gave nothing to the Duc de Berry. The latter had so little money that he could not play during the first days of the voyage to Marly. The Duchesse de Bourgogne told this to the King, who, feeling the state in which he himself was, said ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... lowest class and ascended by regular rotation to the highest. The examination of these classes passed off fairly enough to satisfy a reasonable audience. Among the pupils there was the usual proportion of "sharps, flats, and naturals"—otherwise of bright, dull, and mediocre individuals. After the examination of the three classes was complete, there remained the two youths, Walter Middleton and Ishmael Worth, who, far in advance of the other pupils, were not classed with them, and, being but two, could not be called a class of themselves. Yet ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... against women, entitled Laberinto d'Amore, otherwise Corbaccio, a coarse performance occasioned by resentment at what he deemed capricious treatment by a lady to whom he had made advances. To the same period, though the date cannot be precisely fixed, belongs his Life of Dante, a work of but mediocre merit. Somewhat later, it would seem, he began the study of Greek under one Leontius Pilatus, a Calabrian, who possessed some knowledge of that language, and sought to pass himself off as ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the relict of John Merrick's only brother, was endowed with a mediocre mind and a towering ambition. When left a widow with an only daughter she had schemed and contrived in endless ways to maintain an appearance of competency on a meager income. Finally she divided her capital, derived from her husband's life ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... contract for a second as though in keen annoyance or disappointment at this mediocre turn in a promising ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... deigned to be pleased with them; for all these works appeared indeed at a happy and favorable time. They were all written in the spirit which we have developed above. Frequently the fortunate poet undertook the artistic task of giving a high value to very mediocre materials by revising them; and though it cannot be denied that he sometimes permits reason to triumph over the higher powers, and at other times allows sensuality to prevail over the moral qualities, yet we must also grant that, in its proper place, everything which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in luoghi di monte or funds. Three nephews of Urban VIII., the brothers Barberini, were said to have enjoyed joint revenues amounting to half a million scudi, and their total gains from the pontificate touched the enormous sum of 105,000,000. These are the families, sprung from obscurity or mediocre station, whose palaces and villas adorn Rome, and who now rank, though of such recent origin, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... it any foolery one wishes; as for the phrase he adds to every one of the phrases his rival recites, he chooses it to insinuate that the work of Euripides is labour lost, and that he would have done just as well not to meddle with tragedy. The joke is mediocre at its best and is ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... say, Alixe—" the familiarity brought with it no condescending reverberations—"has bothered me more than once. I shall be just as frank on my side. No, your husband has but little talent; original talent, none. He is mediocre—wait!" She started, her cheeks red with the blood that fled her heart when she heard this doleful news. "Wait! There are qualifications. In the first place, what do ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... noble, others mediocre, others again may be sensual and degrading, but they have one quality in common—for good or ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... sovereign otherwise than by his vote, to conduct public business with no more misgivings than his private business, to directly and forcibly interfere with this, to set himself up, he and his clique, as guides, censors and rulers of his government, to persuade himself that, with his mediocre education and average intellect, with his few scraps of Latin and such information as is obtained in reading-rooms, coffee-houses, and newspapers, with no other experience than that of a club, or a municipal council, he could discourse ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... home-evenings—which were not many—chatted together familiarly, the well-pleased Masons thought confidentially, by the fireside in the family parlor. It must not be inferred from their constant intercourse that he had the field entirely to himself. Gallants of divers pretensions—first-class, mediocre, and contemptible—considered with a practical eye to "settlement," hovered about the fascinating witch as moths about a gas-burner, and had no citable cause of complaint of non-appreciation, inasmuch as she shed equal light upon all, save ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... man like Gibbon, who became perhaps the world's greatest historian, and a beautiful woman of mixed nationality, whose subsequent career, although gilded with riches and adorned with a position of power, displays nothing above the mediocre and commonplace. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... 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 ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... associated with one definite, unmistakable success. Gerard Hamilton did more for himself by that single brilliant speech than if he had delivered a whole multitude of less striking orations. There is nothing more fatal to a man than middlingness—a sort of dead level of mediocre performance. The world loses count of merely respectable outcome. To obtain its regard you must take its imagination captive at least once. You may be a very excellent person, and do very useful work; but, if you desire to be kept in mind, ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... She was in love with a conjurer, a common, flashy fellow, who gave his mediocre exhibitions of legerdemain at such places as Le Jardin Exterieur, and had recently come to lodge at her mother's. She aspired to marry him, but did not dare to expect it. Her homage was very palpable, and monsieur Eugene Legrand, who had no matrimonial intentions, would ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... the bedlam continued while they voted in vain to elect a Speaker. The new party was determined to have John Sherman. The opposition was divided but finally chose Mr. Pennington, a moderate of mediocre ability. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... children. He was far from rich, he 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. They would ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... circles; and in America the explorers Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong human testimony to the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... object of its zeal, the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which they propose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kind always have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocre mortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown. Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would be prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to have already become odious, and are ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... occupation for a woman who could not exist without movement. She finished her life there remarkably healthy in mind and body, and in a prodigious opulence, which was not without its use in that deplorable Court. For the rest, Madame des Ursins was in mediocre estimation at Rome, was deserted by the Spanish, little visited by the French, but always faithfully paid by France and Spain, and unmolested by the Regent. She was always occupied with the world, and with what ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... bourgeois conscience which makes me see in all artistry, in all unusualness and all genius something deeply ambiguous, deeply dubious, deeply disreputable, and which fills me with this lovelorn weakness for the simple, candid, and agreeably normal, for the decent and mediocre. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very high—but such as the work was, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in the catecheesm," remarked Salemina, yawning a little as she put away her darning-ball. "It is pathetic to see you waste your time painting mediocre pictures, when as a lecturer upon love you ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... and in his mind he shuffled them and their values for him or against him as a gambler arranges and rearranges the cards in his hand. He saw himself plainly as his own highest card, and Barrat and Erhaupt as willing but mediocre accomplices. In Father Paul and Kalonay he recognized his most powerful allies or most dangerous foes. Miss Carson meant nothing to him but a source from which he could draw the sinews of war. What would become of her after the farce ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... wonder at the success of mediocre talents in aesthetics? or at the bitter anger of small minds against true energetic beauty? They reckon on finding therein a congenial recreation, and regret to discover that a display of strength is required to which they are unequal. With mediocrity they are always welcome; however ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is calculated to turn out a good, fairish, commonplace article; but the formula for a genius remains a secret with Deity. The great man becomes great in spite of teachers and parents: and his near kinsmen, being color-blind, usually pooh-pooh the idea that he is anything more than mediocre. At Oxford, William Morris fell in with a young man of about his own age, by the name of Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was studying theology. He was slender in stature, dreamy, spiritual, poetic. Morris was a giant in strength, blunt ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... SMART is an interrogative comment on the strange mental vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, "A Song to David," was produced in a mad-house[126]. Of this "Song" Rossetti has said (I quote the "Athenaeum" of Feb. 19, 1887) in a published letter to Mr. Caine, "This wonderful poem of Smart's is the only great accomplished poem of the last century. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, ghosts, I might even say the legend of God, for our conceptions of the workman-creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creatures. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'God made man in His own image, but man has ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... his warmest friends in Camberton days would not have bestowed on him. He was sleek and solid; well-groomed and rounded, in spite of constant activity, and if his scientific reputation was not more than mediocre, it was enough to give him a lectureship on neurosis in the Camberton Medical School—that necessary mark of approval for a doctor practising in his circle. He spent eight months of each year in Boston; the other four he ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... robbed them of this timid hope. He was now in his element, knew all about it, rushed into details, and sawed away all doubt from their minds. The sum was this. Dodd's general performance was mediocre, but passable; he was plucked for his Logic. Hardie said he was very sorry for it. "What does it matter?" answered Kennet; "he ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... insensibility, that he was not touched by the accident which happened to the man he seemed to love most. Too happy if one had only said that of him! He was supposed to be jealous of the merit of Schwerin and of Keith, and delighted to have got them killed. It is thus that mediocre people seek to lower great men, to diminish the immense space that lies ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was simply the final decomposition of impoverished, tainted, bourgeois blood, the sudden disappearance of a poor, mediocre being who, despite a facade of seeming health, had been ailing since childhood. But what an overwhelming blow it was both for the mother and for the father, all whose dreams and calculations it swept away! The only son, the one and only heir, the prince of industry, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... only existed in pugilism. At peace, Veuillot was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry and novels were pitiful. His language was vapid, when it was not engaged in a striking controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banal litanies and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... had predicted that we would find no comforts in Nome proved himself a true prophet. There were none. Crowded, dirty, disorderly, full of saloons and gambling houses, with a few fourth-class restaurants and one or two mediocre hotels, we found the new mining camp a typical one in every respect. Prices were sky high. One even paid for a drink of water. Having our newly found Alaska appetites with us, we at once, upon landing, made our way to an eating house, the best to ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... 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 that ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... an honest man and sincerely loved his country. There his merits ended. He was readily quarrelsome, utterly without judgment and susceptible to that mood of panic in which mediocre persons are readily induced to act the "strong man." During his administration a new quarrel arose with France—a quarrel in which once again those responsible for that country's diplomacy played the game of her enemies. Genet had merely been an impracticable and impatient enthusiast. Talleyrand, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... 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. There were in the ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 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 great majority of the Italian public, and so be it. The contrary will always be favorable to one who greatly loved his ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... exercise of special aptitudes should gain in depth what they are permitted to lose in extension. We are aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius does not shut up its activity within the limits of its functions; but mediocre talents consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their feeble energy; and if some of their energy is reserved for matters of preference, without prejudice to its functions, such a state of things at once bespeaks a spirit soaring above the vulgar. Moreover, it ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the more common and shallow theatrical production, lighting and color effects have many times saved the day, and, although these effects are not of the deeper emotional type, they may add a spectacular beauty which brings applause where the singing is mediocre and the comedy isn't comedy. The potentiality of lighting effects for the stage has been barely drawn upon, but as the expressiveness of light is more and more utilized on the stage, the art of mobile light will be advanced just so much more. Light, color, ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... books and charts and papers were made for use and are therefore of the greatest utility when most available. When I am at work I like my tools around me; if they are not handy, my work is interrupted, and an interruption often breaks the train of thought and renders impotent or at least mediocre an endeavor which elsewise would be excellent. In their ambition to "put things in shape," and to give me an object lesson in order and method, Alice and her vandal hired girl hide my tools of trade, disposing ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells, Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no difficulty ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... heard them. So it sometimes happens that a life may in the end be made up of a few well-turned speeches, a few fine books, and a few great plays. As for practicing what is so magisterially set forth, that is the last thing thought of. And if we pass from the world of talent to spheres which the mediocre exploit, there, in a pell-mell of confusion, we see those who think that we are in the world to talk and hear others talk—the great and hopeless rout of babblers, of everything that prates, bawls, and perorates and, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... intellectual process is bound up with the moral process, and a man must give his character firmness and fibre before he can make his talent effective or his genius fruitful. The way of the most gifted workman is no easier than that of the most mediocre; he learns his lesson more easily, but he must learn the same lesson. The familiar story of the Sleeping Princess protected by a hedge of thorns, told in so many languages, is a parable of all success of a high order. The highest prizes are always guarded from the facile hand; they exact ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... than in the previous season, but what had been holes on the infield were plugged tightly. Many looked askance when Larry Gardner, supposedly a second baseman, was assigned to third, but the results more than justified the move, and it made room at second for Yerkes, a player who had proved only mediocre on the other side of the diamond. This switch and the return of Stahl, who is a grand mark to throw at on first base, gave the infield the same dash and confidence as the outfield possessed, and the addition of some pitching strength in Bedient and O'Brien did the rest. It is the ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... this heavenly awe-inspiring object sailing through the skies, you will have trials of an unexpected nature to beset you, but by bravely combating these foes you will rise above the mediocre in ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... neutrality. mediocrity, least common denominator. V. split the difference; take the average &c n.; reduce to a mean &c n.; strike a balance, pair off. Adj. mean, intermediate; middle &c 68; average; neutral. mediocre, middle-class; commonplace &c (unimportant) 643. Adv. on an average, in the long run; taking one with another, taking all things together, taking it for all in all; communibus annis [Lat.], in round numbers. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... that the artistes were no good but the committee, he said, had decided to let the first three concerts go as they pleased and reserve all the talent for Saturday night. Mrs. Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items followed one another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert. There was something she didn't like in the look of things and Mr. Fitzpatrick's ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... were not the right-down villains that some imagined them to be, nor the complete heroes that others thought them, but ordinary people, just the same as others, among whom there were some good and some bad, and some mediocre, as ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... in the systematization which an irregular and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... more common. The charm of learning was discovered by one lad after another. The chance of exchanging the craftsman's work for the scholar's work, never thought of before, fired the brains of hundreds first, and thousands afterward. Then began a rage for learning. All those who had abilities even mediocre tried to escape their lot by working at the higher subjects. It was reproached to the Polytechnics that their original purpose, to bring the boys together for common discipline and orderly recreation, and to train them in their crafts, was departed from, and that all ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... you—very grand, but very silly: when all the while, perhaps, there is something else you can do thoroughly well; and the world will be exceedingly obliged to you for doing it, and not doing the other thing.—As doubtless the world was to me, when, instead of being a mediocre musician, as I once wished to be—it's true, my dear—I took to keeping one of the best ladies' ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... faintest aroma of West Point lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to the State-House ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Chopin's parents has given rise to all sorts of misconceptions and misstatements. A writer in Larousse's "Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siecle" even builds on it a theory explanatory of the character of Chopin and his music: "Sa famille d'origine francaise," he writes, "jouissait d'une mediocre fortune; de la, peut-etre, certains froissements dans l'organisation nerveuse et la vive sensibilite de l'enfant, sentiments qui devaient plus tard se refleter dans ses oeuvres, empreintes generalement d'une profonde melancolie." If the writer ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... found a mediocre sunset on an easel. Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust. He knew ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... masterpieces of action and adventure in the forest and on the sea. No other writer has so well told the story of the pioneer. He is not a successful novelist of the drawing-room. His women are mediocre and conventional, of the type described in the old Sunday school books. But when he leaves the haunts of men and enters the forest, power comes naturally to his pen. His greatest stage of action is the forest. He loved wild nature ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... known as the Leguay Institution. He had a taste for reading, indeed it was more than a taste, it was a sort of mental starvation which made him throw himself hungrily upon every book he encountered. Otherwise, Honore was frankly a mediocre and negligent. But concentrated in himself and deprived of the caresses which would have meant so much to him, he created a whole world out of his readings and sometimes gave glimpses of it to Laure by acting out ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... of Piyutim, i.e. Synagogue hymns, but these were mediocre in merit. The elegies written in lament for the burning of the Law and the martyrdoms endured in various parts of Italy were the only meritorious devotional poems composed in Hebrew in that country. Italy remained famous ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... 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 than an accessory and ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... verse I of paragraph 19 in "The Old and New Tables") Nietzsche gives us a reason for his occasional obscurity (see also verses 3 to 7 of "Poets"). As I have already pointed out, his philosophy is quite esoteric. It can serve no purpose with the ordinary, mediocre type of man. I, personally, can no longer have any doubt that Nietzsche's only object, in that part of his philosophy where he bids his friends stand "Beyond Good and Evil" with him, was to save higher men, whose growth and scope might be limited by the too strict observance of modern ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... staple.[8] The arrival of Carolina indigo at London was welcomed so warmly that in 1748 Parliament established a bounty of sixpence a pound on indigo produced in the British dominions. The Carolina output remained of mediocre quality until in 1756 Moses Lindo, after a career in the indigo trade in London, emigrated to Charleston and began to teach the planters to distinguish the grades and manufacture the best.[9] At excellent ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a man of genius and of considerable originality, and a close study of his writings shows conclusively his mental eccentricity. Judging wholly from his printed utterances, Mr. Ingersoll was only a superficial scientist and mediocre scholar. His power lay in his wonderful word imagery, and his intricately constructed verbal arabesques. He was a verbal symbolist. Symbolism, wherever found, and in whatever art, if carried to any extent, must necessarily be an evidence of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... the night that his son was being graduated from college he sat in his room at the hotel—cheap room in a mediocre hotel; he had never learned to feel at home in the rich ones—reading Marcus Aurelius. But his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man. At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... sing,' she warned him as a gaunt girl went towards the piano; and sinking on to a convenient and sheltered couch, they resigned themselves to listen—or to endure. From that corner Rose had a view of the long room, mediocre in its decoration, mediocre in its occupants. She could see her host standing before the fire, swinging his eyeglasses on a cord and gazing at the cornice as the song proceeded. She could see Christabel's neck and shoulders ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest, and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'If God made man in His own image, man has ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... while Robespierre was not. The continuous fanaticism of the latter defeated the intermittent efforts of the former. Nevertheless, it was an amazing spectacle to see so powerful a tribune sent to the scaffold by his pale, venemous enemy and mediocre rival. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... is a song; every sound is a song. But inflections must not be multiplied, lest delivery degenerate into a perpetual sing-song. The effect lies entirely in reproducing the same inflection. A drop of water falling constantly, hollows a rock. A mediocre man will employ twenty or thirty tones. Mediocrity is not the too little, but the too much. The art of making a profound impression is to condense; the highest art would be to condense a whole scene into one inflection. Mediocre speakers are always seeking to enrich their ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... too excited to strike more than a mediocre bargain. The cumbrous sack was hoisted into the cab. Natalya sprang in beside it, and in a resolute voice bade the driver draw up for a ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... men of the time on their right and left hands. People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized in marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors, O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the putting of all mediaeval European history upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task. It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre. There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 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 toujours ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... kindly charm which illuminated the dry juridic discussions. All this forms an attractive whole, and everyone may feel the attraction; for the commentaries on the Bible, which can be read with pleasure and without mental fatigue, are intelligible to persons of most mediocre mind and cultivation. The words of a certain French critic upon another writer of Champagne, La Fontaine, might be applied to Rashi, though a comparison between a poet and a commentator may not be pressed to the utmost. "He is the milk of our early years, the bread of the adult, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable government, of new laws, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... well 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 ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... There was enough to exhaust the seeing possibilities of a lifetime in his own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only with the eye of a poet, but also with that of a naturalist. His favorite pastime was ornithology, and he made fine collections ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... she had her work to return to, she had reckoned without her henchman Jenkins, a new broom that was sweeping very clean indeed. It is an axiom that while it requires creative genius to start an enterprise, once the momentum is gained any mediocre intelligence may keep it going. Kate ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Olympus, a volcano of Lycia, and practiced occult rites, among others those of Mithra which, he says, "exist to the present day and were first taught by them."[14] Lactantius Placidus, a commentator on Statius and a mediocre authority, also tells us that the cult passed from the Persians to the Phrygians and from ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... ability, and do not reckon this personal atmosphere or magnetic power as a part of their success-capital. Yet this individual atmosphere has quite as much to do with one's advancement as brain-power or education. Indeed, we constantly see men of mediocre ability but with fine personal presence, superb manner, and magnetic qualities, being rapidly advanced over the heads of those who are infinitely their superiors in ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... n'inspirait qu'un mediocre respect. La faute en etait en partie a ses representants, en partie a l'esprit general. Un pur formalisme, une etiquette mondaine, telle elle etait: rien de plus. Le systeme etait commode; il est reste tel, d'ailleurs, et non pas seulement ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... not fall apart as might a bad building, or be diffuse as a poorly written essay. And yet, with this coherence, there must always be stimulating and refreshing variety; for a too constant insistence on the main material produces intolerable monotony, such as the "damnable iteration" of a mediocre prose work or the harping away on one theme by the hack composer. In no art more than music is this dual standard of greater importance, and in no art more difficult to attain. For the raw material of music, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... we doubt), but certainly a better language than the Greek man cannot have invented in either planet. Falling back from cases so low and so lofty (Venus an inferior, Jupiter a far superior planet) to our own case, the case of poor mediocre Tellurians, perhaps the reader thinks that other nations might have served the purpose of Providentia. Other nations might have furnished those Providential models which the great drama of earth required. No. Haughtily and ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the men chosen to high office in the State and nation are men of ability and high character, who recall the best traditions of Southern statesmanship; others are parochial and mediocre; and some are blatant demagogues who bring discredit upon their State and their section and who cannot be restrained from "talking ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... had an enervating effect on his morality. Mediocre in capacity as these persons appeared to him, he felt proud of knowing them, and internally longed for the respectability that attached to a wealthy citizen. A mistress like Madame Dambreuse ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... with all sorts of questions; he reads Nietzsche, he ponders over many things, but he does not know how to think for himself. The fact that there are people who can find a way to express themselves appears to him as an inaccessible ideal; while mediocre minds have no attraction for him at all. It is from this feeling that all his sufferings come. So "a horse, carrying a heavy burden, breathes hard, falls to the ground, but is forced to rise and proceed by stinging lashes from ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... which is the most tragic incident in the melancholy story of poor old Pons. There were a "Chevalier de Malte en Priere," by Sebastian del Piombo; a "Holy Family," by Fra Bartolommeo; a "Landscape," by Hobbema; and a "Portrait of a Woman," by Albert Durer. Apparently they were in reality mediocre as works of art, but they were a source of the utmost pride and delight to their owner, who said enthusiastically of one of them—the Sebastian del Piombo—that "human art can go no further." When we know that ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... unique. Though he was not uncommonly tall, his shoulders were thick and broad, giving the impression of great strength. His jaw was square, but it evidenced brutality rather than determination. His nose, in contrast to the intelligence denoted by his high, broad forehead, was mediocre, inconsequential, the kind of a nose seldom seen on the person who achieves. The two features were those of the man who conceives big things, yet lacks the force ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... pictures, write poetry and expound philosophy. One of the chief delights of conversation is the opportunity it affords for self-expression. A good conversationalist who monopolizes all the conversation, will be voted a bore because he denies others the enjoyment of self-expression, while a mediocre talker who listens interestedly may be considered a good conversationalist because he permits his companions to please themselves through self-expression. They are praised who please: they please who ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... existence on that July day. Pre-eminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances. Perhaps it was not quite mythical that a slave has been proud to be bought first; and probably a barn-door fowl on sale, though he may not have understood himself to be called the best of a bad lot, may have a self-informed consciousness of his relative importance, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... actors more versatile and gifted than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages. His voice was limited in compass, inferior in quality, and habitually out of tune, his power of musical execution mediocre, his physical appearance entirely without grace, picturesqueness, or dignity. Yet Ronconi, by sheer force of a versatile dramatic genius, delighted audiences in characters which had been made familiar to the public through the splendid ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... 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, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... got better, got worse. Her acting remained mediocre to bad. At the fifth rehearsal after the break with the stage-director, Mildred saw Crossley seated far back in the dusk of the empty theater. It was his first appearance at rehearsals since the middle of the first ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... has no strength with the officers of the army. They have no confidence either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, it is a beggars' quarrel, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... taken by 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 ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... is still looking forward to 'finishing' with some European artist. They are not satisfied until they have secured the foreign stamp of approval. While this is true of the advanced pianist, it is even more in evidence in the mediocre player. He, too, is dreaming of the 'superior advantages,' as he calls them, of European study. He may have no foundation to build upon—may not even be able to play a scale correctly, but still thinks ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the faint praise that kills. There was some adverse criticism, too; but it was of the light, insincere variety that is given to mediocre work by unimportant artists. Then, here and there, appeared the signed critiques of the men whose opinion counted—and Bertram knew that he had failed. Neither as a work of art, nor as a likeness, was the portrait the ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... 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 like these, which require a light heart and gladsome mood, still ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. The Burial in England is perhaps too much of an ad hoc call to be great poetry. But it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of God ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... controversy which presently arose out of Cibber's well-known letter to Pope. In August 1742, the month following its publication, among the pamphlets to which it gave rise, was announced The Cudgel; or, a Crab-tree Lecture, To the Author of the Dunciad. "By Hercules Vinegar, Esq." This very mediocre satire in verse is still to be found at the British Museum; but even if it were not included in Fielding's general disclaimer as to unsigned work, it would be difficult to connect it with him. To give but one reason, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Washington's hard-headed and discreet lawyer friend; John Blair, George Wythe, and James McClurg. From South Carolina went three unusual orators, John Rutledge, C.C. Pinckney and Charles Pinckney, and Pierce Butler. Georgia named four mediocre but useful men. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... individual instances—Kant, Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart—how very little which is absolutely new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks, after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seems quite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on or listener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similar sequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding and enjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to us; and, while we expatiate ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, a blessing ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... reading, taken together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the Parisian chroniquear, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... figure of Laura is most affecting, the author did not fully reach the goal he had set for himself, yet "no mediocre mind or ordinary imagination could have conceived such ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... 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 ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry |
