"Mediocrity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for he was always a loose talker. Active and ambitious in his pursuits, and magnificent in his tastes, he devoted himself to literature, politics, and society; to the two first with greater success than would be expected of a man whose talents for composition were below mediocrity, and for public speaking none at all. He became the patron of various literary institutions and undertakings connected with the arts, he took the chair at public meetings for literary or scientific purposes, he ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... imputed a fault either to his character or to his deportment; for he had come into the world endowed with an infallible instinct for the commonplace. In any profession he would have won success as a shining light of mediocrity, since the ruling motive of his conduct was less the ambition to excel than the moral inability to be peculiar. His mind was small and solemn, and he had worn three straight and unyielding wrinkles across his forehead in his earnest endeavour to prevent people from acting, and especially ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... of him. A mortal who possesses no quality likely to be envied by those around him is certain to belong to the rank and file of humanity. But these unconsidered units of mankind can always console themselves with the undoubted fact that mediocrity is ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... position of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not alone through the wonderful inventions ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Wernock. Wither's were written, as we learn from the title-page of the 1615 volume, while the author was in prison in the Marshalsea for hunting vice with a pack of satires in full cry, that is, the Abuses Stript and Whipt of 1611. The verse seldom rises above an amiable mediocrity, the best that can be said for it being that it carries on, in a not wholly unworthy manner, the dainty tradition of the octosyllabic couplet between the Faithful Shepherdess and Milton's early poems. Browne's eclogues are chiefly remarkable for the introduction into the first of a long and rather ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the light is equally diffused and everything is placed in relief without the contrast of shadow,—the stiffness of the legs of the bull, the crude coloring of the plants and animals in the background; the mediocrity of the shepherd's figure. But, for all this, Paul Potter's bull was crowned with glory as one of the noblest examples of art, and Europe considers it as the greatest work of the prince of animal-painters. An illustrious critic ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with contempt. He thought it odious—oppressively odious—in its unsuggestive finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the entrance to the grounds ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... their misfortunes, managed with consummate craft. Their policy was to appear in the light of victims of persecution. There was to them no medium between reigning as despots or dying as martyrs. Mediocrity would have degraded them. Ricci, the general of the order, would not permit them to land in Italy, to which country they were sent by the king of Spain. Six thousand priests, in misery and poverty, were sent adrift upon the Mediterranean, and after six months of vicissitude, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the daughter. But the equal succession of independent matrons supported their pride and luxury, and might transport into a foreign house the riches of their fathers. While the maxims of Cato were revered, they tended to perpetuate in each family a just and virtuous mediocrity: till female blandishments insensibly triumphed, and every salutary restraint was lost in the dissolute greatness of the republic. The rigor of the decemvirs was tempered by the equity of the praetors. Their edicts restored ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... dependent. These are the only ones to whom the term "proletarian" could with any propriety be applied. Next above these is another well-defined stratum,—the self-supporting, but unskilled and illiterate. Then all who fall between PQ and RS are characterized by mediocrity, and they constitute "the masses." In all new countries, and as it would seem at the present time also in central Europe, there is a very strong current upwards from the lower to the upper strata of PQRS. Universal education tends to produce ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... in any of the allied countries towered above the dead level of mediocrity. Great Frenchmen, Britons and Russians were said to be available, but there was no great man in evidence. And this want proved disastrous. In Germany, on the other hand, it was hardly felt. For it was compensated by the existence of a ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the close of the battle sung the triumph or the wail, on the side of his partisans.[17] To the presence of this person the clans are supposed to have been indebted for much of the enthusiasm which led them to glory in the wars of Montrose. His poetry only reaches mediocrity, but the success which attended it led the chiefs to seek similar support in the Jacobite wars; and very animated compositions were the result of their encouragement. Mathieson, the family bard of Seaforth, Macvuirich, the pensioner ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... that he, and he alone, can force the Prussians to raise the siege of Paris. When his plan has failed, as fail it in all probability will, he still, with that serene assurance which is the attribute of mediocrity, will insist that it ought to have succeeded. "Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni." Those who knew him in Brittany tell me that long before he became a personage, "le plan de Trochu" was a standing joke throughout that province. The General, it appears, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... information. Our readings in modern history at Tadmor had informed us of the dominant political position of the middle classes in England, since the time of the first Reform Bill. Mr. Farnaby's guests represented the respectable mediocrity of social position, the professional and commercial average of the nation. They all talked glibly enough—I and an old gentleman who sat next to me being the only listeners. I had spent the morning lazily in the smoking-room of the hotel, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... great democracy, ambitious without being envious, where shabby class rivalry is unknown, where each man endeavours to rise by his own intelligence, worth, and energy, but where no one desires to drag others down to the level of his own idleness or mediocrity. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... points and his bad ones, as all your great saints have. Look at them closely, and in spite of all their pretensions you will find them no better than their neighbours. And so we may comfort ourselves, in our own mediocrity and laziness, by denying the existence of all ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... out the near-lying north shore. He was unaware of her gaze, and she watched him intently, speculating fancifully about the strange warp of soul that led him, a young man with signal powers, to fritter away his time on the writing of stories and poems foredoomed to mediocrity and failure. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... her sorrowful humility, that possibly her qualities stood on a higher level than Peter's powers of appreciation. Yet it is certain that people can only admire intelligently what is good within their comprehension; and their highest flights of imagination may sometimes scarcely touch mediocrity. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... George Eliot was alive, there was much appreciative interest and much unlawful curiosity felt regarding her private life. This as a matter of course. No such striking personality as hers could project itself into a time of dulness and mediocrity without exciting unusual interest and attention. And the half-knowledge which had been gained of her life and character served as an active stimulus to this curiosity. One or two leading facts in her history had become known and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... strong faculty, the using of which would give delight and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an eagle should become a competitor in a walking race and if the fawn should ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... were his partners in the business. If there had been any element of passion in the transaction he would have felt less deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her change of husbands like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity. He could have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses; for resisting Hackett, for yielding to Varick; for anything but her acquiescence and her tact. She reminded him of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt and she knew they would ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the Royal Academy is now open. Its general character is mediocrity, unrelieved by any works of extraordinary or striking merit. There are some clever landscapes by the younger Danbys, and one by the father, which is by no means among his happiest—a dark picture, which in half a ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... introduced also the plan of having two, and now three, important articles in each number—one political or social, one literary, and one scientific. Under the old regime they never had an editor above mediocrity, except Masson (? Musson); there was a want of unity among the proprietors as to the aims and objects of the journal; and there was a want of capital to secure the services of good writers. This seems to me to be now all ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... eminent for almost every other species of literary excellence, has been hitherto remarkably barren of historical genius; and so far has this defect raised prejudices against us, that some have doubted whether an Englishman can stop at that mediocrity of style, or confine his mind to that even tenour of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... this face?' I heard my mother say in a voice that seemed agitated; 'could you tell me something about the original of this remarkable face?' 'The model?' said Wilderspin. 'We are not often asked about our models, but a model like that would endow mediocrity itself with genius, for, though apparently, and by way of beneficent illusion, the daughter of an earthly costermonger, she was a wanderer from another and a better world. She is not more beautiful here ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... one hand, the infinitely ramified division of society into the most varied races, which confront each other with small antipathies, bad consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and precisely because of the ambiguous and suspicious positions which they occupy towards each other, such positions being devoid of all real distinctions although coupled with various formalities, are treated by their lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Washington, his steadiness and ability, had long since elevated him above all his rivals and far beyond the reach of envy. His enemies still labored, however, to fasten upon him, as a general, the reproach of mediocrity. It is true that the military career of this great man is not marked by any of those achievements which seem prodigious, and of which the splendor dazzles and astonishes the universe, but sublime virtues unsullied with the least stain are a species of prodigy. His conduct throughout the ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... effort, and the debate, for a while revived by his interposition, continued to languish until this hour (nine o'clock), with successive relays of mediocrity, until it yielded its last gasp in the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... the question,) but 'hanging' woods, the 'sylvae superimpendentes' of Catullus [2]; yet let some wit call out in a slang tone,—"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces have had a decent run, only because nothing unusual above, or absurd below, mediocrity furnished an occasion,—a spark for the explosive materials collected behind the orchestra. But it would take a volume of no ordinary size, however laconically the sense were expressed, if it were meant to ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... to place aught within the reach of such but doubt and destitution. I feel the necessity of protesting earnestly against the reaction set on foot by certain thinkers against the mighty-souled, which serves as a cloak for the cavilling spirit of mediocrity. There is something hard, repulsive, and ungrateful in the destructive instinct which so often forgets what has been done by the great men who preceded us, to demand of them merely an account of what more might have ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... fully during the next hour. There was nothing particularly "awful" about L'Abbaye of itself—at first, nor, perhaps, even later; at least the awfulness was well covered. The program of entertainment was awful enough, if deadly mediocrity is awful. A big darkey, dressed in a suit which reminded me of the "end man" at an old-time minstrel show, sang "My Alabama Coon," accompanying himself, more or less intimately, on the banjo. I could have heard the same thing, better done, at a ten cent theater in the States, where this ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be right, and when he was dead, he could not know that he had been wrong. And then the social danger. The possessor not the owner of his own property? He must give it up, share it with the poor. Such equality of property or lack of property would prevent all progress, and plunge everything into mediocrity. No, that is not my salvation! Ah, well, this journey into the desert will be an advantage to me in one way: it will make me feel happier than ever in ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... several States, will be so great as to repay many times over the relatively small expense. We should not rest satisfied with what has been done, however. The only people who are contented with a system of promotion by mere seniority are those who are contented with the triumph of mediocrity over excellence. On the other hand, a system which encouraged the exercise of social or political favoritism in promotions would be even worse. But it would surely be easy to devise a method of promotion from grade to grade in which the opinion of the higher officers ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry—(though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,) —poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London,) highly ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... clever, I should doubtless have attracted the jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity of my success in the classes. One little fact I may mention, because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been made in forty years. I was extremely nearsighted, and in consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... this world, when a man so gifted as Mackintosh has failed completely in public life, never having attained honours, reputation, or wealth, while so many ordinary men have reaped an abundant harvest of all. What a consolation this affords to mediocrity! None can approach Mackintosh without admiring his extraordinary powers, and at the same time wondering why they have not produced greater effects in the world either of literature or politics. His virtues are obstacles to his success; he has not the art of pushing or of making himself ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... taken part with those who vote to each other medals, and, affecting to be tired of the fatigues of office, make to each other requisitions to retain places they would be most reluctant to quit; his great and splendid discovery would long since have been represented to government. Expectant mediocrity would have urged on his claims to remuneration, and those who covered their selfish purposes with the cloak of science, would have hastened to shelter themselves in the mantle of his glory.—But the philosopher may find consolation ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... note. Perhaps the best is Mr. E. C. Dowling, and he is a Tasmanian. Resident in Victoria is a M. Louis Buyelot, a landscape artist of considerable merit. Excepting him, we have no artists here whose works rise beyond mere mediocrity. Mr. Summers was a Victorian, but his fame is almost unknown in his own country. Thanks to Sir Redmond Barry, Victoria possesses a very fair National Gallery attached to the Melbourne Public Library. Some of the paintings in it are excellent, notably Mr. Long's ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compound employments of both; for that will be good for the present, because the virtues of either age, may correct the defects of both; and good for succession, that young men may be learners, while men in age ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... his works still adorn the Cathedral. The names of John Markgraf, James Vischer and the brothers Link were mentioned later. At the latter part of the eighteenth century John Daniel Danegger painted also some, which, however, owing to their mediocrity, have since been removed. For some years past they have undergone considerable repair under the direction of artists of talent and well acquainted with the science of antiquities. The painted windows of the upper galleries of the nave represent ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... earl of Hereford; as if by divine providence, and through the merits of the saints and prayers of those holy men (of whom two lie buried before the high altar), it were destined that the daughter church should be founded in superfluities, whilst the mother continued in that laudable state of mediocrity which she had always affected and coveted. Let the active therefore reside there, the contemplative here; there the pursuit of terrestrial riches, here the love of celestial delights; there let them enjoy the concourse of men, here the presence ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... even when proved and recognized, will be threatened by the advancing tide of middle-class prejudice. It was possible to choose one man out of a thousand, but, amongst three millions, discrimination becomes impossible, when all are moved by the same ambitions and attired in the same livery of mediocrity. No foresight will warn this victorious horde of that other terrible horde, soon to be arrayed against them in the peasant proprietors; in other words, twenty million acres of land, alive, stirring, arguing, deaf to reason, insatiable of appetite, obstructing progress, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... "woman of intellect," it appeared, was a sort of "lusus naturae," a luckless accident, a thing for which there was neither place nor use in creation, wanted neither as wife nor worker. Beauty anticipated her in the first office. He believed in his soul that lovely, placid, and passive feminine mediocrity was the only pillow on which manly thought and sense could find rest for its aching temples; and as to work, male mind alone could work to ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... ed. at Westminster and Camb., entered the diplomatic service, and filled several government appointments. His best play is The West Indian. His novels do not rise much above mediocrity. Along with Sir J.B. Burges he wrote an epic entitled The Exodiad, and he also made some translations from ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... days, amid what has been strongly stated as "the prevailing mediocrity of manners," a study of the manners of the past would seem to reveal to us the fact that in those days of ceremony a man who was beset with shyness need then have suffered less than he would do now in these days of ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... from which he did not succeed in freeing himself till near his fortieth year—the illusion that nature had given him equally the gifts of the painter and the poet. Many hours of the best years of his life were to be spent in laboriously practising an art in which he was doomed to mediocrity; and it must remain a riddle that one, who like Goethe was so curiously studious of his own self-development, should so long and so blindly ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Freedom to excel in nothing Had gained everything he wanted in life except happiness Indefeasible right of the public to have news Intellectual poverty Known something if I hadn't been kept at school Longing is one thing and reason another Making himself instead of in making money Mediocrity of the amazing art product Never go fishing without both fly and bait Nothing like it certainly had happened to anybody Object was to win a case rather than to do justice in a case Public that gets tired of anything in ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would see him as he was, and whose ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Shelley, Goethe and Hugo. And Charlotte Bronte is an eminent example of a strong imagination working with freedom in prose, but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and dispositions of Sheridan; and if the vanity of talent too often turned him aside from their influence, it is but another proof of the danger of that "light which leads astray," and may console those who, safe under the shadow of mediocrity, are unvisited ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... retired into private life at the termination of their year of office, it is inadmissible to make any remarks, critical or laudatory, on the manners and bearing of two personages suddenly emerging from a position of respectable mediocrity into one of preeminent dignity within their own sphere. Such individuals almost always seem to grow nearly or quite to the full size of their office. If it were desirable to write an essay on the latent aptitude of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... This was no other than Pauline Lucca, in the prime of youth and petulance. From her first appearance to the last note she sang, she occupied the stage. The opera seemed to have been written for her. The mediocrity of the troupe threw her commanding merits—the richness of her voice, the purity of her intonation, her vivid conception of character, her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion—into that relief which a sapphire ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... that, however flattering or consolatory the recital of the follies or foibles of great men may be to that mediocrity which forms the mass of mankind, the person who undertakes to cater for mere amusement withdraws something from the common stock of his country. The glory of Great Britain depends as much on the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... so much and so universally adored this ariston metron, "excellent mediocrity,"[780-1] of ancient times, and who have concluded the most moderate measure the most perfect, shall I pretend to an unreasonable ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... we have no concern. As painter and sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical imperfections—his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude color—relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those altogether ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability to trumpet abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as surely fade away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... blood?' Is not fire the next grand cyclic consummation of all things here below? But I come fully prepared to answer such objections. Your argument betrays a narrow mind, circumscribed in its orbit, and shallow in its depth. 'Tis the common thought of mediocrity. You have read books too much, and studied nature too little. Let me give you a lesson today in the workshop of Omnipotence. Take a stroll with me into the limitless confines of space, and let us observe together some of the scenes transpiring at this very instant around us. A moment ago you ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... the celibacy of neglect. Hence the resistance any attempt to establish unlimited polygyny always provokes, not from the best people, but from the mediocrities and the inferiors. If we could get rid of our inferiors and screw up our average quality until mediocrity ceased to be a reproach, thus making every man reasonably eligible as a father and every woman reasonably desirable as a mother, polygyny and polyandry would immediately fall into sincere disrepute, because monogamy is so much more convenient and economical that ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... dedicates his "Memorials relating to the History of Britain" to the Earl of Hardwicke, whom he styles, with equal happiness and propriety, "Learned in British History." "Scholarship" has hitherto been a term reserved for the adept in ancient literature, whatever may be the mediocrity of his intellect; but the honourable distinction must be extended to all great writers in modern literature, if we would not confound the natural sense and propriety ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... exclusively Protestant. So long," he continued, "as you keep up Trinity College in its supremacy you will make your measure of academical education, for all political purposes, an entire failure. Your provincial academies will be marked with all the characteristics of mediocrity, which will only render the elevation of Trinity College more conspicuous by the inferiority with which it will be surrounded. How stunted and dwarfed the groves of our new academies when compared with the rich luxuriance of the gardens of Trinity! I had a thousand ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... result the same action and re-action of the cold parts of the Cacao, and of the hot parts of the other ingredients, which makes the Chocolate of so moderate a quality, that it differs very little from a mediocrity; and when there is not put in any ordinary pepper, or Cloves, but onely a little Annisseed (as I shall shew hereafter) we may boldly say, that it is very temperate. And this may be proved by reason, and experience: (supposing that which Gallen sayes, to be true, that every mixt ...
— Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke • Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma
... and the public of later times laid aside Caecilius for Plautus and Terence; and, if nevertheless the critics of the true literary age of Rome—the Varronian and Augustan epoch—assigned to Caecilius the first place among the Roman editors of Greek comedies, this verdict appears due to the mediocrity of the connoisseur gladly preferring a kindred spirit of mediocrity in the poet to any special features of excellence. These art-critics probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more regular than Plautus ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... husbands, are proud of this accidental favor of fate; they consider themselves as the chosen accomplices and judges of morals and virtue, and cast out from their circles all those who dare to elevate themselves above mediocrity. In this house dwelt an artiste- -the worshipped prima donna, the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... "win out all right" in the end. The old habit of the showman made him inclined to look on those whom he presented in his various enterprises as material, and sometimes battled with an artistic instinct which often led him to pick out what was good from the seething mass of mediocrity. He believed profoundly in names. But he believed also in "new blood," and was for ever ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... rapidity with which he would fill the blackboard, in solving difficult problems in quadratics, was almost bewildering. It was not every teacher even that could follow him in his quick but exact evolutions of complex algebraical formulae. In Greek and Latin he hardly attained to mediocrity, being always behind his class, while in mathematics he was superior, not only to every boy in school, but to any boy of the same age that I have ever had in any school. But this boy received from the Professor only a second or third-rate ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... political sectarian, of the slave-driving, Virginian, Jeffersonian school; principled against all improvement; with all the interests and passions and vices of slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution; with talents not above mediocrity, and a spirit incapable of expansion to the dimensions of the station on which he has been cast by the hand of Providence, unseen, through the apparent agency of chance. To that benign and healing hand of Providence I trust, in humble ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... frantic impotencies. She saw through the rhetorical trickeries of the music, weighed its cheap splendours, realized the mediocrity of this second-rate poet turned symphonist. Image after image pressed upon her brain, each more pessimistic, more depressing than its predecessor. Alixe could have wept. Her companion placed his hand on her arm. His fingers burned; ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... hard, if not impossible, to render into any other language the true spirit of a German poem. But in the original this sonnet is far above mediocrity. It idealizes the opera of Don Juan very artistically, and displays a combination of force with harmony and grace which gives the impression, in connection with the other sonnets, that if Strauss had devoted his mental energy to poetry alone, he would not have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... B.A., and articled himself to a local architect with the firm intent of stopping the insane drift for modern mediocrity, and bringing about a just regard for the stately dignity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... been the cry for some time that Schools of Art turned out only academic students. And one certainly associates a dead level of respectable mediocrity with much school work. We can call to mind a lot of dull, lifeless, highly-finished work, imperfectly perfect, that has won the prize in many a school competition. Flaubert says "a form deadens," and it does seem as if the necessary ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... of Hope, which had been made popular by Heber and Milman. The literary schools, indeed, which I am speaking of, as resulting from the attractions of some original, or at least novel artist, consist for the most part of mannerists, none of whom rise much above mediocrity; but they are not the less serviceable as channels, by means of which the achievements of genius may be incorporated into the language itself, or become the common property of the nation. Henceforth, the most ordinary composer, the very student ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... they tell best; without so much of self-knowledge he is no more a complete man than he would be were he deficient in self-reverence and self-control. He must dare to think for himself, or he will assuredly become a mediocrity, and probably more or less offensive. All his possible influence on his fellow-creatures must depart unless he thinks for himself; and he cannot think for himself unless he is released from insincerity—the insincerity ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... been praised at least equally to its merit. In "The Dispensary" there is a strain of smooth and free versification; but few lines are eminently elegant. No passages fall below mediocrity, and few rise much above it. The plan seems formed without just proportion to the subject; the means and end have no necessary connection. Resnel, in his preface to Pope's Essay, remarks that Garth exhibits ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... without the slightest hesitation. Strong language is usually to be deprecated, but there are seasons when no language can be too strong. We think meanly of the man who can sit down to round his periods, and prune his language, and reduce his feelings to the level of cold mediocrity, when he knows that the best interests of his country are at stake, and that he is her chosen champion. And such, most assuredly, and beyond all comparison, was Sir Walter Scott. He went into that conflict like a giant, in a manner that disdained conventionalisms; he neither ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... set of men does the desire to look as commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world; but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... convicted criminal. And he protested against the still more horrid cruelty which reduced unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of the mediaeval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on political reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political reform. But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... this did not happen to him. There was not a line of badness in the face; yet also there was not a line of strength; no promise in eye, or nose, or chin; the whole thing melted to a stubby, featureless mediocrity. It was a countenance like thousands; and hopelessness filled the Virginian as he looked at this lost dog, and his ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... strong. We all know men clearly of secondary ability who nevertheless occupy high positions in business and state. We are acquainted also with men of excellent native endowment who still have never risen above the ranks of mediocrity. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... How could she, in the total absence of the most powerful, as well as the most amiable motives to exertion? She had no one to please; no one to watch her progress, to rejoice in her success, to lament her failure. In many branches of education she had not advanced beyond mediocrity, but her dancing was perfection; or rather it would have been so, if to her other graces she had added the charm of gaiety. But that want, as our French dancing-master used to observe, was so universal in this country, that the wonder would have been to see any young lady, whose face ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... and lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these commonplace poets suddenly into fame. They do well to amuse an idle hour. The end of both is interesting. That of the first, which begins with stanza lix., discusses the question: "Who cares, how such a mediocrity as Rene lived after the fame of his prophecy died out?"[11] ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... never possible. Oh, I know that you've won great victories against odds! You've done better than anybody could have expected, but you had genius to help you, while we were led by mediocrity in the saddle. But you have reached your zenith. Mark how the Union veterans fought to-day. They're as brave and resolute as you are, and we have the position and the men. You'll never get beyond Gettysburg. Your invasion ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... one of those streets of unimpeachable respectability that may be duplicated a hundred times in London. Its characteristics are monotony and dull mediocrity; a dead sameness makes all the houses appear alike. Before ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... had a respectable [Footnote:— "nam bene gesti rebus, vel potius feliciter, etsi nori summi—medii tamen obtinuit ducis famam."] character; as an orator he was more than respectable; and in other qualifications less interesting to the populace, he had that happy mediocrity of merit which was best fitted for his delicate and difficult situation—sufficient to do credit to the emperor's preference—sufficient to sustain the popular regard, but not brilliant enough to throw his patron into the shade. For the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... done me such good service," she said laughing, "and shown that mediocrity is my musical position, let us have some old-fashioned ballads, and all sing them together ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... formed to himself no notion; either treats these great essentials of the art, as innovations, and such as he is not bound to admit, or in the despair of acquiring them, sits down contented with his mediocrity. It is well if he does not rail at, or attempt to turn into ridicule, perfections which are beyond his reach. And to say the truth, the art has not greater enemies than those professors of it, who stick at the surface, and want the spirit necessary ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... "amateurish mediocrity," and made war upon it, thus drawing jealous attacks upon himself. His great friend and ally, Nordraak, passed away in 1868, and the next year his baby daughter, aged thirteen months, the only child he ever had, ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... hard and perspire, and their skin acts. This is all easily comprehended by the masses, and passes for acting, and is applauded, but the man who is actually the embodiment of the character he is creating will often be misunderstood, be disliked, and fail to attract. Mediocrity rouses no opposition, but strong individualities and forcible opinions make enemies. It is here that danger lies. Many an actor has set out with an ideal, but, failing to gain general favour, has abandoned it for the easier method ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... care to sit in the high places," I objected. "I find life precarious enough in my present humble situation. I have no experience. Mediocrity, you ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... best and highest of their own idols had better means and skill of measurement: I can never forget the pregnant expression of one of the ablest of that school and party—Lord Cockburn—who, when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly: "I have the misfortune to think differently from you—in my humble opinion, Walter Scott's sense is a still more ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... other IMMORALITIES. The evil trait was in the blood, for one of her sisters murdered her own son, and a brother murdered his own sister, As Richard Edwards, his grandfather, had 5 sons and 1 daughter, by a second wife, but none of their numerous progeny rose above mediocrity, and their descendants gained no abiding reputation, Jonathan Edwards must have owed his remarkable mental qualities largely to his grandmother rather than his grandfather. He was evidently a new creation in Christ Jesus and was cured by grace of all inherited ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... had called them on the scene on the same day, but to play very different parts. Brissot, the scribe, political adventurer, journalist, was the man of theory; Petion, the practical man. He had in his countenance, in his character, and his talents, that solemn mediocrity which is of the multitude, and charms it; at least he was a sincere man, a virtue which the people appreciate beyond all others in those who are ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down the country ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... poet, who was not only placed under the surveillance of the police, but expelled from the Foreign Office by express order of the Tsar "for bad conduct." A letter on this subject, addressed by Count Vorontsoff to Count Nesselrode, is an amusing instance of the arrogance with which stolid mediocrity frequently passes judgment on rising genius. ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Great Britain. He pleaded for union, too, not merely for the salvation of the Colonies to the mother country, but even more for the salvation of the Colonies to themselves. Separation merely meant mediocrity for Great Britain, but for the Colonies it meant ruin. There would no longer be any check on the spirit of rancorous and virulent faction which was always inseparable from small democracies. The coercive power ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... meantime, and in consequence of this lawsuit, a certain Barot, an uncle of Mignon and his partner as well, got up a dispute with Urbain, but as he was a man below mediocrity, Urbain required in order to crush him only to let fall from the height of his superiority a few of those disdainful words which brand as deeply as a red-hot iron. This man, though totally wanting in parts, was very rich, and having no children was always surrounded by a horde of relatives, every ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... kindling the enthusiasm of princes and nobles, producing learned men in every country of Europe, whose original investigations should put to the blush the commentators and compilers of this age of religious mediocrity and disguised infidelity. Such intellectual giants in the field of religious inquiry had not appeared since the Fathers of the Church combated the paganism of the Roman world, and will not probably appear again until the cycle of changes is completed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... of departing from my original intention. The task of impartial criticism[4] is now, unhappily, no longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... farewell, children of oblivion! farewell, Spratt, Smith, Duke, Hughes, King, Pomfret, Phillips, and Blackmore: ye who, in that day of very small things, just rose, as your Leviathan biographer so often testifies, "to a degree of merit above mediocrity:" ye who—but (Candor and good Charity, I thank you for the hint,) limited indeed is my knowledge of your writings, ye long-departed poets, whom I thus am base enough to pilfer of your bays; and therefore, if any man among you penned aught of equal praise with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Liebknecht, apostle of a creed that would save the world by the gospel of mediocrity, were human nature other than it is. But, in considering this Liebknecht, let us not forget that he has no more love for England, or for any of the Allies, than the giant whom he attempts so vainly to oppose: he is an apostle, not of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... equality of wages for the same time to the manager and superintendent also. In other words, he proposes to take away all the incentives to the acquirement or exercise of superior and signal ability in every work of life, the result of which would inevitably lead to a deadening extension of mediocrity. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... his real name, or his father's, to turn the balance of the hesitation and doubt; but that, he told himself, would never, never do. She must turn aside from her training, love him for himself, and believe, if only for a few hours, that she had thrown herself away upon poverty and mediocrity, and be happy in it; or else she must pass him by, and sweep on up the broad, cold stairway of her own and her ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... students were merely "passed," "not passed," or "conditioned." This undoubtedly stimulated interest in study and scholarship for its own sake in the case of many students, though, in the absence of any of the usual college honors it encouraged a certain level of mediocrity in others. The change in the system and the introduction of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and similar organizations after 1907 resulted in a marked alteration in the attitude toward study and has undoubtedly raised appreciably the general ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... as applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have very wide cobble- stones; the houses for the most part are shabby, with- out local color. The look of things is neither modern nor antique, - a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number of blank walls, - walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses - that avert themselves from the street, as if in natural chagrin at there being so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on which the magnificent ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of the sublime. For the rest of the world it was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them. All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... consent to the Exclusion Bill for six hundred thousand pounds; and the negotiation was broken off only because he insisted on being paid beforehand. To do him justice, his temper was good; his manners agreeable; his natural talents above mediocrity. But he was sensual, frivolous, false, and cold-hearted, beyond almost any prince ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the sixteenth and subsequent centuries. They are closely similar to the foregoing, but they tend to become more learned and less simple. Yet, though as literature they are often quite insignificant, as ethics they rarely sink below mediocrity. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... said Beaton. "I'm not trying to get a rise out of you. I'm in earnest. What you want is some man who can have patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius turning mediocrity on his hands. I haven't any luck with men; I don't get on with them; I'm not popular." Beaton recognized the fact with the satisfaction which it somehow always ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... same number of educated, enterprising, and intelligent men in any one district or state of Europe, not excepting any given part of France or England? If we have fewer learned and scientific men than older countries can boast, we have a greater number above mediocrity, according to our population, and a vastly higher average of general intelligence. If our laws are too often loosely administered, it is at least in the power of the people to remedy the difficulty by substituting good and faithful for ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Tocqueville, profoundly uninteresting. We have been housekeeping; and why does the novelist always make his bow to the hero and heroine at the church-door, unless because he knows, that, if they are well off, nothing more is to be made of them? Prosperity is the forcing-house of mediocrity; and if we have ceased to produce great men, it is because we have not, since we became a nation, been forced to pay the terrible price at which alone they can be bought. Great men are excellent things for a nation to have had; but a normal condition that should give a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... all men were created equal and left out the implied kicker that equality was in the sight of God and before the law. They wanted an equality with the greatest men without giving up their drive toward mediocrity, and they meant to have it. In ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... was known as 'Pussy' among a gang of disrespectful subordinates. He really did as little to earn respect as he did to forfeit it; in fact he was a pre-eminently respectable mediocrity of the kind that, towards the close of the mid-Victorian period, clung like barnacles to office, and he was a Whig during the period that ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... those you imagine to be such; if this card comes near you, leave your plan and adopt another: seven of spades shows the loss of a most valuable, influential friend, whose death will plunge you in very great distress and poverty: the six of spades announces a mediocrity of fortune, and great uncertainty in your undertakings: the five of spades is rather doubtful as to success or a rise in life; but it promises luck in the choice of your companion for life, although it shows that your own temper is rather sullen—and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and pass-words of its ignorances and its imperceptions. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Charlotte Bronte and her books. In the subsequent conversation it appeared that Mademoiselle and her family hold decided opinions upon the subject,—something more than mere lack of admiration. She was familiar with the novels, and thought that, while they exhibit a talent certainly not above mediocrity, they reflect the injustice, the untruthfulness, and the ingratitude of their creator. We were obliged to confess to ourselves that the family have apparent reason for this view, when we reflected that in the books Miss Bronte has assailed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... pretend to a knowledge of yachts. And Surgeon George Metcalf, with the rank of junior lieutenant, was ordered to the torpedo-boat above mentioned, and with him as executive officer a young graduate of the academy, Ensign Smith, who with the enthusiasm and courage of youth combined the mediocrity of inexperience and the full share of the service ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... illusions. Hence his oft varying moods, as the one or the other part of him became ascendent. Hence his fervours of idealism, and the habit of destructive criticism which seemed inconsistent with them. Hence his ardent ambitions, and his appearance of plodding mediocrity in ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... frescoes which may still be seen, and which represent different episodes in the history of Florence—combats, and captures of cities, the whole being a travesty of antiquity, an intermingling of allegories. These frescos, painted with an intrepid and learned mediocrity, display the commonplace tones, swelling muscles and anatomical tricks in use at that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... land with productions both good and bad; mostly feeble, penetrating the cottages of the poor rather than the palaces of the rich, and making the fortunes of magazines and news-vendors, from Maine to California? But there are three women novelists, writing in English, standing out in this group of mediocrity, who have earned a just and wide fame,—Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Marian Evans, who goes by ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... her way! In her way to material luxury, poverty of spirit, the shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral mediocrity of the world. I would to God I could be that stumbling block! I have heard her—I have seen the light in her that may ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... nineteenth, and most of us would be out of place in the world of a hundred years hence. But all higher minds are much more akin than they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences of mankind—Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More—meet in a higher sphere above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates ...
— Sophist • Plato
... of officialism permeated the bank through and through; even the bank solicitors, the Messrs. Freshfields, were merely "highly respectable," and sometimes when that term is applied in England it indicates mediocrity. The Freshfields managed to spend four hundred and fifty thousand dollars of the bank's money in our prosecution. That fact alone would have ruined the reputation of any law firm in America, but the ring of toadies ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... 'poems' sent me by young people of both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about him or her, busy with some useful calling,—too busy to be tagging rhymed ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... have brilliant astronomers and poor astronomers, as we have correct mathematicians and incorrect ones, so we may have phrenologists whose discoveries and whose workmanship may command the admiration of the world, those whose talents are of the order of mediocrity, and those ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... classes. The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] because Mr. Bright always has in ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... is true. As for the joyous and lepid consul, he jokes upon neutral flags and frauds, jokes upon Irish rebels, jokes upon northern and western and southern foes, and gives himself no trouble upon any subject; nor is the mediocrity of the idolatrous deputy of the slightest use. Dissolved in grins, he reads no memorials upon the state of Ireland, listens to no reports, asks ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... tries to amuse his public by familiar methods, writes confidently, in his candid mediocrity, works intended only for the ignorant and idle crowd. But those who are conscious of the weight of centuries of past literature, whom nothing satisfies, whom everything disgusts because they dream of something better, to whom the bloom is off everything, and who always are impressed with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the school in question was the one for which they were best fitted. It may well be understood, therefore, what a medley my classes presented, and how unlikely it was, in the face of all these drawbacks, that their acquirements should be above mediocrity. On the score of natural abilities, however—in quickness of perception, facility in generalization, readiness and coherence of expression, and clearness of head generally—it would not be at haphazard one could find an equal number ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various |
