Mediocre Quotes - Page 12

• We don't become mediocre all at once, and we rarely do it on purpose.

  Seth Godin

  Entrepreneur, Purpose

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• What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

  Tahar Ben Jelloun

  War, Average, World

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• Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO - aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo - all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.

  Warren Buffett

  Business, Bingo, Gob

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• In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Dream, Horse, Dark

  Gustave Flaubert (1999). “Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hate, Home, Cities

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (2005). “Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940”, p.108, Cambridge University Press

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• Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.

  Dorothy Day

  Thank God, Problem

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• But to paraphrase Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, ignorance and mediocrity are forever busy, and the forces of mediocrity aren't content with being mediocre; they'll do everything in their power to prevent even the humblest of teachers and children from accomplishing anything extraordinary. For good work shines a light on the failures of the mediocre, and that is a light which terrifies those who conspire to keep our nation's children, like themselves, ordinary.

  Rafe Esquith

  Teacher, Children, Ignorance

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• Effort is between you, and you, and nobody elseI'm pissed off for greatness. Cause if you ain't pissed off for greatness, that just means you're okay with being mediocre, and ain't no man in here okay with just basic.

  Ray Lewis

  Mean, Greatness, Men

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• Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Crafts, Stealing, Great Writers

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• Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.

  Albert Einstein

  Political, Mind, Encounters

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• I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way.

  Reed Hastings

  Two, Focus, Way

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• I don't apologize for anything. When I make a mistake, I take the blame and go on from there. I just despise to lose, and that has taken a man of mediocre ability and made a pretty good coach out of him.

  Woody Hayes

  Mistake, Taken, Men

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• We create a standard for how we want to do things and everybody's got to buy into that standard or you really can't have any team chemistry. Mediocre people don't like high-achievers and high-achievers don't like mediocre people.

  Nick Saban

  Team, People, Want

  "Alabama coach Nick Saban's quest for perfection". "60 minutes" with Armen Keteyian, www.cbsnews.com. September 14, 2014.

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• Everyone has options. They are a fixed set of predetermined scenarios, points of view, perceived limitations that already reside in your data bank. If you depend on your options to formulate your future, that future will be no more than a rearrangement of your past. Then he says, “Possibilities are completely different. When you ask ‘what is possible?’ you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not ‘what are my options?’ but ‘What is possible?’

  Nicholas Lore

  Past, Views, Data

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• Possibilities are completely different. When you ask 'what is possible?' you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not 'what are my options?' but 'What is possible?'

  Nicholas Lore

  Imagination, Different, Possibility

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• Every issue of the paper presents an opportunity and a duty to say something courageous and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular prejudice. I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.

  Joseph Pulitzer

  Independent, Hard Work, Opportunity

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• In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous.

  Camille Paglia

  Real, Smart, Skills

  Playboy Interview, May 1995.

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• I am a very mediocre intellect, at best, and I am smarter than most people I know - and that terrifies me.

  Doug Stanhope

  People, Intellect, Knows

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• I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

  Donna Tartt

  Book, Writing, Ten

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• If any of you have a desire to be mediocre, you will probably find that you have already achieved your ambition.

  Hugh B. Brown

  Ambition, Desire, Ifs

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• If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

  Tony Judt

  Citizens, Forfeit, Servant

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.84, Penguin

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• A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character... the artist on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature.

  Auguste Rodin

  Art, Character, Eye

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• Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good.

  Shigeru Miyamoto

  Country, Art, Player

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• I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.

  Kent Beck

  People, Tools, Masters

  Twitter post from Nov 08, 2013

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• Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Exercise, Men, Duration

  "History and Utopia". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1960.

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