The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.

- Ayn Rand

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

- Arthur Conan Doyle

Perseverance, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

- Ambrose Bierce

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.

- Scott Alexander

Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

- Chet Atkins

The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.

- Virginia Woolf

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.

- Kathleen Norris

Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.

- Sigmund Freud

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

- William M. Winans

You always admire what you really don't understand.

- Blaise Pascal

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

- Fulton J. Sheen

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.

- Ayn Rand

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

- Margaret Mead

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

- Lily Tomlin

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.

- Sophia Loren



Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

- William E. Gladstone



People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

- Andrew Carnegie



Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.

- Albert Einstein



Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

- Max Beerbohm



There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

- Jean de La Bruyere



In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.

- Robert G. Ingersoll



Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

- Blaise Pascal



Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

- Joseph Heller