"Mediocre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dinner in her sitting-room with Old Jimmie and Miss Grierson—and of that dinner, mediocre and sloppy, and chilled by its transit of twelve stories from the kitchen, Miss Grierson, by way of an introductory lesson, made an august function, almost diagrammatic in its educational details. After the dinner, with Miss Grierson's slow and formal aid, which consisted mainly ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... shrewdness now and then, in his contempt of the showy exhibitors in public life. "The great orators," said he, "who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence, are in general men of the most mediocre talents. They should not be opposed in their own way, for they have always more noisy words at command than you. In my council there were men possessed of much more eloquence than I was, but I always defeated them by this simple ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... great deal upon the nature of the training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can ...
— Progress and History • Various
... 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 ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... succeeding him, and he became an authority and a pattern for many Russian writers, who imitated his pseudo-classical poetry, and even copied his language, as the acme of literary perfection. In reality, although he acquired a certain technical skill, he was a very mediocre poet; yet he was as an eagle among barnyard fowls, and cleverly made use of the remarkable possibilities of the Russian language as no other man did, although he borrowed his models from the pseudo-classical ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
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