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More "Mediocrity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was repugnant to him. Long since he had lost all interest in polar exploration. As he had said to Adler, he was out of it, finally and irrevocably. His bolt was shot; his role upon the stage of the world was ended. He only desired now to be forgotten as quickly as possible, to lapse into mediocrity as easily and quietly as he could. Fame was nothing to him now. The thundering applause of an entire world that had once been his was mere noise, empty and meaningless. He did not care to reawaken it. The appearance of his book he knew was expected and waited for in every civilised nation of the ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... engagement, at an advance of salary, came disenchantment. M. Auguste's services were now withdrawn, for the performer's object was attained; and the management for some time to come was saddled with mediocrity, purchased at a ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... mistake to judge him by his Latin writings, which, both in manner and style, seldom rise above the level of mediocrity. It is in his German books and pamphlets that Luther is seen at his best. There, he appears as a man of great ability and learning, gifted with a prodigious memory, a striking literary style, and a happy knack of seizing upon the weak ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... the thought; besides Italian poetry has innumerable licenses which make it easy to figure in the Tuscan Parnassus, and where anyone who can string together rime or versi sciolti is dignified with the appellation of a poet; whereas from French poetry, a mediocrity is and must be of necessity banished. Neither is it sufficient for an author to have sublime ideas; these must be filed and pruned. Inspiration can make a poet of a German, an Italian or an Englishman, because he may revel in unbounded license of metre and language, but in French poetry ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... and the least of Romans," said his daughter, rising and pointing at her father and then at the dwarf, "I am lost in mediocrity." ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... 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 ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... thought of being left behind, and being left poor; but even these did not grudge the family their brilliant reverse. There might have been much more envy in politer places. It seems probable that mediocrity of fortune would have been disposed to be less magnanimous than the Collegians, who lived from hand to mouth—from the pawnbroker's ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... literally the symbols and allegories of Oriental books as to ante-historical matters, is willfully to close our eyes against the Light. To translate the symbols into the trivial and commonplace, is the blundering of mediocrity. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... fiction, from which they 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. It was not ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... a happy 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 arms ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... always say," retorted Philip. "Everything is in the future. What guaranty have we for that future? I see none. We make no progress towards the higher arts, except in greater quantities of mediocrity. We sell larger editions of poor books. Our artists fill larger frames and travel farther for materials; but a ten-inch canvas would tell all they have ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... that struck the hour. Dashwood defended the taste of London, praised it as loyal, constant, faithful; to which his interlocutor retorted with some vivacity that it was faithful to sad trash. He justified this sally by declaring the play in rehearsal sad trash, clumsy mediocrity with all its convenience gone, and that the fault was the want of life in the critical sense of the public, which was ignobly docile, opening its mouth for its dose like the pupils of Dotheboys Hall; not insisting on something ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... nearest way to come unto glory were to do that for conscience which we do for glory.... The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in going orderly. Her greatness is not exercised in greatness; in mediocrity it is." ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... so essential to the even-balance as humour. The schoolmaster without this humanising virtue never yet won your love and admiration, and to miss your affection and loyalty is to lose one of life's chiefest delights. You are as quick to detect the humbug who hides his mediocrity behind an affectation of dignity as was dear old Yorick, of whom you will read when you have got to know the sweetness of Catullus. This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman's epigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... progress of his lectures, often wavered, often altered, and grew more confused as he lived longer to look about him.[A] The infirm votaries of the new philosophy, with all their sources of genius open before them, went on multiplying mediocrity, while inherent genius, true to nature, still continued rare in ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... for whereas the former change from tavern to tavern, according as they find good wine, and only think of joyous living; the latter in their homes, with the frugality of merchants, who for the most part make but do not spend money, or with the moderation of orderly burghers, never exceed mediocrity. Nevertheless there are not wanting families, who keep a splendid table and live like nobles, such as the Antinori, the Bartolini, the Tornabuoni, the Pazzi, the Borgherini, the Gaddi, the Rucellai, and among the Salviati, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... senses. Said he, "I never lived high, my food was always plain, and I eat now the same things I did formerly." For organs so enfeebled as his, and for so long a time, to regain their powers to so great an extent, denotes a native energy of constitution, far above the standard of mediocrity. ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey
... in dissipation had left him with a tolerably well-filled wardrobe, his efforts in love had brought him tears and a commonplace mistress, whom he kept in the necessaries of life in various lodging- houses. So his youth had passed; but in all this mediocrity a certain spirit of resistance endured. His taste for figures grew more pronounced; he surrounded himself with account books, letter books, and diaries; he took note of every penny that passed through his hands. Money-making, profitable investments—that was to be his aim in life; ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... fine arts, as well as in literature, a levelling principle is going on, fatal, perhaps, to excellence, but favourable to mediocrity. Such facilities are afforded to imitative talent, that whatever is imitable will be imitated. Genius will often be suppressed by this, and when it exerts itself, will find it far more difficult to obtain notice than in former times. There is the evil here that ingenious persons are ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... resolved thereupon to possess my soul in peace all the residue of my days, to take my full farewell of State employments, to satisfy my mind with the mediocrity of worldly living that I had of mine own, and so to retire ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... be content with mediocrity, there is scarcely anything to be said where the conditions are so favorable. But suppose one is not content with mediocrity. Then this highly favored soil is but the vantage-ground from which skill enters on a course of thorough preparation and high culture. A man may plow, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the Spectator, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor worse than other {362} imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which have won them enduring favor. Such are his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... that canonizes, we evoke a very human, living personality: a man of keen intellect, of ardent and emotional temperament, autocratic, fanatical, fastidious, and beauty-loving; a loyal friend; an unpleasant enemy. "He saw black black and white white, for him there was no gray." He was impatient of mediocrity. "He could not ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... cruelly her almighty power in the military state, where justice, punishments and rewards alone ought to be the base of it. Men conduct themselves from the view either of honor or interest; and there can be no emulation in a service where mediocrity of talents, intrigues, favor, ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone
... much fright upon seeing a large mastiff, denotes that you will experience inconvenience because of efforts to rise above mediocrity. If a woman dreams this, she will marry a wise and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... manifested itself for similar privileges in young people who had not previously shown even interest enough to attend our winter night schools. This is the best evidence that inroads are being made into that natural apathy which is content with mediocrity or even inferiority. This is everywhere the world's most subtle enemy. Even if selfishness or envy has been the motive, the fact remains that they have often kindled that discontent with the past which Charles Kingsley preached as necessary ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Lancaster-road Chapel three months, and, unlike many new parsons, he had more sense than preach his best sermons first—than make a grand pyrotechnic dash at the onset and settle down into a round of prating mediocrity afterwards. When tried he gave the people a fair average specimen of what he could do—did not say his best nor his commonest things; began with a fire which he could keep up; and the result is not disappointment, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... and nothing to attract him in what he sees. He suddenly enters the chapel; and here all richness is massed, all fancy is embodied, art of all styles and periods is blended to one perfection. He passes from it into another suite of rooms, half fearful of fresh surprise; and decent mediocrity, respectable commonplace again meet him on every side. Thus, it seems to him, was the imagination of Christopher Smart for one moment transfigured by the flames of madness to resume for ever afterwards the prosaic character of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... structure. This lucidity is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he seldom attempts imagery of the bolder kind, and never has thoughts of a subtle or complex order. Yet it would be very unjust to regard such clearness as merely a compensatory merit of lyric mediocrity, or to ignore its intimate connexion with the man's native grace of mind, with the artist's feeling for expression, with the poet's delicate skill. How many readers, who could enjoy and appreciate Pindar if he were less difficult, are stopped on the threshold by the aspect ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... his work as a critic. It is hardly necessary to say that his criticism was of the slashing kind. He became little short of a terror. With a great deal of critical acumen and a fine artistic sense, he made relentless war on pretentious mediocrity, and rendered good service to American letters by enforcing higher literary standards. He was lavish in his charges of plagiarism; and he made use of cheap, second-hand learning in order to ridicule the pretended scholarship ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... their feelings by the sacrifice of security of surface and durability of hue. The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so many ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... others do for the bar, and that he will probably be considered in the House for some time merely as a political adventurer. But if he has the talent and prudence requisite to ensure distinction in the line of his profession, the mediocrity of his original condition will reflect honour on his success, should he hereafter acquire influence and consideration as a statesman. Of his literary talents I know you do not think very highly, nor am I inclined to rank the powers of his mind much beyond those ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... only 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... was at height of well-earned fame, he for a while played three several parts on the same night. Bold advertisement announced "Toole in Three Pieces." Being just the kind of joke that has the widest run over the low level of mediocrity, it filled the gallery and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... the privileged few of education and fortune. But do not misunderstand me. I do not ask poets, novelists, and painters to descend from the heights and walk along the mountain-sides, finding their satisfaction in mediocrity; but, on the contrary, to mount higher. The truly popular is not that which appeals to a certain class of society ordinarily called the common people; the truly popular is what is common to all classes and unites them. The sources of inspiration ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... things tore your heart, and made the treachery still more horrible by the contrast between the riches that eluded your outstretched hand and the ignoble mediocrity in which you were doomed ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... improbable but that the history of every nation affords us abundant examples of such men; while the middle class, who are neither stimulated by the calls of penury, nor pushed forward by hereditary interest, naturally retain a contented mediocrity ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... a year; gradually I ripened. The electoral struggles of the closing days of the Empire left me cold; I was the son neither of a Senator nor a proscript and I had but to outlive, no matter what the regime, the traditions of mediocrity and wretchedness long since adopted by my family. The law pleased me but little. I thought that the Code had been purposely maldirected in order to furnish certain people with an opportunity to wrangle, to the utmost limit, over the ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... an irresistible force; and he stands excused from the duty of patriotic posturing. He is a Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally comprehensible. What is wanting to his universal success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tenderness. He neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs. The disregard of these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... brawny limbs rolled carelessly in the warm but somewhat unsavory skin of the dead monarch of the forest. I gloried in his calm repose; for the day was yet young, and I flattered myself that a three-hours' snooze would restore his muddled intellects to their normal mediocrity of useful instinct, and that I might still achieve my triumphal entry into the city,—a procession I had been so much in the habit of picturing to myself over the nocturnal camp-fire, that it had become a sort of nightmare with me. Indeed, I had idealized ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... my leane entrailes hath this prodigy burst forth, so please your grace. Naught doth so befit ye grete as grete performance; and haply shall ye finde yt 'tis not from mediocrity this miracle hath issued. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... earthward flung, sink to oblivion's rest Self-sought, 'midst careless acquiescence, seems Strange fate, e'en for a thing of schemes and dreams; But CAESAR's simulacrum, seen by day, Scarce envious CASCA's self would stoop to slay, And mounting mediocrity, once o'erthrown, Need fear—or hope—no dagger save ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... improvement of New Brunswick a year hence, and, in order to do so, must not neglect one moment. Another object which claims my notice very urgently is the establishment of laws regulating a better system of education. The grammar school is in a state of mediocrity, its support not being secured on a proper basis. We want a college—an institution where our young men can receive a thorough education and be fitted for ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... conclusion fixed by authority, whose very survival depends on the perennial stationariness of their understanding. Another essay attempts a vivacious criticism of "common honesty," the moral standard of the average decent citizen, a code of negative virtues and moral mediocrity which is content to avoid the obvious unsocial sins and concerns itself but little to enforce positive benevolence. The reader who would meet Godwin at his best should turn to the essay On Servants. Starting from the universal reluctance of the upper ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... nouns, which, though really regular in respect to possessing the two forms for the two numbers, are not free from irregularity in the manner of their application. Thus means is the regular plural of mean; and, when the word is put for mediocrity, middle point, place, or degree, it takes both forms, each in its proper sense; but when it signifies things instrumental, or that which is used to effect an object, most writers use means for ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... first thing he saw now was Minks, his friendly, ridiculous little confidential secretary. From all the crowds of men and women he knew, respected, and enjoyed in London, as from the vast deluge of human mediocrity which for him was London, he picked out suddenly—little Minks—Herbert Montmorency Minks. His mind, that is, darting forward in swift, comprehensive survey, and searching automatically for some means whereby it might continue the happiness and sweetness recently enjoyed, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... them 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 about three days Remaining enjoyment is the indulgence of frank ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... said my host; 'I know myself too well to think of applying for assistance to any one. Were I to become a parliamentary orator, I should wish to be an original one, even if not above mediocrity. What pleasure should I take in any speech I might make, however original as to thought, provided the gestures I employed and the very modulation of my voice were not my own? Take lessons, indeed! why, the fellow who taught ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... very 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws its beams ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... never taken life easy, as he had never had anything but his monthly salary. His life had been uneventful, without emotions, without hopes. The faculty of dreaming with which every one is blessed had never developed in the mediocrity ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... cultivation. It is only a brutal and sluggish nation, who cannot be made to feel, as well as think. The cultivation necessary, however, is not that which consists in forcing the whole body of the people to become conceited smatterers; but that which provides a full supply of models for mediocrity to copy, and for talent to rival. It is evident, that common sense requires us to pursue one of two courses; either to give true talent, in every field—in literature, in music, painting, sculpture, architecture—some share of the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... have got through your poetry: it has been a weary task! The writer has a good deal of fire, but it is rarely a very bright flame. Here and there we see it just blaze, and then sink into mediocrity. He is too redundant and tiresome.... 'Tis a great disadvantage to read them in MS., as one cannot readily turn to passages; but life is too short to be peeping into other peoples' MSS. I prefer your prose to your verse. Let me know if you receive it safely, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... moral qualities for after-ages to admire, he had beyond any man of modern times. But to suppose that in other respects he belonged to the ranks of mediocrity is not only a contradiction in terms, but utterly false. It was not character that fought the Trenton campaign and carried the revolution to victory. It was military genius. It was not character that read the future of America and created our foreign policy. It was statesmanship of the highest ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sprawling frescos by youths whose ambition is vaster than their genius; and finished and accomplished works of art are set off by the foils of unnumbered pieces of unformed and not very promising mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or careful academical studies of groups ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... artist who played Cherubino. 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
... fair-play. Of course, I am not speaking of it as a governing body. In that character it has been towards Ireland always ignorant and nearly always unfair. I am treating it simply as an assembly of men, and I say of it, it is a body where sooner or later every man finds his proper level, where mediocrity and insincerity will never permanently succeed, and where ability and honesty of purpose will ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... of tawdriness, theatricality, and ballad pathos. There are some authors of whom it may be said that they will never better themselves. They are born with a certain rhapsodic gift of commonness, a gift which neither improves nor deteriorates. Richly dowered with crass mediocrity, they proceed from the cradle to the grave at one low dead level. We suspect that Mr. Knight is of these. In saying that it is a pity that he ever took up a pen, we have no desire to seem severe. He is doubtless a quite excellent ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... against the reactionary forces of Europe, which combined to put an end to what was called his ambition to dominate the whole of creation. He foretold with amazing accuracy that from his ashes there would spring up sectional wars for a time, and ultimately the selfsame elements of vicious mediocrity that destroyed him would bring about a world-conflict which ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... astonished. Swindler is nothing but a word of two syllables. S, W, I, N, D—swind; L, E, R—ler; Swindler. Definition: A moral agriculturist; a man who cultivates the field of human sympathy. I am that moral agriculturist, that cultivating man. Narrow-minded mediocrity, envious of my success in my profession, calls me a Swindler. What of that? The same low tone of mind assails men in other professions in a similar manner—calls great writers scribblers—great generals, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. In the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull leveling to mediocrity.(6) ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, Gain,—these make the general character of the middling class, the unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the shallow to applaud. Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we will ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at table, the young girl could not refrain from furtively watching the man whom they wished to compel her to marry. Never had she seen such intense self-complacency coupled with such utter mediocrity. It was evident that he was doing his best to produce a favorable impression; but as the dinner progressed, his conversation became rather venturesome. He gradually grew extremely animated; and three or four adventures of garrison life ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... 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
... no conception of what it means to shape your life to your income. I am poor, and I know. Years ago I had to choose between mediocrity and"—he looked at her peculiarly—"and love, or advancement alone. I had to choose, and fixing my choice upon the higher aim, I had to put everything else out of my life. The thought is intolerable that my name should always ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is found the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism. They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... often recalled harshly from my dreamy region by the cruel penury of my home, which was partly attributable to the unavailing expense incurred for me. Crops had failed during successive years, and reverses of fortune had changed the humble mediocrity of my parents into comparative want. When on Sundays I went to see my mother, she spoke of her distress, and before me shed tears that she concealed from my father and my sisters. I, too, was reduced to extreme destitution. ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... his coadjutors, or that either the demand or the profits will be any way near equal to his expectations. His specimens already published [three numbers of the 'American Magazine'] are below mediocrity, and even in them he is too much the hero of the tale. His plan of a Federal publication, if sensible, judicious men could be engaged to execute it, and an editor of the same stamp could be procured, I think would do well. Considering circumstances, I would not advise you to engage with, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... mind, she began to think of other causes for regret. After all, it was something to be Countess of Castlewell. She felt that she could play the part well, in spite of all Lady Augusta's coldness. She would soon live the Lady Augusta down into a terrible mediocrity. And then again, there would be dreams of Frank Jones. Frank Jones had been utterly banished. But if an elderly gentleman is desirous that his future wife shall think of no Frank Jones, he had better not begin by calling the father of that young ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... no place where an able person finds his level quicker than in the House of Commons, composed as it is for the most part, of more or less wealthy or frantic mediocrities. But Geoffrey was not a mediocrity, he was an exceedingly able and powerful man, and this fact the ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... look what Jews set up to be—God's witnesses!" interrupted Strelitski. "This mediocrity may pass in the rest of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Maintenon, without enumerating such great writers and leaders of salons as Mme. de Rambouillet, Mlle. de Scudery, Mme. de Lambert, Mme. de Sevigne, and Mme. de la Fayette? The seventeenth century could tolerate no mediocrity; grandeur was in the very atmosphere; its political movements were great movements; it produced in art a Poussin, in letters a Corneille, in science ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... it's the middle—the medium mediocrity—that's irreconcilable with either end," she retorted. "For instance, I led a life of severe asceticism all last Lent." There were incredulous smiles, though the statement was perfectly correct. "It's a course I could confidently recommend to you," she proceeded, unheeding; "of late you have ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... 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, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... are but few, gently born. They are generous and broad-minded. They could not be mine own people otherwise. They are all I care about. I shun mediocrity as I would the plague. I refuse to permit it to touch me, either with words or with deeds. The good opinion of those I love is dear to me; as for the rest of the world!" She snapped her fingers to ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... course of the last twenty years, society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of which are genuine, some only false ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... happiness to a gentleman, a scholar, a philosopher, rest in a greater or lesser income? On the contrary, is it not oftener to be found in a happy competency or mediocrity? Suppose my dear Mr. B. had five thousand pounds a year added to his present large income, would that increase his happiness? That it would add to his cares, is no question; but could it give him one single comfort which he has not already? And if the ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... product should increase, or else if its production should become less costly, the balance of exchange would turn to the advantage of the producer, whose condition would thus be raised from fatiguing mediocrity to idle opulence. This phenomenon of depreciation and enrichment is manifested under a thousand forms and by a thousand combinations; it is the essence of the passional and intriguing game of commerce and industry. And this is the lottery, full of traps, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... marble buildings; lights are her diamond ornaments, and her perfume is the cool fragrance of night air. Almost all cities, and almost all women, look their best at night, and there are those which, though beautiful by night, sink, in their daylight aspect, to utter mediocrity. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and mediocrity. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... told Periculosae rem aleae esse, de iis scribere quibus sis obstrictus; because it is so difficult to observe a mediocrity, where our affections are engaged: But your Majesty is as secure from flattery, as your Virtues are above its reach; and to write thus of ill Princes, were both a shame and a punishment: For this the Senate ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... by his official or honorary title, with all due respect for the worth which the world recognizes—even though the wearer of such honors ignores his own claim to high distinction. "Blow your own trumpet, if you would hear it sound," is a sharply sarcastic bit of advice, since only hopeless mediocrity could ever profit by the injunction. Real merit needs no trumpeter. Mrs. Grant could afford to call her husband "Mr." Grant, as was her modest custom; because all the world knew that he was the General of our armies, ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the wives of dull and steady mediocrity. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... us unskilled mediocrity is the popular level because it is within the reach of everyone in a democracy. With the German, high skilled, highly instructed efficiency is the ideal. The failure of America to rise into the expert level is due to our unenforced higher education. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... the power of influence. The politicians talk about the soundness of the instincts of the people Something more than instinct is wanted in a democracy. Instincts are not progressive. Individualism, the pleasure of the moment, and mediocrity are represented too much by instincts and in every expression of the mere will of the majority. People in the mass are governed too much by impulse. Conduct and purpose are too discontinuous and fragmentary; or perhaps we had better say that the stimuli ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... "It is mostly of wind-instruments," King himself often taking part with his flute; "performers the best in Europe. He has three"—what shall we call them? of male gender,—"a counter-alt, and Mamsell Astrua, an Italian; they are unique voices. He cannot bear mediocrity. It is but seldom he has any singing here. To be admitted, needs the most intimate favor; now and then some young Lord, of distinction, if he meet with such." Concert, very well;—but let us now, suppressing any little abhorrences, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Russian Czar once laid a ruler across the map of his empire and, drawing a straight line from Moscow to Petersburg, commanded his engineers: "Build me a railroad to run like that." Genius has winged conceptions; it sees things as a completed whole from the first; it is only mediocrity which permits itself to be ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... of thirty-five years, had been crowded a wealth of incident and experience that seldom falls to the lot of the most fortunate men in this commercialized era whose tendency is to pull nations like individuals down to a common level of mediocrity, and seems bent upon extinguishing even their few remaining national traits ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... much confidence, and too violent a manner of speaking, which these teachers seem so much to dread, have as Dr. Johnson calls it, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, and a torpid apathy. These must be roused by something strong and excessive, or they will never rise even to mediocrity; while the few who have a tendency to rant, are very easily reclaimed; and ought to be treated in pronunciation and action, as Quintillion advises to do in composition; that is, we should rather allow of an exuberance, than, by ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... I am especially impressed by Cicero's dramatic power. But for the mediocrity of his poetic genius, he might have won pre-eminent honor from the Muse of Tragedy. He here so thoroughly enters into the feelings of Laelius with reference to Scipio's death, that as we read we forget ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... there is still more prejudice to be found. It is here where the Negro has his fiercest battle ground; it is here where he finds his greatest opposition. It is only following out the idea of the French writer who said, "Mediocrity alone is jealous." The constant desire of this class of white people to rise to the highest level aggravates them upon seeing a Negro reaching out for or obtaining in any way that which they may have or may be seeking, and they "take it out" by greater assumption ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... first three quarters of the eighteenth century the literature of Holland, like that of other countries of Europe, with the exception of France, remained stationary, or slowly declined. But in the midst of universal mediocrity, a few names shine with distinguished lustre. Among them that of Poot (1689-1732) is commonly cited with those of Hooft and Vondel. He was a young peasant, whose rare genius found expression in a sweet and unaffected style. He excelled in idyllic and erotic poetry, and while he has no rival ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... nothing could have restrained him from falling back on despondency or despair. Yet even to his final sermon, he maintained his preeminence; and in no one discourse of his last years, did he decline into mediocrity, or fail to remind the elder part of his audience of a period when his ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... the Moon" - was again manifested in him by the production of numberless poetical effusions, in which his own poignant anguish and Miss Patty's incomparable attractions were brought forward in verses of various degrees of mediocrity. They were also equally varied in their style and treatment; one being written in a fierce and gloomy Byronic strain, while another followed the lighter childish style of Wordsworth. To this latter class, perhaps, belonged ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... superimpendentes of Catullus; 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 instance the effects, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Mean without a hint Of brave extravagance that breaks the rule. The master of the mansion was no fool Assuredly, no genius just as sure! Safe mediocrity had scorned the lure Of now too much and now too little cost, And satisfied me sight was never lost Of moderate design's accomplishment In ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... mother, I never had any affection for politics; and unless a man could be a modern Pitt, I don't see the use of that kind of thing. Every young Englishman turns his face towards the House of Commons, as the sunflower turns to the sun-god; and see what a charming level of mediocrity ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the present year showed me a necessity 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
... Captain Belliot, her host, was standing, shook hands with him, and left the ship. Many eyes had followed her with curiosity and interest; and many tongues made remarks about her when she was gone, expressing positive opinions with the confident conceit of mediocrity, although she had not at that time made any sign of what manner of person she really was. She had only been a week amongst them, and her mind had been in a state of passive receptivity the whole time, subject to the impressions which might be made upon it, but not itself producing any. It ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... that fixes the type he admires. When there are no more enemies, "the bond and constraint of the old discipline severs," and a rapid decay sets in; which leads inevitably, after a chaos of individualism, to a period of mediocrity such as the present. In other words, so soon as its political and social activities are confined to "lording it," the aristocracy loses its vigor, and falls an easy prey to democratic or other propagandists who want something and are united ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... monarchs—Elizabeth, Henri Quatre, Gustavus Adolphus; but they were mostly bred up in adversity, succeeded to the throne by the unexpected failure of nearer heirs, or had to contend with great difficulties in the commencement of their reign. Since European life assumed a settled aspect, any thing above mediocrity in an hereditary king has become extremely rare, while the general average has been even below mediocrity, both in talent and in vigor of character. A monarchy constitutionally absolute now only maintains itself in existence ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... 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 of Clanranald, and Hector the Lamiter, bard of M'Lean, were ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... prevalent style of heavy mediocrity; the melodrama was not bad enough to laugh at nor good enough to excite. But the master, turning wearily to the child, was astonished and felt something like self-accusation in noticing the peculiar effect upon her excitable ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... celebrity than any other York typographer. Gent was an engraver as well as printer, and was the author of a History of York, and other works. As a printer his work was wretched; there is little to be said for him as an engraver; while as an author he was below mediocrity. Nevertheless, he deserves credit for the interest he took in the history of York. His history of that city was published in small octavo in 1730, and he followed it up in 1735 with Annales Regioduni Hullini, or The ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... 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 ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... He would Love Her" George Etherege To Aenone Robert Herrick To Anthea, who may Command him Anything Robert Herrick The Bracelet: To Julia Robert Herrick To the Western Wind Robert Herrick To my Inconstant Mistress Thomas Carew Persuasions to Enjoy Thomas Carew Mediocrity in Love Rejected Thomas Carew The Message Thomas Heywood "How Can the Heart forget Her" Francis Davison To Roses in the Bosom of Castara William Habington To Flavia Edmund Waller "Love not Me for Comely Grace" Unknown "When, Dearest, I but Think of Thee" Suckling or Felltham A Doubt of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... earl of Leicester, whose haughty and grasping spirit led him to covet distinction and authority in every line, was eagerly soliciting the supreme command of this important armament; and in spite of the general mediocrity of his talents and his very slight experience in the art of war, his partial mistress had the weakness to indulge him in this unreasonable and ill-advised pretension. The title of general of the queen's auxiliaries in Holland was conferred upon him, and with it a command over the whole English ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... he stigmatizes the abuses of administration, and "Dead Souls," that classic work which de Voguee judges worthy of being given a place in universal literature, between "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas," and which, in a series of immortal types, flagellates the moral emptiness and the mediocrity of life in high Russian society ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... succession of 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 ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... of the high culture of certain 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 and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... most. And when I fire to a thing, most always I can manage somehow. You yourself have engineered for me every profitable commission I've ever had. What's more, Kenny, if ever once you'd put into real art the dreadful energy I've put into my mediocrity—" ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the human race to overcome the resistance of the Sphinx. The philosophy of the complex vision implies the difficult attainment of an elaborate harmony. It regards "philosophy" as the most difficult of all "works of art." What it seems to be suspicious of in pragmatism is a tendency to seek mediocrity rather than beauty, and a certain humorous opportunism rather than the quiet of an eternal vision. It seems to look in vain in "Pragmatism" for that element of the impossible, for that strain of Quixotic faith, in which no high work of art is found to be lacking. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Somehow he wants audacity, fears the public, and, what is worse, fears the shadow of his own reputation. He is a great corrector too, which succeeds as ill in composition as in education. Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce, and many an original composition corrected into mediocrity. Yet Tom Campbell ought to have done a great deal more. His youthful promise was great. John Leyden introduced me to him. They afterwards quarrelled. When I repeated Hohenlinden to Leyden, he said, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... excel, When mediocrity does quite as well? 'Tis women buy the books,—and read 'em, say, What time a person nods, en negligee, And in default of gossip, cards, or dance, Resolves t' incite a ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... known that the extremes of the race are less fertile than the means; and since fertility is the chief factor in fixing the type, in the absence of selection and repression, the race appears doomed to remain at the dead level of mediocrity. The tremendous significance of this fact is that the welfare of the race—the gradual substitution of a superior for the present mediocre type—rests absolutely upon the willingness and ability of the superior class to do their full ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... years of age, a man of dark hue, size and height about mediocrity, and mental ability ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... know of the ways of heaven! And yet, in this respect, they are direct; the hands before me, were designed to pull a rope, knock down a sheep, or perform the servile offices of life; no "mute, inglorious poet" rests amongst them, and he who is superior to his fellow, does not rise above mediocrity. The genius that sprouts from a dunghil soon shakes off the heterogenous mass; those only grovel, who have ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... dramatist, 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 ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... it? [1755]"In prosperity we are insolent and intolerable, dejected in adversity, in all fortunes foolish and miserable." [1756]"In adversity I wish for prosperity, and in prosperity I am afraid of adversity. What mediocrity may be found? Where is no temptation? What condition of life is free?" [1757]"Wisdom hath labour annexed to it, glory, envy; riches and cares, children and encumbrances, pleasure and diseases, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the scrutiny of the Grindstone. He glanced round the walls of the gallery, and here and there a canvas due to one hand or another that had co-operated in the rival scheme came to his view. He made silent, acidulous comments on certain manifestations of mediocrity placed there by men so much better quartered, better known, better circumstanced than himself. "Never mind," he said; "next year I shall be here, and then the difference will be seen by everybody." Well might the director welcome work from one who had distanced all others in a ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... found to be old varieties re-named; others, although sold at high prices and asserted to be prodigies, were seen to be comparatively worthless when growing by the side of good old standard sorts; the majority never rose above mediocrity under ordinary treatment; but now and then one, like the Sharpless, fulfilled the ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... there passed through the courts 3,870 children under seventeen years of age, 10,449 under twenty years, and 25,580 under twenty-five years of age. But it is not the actual delinquency of which the law takes account that most impresses one; it is rather the weight of failure and mediocrity, the host of "seconds" and "culls" that the city treatment ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... the field in which the conscious purpose cherished on Quaker Hill would have wrought its best efforts. But personality was always on Quaker Hill inhibited, restrained and schooled into mediocrity. Variation was repressed. Spontaneity was forbidden. Ingenuous spirits were firmly and effectively directed into channels believed to ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... being 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the necessity of cozening, beguiling, managing its members. The vast majority of these fall into a broad zone of mediocrity which embodies group character and represents a general adjustment to life-conditions. From this medial area individuals vary, some in ways which aid the group in its competition, others in a fashion which imperils ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... performances at the theatre and then is loud in his abuse, declaring that authors ought to represent only ideal women, and so on. You have omitted to consider also that a good gynaecologist cannot be a stupid man or a mediocrity. Intellect has a brighter lustre than baldness, but you have noticed the baldness and emphasized it—and have flung the intellect overboard. You have noticed, too, and emphasized that a fat man—brrr!— exudes a ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... removed to Paris, settling in the Marais quarter. Honore continued his studies at two different schools successively, first at the Lepitre school, in the Rue Saint-Louis, and then at the establishment of Sganzer and Bauzelin, in the Rue de Thorigny, where he continued to display the same mediocrity and the same indifference regarding the tasks required of him. Having finished the prescribed courses, he returned to his family, which at this time was living at No. 40, Rue du Temple, and his father decided that he should study ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... bow down before mediocrity, frigidly polite mediocrity which you despise—and obey. On more mature reflection, I have discovered the reasons of these glaring inconsistencies. Mediocrity is never out of fashion, it is the daily wear of society; genius and ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... men, and polyandry a great many women, to 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 ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... are true to type; they each first exhaust the possibility of error, and when no wrong course is left, the right road becomes quite easy. The only difference is in the motive. Ours is mostly because social influence is always on the side of educated mediocrity, and theirs because self, coupled with corruption, is their natural incentive to all exertion. We have a different standard; all our theories of Government preclude the possibility of hidden personal advantage in the transaction of State business. The Russian ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready 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, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... do, when she knows that an epoch of feeling is rounded off, finished, dead? Go back to her story-books, her dress-making, her worsted-work? Shall she attempt to rise to mediocrity on the piano or in drawing, distribute tracts, become secretary of a Dorcas society? or shall she turn her mind to the matter of cultivating another lover at once? Few of us women have courage enough to shoulder out the corpses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... disposal? I do not think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrate gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of mediocrity. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... erudition and more practised delivery; but now his voluble gift of words deserted him. "He was much obliged to them," he said; "though perhaps, on the whole, it was better that men who placed themselves in a mediocre condition should be left to their mediocrity. He had no doubt himself of the justness of the lists. It would be useless for him to say that he had not aspired; all the world"—it was all the world to him—"knew too well that he had aspired. But he ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Great people, if it pleases them to do so, beat us. I have received blows from them. It is their prerogative; and they lose nothing of their greatness by breaking our bones. The ossifrage is a species of eagle. Let us venerate the sceptre, which is the first of staves. Respect is prudence, and mediocrity is safety. To insult the king is to put oneself in the same danger as a girl rashly paring the nails of a lion. They tell me that you have been prattling about the farthing, which is the same thing as the liard, and that you ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of publication were the Monthly, the Critical, the British Critic, and the Anti-Jacobin. The latter was preeminently vulgar in its appeal, the Critical had lost its former prestige, and the other two had never risen above a level of mediocrity. There was more than a lurking suspicion that these periodicals were, to a certain extent, booksellers' organs, quite unreliable on account of the partial and biassed criticisms which they offered the dissatisfied public. The ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... constitution, and with an easy temper, which yielded to the influence of companions inferior to himself, except in bodily vigour and more sturdy will, Arthur Beaufort had been ruined by prosperity. His talents and acquirements, if not first-rate, at least far above mediocrity, had only served to refine his tastes, not to strengthen his mind. His amiable impulses, his charming disposition and sweet temper, had only served to make him the dupe of the parasites that feasted on the lavish heir. His heart, frittered away ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... attributed to the young girl and the bourgeois of the terrace, can only result from love or interest. Now between these two there could be no love; and as to interest, the thing was still less probable; for, if they were not in absolute poverty, their situation was certainly not above mediocrity—not even that gilded mediocrity of which Horace speaks, with a country house at Tibur and Montmorency, and which results from a pension of thirty thousand sestercia from the Augustan treasury, or a government annuity of six thousand ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... these, the brilliant air and lively effrontery of Captain Kendal secured him a warm acceptance; and by frequenting the circle of Lady Emlyn, he had not only the gratification of escaping from the insipid mediocrity of the home his vices had created, but acquired the power of indulging in others which were now ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... construction (1520); the carve-work is quite like lace, so minutely elaborate. The interior possesses several interesting objects in architecture, and some inconsistencies, the pulpit is extremely curious, and its effect is very striking. There are also some pictures above mediocrity, principally by French artists of the past school. The tower of this church is famed from the desperate resistance which was made from it by a few young men in 1832 against ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... bursts of greatness followed by general mediocrity, with occasional great writers whose advent could not possibly have been predicted by anything in art preceding them. Even the exception to this in France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was apparently a flash of light that disappeared ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... merchandise before the public. Thus art and literature sink to the level of bad taste and speculation. The artistic individuality shrinks before the calculating reckoner. Not that which moves the artist or the writer most receives expression; the vacillating demands of mediocrity of every-day people must be satisfied. The artist becomes the helper of the dealer and the average men, who trot along in the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... without its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him—I could wish to say honestly—those historic and statistical data which, published in his elaborate work on the Prussian monarchy, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... that, "Very wise men and very fools do little harm; it is the mediocrity of wisdom that troubleth all the world."—He described, by a lively image, the differences which rise in argument: "Men, in arguing, are often carried by the force of words farther asunder than their question was at first; like ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Winckelmann may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that, by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one [188] chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... song of Victor Escousse, stifled by the pride which had been implanted in him by a factitious triumph, was for a time the "Marseillaise" of the volunteers of art who were bent on inscribing their names on the martyrology of mediocrity. ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... in transactions with foreign nations, ought to be exercised by none who are not thoroughly weaned from the prepossessions and habits incident to foreign birth and education. The term of nine years appears to be a prudent mediocrity between a total exclusion of adopted citizens, whose merits and talents may claim a share in the public confidence, and an indiscriminate and hasty admission of them, which might create a channel for foreign influence on ...
— The Federalist Papers
... grocers' shops and bought Italian paste foods without brawling over it. It was during this year that Goriot made the money, which, at a later time, was to give him all the advantage of the great capitalist over the small buyer; he had, moreover, the usual luck of average ability; his mediocrity was the salvation of him. He excited no one's envy, it was not even suspected that he was rich till the peril of being rich was over, and all his intelligence was concentrated, not on political, but on commercial speculations. Goriot was an authority second to none on all questions ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... to say, Teresa. There are deceptions everywhere, in the convent as in the world; and the mediocrity of the Sisters here is tiresome; one longs for a little more intelligence. And, as I was saying just now, everything declines; an idea ravels like a sleeve. Are you happy here?... You are not; I ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... the eugenic problem in the human is not, and never will be, as simple as it is in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. If we want to strive after healthy, normal mediocrity, then the principles of animal eugenics become applicable to the human race. If, on the other hand, we want talent, if we want genius, if we want benefactors of the human race, then we must go very slow with our ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... compose our power of spiritual observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open and liberal method, which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or disapproval, and fixes the standard either at the balance of common qualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon qualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud of blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from time to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 bias to the fact that such compositions were ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... intercourse of daily life as Madame Cornuel? Buffon was dull company; Newton was never in love; Lord Byron loved nobody but himself; Rousseau was gloomy and half crazy; La Fontaine absent-minded. Human energy, equally distributed, produces dolts, mediocrity in all; unequally bestowed it gives rise to those incongruities to whom the name of Genius is given, and which, if we only could see them, would look like deformities. The same law governs the body; perfect beauty is generally allied ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... you loved him; and no doubt Lesbia possessed the same ideal goodness for him. Love throws its own glamour,' he went on, and his voice was unusually grave; 'it does not believe in commonplace mediocrity; it lifts up its idol to some fanciful pedestal, where the poor thing feels very uncomfortable and out of its element, and then persists in falling down and worshipping it. We humans are very droll, Ursula: we ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the sodden sky from beneath a dripping slouch hat, Wilson was keenly alive to this. Each rubber-coated officer he passed affected him like an insolent intrusion. He brought home all the mediocrity of the night, all the shrilling gray, all the hunger, all the ache. These fellows took the color out of the picture, leaving only the cold details of a photograph. They were the men who swung open the street doors at the close of a matinee, admitting the stale ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... to mourn. God had blessed them with four children; children of whom they had just cause to be proud, for they early displayed talents which marked them as above mediocrity, but one after another, just after they had reached manhood and womanhood, they had fallen victims to that insidious disease, consumption, and the aged couple were left in their declining years, sad and lonely, like two aged trunks stript of ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... opposing authority and precedent to reason and progress; while they arrogate to themselves the right to point us to the path of duty, while they close the avenues of knowledge through public institutions, and monopolize the profits of labor, mediocrity and inferiority must be our portion. Shall we accept it, or ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... he wed that lustre might be added to the glory of the House? "I know a woman," Hagen replies, "the most glorious in the world. On a high rock is her throne; a fire surrounds her abode; only he who shall break through the fire may proffer his suit for Bruennhilde." Gunther's mediocrity and his sense of it stand ingenuously confessed in his question: "Is my courage sufficient for the test?" "The achievement is reserved for one stronger even than you." "Who is this unparalleled champion?" "Siegfried, the son of the Waelsungen.... He, grown ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... was in the talking vein. As to clever people's hating each other, I think a little extra talent does sometimes make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... huge fortune also had been lost in the slow decline which for a century past has been ruining the Roman patriziato. It had been necessary to sell the estates; the palace had emptied, gradually sinking to the mediocrity and bourgeois life of the new times. For their part the Boccaneras obstinately declined to contract any alien alliances, proud as they were of the purity of their Roman blood. And poverty was as nothing to them; ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... writer who signs himself S.P. (probably Simon Patrick, bishop of Ely), in a pamphlet called A Brief Account of the new Sect of Latitude Men (1662), vindicates their attachment to the "virtuous mediocrity" of the Church of England, as distinguished from the "meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squalid sluttery ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... born with faculties that are naturally adapted to the situation of a general, and if his talents do not fit the extraordinary casualties of war, he will never rise beyond mediocrity." ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... comparatively recent date, at least so far as the outward structure and internal decorations are concerned; the former being filled with pictures supplied by the modern school, all of which are said to be below mediocrity. ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the prevalent style of heavy mediocrity; the melodrama was not bad enough to laugh at nor good enough to excite. But the master, turning wearily to the child, was astonished and felt something like self-accusation in noticing the peculiar effect upon her excitable nature. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... this epistle is addressed, was schoolmaster of Ochiltree, and afterwards of New Lanark: he was a writer of verses too, like many more of the poet's comrades;—of verses which rose not above the barren level of mediocrity: "one of his poems," says Chambers, "was a laughable elegy on the death of the Emperor Paul." In his verses to Burns, under the name of a Tailor, there is nothing to laugh at, though they are intended to be laughable as ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Napoule the road is generally near the sea, passing over little hills or strings of vallies, the soil stony, and much below mediocrity in its quality. Here and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... We can say that we hold France. It is not because of our numbers, since there are only 25,000 Freemasons in this country [this was in 1889]. Nor is it because we are the brains, for you have been able to judge of the intellectual mediocrity of the greater number of these 25,000 Freemasons. We hold France because we are organized and the only people who are organized. But above all, we hold France because we have an aim, this aim is unknown; as it ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... my own security and independence, which constitutes, and is the only thing which does constitute, the proud and comfortable sentiment of freedom in the human breast. I know, too, and I bless God for my safe mediocrity; I know that if I possessed all the talents of the gentlemen on the side of the House I sit, and on the other, I cannot, by royal favour, or by popular delusion, or by oligarchical cabal, elevate myself ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... said my host; "I know myself too well to think of applying for assistance to any one. Were I to become a parliamentary orator, I should wish to be an original one, even if not above mediocrity. What pleasure should I take in any speech I might make, however original as to thought, provided the gestures I employed and the very modulation of my voice were not my own? Take lessons, indeed! why, the fellow who taught ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... hand of reason. He was an indefatigable worker, his mind was always actively alert. Versed alike in philology, archaeology, poetry, and philosophy, he was productive in each of these departments, without ever laying himself open to the charge of mediocrity. He was the creator of the Science of Judaism in the Italian language, but above all he was a ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... conceptions of Gustave Dore—teste for instance the weird pictures of "The Wandering Jew" already mentioned—George Cruikshank sinks at times into insignificance; and yet side by side with George Cruikshank, as a purely comic artist or caricaturist, Dore is beneath mediocrity. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Till from worse scenes released by death, at last. O my Victorio, this was not for thee The fitting age, or land. Great souls congenial times and climes demand. In mere repose we live content, And vulgar mediocrity; The wise man sinks, the mob ascends, Till all at last in one dread level ends. Go on, thou great discoverer! Revive the dead, since all the living sleep! Dead tongues of ancient heroes arm anew; Till ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... brief survey of history shows that every great nation has started from a small beginning and risen sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly to greatness; and then fallen, sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly, to mediocrity, dependence, or extinction; that the instrument which has effected the rise has always been military power, usually exerted by armies on the land, sometimes by navies on the sea; and that the instrument which has effected the actual fall has always been the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... maxims of Cato [148] 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 and emancipated posthumous children to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the contrary. "It is true," said he, "we can boast of no palaces nowadays, like Dryden's Ode to St. Cecilia's Day, but we have villages composed of very pretty houses." Goldsmith, however, maintained that there was nothing above mediocrity, an opinion in which Johnson, to whom it was repeated, concurred, and with reason, for the era was one of the dead ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... honorary title, with all due respect for the worth which the world recognizes—even though the wearer of such honors ignores his own claim to high distinction. "Blow your own trumpet, if you would hear it sound," is a sharply sarcastic bit of advice, since only hopeless mediocrity could ever profit by the injunction. Real merit needs no trumpeter. Mrs. Grant could afford to call her husband "Mr." Grant, as was her modest custom; because all the world knew that he was the General of our armies, and the President ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... to nete, in respect of the irascible; insomuch as it depresses and heightens,—and in fine makes a harmony,—by abating what is too much and by not suffering them to flatten and grow dull. For what is moderate and symmetrous is defined by mediocrity. Still more is it the end of the rational faculty to bring the passions to moderation, which is called sacred, as making a harmony of the extremes with reason, and through reason with each other. For in chariots the best ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... an effect of the high culture of certain 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 ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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
... interested in all my thoughts, to love those whom I loved, to watch my progress, to rebuke my faults and follies, to encourage within me every generous and pure aspiration, to demand of me, always, the best that I could be or do, and to be satisfied with no mediocrity, no conformity to any ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... what are termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. In the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull leveling to mediocrity.(6) ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... with that of other poets whose career has been less placid, we may say that he was perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it was his constant endeavour to avoid all excitement, save of the purely poetic kind; and that the outward circumstances of his life,—his mediocrity of fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence of striking personal charm,—made it easy for him to adhere to a method of life which was, in the truest sense of the term, stoic—stoic alike in its practical ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... equally sensitive to all that the right requires, and it is often the deficiencies of a character that give it its reputation for distinguished excellence in some one form of virtue, the vigilance, self-discipline, and effort which might have sustained the character in a well-balanced mediocrity being so concentrated upon some single department of duty as to excite high admiration and extended praise. There may be a deficient sensitiveness to some classes of obligations, while yet there is no willing or conscious violation of the right, and in such cases ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... inheritance; and, on the other hand, we can claim no credit to ourselves if we have inherited strong bodies with healthful tendencies. It is our misfortune, and not our fault, if we are not quite perfectly poised by nature; it is our good fortune, not our foresight, if we have genius instead of mediocrity. The gifts that come to us through inheritance are ours without blame or credit to us but they bring with them the responsibility of their use. We are responsible for maintaining or increasing our dower of health by obedience to physical laws; responsible for the cultivation ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... self-confidence. Distrusting themselves, they live a life of limited effort, and at last pass on without having realized more than a small part of their rich possessions. It is believed that this book will be of substantial service to those who wish to rise above mediocrity, and who feel within them something of their divine inheritance. It is commended with confidence ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... and thought. The Cavendishes had once held an important position in the county, and lived in one of the greatest "places" in the neighbourhood. But they had met with a fate not unknown to the greatest favourites, and had descended from their greatness to mediocrity, without, however, sacrificing everything, and indeed with so good a margin that, though they were no longer included among the most eminent gentry of England, they still held the place of a county family. They had shifted their ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... recommendations of the Wartons far outran the mediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. To comprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse as Parnell's Hermit or Addison's Campaign could be regarded as satisfactory in the setting of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... others call it bad. It would be nearer correct to say that it is mediocre; for on the one hand, our happiness is never as great as we should like, and on the other hand, our misfortunes are never as great as our enemies would wish for us. It is this mediocrity of life which prevents ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... is the art which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like genius. 5. In 1685 Louis XIV. signed the ordinance that revoked the Edict of Nantes. 6. The thirteen colonies were welded together by the measures which ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... in the human is not, and never will be, as simple as it is in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. If we want to strive after healthy, normal mediocrity, then the principles of animal eugenics become applicable to the human race. If, on the other hand, we want talent, if we want genius, if we want benefactors of the human race, then we must go very ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... staring at the face of the Man on the cross. Did he, in his overwrought state, imagine there an expression he had never before remarked, or had the unknown artist of the seventies actually risen above the mediocrity of the figure in his portrayal of the features of the Christ? The rector started, and stared again. There was no weakness in the face, no meekness, no suggestion of the conception of the sacrificed Lamb, no hint of a beatific vision of opening ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Richardson, Richardson, unique among men in my eyes, thou shalt be my favourite all my life long! If I am hard driven by pressing need, if my friend is overtaken by want, if the mediocrity of my fortune is not enough to give my children what is necessary for their education, I will sell my books; but thou shalt remain to me, thou shalt remain on the same shelf ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... mediocrity of the pamphlets for the Union is a curious piece of finesse; for he was known to be the author of an able pamphlet, "Arguments for and against an Union between Great Britain and Ireland." In it he dilated on the benefits gained by Wales and Scotland from a Union with England. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... however, often recalled harshly from my dreamy region by the cruel penury of my home, which was partly attributable to the unavailing expense incurred for me. Crops had failed during successive years, and reverses of fortune had changed the humble mediocrity of my parents into comparative want. When on Sundays I went to see my mother, she spoke of her distress, and before me shed tears that she concealed from my father and my sisters. I, too, was reduced ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in an inferior style may be reasonably preferred to mediocrity in the highest walks of art. A landscape of Claude Lorraine may be preferred to a history of Luca Jordano; but hence appears the necessity of the connoisseur's knowing in what consists the excellence of each class, in order to judge how near it ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... some good lines in the poem, but not enough to rescue it from that fate which poetical mediocrity is irreversibly ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... embellished with mouldings and a pediment. I gathered from these tokens that this was the abode not only of rural competence and innocence, but of some beings raised by education and fortune above the intellectual mediocrity ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high motive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... with the idea that these social problems appertain only to the effete monarchies of Europe, and have no application with us. But, though I readily admit that the keenest point of this satire is directed against the small States which, by the tyranny of the dominant mediocrity, cripple much that is good and great by denying it the conditions of growth and development, there is yet a deep and abiding lesson in these two novels which applies to modern civilization in general, exposing glaring defects which are ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... wine, and only think of joyous living; the latter in their homes, with the frugality of merchants, who for the most part make but do not spend money, or with the moderation of orderly burghers, never exceed mediocrity. Nevertheless there are not wanting families, who keep a splendid table and live like nobles, such as the Antinori, the Bartolini, the Tornabuoni, the Pazzi, the Borgherini, the Gaddi, the Rucellai, and among the Salviati, Piero d'Alamanno and Alamanno d'Jacopo, and some ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Golden Mean without a hint Of brave extravagance that breaks the rule. The master of the mansion was no fool Assuredly, no genius just as sure! Safe mediocrity had scorned the lure Of now too much and now too little cost, And satisfied me sight was never lost Of moderate design's accomplishment ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... Concert: "It is mostly of wind-instruments," King himself often taking part with his flute; "performers the best in Europe. He has three"—what shall we call them? of male gender,—"a counter-alt, and Mamsell Astrua, an Italian; they are unique voices. He cannot bear mediocrity. It is but seldom he has any singing here. To be admitted, needs the most intimate favor; now and then some young Lord, of distinction, if he meet with such." Concert, very well;—but let us now, suppressing any little abhorrences, hear ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... in the directions where 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... not take their point of view," John Derringham said, continuing the conversation he had been carrying on before Halcyone arrived. "Everything in England is spoilt by this pandering to the mediocrity. A man may not make a speech but he must choose his words so that uneducated clods can grasp his meaning, he cannot advocate an idea with success unless it can appeal to the lower middle classes. It is this subservience to them which has brought us to where we are. No ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... result from love or interest. Now between these two there could be no love; and as to interest, the thing was still less probable; for, if they were not in absolute poverty, their situation was certainly not above mediocrity—not even that gilded mediocrity of which Horace speaks, with a country house at Tibur and Montmorency, and which results from a pension of thirty thousand sestercia from the Augustan treasury, or a government annuity ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Fra Angelico painting. No one—not even the nurse of his infancy—had ever 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, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 so ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... energy and activity. But no theory holds them long in bondage. At the least, it speedily gives place to another formulation of the mutinous freedom its very acceptance creates. And the conformity that each of them in succession imposes on mediocrity is always varied and relieved by the frequent incarnations in masterful personalities of the natural national traits—of which, I think, the architectonic spirit is one of the most conspicuous. Painting will again become creative, constructive, personally expressive. Its basis having ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... I own to being entirely fascinated by him. But he was never, I think, really popular. He was supposed to be intolerant of mediocrity; and also he used to offend quite honest, simple-minded people by treating their beliefs very cavalierly. I used to compare him with Raleigh or Henri IV.—the proud, confident ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... he remarks: "I have very often seen the greatest fecundity of ideas, the most brilliant imagination, a singular aptitude for the arts, suddenly develop in girls of this age, only to give place soon afterward to the most absolute mental mediocrity." (Cabanis, "De l'Influence des Sexes," etc., Rapports du Physique ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of Death of the former, are instanced as works of excellence. Mola, we are surprised to find ranked as Swiss; for he is altogether, in art, Italian. The influence of the school and precepts of the Caracci, produced in France an abundant harvest of mediocrity. In France was the merit of Michael Angelo first questioned. There are, however, names that rescue France from the entire disgrace of the abandonment of the true principles of art: Nicolo Poussin, Le Sueur, Le Brun, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... wistful interest of a soul struggling to receive ideas of beauty vaguely discerned yet ever eluding her. That brightness in her mother's mind which might have descended to the second Avice with the maternal face and form, had been dimmed by admixture with the mediocrity of her father's, and by one who remembered like Pierston the dual organization the opposites could ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... great vogue, was something of an oracle, and molded the character and manners of divers women of this period, among others the future Mme. de Maintenon. His confidence in his own power of bringing talent out of mediocrity was certainly refreshing. Among his pupils was the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres, who said to him one day, "I wish to have esprit."—"Eh bien, Madame," replied the complaisant chevalier, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... out of the question: the most it is reasonable to expect is a bourgeois fulfilment of inescapable duties. In such, cases the flower droops; the dream vanishes; the free-born spirit has the choice of fighting day in and day out against the collective demons of pettiness and mediocrity, or of going down ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... soul has been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and mediocrity. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... 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
... Statements from the lips of General Wood and young Roosevelt to the effect that citizens should not argue with Bolshevists but meet them "head on" were very conspicuously displayed on all occasions. Any addle-headed mediocrity, in or out of uniform, who had anything particularly atrocious to say against the labor movement in general or the "radicals" in particular, was afforded every opportunity to do so. The papers were vying with one another in devising effectual, ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... I know nothing," thought John Effingham, "except by his own passing declarations, and the evident fact that, as regards station, it can scarcely have reached mediocrity. He is one of those who appear to live for the most vulgar motives that are admissible among men of any culture, and whose refinement, such as it is, is purely of the conventional class of habits. Ignorant, beyond the current opinions of a set; prejudiced ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... whose haughty and grasping spirit led him to covet distinction and authority in every line, was eagerly soliciting the supreme command of this important armament; and in spite of the general mediocrity of his talents and his very slight experience in the art of war, his partial mistress had the weakness to indulge him in this unreasonable and ill-advised pretension. The title of general of the queen's auxiliaries in Holland was conferred upon him, and with it a command over the whole English ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and more practised delivery; but now his voluble gift of words deserted him. "He was much obliged to them," he said; "though perhaps, on the whole, it was better that men who placed themselves in a mediocre condition should be left to their mediocrity. He had no doubt himself of the justness of the lists. It would be useless for him to say that he had not aspired; all the world"—it was all the world to him—"knew too well that he had aspired. But he had received a lesson which might probably be useful ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... of a few of both, but the majority, if not all, are the small tradesmen or the great middle class. These men are not ignorant, prejudiced, or unintelligent. They have a limited experience, but their judgment is the judgment of mediocrity and mediocrity is what is wanted. The professional man, the expert, the specialist is needed for the special degree of administration, but for the determination of the actual right and justice, what is needed is the instinct of the ordinary ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... upon to set forward the same injustice which presided over her own education. "Preaching down a daughter's heart," the beautiful phrase of Tennyson, becomes the duty of every woman who finds in her daughter saliency of intellect and individuality of will. Mediocrity is the standard! "Seek not, my child, to go beyond it. Thou hast thy little allotments. The French must be thy classics, the house accounts thy mathematics. Patchwork, cooking, and sweeping thy mechanics; dress and embroidery thy fine arts. See how small ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... innocent family of a 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 bias to the fact that such compositions were the nearest ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... himself to hopeless mediocrity."—EMERSON, Address to the Senior Class in Divinity ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... matters of competition, or of exhibition, nor yet as the means of attracting temporary admiration. We are not afraid that any, who are really conscious of having acquired accomplishments with these prudent and honourable views, should misapprehend what has been said. Mediocrity may, perhaps, attempt to misrepresent our remarks, and may endeavour to make it appear that we have attacked, and that we would discourage, every effort of female taste and ingenuity in the fine arts; we cannot, therefore, be too explicit in ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... again manifested in him by the production of numberless poetical effusions, in which his own poignant anguish and Miss Patty's incomparable attractions were brought forward in verses of various degrees of mediocrity. They were also equally varied in their style and treatment; one being written in a fierce and gloomy Byronic strain, while another followed the lighter childish style of Wordsworth. To this latter class, perhaps, belonged ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... is pleasant rather than what 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 no questions, and ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selected our table. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated than the first violin began to speak, to assert itself, as if it were suddenly done with mediocrity. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... value. The economic value—with some regard also to the social value in the narrower sense—of these aptitudes and propensities is attempted to be passed upon without reflecting on their value as seen from another point of view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the latter-day industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited standards of morality, and more especially by the standards of aesthetics and of poetry, these survivals from a more primitive type of manhood may have a very ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... conception of what it means to shape your life to your income. I am poor, and I know. Years ago I had to choose between mediocrity and"—he looked at her peculiarly—"and love, or advancement alone. I had to choose, and fixing my choice upon the higher aim, I had to put everything else out of my life. The thought is intolerable that my name should always be under another's upon some ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... circumstance of so serious moment as to another man engaged in less strenuous pursuits. WE do not, and cannot, read many of the novels that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor with a difference. There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... defects; did not seduce him into indiscriminating praise; did not deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excess blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Mr. Ruskin's etymology. And as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary production was brought under Matthew Arnold's notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... against the flashing sword, and of the chessboard against genius. On June 18, 1815, this rancor got the best; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, and Arcola, it wrote—Waterloo. It was a triumph of mediocrity, sweet to majorities, and destiny consented to this irony. In his decline, Napoleon found a young Suvarov before him—in fact, it is only necessary to blanch Wellington's hair in order to have a Suvarov. Waterloo is ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... transition from the mediaeval to the modern epoch of Catholicism. He was no Cromwell, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck; only a politic old man, contriving by adroit avoidance to steer the ship of the Church clear through innumerable perils. This scion of the Italian middle class, this moral mediocrity, placed his successors in S. Peter's chair upon a throne of such supremacy that they began immediately to claim jurisdiction over kings and nations. Thirty-eight years before his death, when Clement VII. was shut up in S. Angelo, it seemed as though ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... quantity of blackened paper. Gabriel Naude and your Abbe Bignon, both librarians of fame, are, compared to me, indolent shepherds of a vile herd of sheep-like books. I concede that the Benedictines are diligent, but they have no high spirit and their libraries reveal the mediocrity of the souls by whom they have been collected. My gallery, sir, is not on the pattern of others. The works I have got together form a whole which doubtless will procure me knowledge. My library is gnostic, oecumenic and spiritual. ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... journalism from within, and who does not ardently desire that literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly protected it, and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which, with rare exceptions, pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... other women. Those who owe their rank to their fathers and 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
... burns. To cling one moment nigh to power's crest, Then, earthward flung, sink to oblivion's rest Self-sought, 'midst careless acquiescence, seems Strange fate, e'en for a thing of schemes and dreams; But CAESAR's simulacrum, seen by day, Scarce envious CASCA's self would stoop to slay, And mounting mediocrity, once o'erthrown, Need fear—or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... to possess my soul in peace all the residue of my days, to take my full farewell of State employments, to satisfy my mind with the mediocrity of worldly living that I had of mine own, and so to ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... goodness achieved as well as in money pocketed. He has been at Lancaster-road Chapel three months, and, unlike many new parsons, he had more sense than preach his best sermons first—than make a grand pyrotechnic dash at the onset and settle down into a round of prating mediocrity afterwards. When tried he gave the people a fair average specimen of what he could do—did not say his best nor his commonest things; began with a fire which he could keep up; and the result is not disappointment, but ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... but a few degrees too refined and poetical to escape the epithet of lantern-jawed from any one who had quarrelled with him, 'you would not mind my coolness about this. It is a good thing of course to go; I have always fancied that we were mistaken in coming here. Mediocrity stamped "London" fetches more than talent marked "provincial." But ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... her of the untrustworthiness of the so-called history of to-day, although we had every facility for recording facts, and he pointed out how utterly unreliable it was when tradition was the only means of transmission. Mediocrity, he felt sure, had oftentimes been exalted into genius, and brilliant and patriotic exclamations attributed to great men, were never uttered by them, neither was it easy he thought, to get a true historic ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... privileges in young people who had not previously shown even interest enough to attend our winter night schools. This is the best evidence that inroads are being made into that natural apathy which is content with mediocrity or even inferiority. This is everywhere the world's most subtle enemy. Even if selfishness or envy has been the motive, the fact remains that they have often kindled that discontent with the past which Charles Kingsley preached as necessary to all progress. Nowhere ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... far, but he assured me that I needn't be nervous: he had his limit—his limit was inexorable. He would reserve pure vulgarity for his serial, over which he was sweating blood and water; elsewhere it should be qualified by the prime qualification, the mediocrity that attaches, that endears. Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared for adverse comment, resolute for his noble course. Hadn't Limbert moreover in the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... that his formula does not hold water quite so perfectly as he was thinking, so long as he kept it to himself, and never thought of imparting it to anybody else. The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity, as I have noticed that a great pumpkin, the wonder of a village, seemed to lose at least a third of its dimensions between the field where it grew and the cattle-show fair-table, where it took its place with other enormous pumpkins ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... positively good; of the cultivation of brain laziness by "thoughts-made-easy" reading. It is a republic's, a public school problem, viz.: How is it possible to raise to a higher average the lowest, without reducing to a dead level of mediocrity the citizens of superior possibilities? Our relation to publisher and parent, to the library's adult open shelves of current fiction enter into the problem. The children's over-reading, and their reluctance to "graduate" from juvenile books, these and many ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... in ancient Greece. Let us go, then, to Athens in the age of Pericles, that period of her glory concerning which Professor Freeman somewhere says that to have lived but ten years in the midst of it would have been worth a hundred of modern mediocrity. Who can think otherwise as he recalls the Athenian drama, eloquence and philosophy, architecture and sculpture? But when one turns to the organization of society, as it was in Athens, to find out at what human price the splendor ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... benumbeth sense, And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. We not require the dull society Of your necessitated temperance, Or that unnatural stupidity That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd Falsely exalted passive fortitude Above the active. This low abject brood, That fix their seats in mediocrity, Become your servile minds; but we advance Such virtues only as admit excess, Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, All-seeing prudence, magnanimity That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue For which antiquity hath left no name, But patterns only, such as Hercules, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... 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
... order at all times and in every case, a thing which very often renders uncertain the judgments of men. How this may happen is seen in Raffaellino, since it appeared that in him nature and art did their utmost to set out from extraordinary beginnings, the middle stage of which was below mediocrity, and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... [1755]"In prosperity we are insolent and intolerable, dejected in adversity, in all fortunes foolish and miserable." [1756]"In adversity I wish for prosperity, and in prosperity I am afraid of adversity. What mediocrity may be found? Where is no temptation? What condition of life is free?" [1757]"Wisdom hath labour annexed to it, glory, envy; riches and cares, children and encumbrances, pleasure and diseases, rest and beggary, go together: as if a man were therefore ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... relegated to the limbo whence it had been disinterred. James Madgin had given up the expectation of ever shining in the theatrical system as a "great star;" he was trying to content himself with the thought of living and dying a respectable mediocrity—useful, ornamental even, in his proper sphere, but certainly never destined to set the Thames on fire. The manager of the Tabard had recently died, and at present James Madgin was in ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... quote the enthusiastic eulogiums and unmeasured invectives heaped upon him by different parties, to render it necessary to repeat here, that he possessed the strongest proofs against the reproach of mediocrity ever being ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... crown. Yet he was willing to 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 of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... think," he said, "unless it be mediocre—then one is safe; one has scores of friends, and scarce a foe. Mediocrity succeeds wonderfully well nowadays—nobody hates it, because every one feels how easily they themselves can attain to it. Exceptional talent is aggressive—actual genius is offensive; people are ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to them; they are perfect logs smeared with honey. They never, for instance, call Raphael, Raphael, or Correggio, Correggio; 'the divine Sanzio, the incomparable di Allegri,' they murmur, and always with the broadest vowels. Every pretentious, conceited, home-bred mediocrity they hail as a genius: 'the blue sky of Italy,' 'the lemons of the South,' 'the balmy breezes of the banks of the Brenta,' are for ever on their lips. 'Ah, Vasya, Vasya,' or 'Oh, Sasha, Sasha,' they ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... times we have seen endowed with a similar spirit of self-control, have attracted our admiration by their honesty rather than their intellect; and the skeptic in human virtue has ascribed the purity of Washington as much to the mediocrity of his genius as to the sincerity of his patriotism:—the coarseness of vulgar ambition can sympathize but little with those who refuse a throne. But in Solon there is no disparity between the mental and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... purchased the power of being rich beyond the wish of rapacity[1], and I have procured the improbability of being made poor by flights of the fairy, speculation. 'Tis thus that a woman and men of feminine minds always—I speak popularly—decide upon life, and chuse certain mediocrity before probable superiority; while, as Eton Graham ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... tabernacle of flesh; in short, that flower of life which Raphael and Titian culled. Start from the point you have now attained, and perhaps you may yet paint a worthy picture; you grew weary too soon. Mediocrity will extol your work; but the true artist smiles. O Mabuse! O my master!" added this singular person, "you were a thief; you have robbed us of your life, your knowledge, your art! But at least," he resumed after a pause, "this picture is better than the paintings of that rascally Rubens, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... 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, reading the day's newspapers. And what did I hear now, when ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... On the 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 fact that they ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... death—alone in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. The rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, rested in the chair that had been her dying sister's, and held her melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... who only 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... women, to 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 ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... he performed. He had a style of his own, and was most successful in playing his own compositions. In Paris, when, out of respect to the Parisians, he played a concerto by Rode, and one by Kreutzer, he scarcely rose above mediocrity, and he was well aware of his failure. He adopted the ideas of his predecessors, resuscitated forgotten effects and added to them, and the chief features of his performance were, the diversity of tones produced, the different methods of tuning his instrument, ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted from the ranks of the ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... of a divisional artillery unit was intimately acquainted with the division's shortcomings, delineated an entirely different set of causes. The division was doomed to mediocrity and worse, Lt. Col. Marcus H. Ray concluded, from the moment of its activation. Undercurrents of racial antipathy as well as distrust and prejudice, he believed, infected the organization from the outset and created an unhealthy beginning. The practice ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... the bravery of their rank and file and the mistakes of the invaders, they gained tactical successes at some points; but they failed to win the campaign owing to the inability of their Government to organise soundly on a great scale, and the intellectual mediocrity of their commanders in the sphere of strategy. Mr. Layard, who succeeded Sir Henry Elliot at Constantinople early in 1878, had good reason for writing, "The utter rottenness of the present system has been fully revealed by the present war[156]." Whether Suleiman ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... good-natured efforts at last to make Falstaff forget his sad miscarriages, and to compose, in a well-crowned cup of social merriment, whatever vexations and disquietudes still remain.—Anne Page is but an average specimen of discreet, placid, innocent mediocrity, yet with a mind of her own, in whom we can feel no such interest as a rich father causes to be felt by those about her. In her and Fenton a slight dash of romance is given to the play; their love ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... better ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or, indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of the genuine qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a short course of successful affectation. The imposition breaking down at last, he sinks helplessly into the unheroic mediocrity of position and pretension for which alone he ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... accept the moral standards as absolute and are quick to resent changes in custom. They follow leaders cheerfully, are capable of intense loyalty to that cause which they believe to stand for their interests. Yet each individual of the mass of men, though he never rises above mediocrity, presents to his intimates a grouping of qualities and peculiarities that gives him a ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue, though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political movement takes place, it is not consciously ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... generous proposal seemed to show an intervening hand in his favour, that sent her distraught at the right moment. He entirely trusted her to be discreet; but she was a miserable creature, who had lost the one last chance offered her by Providence, and furnished him with a signal instance of the mediocrity of woman's love. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fighting with the sword, do against dwarfs who have cannon? You are courageous, but they are cunning, and would conquer you. For the sake of the nineteenth century you must not be vanquished. Do not come; in your simplicity you would be caught in the spider's web of clever mediocrity, and your grand efforts to tear yourself free would only be laughed at. Great man, you would ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity who rule over the earth ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... . . . His country was the country of music, but the Russian musicians of to-day are more original than the mere followers of Wagner, the copyists who take refuge in orchestral exasperations in order to hide their mediocrity. . . . In its time of stress the German nation had men of genius, before Pan-Germanism had been born, when the Empire did not exist. Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven were subjects of little principalities. They received influence from other countries and contributed their share to the universal ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... him," she said in an odd voice. And, looking at it, Craven realised that the cleverness of the painted head on the large canvas paled to mediocrity beside the brilliance of the sepia sketch he held. It was the same head—but marvellously different—set on the body of a faun. The dancing limbs were pulsing with life, the tiny hoofs stamping the flower-strewn earth in an ecstasy of movement; the head was thrown forward, bent as though ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... such arranging the words came of themselves. But as he looked at Shorty, 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 ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... what humanity! Yet, as he left the eminent company concerning whose ways of life at home he had been so youthfully curious, and sought, after his manner, to determine the main trait in all this, he had to confess that it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... invention, if we are to give credit to Pliny, Carbilius, and Seneca. Caligula has absolutely denied him even mediocrity; Herennus has marked his faults; and Perilius Faustinus has furnished a thick volume with his plagiarisms. Even the author of his apology has confessed, that he has stolen from Homer his greatest beauties; from Apollonius Rhodius, many of his pathetic passages; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that I may be thought to have embellished it beyond the bounds of truth, to give an agreeable air to my narrative: but as your favourite sect, my Brutus, the Old Academy, has defined all Virtue to be a just Mediocrity, it was the constant endeavour of these two eminent men to pursue this Golden Mean; and yet it so happened, that while each of them shared a part of the other's excellence, he preserved his own entire."—"To speak what I think," replied Brutus, ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union Bank, and who was already regarded ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... account for the low calibre of a good many first-rate men's sons, and gives a certain support to the common notion that they are always third-raters. Those sons inherit from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the bad strain is often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain. Mediocrity, as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and extraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between an able man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given child will resemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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 ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... their works there and taking the greatest pains to excel, in order, in a sense, to be avenged on those by whom they have been outraged. In this way they frequently become great men, whereas had they remained quietly at home they might possibly have achieved little more than mediocrity in their art. Antonio of Venice, who went to Florence, in the train of Agnolo Gaddi, to learn painting, so far acquired the proper methods that not only was he esteemed and loved by the Florentines, but made much of for this talent and for his other good qualities. Then, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... appears to me 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 heroes she has produced, as on her wealth, her influence, and her possessions; and ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
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