It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.
Isaac Disraeli

It's a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation.
Roberto Benigni

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
Fulton J. Sheen

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Herman Melville

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.
Armand Assante

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.
Patrick Kavanagh

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Media, the plural of mediocrity.
Jimmy Breslin

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.
Benjamin Disraeli

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger

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

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

Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
Charles G. Dawes

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Ellen Glasgow

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.
Dale Carnegie

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

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

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

Only mediocrity of enjoyment is allowed to man.
Hugh Blair