The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

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

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

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

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

A man trying to sell a blind horse always praises its feet.

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.

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.