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'Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best. (Darby Bannard)
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. (Cecil Beaton)
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. (Max Beerbohm)
It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post-office clerk. (Rudolf Bing)
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre. (Warren Buffett)
Mediocrity is created by the notion of 'good enough will do' and it is also aided by the dumbing down of our media and buying into fear and conservatism. (Paul Cade)
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. (Albert Camus)
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was. (Thomas Carlyle)
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse. (Bruce Cockburn)
Never leave a painting mediocre; it's better to take a chance with it. (Guy Corriero)
It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity. (Gustave Courbet)
Mediocrity finds safety in standardization. (Frederick Crane)
Whatever is felicitously expressed risks being worse expressed: it is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us. (Isaac D'israeli)
Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity. (Charles G. Dawes)
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
While I may not be a Rembrandt or a Vermeer, I can continue to learn, and to aspire. Mediocrity is never acceptable! (Leoni Duff)
Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. (Margot Fonteyn)
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from. (Jodie Foster)
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. (Paul Gauguin)
Contrary to popular belief, all evolving artists are in a full time battle with mediocrity. (Robert Genn)
Only the mediocre are always at their best. (Jean Giraudoux)
Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity. (Ellen Glasgow)
It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard... The natural state... is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will... (Ira Glass)
It's more than magnificent – it's mediocre. (Samuel Goldwyn)
Remember, Rembrandt wasn't perfect. He had to fight mediocrity. (Irwin Greenberg)
Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity. (Henry S. Haskins)
Normal is the wrong name often used for average. (Henry S. Haskins)
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. (Joseph Heller)
Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life. (John F. Kennedy)
Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens. (George Lois)
I own up to my own mediocrity, embrace it actually, and think of it as the petri dish wherein I strive to culture my own excellence. (Carole MacRury)
Only a mediocre man is always at his best. (W. Somerset Maugham)
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. (W. Somerset Maugham)
The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind. (John Stuart Mill)
Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with. (Claude Monet)
- b.1689 d.1755...
Mediocrity is a hand-rail. (Baron de Montesquieu)
I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. (Peter O'Toole)
Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end... To leave the mean is to abandon humanity. (Blaise Pascal)
'Mediocrity' doesn't mean average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters. (Ayn Rand)
Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating. (Tom Robbins)
Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)
Mediocrity seeks Comradery. (Paul Sandip)
When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. (Susan Sontag)
We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre. (Billy Wilder)
Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down. (William M. Winans)
The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace. (N. C. Wyeth)
- b.AD 61 d.AD 112, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus...
It is better to excel in any single art than to arrive only at mediocrity in several. (Pliny the Younger)
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