|
|
|
More "Mediocre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... production, lighting and color effects have many times saved the day, and, although these effects are not of the deeper emotional type, they may add a spectacular beauty which brings applause where the singing is mediocre and the comedy isn't comedy. The potentiality of lighting effects for the stage has been barely drawn upon, but as the expressiveness of light is more and more utilized on the stage, the art of mobile light will be advanced just so much more. Light, color, and darkness have ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... project was this: He knew that the editor of the Hearthstone relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin's judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction. Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type. The central idea and keynote of "Love Is All" was love at first sight—the enrapturing, irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart. Suppose he should impress ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... can't go far wrong in politics because they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents in the interest of a mediocre regularity. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... same name." Hadassah's eyes smiled. "I like your man so much, if I may say so. He is worth a great deal. We can't expect big things to come to us in a small, mediocre way, can we?" ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... this natural law, and compel the country to obey. If you collect a crowd of mediocrities together, sooner or later they will fall under the dominion of a stronger head. A deputy of talent understands the reasons for which a government exists; the mediocre deputy simply comes to terms with force. An assembly either obeys an idea, like the Convention in the time of the Terror; a powerful personality, like the Corps Legislatif under the rule of Napoleon; or falls under the domination of a system ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... are masterpieces of action and adventure in the forest and on the sea. No other writer has so well told the story of the pioneer. He is not a successful novelist of the drawing-room. His women are mediocre and conventional, of the type described in the old Sunday school books. But when he leaves the haunts of men and enters the forest, power comes naturally to his pen. His greatest stage of action is the forest. He loved ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... was not made for me, and I was not made for morality. I am a man apart, and I accept nobody's conditions. I tell you always, Josephine, that these are the foolish phrases of mediocre people who wish to fetter the great. They do not apply to me. I will never consent to frame my conduct by the ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and his three daughters. And you can picture his bewilderment amidst those four women, terrible women ever busy with finery, receiving and paying visits, and running after marriageable men who flee away. It's ill-luck with a vengeance, the daily defeat of a poor devil of mediocre attainments, who imagined that his position as a deputy would facilitate money-making, and who is drowning himself in it all. And so how can Chaigneux have done otherwise than take money, he who is always ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... mediocre intelligence, he contrived to wrap himself in what Saint-Simon has called a "terrible majesty." He was obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity—of kingship. I cannot believe that he conceived himself human. ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... unfavorable to his plans, and in his mind he shuffled them and their values for him or against him as a gambler arranges and rearranges the cards in his hand. He saw himself plainly as his own highest card, and Barrat and Erhaupt as willing but mediocre accomplices. In Father Paul and Kalonay he recognized his most powerful allies or most dangerous foes. Miss Carson meant nothing to him but a source from which he could draw the sinews of war. What would become of her after the farce was ended, ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... is fitted by nature to do one of these better than the others and there will be one class for which he has the least ability. In the other one of the three he might make a mediocre success. Every individual should find a vocation furnishing that one of these three kinds of work for which he has the greatest ability. Then he should go into the particular branch of that vocation which is best adapted to ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... compromise &c. 774; middle course, middle state; neutrality. mediocrity, least common denominator. V. split the difference; take the average &c. n.; reduce to a mean &c. n.; strike a balance, pair off. Adj. mean, intermediate; middle &c. 68; average; neutral. mediocre, middle-class; commonplace &c. (unimportant) 643. Adv. on an average, in the long run; taking one with another, taking all things together, taking it for all in all; communibus annis[Lat], in round numbers. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... importunate and self-elected pall-bearers for the present and future, proxy-livers of life and vicarious sensualists that they are in a eunuch sort of way, insist, since their own selves, environments, and narrow agitations of the quick are mediocre and commonplace, that no man or woman can rise ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... It must call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society. It must awaken new tastes and ambitions ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... in 1508. He settled in Florence, where the chief branch of his family continued to flourish, and had for his second master Piero di Cosimo, that jocund and facile painter and vivid and harmonious colourist, under whose brush the pagan deities came to life again. This Giusto was by no means a mediocre artist, but he consumed all his forces in the vain effort to reconcile his primary Gothic education with the newly awakened spirit of the Renaissance. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century the Sperelli family migrated to Naples. There ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... buttress in a fives court. If the ball hit him, as it frequently did, the player waiting for it was at liberty either to play it or claim a let. This arrangement added a piquant and pleasing variety to what is too often—especially when indulged in by mediocre ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... impossible to grasp all that is offered to us in this life-work and pleasure. It is necessary to make a choice, to economize one's time and strength, and to work with either the heart or the brain alone. The result is that the neglected organ wastes away, and that men of pleasure remain all their lives mediocre workers, while hard workers are pitiful lovers. The former sacrifice the dignity of existence, the latter that which is the charm of existence. So that, in decisive moments, when the man of pleasure appeals to ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... poet—was apparently leading the life of a saint, but his most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul—whose name is veritably Balzac-ian—tells us some different stories; even Gustave Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand,—as was Countess d'Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better known as "Daniel Stern,"—that lasted from 1846 to 1854, according to Emile Faguet. Here then was a medium which was the other side of good ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps I was prejudiced; but, now, the remarks of the other girls seemed to me ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. The Burial in England is perhaps too much of an ad hoc call to be great poetry. But it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of God ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... "and—really, how can one expect them to get good results with no training for their work and only a few years in office? Take men like Johnson, Tyler, Polk, Hayes, Buchanan, Pierce, Filmore, Harrison, McKinley. Mediocre figures, are they not? What ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... difficult to find, and it needs—apart from discernment—a certain greatness to find him. The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything. I have never met a woman of supreme beauty with more than a mediocre intellect, by which I do not mean intelligence. There may be some, but I am only writing my own life, and I have not met them. A person of magnetism, temperament and quick intelligence may have neither intellect nor character. I have known one man ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... "The Iron Virgin." Of its immense success widow and librettist were in no doubt. Had they not witnessed it an hour earlier! Such furore did not often occur at the Comique. All recollection of Patel's mediocre work was wiped away in the swelter and glow of this passionate music, more modern than Wagner, more brutal than Richard Strauss. "Who would have believed that the old dried-up mummy had such a volcano in his ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... say, Alixe—" the familiarity brought with it no condescending reverberations—"has bothered me more than once. I shall be just as frank on my side. No, your husband has but little talent; original talent, none. He is mediocre—wait!" She started, her cheeks red with the blood that fled her heart when she heard this doleful news. "Wait! There are qualifications. In the first place, what do you expect from ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... superlative writers to be heaven-sent teachers, to be prophets, to be discoverers, what do we ask of them? Is it to write in a particular style, in a given lucid style, a given figurative style, or a given dignified style? Nay, it is only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, how his abrupt, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... corridor in the Law Courts, like the other main corridors, is a place of strange meetings and interviews. A man may receive there a bit of news that will change the whole of the rest of his life, or he may receive only an invitation to a mediocre lunch in the restaurant underneath; he never knows beforehand. Priam assuredly did not receive an invitation to lunch. He was traversing the crowded thoroughfares—for with the exception of match and toothpick sellers the corridor has the characteristics of a Strand pavement in the forenoon— ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... not aware," Chia Cheng added with a smiling countenance, "that I've been, even in my young days, very mediocre in the composition of stanzas on flowers, birds, rockeries and streams; and that now that I'm well up in years and have moreover the fatigue and trouble of my official duties, I've become in literary compositions like these, which require a light heart and gladsome ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... and broke all previous records in the Charchester match. By the rules of the dramatic, nothing else is possible. But truth, though it crush me, and truth compels me to admit that his performance was in reality distinctly mediocre. One of his weak points as a bowler was that he was at sea when opposed to a left-hander. Many bowlers have this failing. Some strange power seems to compel them to bowl solely on the leg side, and nothing but long hops and full pitches. It was so in the ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... beneficial, for instance, to drill an ineffective turret crew than to try to reduce friction in a training gear already nearly frictionless; or it may be more beneficial to overcome the faults of a mediocre gun-pointer than to develop still more highly the skill already great of another gun-pointer; but, on the other hand, it may be less beneficial to drill boat crews at boat-sailing, even if they need it, than to drill ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... she was already famous for her appreciation of Monsieur Rousseau. Indeed, there was something so unusual, so forceful in this large, almost masculine woman, that Calvert was as much impressed with her as he had been disappointed in Monsieur Necker. It seemed as if the mediocre talents of the Minister of Finance had flamed into genius in this leonine creature who was as much her mother's inferior in looks as her father's superior in intelligence. Mingled with this masculinity of mind and appearance ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... position in which if his argument were not sound nothing could save his speech from failure as a speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare distinction. It is no mean intellectual and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... is the possession of plenty of pluck and self-confidence. One need not be an expert swimmer to be a good diver. In fact, some persons can dive very well and at the same time are mediocre swimmers. As in other branches, practise ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... publisher, the right of publishing a good book is solid capital,—an established house, in the long run, makes more money on "Standards" than on "Catchpennies"; and to the public the possession of the best literature is the breath of life, as that of the bad and mediocre is moral and intellectual decadence. But in practice the interests of the three do not harmonize. The author, even supposing his efforts are stimulated by the highest aspirations for excellence and not by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... it; . . . Mr. Cloete, my husband's partner; such a clever man, man of the world, so amusing! . . . When he dines there and they are alone: Oh, Mr. Cloete, I wish George would do something to improve our prospects. Our position is really so mediocre. . . And Cloete smiles, but isn't surprised, because he had put all these notions himself into her empty head. . . What your husband wants is enterprise, a little audacity. You can encourage him best, Mrs. Dunbar. . . She ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... duties of the trying position of Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. The ablest lawyers of both political parties constituted this great committee, and its chairman, if possessing only mediocre talents or attainments, would have ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... that sheds radiance upon the ideals and manners of an heroic age. In such attempts to exalt the grander phases of human existence, the poets were, however, owing to their fear of enthusiasm, never quite successful. It is significant that though most critics consider Pope's Homer no better than a mediocre performance, none denies that his Rape of the Lock is, in its ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... none too fresh, they took up the work of tracking. It is astonishing to see how a dog can tell which way a track leads. If in doubt, he runs quickly back and forth on the scent, and thus gauges the way the animal has progressed. A mediocre dog cannot do this, but we had dogs with ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... man and sincerely loved his country. There his merits ended. He was readily quarrelsome, utterly without judgment and susceptible to that mood of panic in which mediocre persons are readily induced to act the "strong man." During his administration a new quarrel arose with France—a quarrel in which once again those responsible for that country's diplomacy played the game of her enemies. Genet ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... specified one of his tendencies. As regards cooerdination, the fact was illustrated just above that this method would not always work; but sometimes it works immensely well. Here is a young person (either sex), in the twenties, with insistent sex impulses, tempted to yield to the fascination of some mediocre representative of the other sex. Such a low-level attachment, however, militates against self-respect, work, ambition, social sense. Where is the "cooerdination"? It has to be found; some worthy mate will harness all these tendencies, stimulating and gratifying ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... wake up once during the whole time. He sent her to do her work, put fresh tapers in the place of those that had burnt out, and then he looked at his mother, revolving in his brain those apparently profound thoughts, those religious and philosophical commonplaces, which trouble people of mediocre minds, in the face ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... created in us the habit of losing sight of the individual in the species. A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school. We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... usual length of time; besides, I began seriously to question mathematics as being in the utilitarian class of studies. Certainly very little of it was necessary as a business qualification. I recalled the fact that one of the best business men, in a mediocre station of life, whom I had ever known, could not write his own name and his wife had to count his money for him. So I threw away my Euclid and tried something else; but I would voluntarily tire of each study in a little while, or drop it at the counter-suggestion of some friend. Thus I ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... for herself and her boy; she had trained that boy into manhood and placed his foot on the first rung of business success. She had transformed the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company from a placidly mediocre concern to a thriving, flourishing, nationally known institution. All this might have turned another woman's head. It only served to set Emma McChesney's more splendidly on her shoulders. Not too splendidly, however; for, with her marriage to her handsome business partner, T. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, ghosts, I might even say the legend of God, for our conceptions of the workman-creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creatures. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'God made man in His own image, but man has certainly paid Him ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Lepitre, Rue Saint-Louis, and then at another kept by Messieurs Sganzer and Beuzelin, Rue de Thorigny, both being situated in the Marais Quarter, near his father's house. So far as the subjects of the curriculum were concerned, he was still a mediocre pupil. However, literature began to attract his attention and efforts, and one composition of his for an examination—the speech of Brutus's wife after the condemnation of her sons—treasured up by his sister Laure, is mentioned ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... saw to that. For ever at his pupil's elbow, the hidden Baron pushed him forward, with tireless pressure, along the path which had been trod by Leopold so many years ago. But, this time, the goal at the end of it was something more than the mediocre royalty that Leopold had reached. The prize which Stockmar, with all the energy of disinterested devotion, had determined should be Albert's was a ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... took one day a livelier and more assured turn, the joyousness became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial performance at an East End hall. Dressed as a jockey, for no particular reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the ...
— When William Came • Saki
... safari one tries to mix in four or five tribes. This prevents concerted action in case of trouble, for no one tribe will help another. They vary both in tribal and individual characteristics, of course. For example, the Kikuyus are docile but mediocre porters; the Kavirondos strong carriers but turbulent and difficult to handle. You are very lucky if you happen on a camp jester, one of the sort that sings, shouts, or jokes while on the march. He is probably not much ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... Calderon is seen to much less advantage in the spectacular plays—dramas de tramoya—which he wrote at the command of Philip IV.; the dramatist is subordinated to the stage-carpenter, but the graceful fancy of the poet preserves even such a mediocre piece as Los Tres Mayores prodigies (which won him his knighthood) from complete oblivion. A greater opportunity is afforded in the more animated comedias palaciegas, or melodramatic pieces destined to be played before courtly audiences ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... not look at Maxine when he answered. He looked at Johnny and said, "I'll be frank, kiddo. You have the talent, but you don't have the salesmanship to promote it. Do you want a mediocre job while the weather boys exploit you for the rest of your life or—do you ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase
... literary man like Gibbon, who became perhaps the world's greatest historian, and a beautiful woman of mixed nationality, whose subsequent career, although gilded with riches and adorned with a position of power, displays nothing above the mediocre and commonplace. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... ancient phrases—what Nietzsche called "the Philistine of culture." It is against this fat milch cow of wisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a Huneker. He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention from poor or mediocre workmanship—the traps of sentimentalism, of false feeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of those pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths, mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as I say, he seems to have ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... now; I suppose I shall not see you again, but you were the best companions in the world, my friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one and the worst, having on my livret the note "Conducteur mediocre." ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... distrust of such love is all the more permissible because I am not the father blinded by paternal affection. I see Julie exactly as she is; without being absolutely plain, she has none of that beauty that makes people cry out, "See!" She is quite mediocre. ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... the time of his leaving us to return to Oxford for the autumn term, he walked into the drawing-room where I was sitting, and proposed that we should play some music together. To this I readily agreed. Though but a mediocre performer, I have always taken much pleasure in the use of the pianoforte, and esteemed it an honour whenever he asked me to play with him, since my powers as a musician were so very much inferior to his. After ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... and Dunbar must be considered more in the light of what they attempted than of what they accomplished. Many of them showed marked talent, but barely a half dozen of them demonstrated even mediocre mastery of technique in the use of poetic material and forms. And yet there are several names that deserve mention. George M. Horton, Frances E. Harper, James M. Bell and Alberry A. Whitman, all merit consideration when due allowances ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... view of many, the greatest literary critic of the world, was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December 23, 1804. He studied medicine, but soon abandoned it for literature; and before he gave himself up to criticism he made some mediocre attempts in poetry and fiction. He became professor at the College de France and the Ecole Normale and was appointed Senator in 1865. A course of lectures given at Lausanne in 1837 resulted in his great "Histoire de Port-Royal" and another given at Liege in his "Chateaubriand et son groupe ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... grandfather's hands——! His grandfather had been a man of renown, a famous man. Pepet had never seen him, but he talked of him with admiration, giving him a higher place in his esteem than that evoked by his mediocre father. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... might approve. The breach between Jackson and Calhoun was widened by the disclosure of an old political secret, probably by Crawford of Georgia, a disappointed Presidential aspirant. Jackson's administration naturally fell more and more into the hands of mediocre men. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the French people after six years of radical revolutionary upheavals required hard and honest labor on the part of men of distinct genius. Yet the Directors were, almost without exception, men of mediocre talents, [Footnote: Carnot, upright and sincere, and the only member of first-rate ability, was forced out of the Directory in 1797.] who practiced bribery and corruption with unblushing effrontery. They preferred their personal ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through whose ineptitudes ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... ricochetted among the newspapers with astonishing ado. With the Whig in the forefront the local press began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which, true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special correspondents, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... ringleader of faction. Barnave was not this, or only as much so as was necessary for the success of his discourses; nothing in him was extreme but the orator: the man was by no means so, neither was he at all cruel. Studious, but without imagination; copious, but without warmth, his intellect was mediocre, his mind honest, his will variable, his heart in the right place. His talent, which they affected to compare with Mirabeau's, was nothing more than a power of skilfully rivetting public attention. His habit of pleading gave him, with its power of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... There is yet one chapter to be added and I want to talk about it to the public. One man, Baron Singer, did more for midgets—little people—than any other person, in all time. He lifted them out of the mediocre; gave them standing and personality. I never met the Baron, but I want the public to know what great work he did for an underprivileged group. And I will tell ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... idea—with the great men of the time on their right and left hands. People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized in marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors, O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than the trees in the garden, firm as the ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... a more advanced position which she would probably not be allowed to take on account of her youth and inexperience. Students in this department need to be watched with especial care to determine whether they are well adapted for their occupation, and the mediocre worker would better enter some other field where the opportunities for her are more encouraging. As the advance is slow the girl also whose poverty is hurrying her into wage-earning would better not elect ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... her. His life would never be the same again. The list would be lost to him for ever, no more lists for him; he would be known as the man who lived with—lived with whom? A girl picked up in the suburbs, and sang rather prettily. If she were a great singer he would not mind, but he could not stand a mediocre singer about whom he would have to talk continual nonsense: conspiracies that were in continual progress against her at Covent Garden, etc. He had heard all that sort of thing before.... What should he do? He must make up his mind. It might be as well if he were to ask her to come to ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... things cost. In making the settlement I had not been consulted. Grandmamma and the Marquis had arranged matters with my future husband, and I remember her words: "We have only been able to secure for your personal use a very mediocre sum, but your jointure in case ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... found large and undiminishing interest in the faculty of pressing back the covers and reading the text. Often battered covers held treasures, and often the editions de luxe were swindles. But in between the battered covers and the exquisite Florentine hand-tooling there ranged a row of mediocre books; and it was among these that Elsa found that her instinct was not wholly infallible, as ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... this merit conduce to his own glory, will always be a good general, and may even pass for a great man. Unfortunately, the disposition to do justice to merit in others is not the most common quality: mediocre minds are always jealous, and inclined to surround themselves with persons of little ability, fearing the reputation of being led, and not realizing that the nominal commander of an army always receives almost all the glory of its ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... self-depreciation, which kept the quality of his work down to the level of hopeless hackery. For yielding to this influence; for stooping, in his necessity, to the service of Bagley, who had wronged him; for failing to find a way out of the slough of mediocre production, poor pay, and company inferior to him in mind, ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... briefly noticed him, rather on account of the notoriety recently attached to his name by the 'Trent' affair, than from his prominence among Southern orators and statesmen—his talent, being, in fact, of a decidedly mediocre description. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the one speech which gave glory and a nickname to Single-Speech Hamilton was written by Burke. It was wise, witty and profound—and never again did Hamilton do a thing that rose above the dull and deadly mediocre. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... nor have they all the same scruples, the same sensitiveness, or the same deep conviction. We meet people of highly developed intellect in whom the sense of what is just and unjust is yet infinitely less delicate, less clearly marked, than in others whose intellect would seem to be mediocre; for here a great part is played by that little-known, ill-defined side of ourselves that we term the character. And yet it is difficult to tell how much more or less unconscious intellect must of necessity go with the character that is unaffectedly honest. The point before ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... several who attempted the vain task of completing the "Diablo Mundo." He was a guest of honor with Espronceda at the first reading of "El Estudiante de Salamanca" at Granada in 1837. His verse is mediocre, and he is best known for the Cuento en prosa here quoted. This Fitzmaurice-Kelly terms "a charming tale," and Pieyro praises it for the grace and naturalness of its irony. Rubn Daro gives some interesting reminiscences of Santos lvarez in his old age, "La vida de Rubn Daro escrita por ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... occasionally make a brief stay in her schools, in the course of their progress to something better,—as Pilgrim rested for a while in the half-way recess hollowed in the side of the Hill Difficulty; but only very mediocre men, devoid of energy enough of body or mind to make good masons or carpenters, will stick fast in them. We have learned that, in one northern locality, no fewer than eight Free Church teachers have since Martinmas last either tendered their resignations, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... considers herself destined for the comic press, her wisest course is to collaborate with an artist. A joke may be the best and most original joke in the world, but it will not have a very safe chance of acceptance unless it is illustrated. The illustration per se may be without talent; no matter; mediocre pictures have certainly been instrumental in selling innumerable jokes. And as with jokes, so with "skits," satires, and parodies: the writer must combine with the artist if ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... is unhampered by the restrictions of truth, many fantastic accusations were invented against Las Casas, and diligently circulated. The most frugal and abstemious of men was accused of gluttony and intemperance; his learning, which was certainly varied if not vast and was by no means mediocre, was declared to be superficial and insufficient to enable him to properly weigh nice questions of theology and law, and finally it was insinuated that some of his opinions were heretical and that his refusal to allow the sacraments ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... be fiercely jealous of her husband's success and reputation, and cases are not unknown where the wife put every possible obstacle in her husband's way, in order to make him fail in his work, to make him turn out mediocre work, all from fear that his success would gain him admirers, which might perhaps take him away from her. Wives have been known to do everything in their power to exhaust and weaken their husbands, to make them physically ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... with a scarf across it, and back of the table three steps leading up to a little platform on which were ranged two or three mediocre statues of saints, once brilliant with blue and scarlet and tinsel, but tarnished and dim ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Above us rose the steep green hills on whose crest stood the Kremlin, containing several ancient churches, the governor's house, and so forth. On a lower terrace, to right and left, stood monasteries and churches intermingled with shops and mediocre dwellings. The only noteworthy church was that in front of us, with its picturesque but un-Russian rococo plaster decoration on red brick, crowned by genuine Russian domes and crosses of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... pupil from childhood of her famous mother, she was supposed to be an ideal exponent of the Marchesi method. Professional singers and instructors flocked to her first concert. It was to be an experience, an object-lesson. Well—it was. They saw a fine-looking woman with a mediocre voice and a worse method, a method so hopelessly bad that even her undoubted musicianship could not atone ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... from speaking in its entirety. And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalization does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... search of rest—to forget the unceasing complaints of His friends in the world, who, instead of appreciating the value of the Cross, receive it far more often with moans and tears. Would you then be as the mediocre souls? Frankly, this is not disinterested love. . . . It is for us to console our Lord, and not for Him to console us. His Heart is so tender that if you cry He will dry your tears; but thereafter He will go away sad, since you did not suffer Him to ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... 500 grammes de champignons coupes en morceaux d'assez mediocre grandeur, il faut un litre d'eau acidulee par deux ou trois cuillerees de vinaigre, ou deux cuillerees de sel gris. Dans le cas ou l'on n'aurait que de l'eau a sa disposition, il faut la renouveler une ou deux fois. On laisse les champignons ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... 13th., 1816, he remarked in conversation with Gourgaud, "I did not want the war with Russia, but Kurakin presented me a threatening note on account of Davout's troops at Hamburg. Bassano and Champagny were mediocre ministers, they did not comprehend the intention which had dictated that note. I myself could not argue with Kurakin. They persuaded me that it meant declaration of war. Russia had taken off several divisions from Moldavia and would take the initiative with an attack on Warsaw. ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... three strange phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in the legends of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... rendered him services when he fled to him for protection, for he had brought him royal presents. Moreover, he had taught both the cacique himself and his wife to sing and dance, a thing not to be held in mediocre consideration. Maiobanexius was determined never to surrender the prince who had appealed to his protection, and whom he had promised to defend. He was prepared to risk the gravest perils with him rather than to merit the reproach of having betrayed his guest. Despite the complaints of the people, ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of feeling and openness of statement, these words went far beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up on the wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret wares: the poor expedients devised by a mediocre mankind for preserving an imperfect society from the dangers of moral and physical corruption, both secret too of their kind. They were spoken because Mr Verloc had felt himself really outraged; ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... and reading, taken together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the Parisian chroniquear, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my first reflection on entering Mr. Pfeifer's drawing-room, while in my heart I begged the proprietor's pardon for the patronizing attitude I found myself assuming toward him. The heavy, solid furniture, the grave and decorously mediocre pictures, and the very tint of the walls wore an air of substantial, though somewhat lugubrious comfort. His niece, too, although her form was by no means lacking in grace, seemed somehow to partake of this ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... rationally believe ourselves able to trace in great part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of The Jew of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... time the loss of these commanding figures dealt a blow at the national spirit. There are usually long intervals between Caesars and Napoleons. Nations have, in obedience to some law of Nature, to pass through periods of mediocre rule, and when men of great genius and dominating qualities come to clear up the mess, they are only tolerated possibly by fear, and never for long by appreciation. A capricious public soon tires of these living heroes. It is after they are dead that they become abiding ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... most emphatically," the young man continued "All our plan of life in England, you see, is founded on the assumption that only people of mediocre and diluted passion will hold the stage. We allow our girls to go about freely with ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... that his poetry took no deep root, and that it will not be likely to survive long, except perhaps in his weird ballad of "Ravelston." But he represents a large class of masculine intellects, of secondary and mediocre quality, whose opinions on this subject are not so much opinions as instinctive prejudices against a competitor who may turn out their superior. Whether they know it, or not, their aversion to the authorship of women is very much ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... from the Piraeus reconciled us to the very mediocre vessel which carried us to Smyrna. Our visit to Asia Minor we had inadvertently timed to the opening of the International College at Paradise near Smyrna. This college is the gift of Mrs. John Kennedy of New ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... to be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, a blessing ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... SAILLARD, a clerk of mediocre talent in the Department of Finance, during the reigns of Louis XVIII. and of Charles X.; formerly book-keeper at the Treasury, where he is believed to have succeeded the elder Poiret;[*] he was afterwards appointed ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... series of Preces dia, with miniatures, were first sold off at mediocre prices. Needless to say, the illuminations of these books ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... silly: when all the while, perhaps, there is something else you can do thoroughly well; and the world will be exceedingly obliged to you for doing it, and not doing the other thing.—As doubtless the world was to me, when, instead of being a mediocre musician, as I once wished to be—it's true, my dear—I took to keeping one of the best ladies' ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... domestic system is mediocre, but improving; service is adequate for government and business use, in part because major businesses have established their own private systems; since 1988, the government has promoted investment in the national telecommunications system ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... gentleman of the Croy family, who, as well as his father, had rendered many important services to the crown. The appointment was, however, bestowed, through Granvelle's influence, upon the Seigneur d'Helfault, a gentleman of mediocre station and character, who was thought to possess no claims whatever to the office. Egmont, moreover, desired the abbey of Trulle for a poor relation of his own; but the Cardinal, to whom nothing in this way ever came amiss, had already obtained the King's permission to, appropriate ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... danseuse. And I shall gloat in Gautier-like cadence—if I can catch it—over each superb muscle and each splendid development. But my best article will be on Kitty Carew. Since Laura Bell and Mabel Grey our courtesans have been but a mediocre lot." ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... condition of affairs surprising when we consider that, in the seventeenth century, there flowed from Europe to the West Indies adventurers from every class of society; men doubtless often endowed with strong personalities, enterprising and intrepid; but often, too, of mediocre intelligence or little education, and usually without either money or scruples. They included many who had revolted from the narrow social laws of European countries, and were disinclined to live peaceably within the bounds of any organized society. ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... he could be severed from his innumerable manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... superintending the installation of the accommodations for the cargo of mules and horses. Cappy was particularly interested in the ventilating system below decks, for he was fond of horses and had resolved to deliver the cargo without the loss of a single animal. Of no mediocre turn of mind mechanically, he, assisted by Terry Reardon, made a few suggestions that the British veterinaries in charge ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... upon the nature of the training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works even ...
— Progress and History • Various
... all ruined buildings should be repaired in Rome. In Rome, praised beyond all other cities by the world's mouth, there should be nothing sordid or mediocre[296].' ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... a whole age of Italian society; and even now his spirit haunts you as you read the gorgeous sins of Roman noblemen in the pages of Gabriele d'Annunzio. And Murillo, though the expert not unjustly from their special point of view, see in him but a mediocre artist, in the same way is the very quintessence of Southern Spain. Wielders of the brush, occupied chiefly with technique, are apt to discern little in an old master, save the craftsman; yet art is no more than a link in ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... are said to have been written by an impecunious and mediocre penman called Villemarest, who also wrote "Memoires de Constant" (the Emperor's valet), and both books have been very extensively read and believed. Men have got up terrific lectures from them, authors have ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... in his way, the tendency will be general to place the more popular candidates, those whose success is most feared, at the bottom of the list, so as to give them as few marks as possible. The result would be to favour mediocre men, or even in extreme ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is due to low payment. It is a result, I believe, of a wrong conception of what a book-review should be. My own opinion is that a review should be, from one point of view, a portrait of a book. It should present the book instead of merely presenting ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very high—but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... settlers and the new mingled gaily. The old timers with their indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had blundered. But all alike to-night, ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... in spite of her physical charms, had found life hard during the earlier years of her career. She had become a mediocre actress merely for the sake of having some profession, and had frequented the night restaurants in quest of a wealthy lover. It was only after a long delay that fortune had smiled upon her, and she had arrived at the enviable position of being the ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... both ears spread wide for stray echoes of Salome; its sculptors, stupefied by Rodin, achieved sections of human anatomy protruding from lumps of clay and marble; its dramatists, drugged by Mallarme and Maeterlinck, dabbled in dullness, platitude and mediocre psychology; its writers wrote as bloodily, as squalidly, and as immodestly as they dared; its poets blubbered with Verlaine, spat with Aristide Bruant, or leered with the alcoholic muses of ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Gerda had her own ideas, very definite and critical, about dramatic merit. Barry enjoyed discussing the plays with her, listening to her clear little silver voice pronouncing judgment. Gerda might be forever mediocre in any form of artistic expression, but she was an artist, with the artist's love of merit and scorn ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... kept back her despatches for two days that he might be present at a ball that she was giving. These despatches, as we have said, contained the wish that Mary Stuart should espouse Leicester; but this proposal could not be taken seriously. Leicester, whose personal worth was besides sufficiently mediocre, was of birth too inferior to aspire to the hand of the daughter of so many kings; thus Mary replied that such an alliance would not become her. Meanwhile, something strange and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of their ability, and do not reckon this personal atmosphere or magnetic power as a part of their success-capital. Yet this individual atmosphere has quite as much to do with one's advancement as brain-power or education. Indeed, we constantly see men of mediocre ability but with fine personal presence, superb manner, and magnetic qualities, being rapidly advanced over the heads of those who are infinitely ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... only on paper. The spectator catches sight of a fragment, some section of a wall, or the facade; but the whole escapes him; man's work is no longer proportioned to his organs. It was not thus in antiquity; temples were small or of mediocre dimensions, and were almost always erected on an eminence; their general form and complete profile could be enjoyed from ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... reading anything at all, except Shakespeare, whom am going through from beginning to end. That tones you up and puts new air into your lungs, just as if you were on a high mountain. Everything appears mediocre beside ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... maintained that the qualities of higher forms of man are exhausted in a few generations, while the mass of mediocrities continually produce new genius. The fact that the descendants of distinguished men are often mediocre and that remarkable men suddenly arise from the common people, appears at first sight to support this superficial assertion. It is forgotten, however, that in a people whose average mass consists of thousands or millions of individuals, while men of higher powers are only ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... always famed for his technical ability. Even the mediocre artists possess that. The great artists realize that the mechanical side of piano playing is but the basis, but they would no sooner think of trying to do without that basis than they would of dispensing with the beautiful artistic temples which they build upon the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... assessment: mediocre service; local and long distance service provided throughout all regions of the country, with services primarily concentrated in the urban areas; major objective is to continue to expand and modernize long-distance network to keep pace with rapidly growing number of ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... mistakes which would be ridiculous were they not so inexcusable. There is a certain half-feudal glamour about England yet which appeals strongly to the callow author: it lends that rosy haze of romance and unreality which is popularly associated with fiction; but it was long ago done to death by mediocre writers and laughed out of good literary society, and to-day America will not ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... who was coming towards them with Mrs. Otter. Mrs. Otter, meek, mediocre, and self-satisfied, wore an air of importance. Foinet sat down at the easel of an untidy little Englishwoman called Ruth Chalice. She had the fine black eyes, languid but passionate, the thin face, ascetic but sensual, the skin like old ivory, which ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... substance he chose in the crucible, heat it, throw in a grain or two of some mysterious powder, pronounce a few equally mysterious phrases to impress his audience, and, behold, a lump of precious metal would be found in the bottom of his pot. This was the favorite method of mediocre performers, but was, of course, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... But facts are facts, Watson, and, after all, you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications. It is painful to have to say these things, but you ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... young man, dressed in the extreme of the English fashion. He was probably excessively thin, to judge by his face and neck and hands, but he was made up admirably. He removed his hat and showed a forehead of mediocre proportions, over which his dark hair was conscientiously parted in the middle. Though not in appearance robust, he wore a moustache that would not have disgraced a Cossack, his eyes were small, gray, and near together, and his complexion was ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... country obtained the feeble and irresolute Directory, composed for the moment of the voluptuous Barres, the intriguing Sieyes, the brave Moulins, the insignificant Roger Ducos, and the honest but somewhat too ingenuous Gohier. The result was a mediocre dignity before the world at large and a very questionable tranquillity ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... noble, others mediocre, others again may be sensual and degrading, but they have one quality in common—for good or bad, they ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... teach boys to write Latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish all Latin verse composition, and all Greek composition of every kind for mediocre boys. Not only would they learn the languages much faster, but there would be a great deal of time saved as well. Then I would abolish the absurd little lessons, with the parsing, and I would at all hazards push on till they could ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... manipulate (with accompanying lecture) a marvellous bivouac-tin containing a compound called beef a la mode, which came provided with its own spirits of wine and wick, both of which proved ineffectual to raise the temperature of the beef above a mediocre tepidity. Parker, having heard that the remains of this toothsome dish were intended for his breakfast, wisely hid it with such care that the dog stole it and consumed it, with results which ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... hawked about the streets by the boy. "The Light-House Tragedy" at least sold prodigiously, and the boy's vanity was correspondingly flattered; but the father stepped in and discouraged such work, warning Benjamin that "verse-makers were generally beggars." So, perhaps, we were spared a mediocre poet and given a first-rate prose writer, for the stuff of poetry was ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... before the time of his leaving us to return to Oxford for the autumn term, he walked into the drawing-room where I was sitting, and proposed that we should play some music together. To this I readily agreed. Though but a mediocre performer, I have always taken much pleasure in the use of the pianoforte, and esteemed it an honour whenever he asked me to play with him, since my powers as a musician were so very much inferior to his. After we had ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... nowhere before nor since has pure legality been made such a fetish. It was a game played by lawyers, not an attempt to get justice done. Since, in all criminal cases at least, the prosecution was carried on by one man and his associates, poorly paid and hence of mediocre ability, and the defence conducted by the keenest brains in the profession, it followed that convictions were rare. Homicide in various forms was little frowned upon. Duels were of frequent occurrence, and, in several instances, regular excursions, with ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... assessment: the domestic system is mediocre, but improving; service is adequate for government and business use, in part because major businesses have established their own private systems; since 1988, the government has promoted investment in the national telecommunications ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... was simply the final decomposition of impoverished, tainted, bourgeois blood, the sudden disappearance of a poor, mediocre being who, despite a facade of seeming health, had been ailing since childhood. But what an overwhelming blow it was both for the mother and for the father, all whose dreams and calculations it swept away! The only ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... of this timid hope. He was now in his element, knew all about it, rushed into details, and sawed away all doubt from their minds. The sum was this. Dodd's general performance was mediocre, but passable; he was plucked for his Logic. Hardie said he was very sorry for it. "What does it matter?" answered Kennet; "he ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... voices up, and out of their legitimate tessitura, has become a very grave evil, the consequences of which, in many instances, have been most disastrous. Tolerable baritones have been transformed into very mediocre tenors, capable mezzo-soprani into very indifferent dramatic soprani, and so on. That this process may have answered in a few isolated cases, where the vocal organs were of such exceptional strength and resistance as to bear the strain, is by no means a guarantee ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... interests of the multitude and admired no one man, being excessively devoted to the common weal; suspicious of sovereignty, he hated everything that had grown above its fellows, but loved everything mediocre through pity for its weakness. He showed himself a passionate adherent of the populace as did no one else, and indulged in outspokenness beyond the limits of propriety, even when it involved danger. All this he did not with a view to power or glory ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... independence and solitude. Thus you will come in contact with larger conceptions, fuller ideas, deeper sympathies, higher aspirations than is possible where you follow the ordinary routine of the ordinary, mediocre, self-contented man. Thank God for the spark of discontent, of ambition, of aspiration, of desire to see beyond, to know more, to climb higher, to solve the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... most shew the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... very few sonnets—Browning fewer than Tennyson—and neither ever wrote a great one. Longfellow, so inferior in most respects to his two great English contemporaries, was an incomparably superior sonnetteer. Tennyson's sonnets are all mediocre: Browning did not publish a single sonnet in the final complete edition of his works. He did however print a very few on special occasions, and when he was twenty-two years old, between the composition of Pauline and Paracelsus, there ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... actor. Undoubtedly the editor even in these respects retained what was successful in the originals rather than furnished contributions of his own. Those portions of the pieces which can with certainty be traced to the translator are, to say the least, mediocre; but they enable us to understand why Plautus became and remained the true popular poet of Rome and the true centre of the Roman stage, and why even after the passing away of the Roman world the theatre has repeatedly reverted ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... off youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The inspired young prophet who protested week by week against mediocrity in paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against which his protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of journalism accepted the patronage of the titled promoter of the half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... your smoker Boast your "shag," or even "twist," Every man were mediocre Save the blest tobacconist! He will point immortal morals, Make all common praises mute, Who shall win our grateful laurels With a ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery; the generation ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... continued while they voted in vain to elect a Speaker. The new party was determined to have John Sherman. The opposition was divided but finally chose Mr. Pennington, a moderate of mediocre ability. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... wishes that individuals in the exercise of special aptitudes should gain in depth what they are permitted to lose in extension. We are aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius does not shut up its activity within the limits of its functions; but mediocre talents consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their feeble energy; and if some of their energy is reserved for matters of preference, without prejudice to its functions, such a state of things at once bespeaks a spirit soaring ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... They lived habitually in an atmosphere of peril which taxed all their energies. Their activity was extreme, and their passions corresponded to their vehement vitality. About such men there could be nothing on a small or mediocre scale. When a weakling was born in a despotic family, his brothers murdered him, or he was deposed by a watchful rival. Thus only gladiators of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to religious ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... these critical gentlemen of the Army were less satisfied than ever. There had been three "first appearances," of poor quality, and they accused the management of having filled the hall with civilians in order to secure a good reception for these mediocre performers. Hussars and cuirassiers joined forces ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... the sound of his name pronounced. The fond mother, in the course of discreet conversation, had proceeded from the state of the weather to the state of her boy's soul, taking, with the ease of the mediocre, the one step between the sublime and the ridiculous. She had told the master the state of the weather—which, for once, was sublime; she wanted him, in return, to tell her the state of her ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... first sight one should think his ritual was. All you hear, and that pronounced with nonchalance, is, that Monsieur un tel has had Madame un telle. The Duc de Nivernois has parts, and writes at the top of the mediocre, but, as Madame Geoffrin says, is manqu'e par tout; guerrier manqu'e, ambassadeur manqu'e, homme d'affaires manqu'e and auteur manqu'e—no, he is not homme de naissance manqu'e. He would think freely, but has some ambition of being ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Hundred Days and after Waterloo, remained in his dungeon, forgotten of earth and heaven. Danglars comprehended the full extent of the wretched fate that overwhelmed Dantes; and, when Napoleon returned to France, he, after the manner of mediocre minds, termed the coincidence, "a decree of Providence." But when Napoleon returned to Paris, Danglars' heart failed him, and he lived in constant fear of Dantes' return on a mission of vengeance. He therefore informed ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Almanack seems to me very successful. But the historical Calendar might gain in interest by omissions and additions. Mediocre local celebrities such as "H.S. in E., T.D. in B., L.A. in L.," etc., etc., do not need to figure as historical. As little do a couple of first performances that were given in Weimar under my conductorship. See to it, dear friend, that more important data are collected in good time, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... right to judge a Gainsborough by his landscapes any more than it would be to judge a modern landscape painter by his portraits. But no matter how uninteresting these old landscapes are, their brown tonality insures them a certain dignity of inoffensiveness which a mediocre modern work of art never possesses, I would rather any time have a bad old picture than a bad one of the very recent schools. Modesty is not one of the chief attributes of modern art, and the silent protest of a gallery such as the ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... you just such a conventionalized history as you—yourself a man of conventionality and a vulgarian—will digest easiest of all. Because by itself life is either exceedingly humdrum and tedious to you, or else as exceedingly improbable as only life can be improbable. And so you have the eternal mediocre history about an officer, about a shop clerk, about a baby and a superannuated father, who there, in the provinces, bewails his strayed daughter and implores her to return home. But mark you, Lichonin, all that I'm saying doesn't apply to you; in you, upon my word ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... western Mediterranean and at the seaward base of the Ligurian Apennines, just where this range opens two passes of only 1,800 feet elevation to the upper Po Valley, made an active maritime town of Genoa from Strabo's day to the present. In its incipiency it relied upon one mediocre harbor on an otherwise harborless coast, a local supply of timber for its ships, and a road northward across the mountains.[523] The maritime ascendency in the Middle Ages of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and Barcelona proves that no ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... accepted. The Rothschilds' box is one of the largest in the opera-house. The Princess Metternich created a sensation when we entered—she always does—but Herr Wagner passed unnoticed. He sat behind and pretended to go to sleep. He thought everything most mediocre. The opera was "Faust," which I thought was beautifully put on the stage, with Madame Miolan Carvalho as Marguerite and Faure as Mephistopheles. They both sang and acted to perfection; but Wagner pooh-poohed at them and everything ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... appeared. He was very friendly to the abb and invited him to dinner. The priest was well versed in the art of being pleasant, thanks to the unconscious astuteness which the guiding of souls gives to the most mediocre of men who are called by the chance of events to exercise a power over their fellows. Toward dessert he became quite merry, with the gaiety that follows a pleasant meal, and as if struck by an idea he said: ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... plugged tightly. Many looked askance when Larry Gardner, supposedly a second baseman, was assigned to third, but the results more than justified the move, and it made room at second for Yerkes, a player who had proved only mediocre on the other side of the diamond. This switch and the return of Stahl, who is a grand mark to throw at on first base, gave the infield the same dash and confidence as the outfield possessed, and the addition of some pitching strength in Bedient and O'Brien did the rest. It is the ability to ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... been expended on Alice's musical education, yet she could do no more than rattle through some mediocre composition, with neither ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps I was prejudiced; but, now, the remarks of the other girls seemed ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... there in the lofty air, counting her breaths, counting the winkfuls of light, counting the final wrestles of her breaking heart, had been the belle of her section, and many good men had courted her hand. She had led a pleasant life, and children had been born to her—who shared her mediocre ambition and the invincibility of her will. If the charge of her guilt were proven, she was the Lady ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... she warned him as a gaunt girl went towards the piano; and sinking on to a convenient and sheltered couch, they resigned themselves to listen—or to endure. From that corner Rose had a view of the long room, mediocre in its decoration, mediocre in its occupants. She could see her host standing before the fire, swinging his eyeglasses on a cord and gazing at the cornice as the song proceeded. She could see Christabel's ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... course my bourgeois conscience which makes me see in all artistry, in all unusualness and all genius something deeply ambiguous, deeply dubious, deeply disreputable, and which fills me with this lovelorn weakness for the simple, candid, and agreeably normal, for the decent and mediocre. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... wasted in these pursuits, attended by a mediocre progress in the ordinary course of study and what the French call lecons d'agrement, and we accomplishments, a critical moment came for Aurore. She was weary of frolic and mischief,—she had tormented the nuns to her heart's content. She knew not what new comedy to invent. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... he discharged the duties of the trying position of Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. The ablest lawyers of both political parties constituted this great committee, and its chairman, if possessing only mediocre talents or attainments, would have been ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... made his debut, as has been said, with le Pere prudent in 1706. This was followed a few years later by three mediocre novels. The first of these, written in 1712, though not published" until 1737, appeared under the several titles of Pharsamon, les Folies romanesques, and le Don Quichotte moderne, and was, as one of the titles discloses, an attack upon the romantic novel, as exemplified ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... higher order of importance, or a strong point in another class. It may be more beneficial, for instance, to drill an ineffective turret crew than to try to reduce friction in a training gear already nearly frictionless; or it may be more beneficial to overcome the faults of a mediocre gun-pointer than to develop still more highly the skill already great of another gun-pointer; but, on the other hand, it may be less beneficial to drill boat crews at boat-sailing, even if they need it, than to drill them at landing as armed ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... controversy which presently arose out of Cibber's well-known letter to Pope. In August 1742, the month following its publication, among the pamphlets to which it gave rise, was announced The Cudgel; or, a Crab-tree Lecture, To the Author of the Dunciad. "By Hercules Vinegar, Esq." This very mediocre satire in verse is still to be found at the British Museum; but even if it were not included in Fielding's general disclaimer as to unsigned work, it would be difficult to connect it with him. To give but one reason, it would make him the ally and ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... art in the one and the facades of the other she fired off a rocket-like shower of original remarks, paradoxes, and brilliant criticism. She knew exactly where to scoff and where to be enthusiastic, jeered with all the ruthless slang of the Paris gamins at the pompously mediocre sights recommended to the tourists' admiration by Baedeker, and gave evidence of deep and true comprehension of all that ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... elected a member of the Commune by the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and forthwith appointed Director of the Beaux Arts. Until this time his life had been purely professional, and consequently of mediocre interest for the general public. He was born at Ornans, department of the Doubs, in 1819, and received his primary instructions from the Abbe Gousset, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims. He first applied ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind. But that does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts, or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign many may ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rate, more regardful of us than they are here, duke. The greater the world the uglier the farce; no obscenities and fooleries of the buffoon are more disgusting than the characters of the great, mediocre and insignificant, all mingled together. I prayed this morning for courage to hold out to the end, and to hasten the consummation. I am grateful for the benefit of the journey—but I pray the gods not to conduct themselves toward us as their image-man, for I should swear ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest, and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'If God made man in His own image, man has certainly paid Him ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... in words for the less he gave them in affection. Besides this, he was resolved not to be disturbed in his own vanities, and for this he knew there was one only way, which was to foster the vanities of everybody else. Never did eulogium take such varied forms to laud and exalt the most mediocre things. Nowhere were so many geniuses whom the public never guessed at raised to the rank of divinities as in the salons ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately, Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing occurrence! At ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the trade-mark of superior minds. Mediocre natures take no interest in it and, as we have seen, the timid are incapable of it, except in so far as ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... the highest military authorities were adequate enough till they were confronted with General Bonaparte and the new order of things. If a great man struggling with the storms of fate be the sublimest spectacle, a mediocre man in the same position is surely the most pitiful. Deserted by his presence of mind, which, indeed, had never been anything but an absence of danger,—baffled by the inapplicability of his habitual principles of conduct, (if that may ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... figure at the barristers' table was Samuel Peters Jarvis, his hands yet red with the blood of young John Ridout, ruthlessly shed by him in a duel two years before, and never to be effaced from the tablets of his memory. There, too, sat Henry John Boulton, a young man of much pretension but mediocre intellect, who had been appointed acting Solicitor-General during the previous year, and who united in his own person all the bigotry and narrow selfishness of the faction to which he belonged. He, also, had ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... had too much vulgar and sordid common sense; besides, did she not seem to prefer Jean? Without confessing it to himself too bluntly, this preference had a great deal to do with his low opinion of the widow's intellect; for, though he loved his brother, he could not help thinking him somewhat mediocre and believing himself the superior. However, he was not going to sit there till nightfall; and as he had done on the previous evening, he anxiously asked himself: "What ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... foremost French critic of the nineteenth century, and, in the view of many, the greatest literary critic of the world, was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December 23, 1804. He studied medicine, but soon abandoned it for literature; and before he gave himself up to criticism he made some mediocre attempts in poetry and fiction. He became professor at the College de France and the Ecole Normale and was appointed Senator in 1865. A course of lectures given at Lausanne in 1837 resulted in his great "Histoire de Port-Royal" and another given at Liege in ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a mediocre thing he is unnoticed; if his work is a masterpiece, jealousy wags its tongue ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... that I had so soon found a job. Mika and Nannette, brunette Canadians, with voices sweet and carrying, talked in good English and mediocre French. ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... often most strongly exhibited by the uncultivated—that is, the unspoiled—public, and often is worth more than any cultivation. The cultivated public should be willing to accept only the best; it should ruthlessly condemn the bad and the mediocre. ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... Germans deigned to be pleased with them; for all these works appeared indeed at a happy and favorable time. They were all written in the spirit which we have developed above. Frequently the fortunate poet undertook the artistic task of giving a high value to very mediocre materials by revising them; and though it cannot be denied that he sometimes permits reason to triumph over the higher powers, and at other times allows sensuality to prevail over the moral qualities, yet we must also grant that, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... loosely, for a few days. He was one of those men whom it is a life-long pleasure to remember. I can record his existence the more easily that there is not the slightest chance of his ever reading these lines. He was a fat, large man of forty-five, obviously in business, and probably of a mediocre success. His eyes were light-coloured, very small, always watery, and perpetually roving. The lower part of his face was clean-shaven and very broad; his mouth wide, with thin, moist, colourless lips; his nose fat and Hebraic. He was rather bald. He had respect for Montreal, because, though closed ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... rigidity to allow measurements to be made. It must be allowed that, unfortunately, no physicist or chemist has been as lucky as these two botanists; and the attempts to reproduce semi-permeable walls completely answering to the definition, have never given but mediocre results. If, however, the experimental difficulty has not been overcome in an entirely satisfactory manner, it at least appears very probable that such walls ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... feuilleton some day," Lousteau answered coolly. "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... must call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society. It must awaken new tastes and ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... only a few lyric actors more versatile and gifted than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages. His voice was limited in compass, inferior in quality, and habitually out of tune, his power of musical execution mediocre, his physical appearance entirely without grace, picturesqueness, or dignity. Yet Ronconi, by sheer force of a versatile dramatic genius, delighted audiences in characters which had been made familiar to the public through the splendid personalities of Tamburini and Lablache, personalities ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... the drawing room needs all that to be filled. Being the source of all preferment and of every favor, it is natural that it should overflow[2129]. It is the same in our leveling society (in 1875), where the drawing room of an insignificant deputy, a mediocre journalist, or a fashionable woman, is full of courtiers under the name of friends and visitors. Moreover, here, to be present is an obligation; it might be called a continuation of ancient feudal homage; the staff of nobles is maintained as the retinue of its ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... golden mediocre: a stronger proof, by the hyperbolic praise it receives, of the decline of the drama than even the abundance of trash from which it gleams. Anything at all decent from a new dramatic author will obtain success far more easily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... his tragedy of Menalippus, uses an admirable expression to designate women of the proper degree of matrimonial comeliness, such as a philosopher would select. He calls this degree stata forma—a rational, mediocre sort of beauty, which is not liable to be either koine or poine. And Favorinus, who was a remarkably sensible man, and came from Provence—the male inhabitants of which district have always valued themselves on their knowledge of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... travesty of rusticity. All is reasoned out, full of purpose, and leading to an end. There is in every stroke what the litterateurs call ideas when they talk about painting. Thus Diderot has celebrated Greuze in the most lyric strain. Greuze, however, is not a mediocre artist: he invented a genre unknown before his time, and he possesses veritable qualities of a painter. He has colour, he has touch, and his heads, modelled by square plans and, so to speak, by facets, have ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the fact would have amazed a public whom long experience had taught to put no more faith in the promises of impresarios than in those of princes. As a matter of fact, barring the extravagant attributes alleged to be due to the singers, the majority of whom were worse than mediocre, more than half were kept, and the deficiency more than counterbalanced by new elements which were introduced from time to time, as happy emergencies called for them. Chief of these was the engagement of Luisa Tetrazzini; of which more in its proper place. The official announcement was of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Pons. There were a "Chevalier de Malte en Priere," by Sebastian del Piombo; a "Holy Family," by Fra Bartolommeo; a "Landscape," by Hobbema; and a "Portrait of a Woman," by Albert Durer. Apparently they were in reality mediocre as works of art, but they were a source of the utmost pride and delight to their owner, who said enthusiastically of one of them—the Sebastian del Piombo—that "human art can go no further." When we know that in the ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... in Tours known as the Leguay Institution. He had a taste for reading, indeed it was more than a taste, it was a sort of mental starvation which made him throw himself hungrily upon every book he encountered. Otherwise, Honore was frankly a mediocre and negligent. But concentrated in himself and deprived of the caresses which would have meant so much to him, he created a whole world out of his readings and sometimes gave glimpses of it to Laure by acting out before her dramas and comedies of his own manufacture ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... with the officers of the army. They have no confidence either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... double burden, a sestina, that is what it is like, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Liza, being literature in intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets. We must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of one incomparable prose passage. She has passed out of that mysterious misuse of oil paint, that arid glazing of terre verte, and has come into her possession of eternal life, into the immortality of Pater's prose. Degas is wilting already; year after year ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... consciousness that this is the condition of things, every mediocre writer tries to mask his own natural style. This instantly necessitates his giving up all idea of being naive, a privilege which belongs to superior minds sensible of their superiority, and therefore sure of themselves. For instance, it is absolutely impossible for men of ordinary intelligence ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... I played Gabrielle, by this same Augier, and I had incessant quarrels with him. I found the verses of this play execrable. Coquelin, who took the part of my husband, made a great success. As for me, I was as mediocre as the play itself, which is saying ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... and following a lackey, crossed a large mosaic-paved hall, divided by columns of rare marbles into panels filled with mediocre frescoes on a very large scale. At the end of this hall was the Countess's room, which formed a striking contrast, being small, panelled with wood, and filled with devotional knick-knacks that gave it the look of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... his most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul—whose name is veritably Balzac-ian—tells us some different stories; even Gustave Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand,—as was Countess d'Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better known as "Daniel Stern,"—that lasted from 1846 to 1854, according to Emile Faguet. Here then was a medium which was the other side of good and evil, a new ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... highest power is simply the uniting of the outer agencies of expression with the Power that works from within. Are you a painter? Then in the degree that you open yourself to the power of the forces within will you become great instead of mediocre. You can never put into permanent form inspirations higher than those that come through your own soul. In order for the higher inspirations to come through it, you must open your soul, you must open ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... beyond doubt, there is grave degeneracy. It is impossible to suppose that the old travellers by coach were contented with entertainment such as one gets nowadays at the table of a country hotel. The cooking is wont to be wretched; the quality of the meat and vegetables worse than mediocre. What! Shall one ask in vain at an English inn for an honest chop or steak? Again and again has my appetite been frustrated with an offer of mere sinew and scrag. At a hotel where the charge for lunch was five shillings, I ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... grammatical rule that abstract nouns had no plural. Now all this development in the field of religion throws light upon the character of the Roman mind and its instinctive methods of thought, and we see why it is that the Romans were very great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. Both law and philosophy require the ability for abstract thought; in both cases the essential qualities of a thing must be separated from the thing itself. But in the case of philosophic thought this abstraction, these qualities, do not immediately seek reincarnation. They ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... the cheaper, coarser kind, and although some attempt was made at the close of the last century, when the industry was revived, to bring it to a higher artistic level of colour and glaze, it still, to my mind, continues mediocre, and has neither the highly finished beauty of such work as the Ruskin pottery, nor the genuinely simple lines or colouring of "peasant pottery," such as that from Quimperle in Brittany. The Barum ware has a sort of bourgeois mediocrity between these two different types, and there is room ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... to bring the wages of skilled manual labor. Organized labor insists on making a class and then having that class receive the same wages, and it does nothing to encourage individual effort by consenting to the payment of higher wages to the man of experience, industry and skill than to the mediocre and lazy. It will in some way have to obviate that difficulty which works against the cause of labor and the interest of society. Moreover, its leaders do not discourage, as they should, lawlessness as a means of achieving ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... of great enterprises, to economies achieved, or to the operation of new and more efficient labour-saving appliances. Through either cause, a World State may find itself doing well except for an excess of citizens of mediocre and lower quality. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... acquitted himself gloriously of the obligations imposed by his flowery title. It happened to him, as to many a mediocre actor, that the day when the public granted him their full attention he became, one may almost say, superior. Feeling at his ease, he displayed the fine qualities which accompanied his defects. His wit had ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... know it is not the first song to bear that title, nor is it entirely original with Robert Burns. It is said that the second and third stanzas were written by him, but that the others were merely revised. In a letter to a friend, written in 1793, Burns says, "The air (of Auld Lang Syne) is but mediocre; but the following song, the old song of the olden time, which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man's singing, is enough to recommend any air." This refers to the song as we know it, but the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... at all, except Shakespeare, whom am going through from beginning to end. That tones you up and puts new air into your lungs, just as if you were on a high mountain. Everything appears mediocre beside ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... castra collocutus est.... Quem cum Scato salutasset, 'quem te appellem?' inquit: 'voluntate hospitem, necessitate hostem.' Erat in colloquio aequitas: {15} nullus timor, nulla suberat suspicio; mediocre etiam odium. Non enim, ut eriperent nobis socii civitatem, sed ut ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... pure willpower more than 50 of Euclid's propositions. That makes 18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having figured out 32 while screwing around, according to his sister's reports, later became a fairly mediocre geometer[5] and a very bad metaphysician. Towards his 450th year, near the end of his infancy, he dissected many small insects no more than 100 feet in diameter, which would evade ordinary microscopes. He wrote a very curious book about this, ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... recognized and rewarded, they make their works therein; and striving to become very excellent in order to put to shame, in some sort, those by whom they have been outraged, they become very often great men, whereas, by staying quietly in their country, they would peradventure have had little more than a mediocre success in their arts. Antonio Viniziano, who betook himself to Florence in the wake of Agnolo Gaddi in order to learn painting, grasped the good method of working so well that he was not only esteemed and loved ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... by sending to Denmark an envoy with a 48-hour ultimatum, and along with him 20 ships-of-the-line, which according to Nelson were "the best negotiators in Europe." The commander in chief of this squadron was Sir Hyde Parker, a hesitant and mediocre leader who could be trusted to do nothing (if that were necessary), and Nelson was made second in command. Influence, seniority, a clean record, and what-not, often lead to such choices, bad enough at any time but indefensible in time of war. Fortunately for England, when the reply of the Danish ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... audience during the recitation of Alfieri's tragedies, if they are not sustained by some theatrical celebrity? You will certainly say, to the mediocrity of the actors. But I hold that the tragic effect can be produced even by mediocre actors, if this effect truly abounds in the plot of the tragedy.... I know that these opinions of mine will not be shared by the great majority of the Italian public, and so be it. The contrary will always be favorable to one who greatly loved his country, always desired to serve her, and succeeded ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... birth, more Potterism than they actually possessed. A certain amount, said Juke, is part of the make-up of very nearly every human being; it has to be fought down, like the notorious ape and tiger. But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity. In fact, they would ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... illustrations of men of excellent mentality being cast aside and ones of mediocre or in some cases, little, if any, ability chosen to fill important places. The former are unable to impress their personality; they have great thoughts, great ideas, but these thoughts and ideas are locked up in ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... glamour about England yet which appeals strongly to the callow author: it lends that rosy haze of romance and unreality which is popularly associated with fiction; but it was long ago done to death by mediocre writers and laughed out of good literary society, and to-day America will not suffer ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers of Lyons, they are ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... the faun took one day a livelier and more assured turn, the joyousness became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial performance at an East End hall. Dressed as a jockey, for no particular reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the gay bubbly in Eccleston Square" to an appreciative audience, which included ...
— When William Came • Saki
... married couple. matrona matron. maxima maxim. mayo May. mayor greater, larger, older. mayoral head-shepherd. mecer to stir, to agitate. medallon m. medallion. media noche midnight. mediano middling, mediocre. mediante by means of. mediar to be at the middle, to share, to drink to the middle of a glass. medida measure. medio half; m. middle, way, mean. mediodia m. midday, south. medir to measure. meditar to meditate. Mediterraneo ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... arrival of the French, Napoleon had sent a financier, M. Budin, to put order into the country's resources. M. Budin was a commonplace, middle-aged little man, of mediocre ability, whose personality was not calculated to impress one with an idea of intellectual force. I was told, by those who were in a position to judge of his ability as a specialist, that, although a first-class administrative officer, he was lacking in initiative, and was in no way qualified ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... has given Mark Twain a sort of professional veneer, but it could not give him fine instincts or nice discriminations or elevated tastes. His works are pure and suitable for children, just as the work of most shallow and mediocre fellows. House dogs and donkeys make the most harmless and chaste companions for young innocence in the world. Mark Twain's humor is of the kind that teamsters use in bantering with each other, and his ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... suspected, was not the woman to suffer greatly in her false position; she had very temperate blood, and a thoroughly English devotion to the proprieties; none the less he had done her wrong, for she belonged to a gentle family in mediocre circumstances, and his prospective "M.P.," his solid wealth, were sore temptations to put before such a girl. He had known—yes, he assuredly knew—that it was nothing but a socially sanctioned purchase. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... monuments throw no light, and on which we must therefore be content to be ignorant. All that we can see is, that either personal merit or official rank and position must have enabled him to establish himself; for he certainly did not derive any assistance from his birth, which must have been mediocre, if not actually obscure. It is the custom of the Babylonian and Assyrian kings to glory in their ancestry, and when the father has occupied a decently high position, the son declares his sire's name and rank at the commencement of each inscription, but Sargon never, in any ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... when most available. When I am at work I like my tools around me; if they are not handy, my work is interrupted, and an interruption often breaks the train of thought and renders impotent or at least mediocre an endeavor which elsewise would be excellent. In their ambition to "put things in shape," and to give me an object lesson in order and method, Alice and her vandal hired girl hide my tools of trade, disposing of my books, papers, ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... little too far. Children should respect their parents' wishes as far as possible; but when it is a question of their own future, they have a right to present their side of the case. If my uncle Darbois's father had had his way, my uncle Darbois would probably now be a mediocre engineer, instead of the brilliant philosopher who is admired and recognized by ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... worst and most hopelessly stupid boys in the whole school—I've caned him frequently this term, and that keeps a boy green in one's memory; but Blenkinsopp minor, Cyril Anastasius Guy Thingumbob Whatyoumaycallit,—I don't remember HIM a bit. I suppose he's one of those inoffensive, mildly mediocre sort of boys who fail to impress their individuality upon one in any way. My experience is that you can always bear in mind the three cleverest boys at the top of each form, and the three stupidest or most mischievous ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... elder held that the secret of success consisted in being master of your subject, such mastery being attainable only through continuous application and study. Hence it happens that the men who have most moved the world, have not been so much men of genius, strictly so called, as men of intense mediocre abilities, and untiring perseverance; not so often the gifted, of naturally bright and shining qualities, as those who have applied themselves diligently to their work, in whatsoever line that might lie. "Alas!" said a widow, speaking of her brilliant but careless son, "he ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... has been attempted in the Philippines, but with very mediocre results. Cebu seems to be the island most suitable for vine culture, but the specimens of fruit produced can bear no comparison with the European. In Naga (Cebu Is.) I have eaten green Figs grown in the orchard of a ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... that he might be present at a ball that she was giving. These despatches, as we have said, contained the wish that Mary Stuart should espouse Leicester; but this proposal could not be taken seriously. Leicester, whose personal worth was besides sufficiently mediocre, was of birth too inferior to aspire to the hand of the daughter of so many kings; thus Mary replied that such an alliance would not become her. Meanwhile, something strange and tragic ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be mentioned Morton and Wade, both bluff, coarse, and ungenerous, and thoroughly convinced that the Republican party had a monopoly of loyalty, wisdom, and virtues, and that by any means it must gain and keep control; Boutwell, fanatical and mediocre; and Benjamin Butler, a charlatan and demagogue. As a class the Western radicals were less troubled by humanitarian ideals than were those of the East and ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... especially fitting that all ruined buildings should be repaired in Rome. In Rome, praised beyond all other cities by the world's mouth, there should be nothing sordid or mediocre[296].' ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian: "I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is colored, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... tendencies. As regards cooerdination, the fact was illustrated just above that this method would not always work; but sometimes it works immensely well. Here is a young person (either sex), in the twenties, with insistent sex impulses, tempted to yield to the fascination of some mediocre representative of the other sex. Such a low-level attachment, however, militates against self-respect, work, ambition, social sense. Where is the "cooerdination"? It has to be found; some worthy mate will harness all these tendencies, stimulating and gratifying sex attraction, self-respect, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... and Senator Wigfall, of Texas, denounced the President yesterday as mediocre and malicious—and that his blunders ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... relict of John Merrick's only brother, was endowed with a mediocre mind and a towering ambition. When left a widow with an only daughter she had schemed and contrived in endless ways to maintain an appearance of competency on a meager income. Finally she divided her capital, derived from her husband's life insurance, into three equal parts, which she determined ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... signallers. The handy are absorbed into the transport, or become machine-gunners. The sedentary take post as cooks, or tailors, or officers' servants. The waster hews wood and draws water and empties swill-tubs. The great, mediocre, undistinguished majority merely go to stiffen the rank and file, and right nobly they do ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... age. In such attempts to exalt the grander phases of human existence, the poets were, however, owing to their fear of enthusiasm, never quite successful. It is significant that though most critics consider Pope's Homer no better than a mediocre performance, none denies that his Rape of the Lock ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... of the Binnenhof, the Hague has no important monuments ancient or modern. There are several mediocre statues of the Princes of Orange, a vast, naked cathedral, and a royal palace of modest proportions. On many of the public buildings storks are carved, the stork being the heraldic animal of the city. Many of these birds walk about ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... unhappy victim of a fate which in spiteful mood gifted me beyond my fellow-men. I might have had my share of enjoyment in the world, as mediocre people have, but my perfections are in my way at every turn, continually marring my prospects. A superficial observer might think that these advantages would have the contrary effect—that I should be more fortunate than others—but my story will prove my assertion. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... perspective; from my music mistress, my kind aunt, to recognise the notes and keys, and to play, first short pieces, then sonatas, alone, then as duets. But alas! Neither in the arts of sight nor hearing did I ever prove myself more than mediocre. I never attained, either in drawing or piano-playing, to more than a soulless accuracy. And I hardly showed much greater aptitude when, on bright Sunday mornings, which invited not at all to the delights of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... unhampered by the restrictions of truth, many fantastic accusations were invented against Las Casas, and diligently circulated. The most frugal and abstemious of men was accused of gluttony and intemperance; his learning, which was certainly varied if not vast and was by no means mediocre, was declared to be superficial and insufficient to enable him to properly weigh nice questions of theology and law, and finally it was insinuated that some of his opinions were heretical and that his refusal to allow the sacraments of ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... the world. You will never love her as you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other city of Italy. We do not love the living as we love the dead. They press upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only our love. Genoa has never asked it, and never will. She is one of us, her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has dared to look. She is ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Bosworth would wash his hands of the entire business, and the sly swindlers must look elsewhere, in order to unload their property. The extravagant claims they had made for its richness could not be justified, because it was after all a very mediocre discovery, which would never pay for the working, so far away from ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... sought and found a mediocre sunset on an easel. Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust. He ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... portrait in a half dozen mediocre replicas representing a man of twenty-five or thirty years which some archaeologists are inclined to consider a possible representation of Vergil.[8] It is the so-called "Brutus." The argument for its ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... captivate a fantastic and voluptuous bigot. However, they would never have gained more than an antechamber or alcove influence, they would never have risen to political influence, had they not known how to pervert the noblest inclinations of the King, whilst flattering the lowest. Mediocre and secondary as was his place in the line of the Hohenzollerns, Frederick William was not devoid of all royal qualities. He was brave, he was kind-hearted, or rather he was a man of "sensibility"; he desired the public weal; he had ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... could understand, ever," she said at last in an unaltered voice, a voice, to her own consciousness, like the wrapping of a shroud about her. "It's only I who could feel it, so deeply as to go so far. All that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would see him as he was, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... other hand, I am bound to urge in the Pope's behalf that the colleges are numerous, well endowed, and provided with ample means for turning out mediocre priests. The monasteries devote themselves to the education of little monks. They are taught from an early age to hold a wax taper, wear a frock, cast down their eyes, and chant in Latin. If you wish to admire the foresight of the Church, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... instances—Kant, Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart—how very little which is absolutely new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks, after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seems quite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on or listener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similar sequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding and enjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... considered almost more than a match for his cousin on account of his superior 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 had received a lesson which might probably ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Point lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to the State-House ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... not a bit of difference. History is to record those three Presidentiads, and especially the administrations of Fillmore and Buchanan, as so far our topmost warning and shame. Never were publicly display'd more deform'd, mediocre, snivelling, unreliable, false-hearted men. Never were these States so insulted, and attempted to be betray'd. All the main purposes for which the government was establish'd were openly denied. The perfect ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of affront, 'you thought me serious? Don't you know I'm the ninth, instead of the nineteenth-century man, under your wing? I'd promise you to be a bishop, only, you see, I'm afraid I couldn't be mediocre enough.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... terre, trouva les tentes brisees en pieces, et l'on ne decouvrit pas un seul homme dans tout le pais. La surprise ne fut pas mediocre. On regarda partout si l'on ne verroit point de traces qui marquassent qu'on eut construit quelque petit batiment: mais il n'y avoit ni tarriere, ni hache, ni couteaux, ni cloux, etc. Il n'y avoit ni ecrit ni indication par ou l'on put conjecturer ce qu'etoient ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... Grunch was one of the mildest, most innocent men I ever knew. He had a wife to whom he was devoted with a dog-like devotion; he went to church; he was shy and reserved, and he held a mediocre position in a firm of envelope-makers in the City. But he had a romantic soul, and whenever the public craving for envelopes fell off—and that is seldom—he used to allay his secret passion for danger, devilry and excitement by writing sensational novels. One of these was recently published, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... certainly worthy of Buonarroti's powerful conception. The balustrade which crowns the facade is indeed bad and vulgar; the great pilasters are very poor in invention, and the windows of the first story are extremely mediocre in style. Nevertheless, there is a great simplicity of lines in these palaces; and the porticoes of the ground-floor might be selected for the beauty of their leading motive. The opposition of the great pilasters to the little columns ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the land service—done at home, and not one of them presented, I think, earlier than the end of Mr. Monroe's administration (1825). The delay principally resulted from the want of good die-sinkers. There was only one of mediocre merit (and he a foreigner) found for the army. What the state of this art may now be in the United States I know not. But I beg leave again to suggest that the honour of the country requires that medals, voted by Congress, should always ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... lucky as to hit upon one; always provided that he be not of those whom La Bruyere has described as being made into sages by a certain natural mediocrity of mind. Whatever else may be said of Pattison, at least he was never mediocre, never vapid, trite, or common. Nor was he one of those false pretenders to the judicial mind, who 'mistake for sober sense And wise reserve, the plea of indolence.' On the contrary, his industry and spirit of laborious acquisition were his best credentials. He was invested to our young ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... brothers! What could one do for you which would not be insufficient, unworthy, mediocre? We can at least give up everything and devote ourselves heart and soul to our ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Judge Lawton and other men say that if a man were still a clerk at thirty he was hopeless. The ruts were packed with the mediocre whose destiny was the routine work of the world, whatever might be their secret opinions of their unrecognized abilities and their resentment against a system ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... during his twenty years of business life. And these sprites were as familiar to them now as those of their own childhood. They little knew that at night they met and talked with them. Daddy had put them all into the Wumble Book, achieving mediocre success with the rhymes, but amply atoning with the illustrations. The Woman of the Haystack was evidently a monster pure and simple, till Jinny announced that she merely had 'elephantitis,' and thus explained her satisfactorily. The Lamplighter, with shining feet, taking enormous ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... than it would be to judge a modern landscape painter by his portraits. But no matter how uninteresting these old landscapes are, their brown tonality insures them a certain dignity of inoffensiveness which a mediocre modern work of art never possesses, I would rather any time have a bad old picture than a bad one of the very recent schools. Modesty is not one of the chief attributes of modern art, and the silent protest of a gallery such as the one we are now in, the ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... the return of its own candidate, and to defeat those who stand most in his way, the tendency will be general to place the more popular candidates, those whose success is most feared, at the bottom of the list, so as to give them as few marks as possible. The result would be to favour mediocre men, or even in ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... is always famed for his technical ability. Even the mediocre artists possess that. The great artists realize that the mechanical side of piano playing is but the basis, but they would no sooner think of trying to do without that basis than they would of dispensing ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... true of even mediocre poetry, for how much more are we indebted to the best! Like the fabled fountain of the Azores, but with a more various power, the magic of this Art can confer on each period of life its appropriate blessing: on early years Experience, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... discourses; nothing in him was extreme but the orator: the man was by no means so, neither was he at all cruel. Studious, but without imagination; copious, but without warmth, his intellect was mediocre, his mind honest, his will variable, his heart in the right place. His talent, which they affected to compare with Mirabeau's, was nothing more than a power of skilfully rivetting public attention. His habit of pleading ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps I was prejudiced; but, now, the remarks of the other girls seemed to ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... praise but full applause Of simple critics. Take my case. In me Behold the good knight Marsyas, M.A., Three times a candidate for Parliament, And twice retired; a Justice of the Peace; Master of Arts (I said), and better known In literary spheres as Master of The Mediocre-Obvious; and read By boarding-misses in their myriads. These dote upon me. Sweetly have I sung The commonplaces ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... Brunswick, and a descendant of William. Frederick William I married his first cousin, Dorothea, granddaughter of Sophia, and also a descendant of William the Silent. Unfortunately the Hohenzollern line was continued by a mediocre brother of Frederick II, but through his sister, Queen Ulrica, the line of genius lasted still another generation to Gustavus III ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... portfolios of drawings in public and private libraries, we are struck with the accumulated mass of mediocre talent. Many of them are often well composed, and even well drawn, but they are completely destitute of what constitutes true merit—they possess no distinguishing mark whereby we can discern one master from another; they are struck off with wonderful ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. The Burial in England is perhaps too much of an ad hoc call to be great poetry. But it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of God ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... contradiction to the old grammatical rule that abstract nouns had no plural. Now all this development in the field of religion throws light upon the character of the Roman mind and its instinctive methods of thought, and we see why it is that the Romans were very great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. Both law and philosophy require the ability for abstract thought; in both cases the essential qualities of a thing must be separated from the thing itself. But in the case of philosophic ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... awakened once. He sent her to do her work, put fresh tapers in the place of those that had burnt out, and then he looked at his mother, revolving in his brain those apparently profound thoughts, those religious and philosophical commonplaces which trouble people of mediocre intelligence in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... mistrust of masculine idealism, ever prevents them from speaking in its entirety. And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalisation does not apply exactly to Mrs Fyne's outburst ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and found a mediocre sunset on an easel. Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust. He knew ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... greatly appreciates a joke. Most of the puns were too involved for me to follow, but there was always a certain amount of slap-stick comedy that could be readily understood. Then there was dancing—as a whole monotonous and mediocre; but there was one old man who was a remarkable performer, and would have been appreciated on any stage in the world. The topical songs invariably amused me—they were so universal in spirit. The chorus of one which was a great hit ran: "Haido, haido, rahweni passak!" "I say, ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... of aristocratic conditions and traditions, has produced? it will be asked. Has pure individualism in a virgin field wrought of its opportunity only this mediocre, all-round, good-natured, profane, rough, energetic, ingenious efficiency? Is this colorless, insipid "social consistency" the best wine that the valley can offer of its ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... Falstaff in love, and that Shakespeare, in obedience to this command, wrote the play within a fortnight. Unless this tradition be true, it is difficult to explain why Shakespeare should have written a comedy which is, in comparison with his other work of this period, at once conventional and mediocre. The subject—the intrigues of Falstaff with two married women, and the wooing of a commonplace girl by two foolish suitors and another as commonplace as herself—gave Shakespeare little opportunity for poetry and none for the portrayal of the types of character ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... prejudice, hatred, and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all economical, intellectual, moral, and political ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... army, an English officer in its service, Lieutenant W.V. Herbert, states that the artillery was very good, despite the poor supply of horses; that the infantry was very good; the regular cavalry mediocre, the irregular cavalry useless. He estimates the total forces in Europe and Asia at 700,000; but, as he admits that the battalions of 800 men rarely averaged more than 600, that total is clearly fallacious. An American authority ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... The downward side of middle age finds him afflicted with various physical ailments, entirely dependent upon a precarious position at a moderate salary, without influential friends, completely disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much fagged, devoid of high ambition, and with a most unstimulating prospect before him. His attitude toward the business of book reviewing is that he wishes he had gone into the tailor business or that his father had left ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... rich, he had told her so himself; his life would be that of a beast of burden, and that too, before he had learned to bear the yoke. If he had to work, to feed so many people, he might strain himself to the uttermost, he would still remain mediocre. They would both suffer under this, be disappointed and discontented. He must not pay so heavy a price for an indiscretion for which she was ten times more to blame than he. What did she imagine people would say? He who was so popular, so sought after. They would ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... cousin on account of his superior 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 had received a lesson ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the world knows by now, is the world's No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but perfection satisfies him. He hates compromise, loathes the half-baked and mediocre, refuses to put up with "something ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... to produce something to last, relatively a long time, several generations—what we call 'permanent.' The intermediate position is necessarily insecure. It is not really wanted. What is lost by society when one of these mediocre masterpieces is overlooked? A sensation, a single ray in a sunset, missed by a small literary coterie! The circle is perhaps eclectic. It may seem hard that good work is overwhelmed in the cataract of production, while relatively bad, garish work is rewarded. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... of the psalm in another respect, as insisting on the importance, not of the well endowed, but of the slenderly furnished, who are immensely in the majority. This text is a message to ordinary, mediocre people, without much ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... life of a saint, but his most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul—whose name is veritably Balzac-ian—tells us some different stories; even Gustave Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand,—as was Countess d'Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better known as "Daniel Stern,"—that lasted from 1846 to 1854, according to Emile Faguet. Here then was a medium which was the other side of good and evil, a new transvaluation ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... imagination was endowed with but mediocre power of creation, began to find himself in a quandary as to a means of ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin, and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in knowledge of mediocre verse. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... esteeming merit in others instead of being jealous of it, and skillful in making this merit conduce to his own glory, will always be a good general, and may even pass for a great man. Unfortunately, the disposition to do justice to merit in others is not the most common quality: mediocre minds are always jealous, and inclined to surround themselves with persons of little ability, fearing the reputation of being led, and not realizing that the nominal commander of an army always receives almost all the glory of its ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... might say, the symphonic composition of the play, which allots the parts as arbitrarily as in the Midsummer Night's Dream does Peter Quince, who says to highly respectable people: "You play the Lion, and you play the Ass," necessitates making a victim of a man who was a mediocre diplomat, but for a time, at least, a fairly good soldier. The author feels no compunction on this score. Stupidity, as Comus artlessly thinks, is not wickedness; the Lion or the Ass—each is necessary to different moments ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the great flood of mediocre writing that has been pouring over the United States in the last decade or two, and speaks of it thus in a letter written to Mr. Scribner from her quiet ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of many, the greatest literary critic of the world, was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December 23, 1804. He studied medicine, but soon abandoned it for literature; and before he gave himself up to criticism he made some mediocre attempts in poetry and fiction. He became professor at the College de France and the Ecole Normale and was appointed Senator in 1865. A course of lectures given at Lausanne in 1837 resulted in his great "Histoire de Port-Royal" and another given at Liege in his ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... should persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting him. Those who were good to him he exalted and lauded to the skies, no matter how they conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity. Some of the most mediocre princes, who had paid him compliments, he embalmed in prose and verse. Frederick VII. of Denmark, whose immorality was notorious, was, according to Andersen, "a good, amiable king," "sent by God to Danish land and folk," than whom "no truer ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... playbills: Baptiste, aine, Baptiste pere, Baptiste cadet, Madame Baptiste mere, Madame Baptiste bru. This resulted in the pun of calling a play in which they all appeared une piece de baptistes. Nicolas soon obtained the public favour, specially in La Martelliere's mediocre Robert, chef de [v.03 p.0370] brigands, and as Count Almaviva, in Beaumarchais' La Mere coupable. His success in this was so great that the directors of the Theatre de la Republique—who had already secured Talma, Dugazon and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... daughters of Khuniatonu playing undressed at their mother's side, are examples of a reserved and delicate grace. But these models, when once composed and finished even to the smallest details, were entrusted for execution to workmen of mediocre powers, who were recruited not only from Thebes, but from the neighbouring cities of Hermopolis and Siut. These estimable people, with a praiseworthy patience, traced bit by bit the cartoons confided ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... some day," Lousteau answered coolly. "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he is ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... trapped the Russians in a narrow defile when, caught between two fires, they would have been forced to surrender, and thus brought the war to an end. One regretted the departure of King Jrme, whom Junot had replaced, for although a mediocre general, he would probably have gone to help Ney. We expected to see Junot severely punished, but he was one of Napoleon's earliest adherents and had supported him in all his campaigns, from the siege of Toulon in '93 to the present. The Emperor was fond of him ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... a very kind man and never mistreated his slaves. He was a man of mediocre means, and instead of having a large plantation as was usual in those days, he ran a boarding house, the revenue therefrom furnishing him substance for a livelihood. He had a small farm from which fresh produce was obtained to supply the needs of his lodgers. Mary's family were his only slaves. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... fool, in spite of his follies. He had talents of a mediocre kind, if he had chosen to make a better use of them. Yet the general opinion was not in favour of his wisdom. He quite deserved Sheridan's cool satire for his affectation, if not for his want ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... In those busy years she had not only earned the living for herself and her boy; she had trained that boy into manhood and placed his foot on the first rung of business success. She had transformed the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company from a placidly mediocre concern to a thriving, flourishing, nationally known institution. All this might have turned another woman's head. It only served to set Emma McChesney's more splendidly on her shoulders. Not too splendidly, ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... should," responded Valdor promptly; "Only it happens that they are not! They treat me merely as a laquais de place,—just as they would treat Zouche, had he accepted his Sovereign's offer. But this I will admit,—that mediocre musicians always get on very well with Royal persons! I have heard a very great Majesty indeed praise a common little American woman's abominable singing, as though she were a prima-donna, and saw him ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... can picture his bewilderment amidst those four women, terrible women ever busy with finery, receiving and paying visits, and running after marriageable men who flee away. It's ill-luck with a vengeance, the daily defeat of a poor devil of mediocre attainments, who imagined that his position as a deputy would facilitate money-making, and who is drowning himself in it all. And so how can Chaigneux have done otherwise than take money, he who is always hard up for a five-hundred-franc ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a heavy tyre; but Pocket Upton did not think it was that. He caught his father's arm, and whispered in his father's ear, and they plunged together into a side street broader than the asphalt thoroughfare, but with scarcely a break in either phalanx of drab mediocre dwellings, and not a creature stirring except themselves and a few who followed. The hog's back of a still more deserted bridge arched itself at the foot of the street, its suspension cables showing against the sky in foreshortened curves. As they ran a peculiarly shrill whistle cut ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... The cacique reminded them, however, that Guarionex was a hero, and had rendered him services when he fled to him for protection, for he had brought him royal presents. Moreover, he had taught both the cacique himself and his wife to sing and dance, a thing not to be held in mediocre consideration. Maiobanexius was determined never to surrender the prince who had appealed to his protection, and whom he had promised to defend. He was prepared to risk the gravest perils with him rather than to merit the reproach of having betrayed ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... certainly. But facts are facts, Watson, and, after all, you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications. It is painful to have to say these things, but you leave me ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... himself. Had all else that he wrote been merely mediocre, this one short poem would have given him a claim on the grateful memory of posterity. The note it strikes is one that has never been heard before in Latin poetry and is never heard again. We have wavered before as to Statius' title to the name of true poet; this should turn ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... press have combined to make these volumes, what American books are too apt not to be—a thing of permanent beauty. The publishers intend to bring out the edition quite rapidly. Five volumes are ready, and the others will follow at the rate of one each month. The present is the great era of mediocre men. A horde of novel writers gain their living successfully enough, and we take them up and talk about what they are doing, and how their works compare with each other, as if their doings had real importance. But what ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... came to join her there; Jenny Fagette, slender and fragile, the incarnation of Alfred de Musset's Muse, who at night wore out her eyes of periwinkle-blue by scribbling society notes and fashion articles. A mediocre actress, but a clever and wonderfully energetic woman, she was Nanteuil's most intimate friend. They recognized in each other remarkable qualities, qualities which differed from those which each discovered in herself, and they acted in concert as the two great Powers of the Odeon. Nevertheless, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... without convictions, although discredited in the country and harassed in his attempts to save his party from Protection, remains in ability, Parliamentary knowledge, experience and skill, head and shoulders above his very mediocre band of colleagues in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... their indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had blundered. But all alike to-night, irrespective of pasts or presents or futures, ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... faun took one day a livelier and more assured turn, the joyousness became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial performance at an East End hall. Dressed as a jockey, for no particular reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the gay bubbly in ...
— When William Came • Saki
... assumed the reins of government, nominally at least, for the regent had taken care to give him Dubois for prime minister. Both these illustrious personages, however, died in the course of the year, and were succeeded by the Duc de Bourbon, "ugly and one-eyed, low, mediocre, hypocritical, a man of little led by a woman of nothing, Madame de Prie," and who renewed the persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists. The young king contented himself with "showing at the council table his handsome and impassible countenance, which nothing ever animated. When not ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... villain who planned this thing," I said, "has overstepped himself, as you say, Gatton. If the murder was planned artistically, in his attempt to throw the onus of the crime upon innocent shoulders he has been guilty of a piece of very mediocre work. It would ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... individual and of the landscape, or their achievements will be neglected in favor of the fac-similes obtainable through sunshine and chemistry. The best photographs of architecture, statuary, ruins, and, in some cases, of celebrated pictures, are satisfactory to a degree which has banished mediocre sketches, and even minutely finished but literal pictures. Specimens of what is called "Nature-printing," which gives an impression directly from the veined stone, the branching fern, or the sea-moss, are so true to the details as to answer a scientific ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... (with accompanying lecture) a marvellous bivouac-tin containing a compound called beef a la mode, which came provided with its own spirits of wine and wick, both of which proved ineffectual to raise the temperature of the beef above a mediocre tepidity. Parker, having heard that the remains of this toothsome dish were intended for his breakfast, wisely hid it with such care that the dog stole it and consumed it, with results which cannot be ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; that out of experience there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part, the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which we are forced to fall back upon the picturing power ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... restaurants of every kind are lighted up, and quickly filled. Debauchery runs riot, and yet, strange to say, there is very little crime. The respectable classes are less well provided for as regards amusement. I went to the opera, and heard William Tell. The performance was mediocre, though far superior to anything that could be done upon the English operatic stage. But I was chiefly amused in watching the habits of the gentlemen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... in 1865—Boker's thoughts were concerned with poetry. His official laureate consciousness did not serve to improve the verse. His "Our Heroic Themes"—written for the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa—was mediocre in everything but intent, recalling what Taylor wrote to him: "My Harvard poem, [he had read it in 1850 before the same fraternity] poor as it is, was received with great applause; but, alas! I published it, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... little thrilled that she, representing to him an average and mediocre public, should ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... impossible to deny the inconceivable influence which military glory exercises upon the spirit of a nation. General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to be the head of their government, is a man of violent temper and mediocre talents; no one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people; and indeed the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always been ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... them; for all these works appeared indeed at a happy and favorable time. They were all written in the spirit which we have developed above. Frequently the fortunate poet undertook the artistic task of giving a high value to very mediocre materials by revising them; and though it cannot be denied that he sometimes permits reason to triumph over the higher powers, and at other times allows sensuality to prevail over the moral qualities, yet we must also grant that, in its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that they drop matters for the night. After a few fruitless parleys his father and Steger finally said good night, leaving him to his own private reflections. He was tired, however, and throwing off his clothes, tucked himself in his mediocre bed, and ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... fantastic and voluptuous bigot. However, they would never have gained more than an antechamber or alcove influence, they would never have risen to political influence, had they not known how to pervert the noblest inclinations of the King, whilst flattering the lowest. Mediocre and secondary as was his place in the line of the Hohenzollerns, Frederick William was not devoid of all royal qualities. He was brave, he was kind-hearted, or rather he was a man of "sensibility"; he ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... intermediate school, it was necessary for him to take a conscientious valuation of his mental capacity; and he arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to become a first-rate factory-overseer than a mediocre teacher or official. And he could carry out this—perhaps too severe—resolve without socially degrading himself, for in Freeland manual labour does not degrade as it does in Europe and America, where the assertion that it does not ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... and signallers. The handy are absorbed into the transport, or become machine-gunners. The sedentary take post as cooks, or tailors, or officers' servants. The waster hews wood and draws water and empties swill-tubs. The great, mediocre, undistinguished majority merely go to stiffen the rank and file, and right nobly they do it. Each ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... that he is conceited. He is merely conscious of the fact that intellectually he is somewhat superior to his colleagues, most of whom, strangely enough, quite agree with him. They consult him and accept his counsel with almost childlike faith. To the mediocre politicians and provincial lawyers who constitute the bulk of the Senate and House of Representatives, he is a figure apart, who looks upon their antics with a kindly, ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... envy struck me sharply—horribly. Without waiting to listen to the comment of her companion I hurried out of the building into the cold, white sunlight that threw into bold relief the mediocre houses of the street. Here was everyday life, but the portrait had suggested that which might have been—might be yet. What did I mean by this? I didn't know, I didn't care to define it,—a renewal of her friendship, of our intimacy. My being ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thing, but utterly mediocre and uninteresting, was clinging to the officer's arm, a second lieutenant in the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... development. We may thus in some cases correct defects and develop abilities which we might otherwise neglect." (b) "Many opinions have been given on the value of life. Some call it good, 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 it from ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... presence an instant without feeling it. A power that enwrapped you; made you feel like a child. Helpless. Anxious to placate a possible wrath that would be devastating; anxious—absurdly—for a smile. It was a radiation of genius, humbling every mediocre mortal it touched. ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... ministers forced upon the king by this triumph of the liberal party were men of moderate principles; and they were only tolerated by the king as a necessary evil At the head of them was M. Roy, who possessed a considerable knowledge of finance; but the rest were of very mediocre talent. At this time the priests and Jesuits were striving in France for the absolute control of public education, as the most effectual means of recovering their domination. This attempt was resisted by the people, who ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... heat it, throw in a grain or two of some mysterious powder, pronounce a few equally mysterious phrases to impress his audience, and, behold, a lump of precious metal would be found in the bottom of his pot. This was the favorite method of mediocre performers, but was, of course, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... province of Murcia, together with seven cities which he was to hold under the kalif, on condition of a yearly tribute. Such was the defence of Orihuela, and while it involved no strenuous fighting, it was at the same time no mediocre test of womanly daring. After the first few trying hours of the masquerade had been passed, however, and it was evident that the ruse had been successful, it may well be imagined that these feminine warriors were ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... uneducated any more than a string of pearls about the neck of a monkey"; "The inner power of great men becomes more evident in their misfortune than in their fortune; the fine perfume of aloes wood is strongest when it falls into the fire"; "The anger of the best man lasts an instant, of the mediocre man six hours, of the common man a day and a night, and the rascal will never get rid of it"; "The scholar laughs with his eyes, mediocre people show their teeth when they laugh, common people roar, and true men of wisdom ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... possibilities of a lifetime in his own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only with the eye of a poet, but also with that of a naturalist. His favorite pastime was ornithology, and he made fine ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... done much good work before, but nothing remarkable; he had taken his years of labour with patient courage, insisting that they were but preparation. He had half starved in the beginning—had gradually made his way to what every one believed was a mediocre standstill; but he kept his faith and his cheerful outlook, and then—he quietly presented the remarkable figure that demanded ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... heavy expenses are already met, and the state, the manager-general of the service, furnishes simply a very small quota; and this quota, mediocre as a rule, is found almost null in fact, for its main largess consists in 6,400 scholarships which it establishes and engages to support; but it confers only about 3,000 of them, and it distributes nearly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, ghosts, I might even say the legend of God, for our conceptions of the workman-creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creatures. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'God made man in His own image, but man has certainly paid Him ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of the worst and most hopelessly stupid boys in the whole school—I've caned him frequently this term, and that keeps a boy green in one's memory; but Blenkinsopp minor, Cyril Anastasius Guy Thingumbob Whatyoumaycallit,—I don't remember HIM a bit. I suppose he's one of those inoffensive, mildly mediocre sort of boys who fail to impress their individuality upon one in any way. My experience is that you can always bear in mind the three cleverest boys at the top of each form, and the three stupidest or most mischievous boys at the bottom; but the nine or a dozen meritorious ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... waltzes.' In this invariably sarcastic turn of the phrase, this absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the disagreeable, we find the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point in his career, when, like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and to analyse the more mediocre manifestations ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the tradition of her early experience, it was a life of energy and excitement, of splendour and power, with a total absence of petty vexations and miseries, affording neither time nor cause for the wearing chagrin of a monotonous and mediocre existence. But the crowning joy of her emancipation was the prospect it offered of frequent enjoyment of the society ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the melancholy story of poor old Pons. There were a "Chevalier de Malte en Priere," by Sebastian del Piombo; a "Holy Family," by Fra Bartolommeo; a "Landscape," by Hobbema; and a "Portrait of a Woman," by Albert Durer. Apparently they were in reality mediocre as works of art, but they were a source of the utmost pride and delight to their owner, who said enthusiastically of one of them—the Sebastian del Piombo—that "human art can go no further." When we know that in the novel Balzac is speaking of his own ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... that he too was owned by Joseph Griffiss. Peter is, he thinks, thirty-nine years of age,—tall, of a dark chestnut color, and in intellect mediocre. He left his wife and five children behind. He could not bring them with him, therefore he did not tell them that he was about to leave. He was much dissatisfied with Slavery and felt that he had been badly dealt with, and that he could do ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... male friends—in order to preserve peace in the family. A wife may be fiercely jealous of her husband's success and reputation, and cases are not unknown where the wife put every possible obstacle in her husband's way, in order to make him fail in his work, to make him turn out mediocre work, all from fear that his success would gain him admirers, which might perhaps take him away from her. Wives have been known to do everything in their power to exhaust and weaken their husbands, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... and two glad lips of song have lifted many a mediocre soul up the slopes of happiness to ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... admitted that the artistes were no good but the committee, he said, had decided to let the first three concerts go as they pleased and reserve all the talent for Saturday night. Mrs. Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items followed one another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert. There was something she didn't ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... should have succeeded in this form. The two men wrote very few sonnets—Browning fewer than Tennyson—and neither ever wrote a great one. Longfellow, so inferior in most respects to his two great English contemporaries, was an incomparably superior sonnetteer. Tennyson's sonnets are all mediocre: Browning did not publish a single sonnet in the final complete edition of his works. He did however print a very few on special occasions, and when he was twenty-two years old, between the composition of Pauline ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... exchange of ideas and talents, and all the wealth of civilization it has to offer, is based on a division of labor. Every member must have something to contribute, some special talent. For Earthmen, the talent was obvious very early. Our technology was primitive, our manufacturing skills mediocre, our transport and communications systems impossible. But in our understanding of the life sciences, we have far outstripped any other race in the galaxy. We had already solved the major problems of disease and longevity among our own people, while some of the ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... endurance and to daring. They lived habitually in an atmosphere of peril which taxed all their energies. Their activity was extreme, and their passions corresponded to their vehement vitality. About such men there could be nothing on a small or mediocre scale. When a weakling was born in a despotic family, his brothers murdered him, or he was deposed by a watchful rival. Thus only gladiators of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to religious and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... hands met his, her soul gave a little half-humorous "Oh!" of surprise; for photography, which seems to have been invented to flatter the mediocre and belittle the exceptional, had indeed given Londonderry an "interesting face," as we have heard, but missed all the rest—"all the rest" of a large, mobile, talking face, not exactly handsome perhaps, but decidedly good-looking and full of various ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... seven hundred feet in length, three stories high, with the central portion surmounted by a dome, its chief facade looking towards a park. The whole, of course—for Baedeker is talking—forms an "imposing pile," with "mediocre sculptures, but the effect of the weathered sandstone figures against the red brick is very pleasing." Here the Emperor's father, Frederick III, was born, lived as Crown Prince, reigned for ninety-nine days, and died. Here, too, are more "apartments of Frederick the Great," with ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... wash his hands of the entire business, and the sly swindlers must look elsewhere, in order to unload their property. The extravagant claims they had made for its richness could not be justified, because it was after all a very mediocre discovery, which would never pay for the working, so ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... insensibility, that he was not touched by the accident which happened to the man he seemed to love most. Too happy if one had only said that of him! He was supposed to be jealous of the merit of Schwerin and of Keith, and delighted to have got them killed. It is thus that mediocre people seek to lower great men, to diminish the immense space that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... extreme northern end of the gallery, beyond the foreign sections, is a tier of four rooms, 117-120, ranging from the mediocre to the admirable. In No. 117 are seven interesting canvases by Frieseke, the grand-prize winner, already mentioned. These pictures show the artist's scope. No. 1816 and others are strikingly like Plinio Nomellini's No. 86 in the Italian ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual—and he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities. For how can there ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... general assessment: the domestic system is mediocre, but improving; service is adequate for government and business use, in part because major businesses have established their own private systems; since 1988, the government has promoted investment ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Telephone system: general assessment: mediocre service; local and long distance service provided throughout all regions of the country, with services primarily concentrated in the urban areas; major objective is to continue to expand and modernize long-distance network in order to keep pace with ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... ideal. "A prize-fighter will follow the danseuse. And I shall gloat in Gautier-like cadence—if I can catch it—over each superb muscle and each splendid development. But my best article will be on Kitty Carew. Since Laura Bell and Mabel Grey our courtesans have been but a mediocre lot." ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... university circles; and in America the explorers Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong human testimony to ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
