Albert Einstein:

Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.

Andrew Carnegie:

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

Ayn Rand:

Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.

Blaise Pascal:

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

Blaise Pascal:

You always admire what you really don't understand.

Chet Atkins:

Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

Fulton J. Sheen:

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

Jean de La Bruyère:

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

Joseph Heller:

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

Kathleen Norris:

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.

Lily Tomlin:

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

Margaret Mead:

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

Maureen Reagan:

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.

Max Beerbohm:

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

Robert G. Ingersoll:

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

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

Scott Alexander:

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.

Sophia Loren:

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.

Virginia Woolf:

The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.

William E. Gladstone :

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

William M. Winans:

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.