Quotes About Excess

why kill two birds with one stone when you can kill twelve

Yet one of the most important things we have to learn is how to cope with abundance and with our hunger for yet more abundance

A lot of campaigning for food purity is a translated worry about abundance. You still eat your fill, but you agonize over the food's contents. We are a pack of animals that allows some to have excess food while others starve. Those who have so much get finicky about what is good to eat; they become obsessed by it, re-creating scarcity for themselves so as to not feel guilty, confused, or dangerously envied.

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir's barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes - and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody's elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour's elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter.

inlaid in Florentine mosaic, the very flower-stands placed in the recesses of the windows, oozed and sweated with gold. At the four corners of the room were four great lamps placed on pedestals of red marble, to which they were fastened by chains of bronze gilt, that fell with symmetrical grace. And from the ceiling hung three lustres with crystal pendants, streaming with drops of blue and pink light, whose hot glare drew a responding gleam from all the gold in the room.

spoilt his eye (35)

S]he takes a killer. Sometimes she takes two, never more than two, because some things are good for us but too much is suddenly bad.

La méchanceté donne son spectacle ; elle a ses gestes, ses fastes, son imagination, son excès, sa splendeur. Néron était un artiste lorsqu'il s'offrait le spectacle de Rome dévorée par les flammes.

You can never get enough of what you don't really need.

You can never have enough of that which you don't need.

we can never have enough of that which we really don't want

Drunken women in very sheer catch-a-cold-or-catch-a-man dresses were acting like they were on spring break in Cancún. Inebriated men in dark suits were . . . making passes and grabbing asses and refilling glasses.

C'est une maladie d'être optimiste? Non, c'est une maladie de l'être trop. L'excès devient pathologique.

On aime toujours trop quand on aime vraiment. L'exces est de rigueur. ( Don Juan ) Votre Diablerie, vous ne pouvez dire cela. Tout est pour le pire dans le pire des mondes possibles. ( Le majordome dans L'Ecole du diable )

Greed?has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.

The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle.

Surgically augmented breasts and a large vocabulary are two things that come to mind when I contemplate that which is showy and of little value, but I'm certain that you can think of others. also

She drank three giant glasses of Kool-Aid and vodka that night.

I love America, and I love American women. But there is one thing that deeply shocks me - American closets. I cannot believe one can dress well when you have so much.

For our excess we lost everything.

People don't need yachts – they want yachts', in the words of a CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer.

Money undergoes a conversion when one has more of it than is strictly necessary. When there is enough of it to move beyond the strict survival mode, money goes in search of beauty. That is to say, in search of the abstract and the imaginary. Just like poetry, which is the distillation of an excess of language. Too much money and too many words tend toward the poetic.

As Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.