Quotes About Excess

Some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.

America has potholed roads and decrepit airports, but it builds state-of-the-art offices for regulatory bureaucrats—and their enforcers. The federal Department of Education doesn't employ a single teacher, but it does have a SWAT team.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.

I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.

Las Vegas no less—the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness

It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess.

Hot, salty, crunchy, and portable, the previously awful-sounding collection of greasy delights can become a Garden of Eden of heart-clogging goodness when you're in a drunken stupor, hungering for fried snacks. At that precise moment, nothing could taste better.

How do you instruct a woman who's already survived incredible hardship, who's worked hard all her life, on how to live 'properly', when your life is, by contrast, a carefree wonderland of excess, sloth and caprice?

By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun. By all rights I should have been, at various times: shot to death, stabbed to death, imprisoned for a significant period of time, or at very least, victimized by a casaba-sized tumor.

Though you add carriage to carriage, you will not be carried more comfortably.

E ate so much that he became too fat to see to eat his vittels. 

In life I've rung all changes through, Run every pleasure down, 'Midst each excess of folly too, And lived with half the town.

In jewels and brocades and a whirl of musk, Alice flounced triumphantly out of her chariot, her three little dogs frisking and barking after her. She raised her thickly painted face to the Duke.

Nature is wasteful, he had said. That's why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.

They who love in excess also hate in excess.

The greatest crimes are not those committed for the sake of necessity but those committed for the sake of superfluity. One does not become a tyrant to avoid exposure to the cold.

The man who shuns and fears everything and stands up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger becomes foolhardy. Similarly the man who indulges in pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious (akolastos); but if a man behaves like a boor (agroikos) and turns his back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean.

There is no such thing as observing a mean in excess or deficiency, nor as exceeding or falling short in observance of a mean.

The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honour bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.

First then this must be noted, that it is the nature of such things to be spoiled by defect and excess; as we see in the case of health and strength (since for the illustration of things which cannot be seen we must use those that can), for excessive training impairs the strength as well as deficient: meat and drink, in like manner, in too great or too small quantities, impair the health: while in due proportion they cause, increase, and preserve it.