Quotes About Excess

I own about 300 pairs of shoes. When I start to go over 300, I have mini-sales from my closet and give the money to charity. It's my way of recycling; I feel like I can give back to the universe.

I like the drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose approach - you're getting way more than you can handle.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.

In London, there is no need for 25 high-end gastronomic restaurants. That would be too much.

Ah, let a man beware, when his wishes, fulfilled, rain down upon him, and his happiness is unbounded.

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.

Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.

The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy.

A smart hotel is a place where 100 people toil like devils in order that 200 may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.

This meal we just ate? says Aunt Lydia. In many countries, this sort of meal would only be eaten by royalty. There are countries where people could live one year on what we throw out in one week, says Grandpa Kirk. I thought it was they could live one year on what we throw out in one day, says Grandma Sally. I thought it was they could live ten years on what we throw out in one minute, says Uncle Gus. Well anyway, says Doris. We are very lucky.

Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night? Not in his Bible.

In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the most dreadful words and it wouldn't be enough!

I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome.

only poetry, exempt from all practical applications, permits one to have at its disposal, to a certain extent, the brilliance and suffocation that Marquis de Sade tried so indecently to provoke.` Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 93

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in it's growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

Was it he who had shacked up with the two Martini women, the mother with the plastered face and the daughter with the callipygian figure? … Was it he who had immersed himself blissfully in the crapulous laziness of the Liberty Bar? …

Sir Nugent] wore so many rings on his fingers, and so many fobs and seals dangling at his waist, that he might have been taken for a jeweller advertising his wares.

Awards have lost their charm. The experience of getting an award has completely dissolved. Awards functions start in December and go on till April and are distributed for anything and everything. Categories like Best Jodi, Best Dressed Celebrity are all redundant.

So what I did was stuff my face with anything around, any old rubbish, burgers, chocolate, crisps, fish and chips, loads of it, till I felt sick - but at least I'd had the pleasure of stuffing my face and feeling really full.

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million," wrote Sam Polk in the New York Times, "and I was angry because it wasn't big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted." Polk

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.