Quotes About Moderation

Accept it: you're too old to drink more than one drink and sleep through the night. Face it: you're never going to get carded again, so quit asking bouncers if they want to see your ID. Quit going places where they have bouncers.

I watched wealthy men and their wives and dates dancing and playing cards and making deals: I will admire you exactly as much, no more or less, as you admire me. I will love you in the strictest moderation.

They looked around with drained faces and drank less than their friends did, barely wetting their lips so as to keep their secrets.

Leave the table while you still feel you could eat a little more.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Fire is the most tolerable third party.

The life of Balance is difficult. It lies on the verge of continual temptation, its perpetual adjustments become fatiguing, its measured virtue is monotonous and uninspiring.

Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.

Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization.

Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great.

For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.

Joy and Temperance and Repose Slam the door on the doctor's nose.

In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

Il ne faut jamais rien outrer: One must do nothing in excess

There never has been and cannot be a good life without self-control. Apart from self-control no good life is imaginable.

Il ne faut jamais rien outrer: One should never overdo

all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.

A espécie mais elevada dos animais, a espécie humana, devia, para se manter na luta contra os outros animais, assemelhar-se em tudo a um enxame de abelhas; não se multiplicar até ao infinito. Devia, como as abelhas, criar assexuados, isto é, caminhar para a continência e não para o sensualismo para o qual está organizada a vida moderna.

Better a dry crust eaten in peace than a house filled with feasting—and conflict. Proverbs 17:1

You do realize it's all right to have nice things sometimes, right?

It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't everything either.

and in its way too much happiness was as dangerous as too much sadness.