Quotes About Extremes

I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle.

The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man. But in this movie [A Clockwork Orange], you have an example of social institutions gone a bit berserk. Obviously, social institutions faced with the law-and-order problem might choose to become grotesquely oppressive. The movie poses two extremes: it shows Alex in his pre-civilized state, and society committing a worse evil in attempting to cure him.

She had always had a streak of recklessness about her, a willingness to go chasing hurricanes and tsunamis, all in the name of science, always willing to go that bit further than anybody else. Disaster hunting, she called it, surfing the extreme weather.

I'm not very romantic in real life. I guess love is the thing that makes us do the most extraordinary things—the emotion that can bring us highest or lowest, or be the most transformative—and extremes of emotion are always interesting to write about.

The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.

Virtues become vices when they are carried to an extreme.

It is change that contains vital information, not steady states. Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes. We don't just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each time we hit one we replace it with another.

Phillip, who is congenitally incapable of moderation

it doesn't matter if people love you or hate you, as long as they feel strongly one way or the other. The worst place you can be is in the middle.

By many measures, the Dominican Republic is a land of extremes.

Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness

But time lessens all extremes and reduces them to mediums & unconcern.

In sailing, I single-hand, and I want to do the Horn. The Horn is the maximum expression of sailing, the way the Iditarod is the maximum expression of running dogs. It's not to write about it; it's to experience the maximum thing.

The vast majority of humanity today Seems bereft of all common sense. They lack the eye able to tell right from wrong And stagger off the cliff falling to extremes. Some, poisoned by the waters of jealousy, Are obsessed with the thought of besting others; While others, poisoned by hatred and hypocrisy, Race around in a state of utter delirium. And both claim to uphold the spiritual path!

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another?

In the physical disciplines of yoga, samadhi is reached by suspending the extremes of solar (pingala) and lunar (ida) mind. This state arises when the inner breath (prana) enters the central channel (sushumna). Then truth or deep reality suddenly flashes forth. Why

There's two extremes in male sport: there's complete and total worship of them, or complete and utter contempt. Those extremes create huge problems at either end. And it creates distance, too, and leads them into a bubble.

For me, there is a real line between something being the worst thing in the world and the best thing in the world.

There is always something happening at Schalke. I love the extremes. When we have bad runs, the atmosphere is really bad and you feel that. But you know, when you are on a good run again, it just tops everything - then it is just super!

My tortured life - with its extremes and conflicts - might have been difficult for me to deal with, but the press couldn't get enough of it. I was in the papers every day, 'the enfant terrible of the culinary world.'

I'm a guy who has problems with moderation. All or nothing. Binge and purge. Kill or be killed. Gray is not a color I wear well. I should be dead. I know that. I should not be successful. I know that too. My daily existence is a toss of the coin - one side, fear, the other side, gratitude.

The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.

Then again, isn't tradition just another word for that particularly religious, self-righteous, non-thinking inertia that propels so many to extremes they might not ever have engaged in had they stopped to actually consider, to weigh, to examine?