Quotes About Extremes

However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

I take it to be from the greatest extremes, both in virtue and in vice, that the uniformly virtuous and reformed in life can derive the greatest and most salutary truths and impressions.

this: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd

I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practiced, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible, one occupies the place of the impossible.

April in Québec was a climatological shitstorm. A mindfuck of epic proportions.

I see you know your art. Yes. Not many realize that it's the play of light and dark, of subtleties and extremes—

I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government--but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops.

Without the mind, the will is blind and has no content. Without content the will starts willing itself. This state of disablement causes severe problems, some of which are: 1. The will wills what can't be willed. 2. The will tries to control everything. 3. The will experiences itself as omnipotent or, when it has failed, as "wormlike." 4. The will wills for the sake of willing (impulsiveness). 5. The will wills in absolute extremes—all or nothing.

Adults who have a wounded inner child who failed to learn this lesson tend to be rigid and absolutist. They think in all-or-nothing extremes.

The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparisons of his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.

extreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery.

He totally underestimated the press reaction. First, the press thrives on confrontation. They also love stories about extremes, whether they're great successes or terrible failures. This story had it all. Perhaps most important, many reporters tend to see themselves as consumer advocates. Almost nothing gets them as outraged as a boondoggle that victimizes average citizens. The city's fiasco at the Wollman Rink was an absolute classic.

There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.

Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.

It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead. [Address at the University of Washington in Seattle, November 16 1961]

Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.

I'm a very emotional person, a person of real extremes, and that's often destructive both to myself and others.

There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.

I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience - which is definitely an acquired taste.

If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism.

Happiness needs sadness. Success needs failure. Benevolence needs evil. Love needs hatred. Victory needs defeat. Pleasure needs pain. You must experience and accept the extremes. Because if the contrast is lost, you lose appreciation; and when you lose appreciation, you lose the value of everything.

I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just...in between. I want the freedom to try everything.

The evil is not in extremes It's in the aftermath

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.