Famous quotes containing the word excess:
“For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure—tangible material prosperity in this world—is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed: the excess on that side will wear off, with a little age and reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,—all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)