Quotes about Moderation

Wine gives great pleasure; and every pleasure is of itself a good. It is a good, unless counterbalanced by evil.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

Moderation is commonly firm, and firmness is commonly successful.

Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty.

Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.

By the mean of the thing I denote a point equally distant from either extreme, which is one and the same for everybody; by the mean relative to us, that amount which is neither too much nor too little, and this is not one and the same for everybody.

Hence while in respect of its substance and the definition that states what it really is in essence virtue is the observance of the mean, in point of excellence and rightness it is an extreme.

There is no such thing as observing a mean in excess or deficiency, nor as exceeding or falling short in observance of a mean.

Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.

Virtue is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.

Praising the lean and sallow abstinence.

Our danger is not from scarcity, but from abundance. We are constantly tempted to excess.