Quotes about Extremes

Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect

We fear extremes and shy away from too much ardor in religion as if it were possible to have too much love or too much faith or too much holiness.

His expression was suddenly serious as the tip of his finger traced her lips. "I never understood why history is filled with stories of men who waged wars over a woman they loved. There are many women in the world, and it was beyond my grasp what made one woman special enough to go to such extremes." He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Now I understand.

Every kind of weather is intensified by warming.

As fallible humans, we usually slip too far over one edge or the other - all wrath and judgment or all grace and love.

There is no golden mean between these two extremes; either this early life must become low in our estimation, or it will have our inordinate love.

But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

The extreme of right is the extreme of wrong.

It becomes somewhat absurd when some claim that the sight of a Bible or a cross causes them so much psychological distress that it impinges upon their freedom. It is important that we learn to be reasonable and tolerant of everyone's beliefs without going to such extremes that we compromise everyone's rights.

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.

At certain revolutions all the damn'd are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce.