Excess

“ Excess of everything—for such is the implication of the word itself—must be bad for everybody, but there is no earthly foundation for supposing that what is excess for one person injures another in the very least. ”

“ Which being so, and evident capability of excess or defect existing in pleasures of this higher order, we ought to have been told how it happens that men are not called intemperate when they indulge in excess of this kind, and what is that difference in the nature of the pleasure which diminishes the criminality of its excess. ”

“ The best things carried to excess are wrong; ”

“ But the most pernicious thing of all, and in every station of life, is excess, and more especially excess in food; in fact, it is the most prudent plan to retrench everything that may be possibly productive of injury. Let us, however, now pass on to the other branches of Nature. ”

“ The Motive which leads to the acquisition of wealth, great as is the part which it plays in human life, has no appropriate name. Avarice, Rapacity, like the words Gluttony, and Lust, are only names for cases of excess. ”

“ But it is an essential principle of life that a faculty to which circumstances do not allow full exercise diminishes; and that a faculty on which circumstances make excessive demands increases. And so long as this excess and this deficiency continue, there must continue decrease on the one hand, and growth on the other. ”

“ There are many objects, as to which the question of duty is a question of more or less. To this class belong not only food and drink, but all forms of luxury, indulgence, recreation, and amusement. In all these the choice lies between excess, abstinence, and temperance. The tendency to excess is intensely strong, when not restrained by prudence or principle. ”

“ You will find out for yourself what are the appropriate qualities or courses of conduct, of which the excess, mean and defect are expressed by the words given above. Fear, for example, is the feeling of which excess is Cowardice and defect is Rashness, while the mean is Courage. Similarly as regards one's own opinion of one's powers, excess is Conceit and defect is Diffidence, while the mean is Modesty. ”

“ To be sure; there is always danger of running every innocent thing to excess. One might eat to excess, or drink to excess; yet eating and drinking are both useful in their way. Now, our lively young friend Helen, here, might perhaps be in some temptation of this sort ”

“ Or it may be an excess in the frequency and ordinary unseasonableness of eating; when men eat too oft, and sit at it too long. (4.) It may be an excess in the costliness or price; when men feed themselves at too high rates. ”

“ At just such points as these, men have plunged into intemperance and wild excess,—they have gone to be shot down in battle,—they have broken life, and thrown it away, like an empty goblet, and gone, like wailing ghosts, out into the dread unknown. ”

“ So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. ”

“ To pursue them more, is excess: to pursue them less, is defect. There is however, in estimating excess and defect, a certain tacit reference to the average dispositions of the many.
“Wherefore the desires of the temperate man ought to harmonize with reason ”

“ Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; ”

“ The commander was resolved to make an —— to deter others from the like offense.
EXCESS (page 160) . QUESTIONS.
1. What is excess? Is it used in the favorable or unfavorable sense? 2. What is extravagance? 3. What is exorbitance? 4. What kind of excess do overplus and superabundance denote? lavishness and profusion? 5. Is surplus used in the favorable or unfavorable sense? 6. To what do redundance and redundancy chiefly refer? 7. What words are used as synonyms of excess in the moral sense?
EXAMPLES.
Saving requires self-denial, and —— is the death of self-denial. ”

“ It is undoubtedly true that they are indulging in the most atrocious excesses, although the measure in which those excesses take place has undoubtedly been exaggerated by grouping together facts that have occurred in a series of years. ”

“ I explain so, — by this manlike love of truth, — those excesses and errors into which souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. ”

“ If we consider it under its special, particular form, as peculiar to a given individual carrying on a given occupation and having given habits of life—an artisan, a labourer, a tradesman, a lawyer, a physician, etc.—the disturbed balance will appear to us as setting its mark on the individual’s professional activity and its products. The artisan will pass from a fury of work to excesses of idleness or drink ”

“ As for my own experience, though I have not lived yet so long as to love excesse, yet have I seene such powerful effects, both on my selfe and others, as if I could render no other reason, they were enough to persuade me of its excellencie, seeing extenuate withered bodies by it caused to be faire, fresh, plumpe, and fat, old and infirme to be young and sound, when as water or small-beer drinkers looke like apes rather than men. ”

“ It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. ”

“ Then many of us find that an excentric [sic] activity -- a 'spree,' say -- relieves. There is no doubt that to some men sprees and excesses of almost any kind are medicinal, temporarily at any rate, in spite of what the moralists and doctors say. ”

“ The low and the base, the palled taste of luxury, the satiated sense of licentiousness, the callous heart of selfishness, the blunted sensibilities of lust, covetousness, gluttony, effeminacy, and idleness, take refuge in indifference, and call it to their aid, lest vanity—the weakest, but the last point to become hardened in the heart of man—should be wounded. ”

“ If our condition in the world be poor and low, our enjoyments coarse and scanty, our employments despicable and contemptible, yet we must bring our minds to it, and acquiesce in it. So the margin: Be contented with mean things. Be reconciled to the place which God in his providence hath put us in, whatever it be. ”

“ We must use the means, and yet, in our most accurate using, somehow screen and cloak them, as we can only give them any beauty, by a reflection of the glory of the end. That is the good head, which serves the end, and commands the means. The rabble are corrupted by their means: the means are too strong for them, and they desert their end. ”

“ It is the flowers that you have made grow in unlikely places that will tell—not how much money you have made, not how big a house you have lived in, not how popular you were in the world of letters, of science, of finance, but—how many burdens have you lifted? ”

“ When one considers the characteristics of our surface life for recent decades—the devotion to money-getting, the rapid increase of senseless and debauching luxury, the reckless frivolity, the unthinking haste and selfish pleasure-seeking—one questions. ”

“ Everything that formerly seemed to me wrong and despicable, such as rusticity, obscurity, poverty, austerity, simplicity of surroundings, of food, of clothing, of manners, all have now become right and important to me. ”

“ In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. ”

“ The demand for more and fuller life, which attempts in empty effort, in acceleration, in sense-given pleasure, in the mere blind and laborious effort at the attainment of wealth, may be here pictured as realising itself in no material or brutal fashion, through an experience which itself is its own justification. ”

“ But, if the eye, seeking to penetrate into that nether abyss, is thus baffled, the mind knows of course that here are lives in unique abundance. Are they, and all of us together, moving towards a worse or a better fortune? ”

“ If, on the contrary, it is a question of a complex state, such as those impressions of profound joy or sorrow which lay hold of us entirely, invading and overwhelming us, what we call their intensity expresses only the confused feeling of a qualitative progress, and increasing wealth. ”

“ Not contentment, but a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong! We hear it in the continual cry over what is known as the increased cost of living, and feel its pressure in the higher standard of living. ”

“ And I paint this picture, too, literally, and not on its picturesque side—it, indeed, poverty has a picturesque side—in order to show another side which it really has—high, heroic, made up of dauntless endurance, self sacrifice, and self control Also, to indicate that blessing which narrow circumstances alone bestow, the habit of looking more to the realities than to the shows of things, and of finding pleasure in enjoyments mental rather than sensuous, inward rather than external. ”

“ If certain things are more necessary to you than me—search for them—Say but one word, and you shall never hear of me more.—If not—for God’s sake, let us struggle with poverty—with any evil, but these continual inquietudes of business, which I have been told were to last but a few months, though every day the end appears more distant! ”

“ One wonders, incidentally, how any creature perpetually working from the reasons given by economists, that is to say, working against the grain, from no spontaneous wish or pleasure, can possibly store up, in such exhausting effort, a surplus of energy requiring to be let off! ”

“ I speak all this of bodily labour, which is necessary to the body, and consequently to the mind; for want of which abundance grow melancholy, and abundance grow sluggish and good for nothing, and abundance cherish filthy lusts, and millions yearly turn to earth before their time. ”

“ Is there not more than is wanted? The overplus is 'exceeding abundant,' not only 'above what we ask or think,' but far more than our need. 'Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient that every one may take a little,' says Sense. ”

“ So, though we be poor and weak creatures, we want much to make us restful. We want no less than that every appetite, desire, need, inclination shall be filled to the full; that all shall be filled to the full at once, and that by one thing ”

“ Whoever would know how much piety and virtue surpass all external goods, might here have seen them weighed against each other, where all that gives motion to the active, and elevation to the eminent, all that sparkles in the eye of hope, and pants in the bosom of suspicion, at once became dust in the balance, without weight and without regard. ”

“ Material prosperity, say these ascetics,—plenty to eat and to drink, good clothing, commodious habitations, life–embellishing arts, and ministrations of all sorts to corporeal well–being, are not the proper objects of man here on this earth. ”

“ And when the wealthy man expressed his willingness to learn, the Blessed One said: "There are five things which produce the condition of which thou complainest: opulent dinners, love of sleep, hankering after pleasure, thoughtlessness, and lack of occupation. ”

“ Two pounds would have been treated as an absurdity. Men of God, who have to live while they cultivate the Lord's vineyard, want a more substantial share of the good things of this world. Nothing satisfies them but the certainty of something very valuable in this life, as well as the promise of the life that is to come. ”

“ And that only by sore hard work of body and of mind; for when it is difficult to get enough even to live on, look you, how can one have surplus to spare for roses, and trinkets, and all pretty trifles such as pretty women love? ”

“ Why do ye seek to accumulate riches as though they were necessary? Nothing is so necessary as to know what is not necessary. Why do ye cast the blame upon the flesh? it is not the lust of the belly, but the desires of the mind which make a man insatiable. ”

“ And certainly the presence of things in abundance, things empty and things vulgar and things absurd, as well as things convenient and useful, has produced the desire for the possession of things, the exaltation of the possession of things. ”

“ The objects themselves, which in that place of sorrow lie before our view, naturally give us a seriousness and attention, check that wantonness which is the growth of prosperity and ease, and head us to reflect upon the deficiencies of human life itself; that every man at his best estate is altogether vanity. ”

“ His expence indeed was needless, but not in vain. Whereas he that drudges in the pursuit of knowledge, not only toils for that which in a short time he shall have, and in abundance, but which after all he can’t compass, and so undergoes a vain as well as needless labour. ”