Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Balance is good, because one extreme or the other leads to misery, and I've spent a lot of my life at one of those extremes.

Avoid Extremes; and shun the fault of such Who still are pleas'd too little or too much.

There should be balance in all our actions; to be either extreme or lukewarm is equally bad.

Purity without balance is its own corruption.

As many suffer from too much as too little.

Be moderate in everything, including moderation.

My theory is that balance is key - nothing in excess.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

In every extreme there is vice and not virtue.

Practice moderation in all things except love.

He who tip-toes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.

In everything the middle course is the best; everything in excess brings trouble.

Perfect reason avoids all extremes.

All extremes are bad. All that is good and useful, if carried to extremes, may become-and beyond a certain limit is bound to become-bad and injurious.

There is moderation in everything.

I shall ever repeat it, that mankind are governed not by extremes, but by principals of moderation.

You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling? A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn.

There is a proper measure in all things, certain limits beyond which and short of which right is not to be found. Who so cultivates the golden mean avoids the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.

Let a man neither give himself over to pleasures ... nor yet let him give himself over to self-mortification ... To the exclusion of both these extremes, the Truth-Finder has discovered a middle course.

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind; Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily; Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness; Sometimes one is up and sometimes down. Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency.

It is the nature of men having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean.

When people are temperate in their behavior, in their lives, someone who is addictive or extreme or obsessive can't understand how people can just go through their lives in the middle, and people who are rational and balanced can't understand the opposite. I'm one who's in the extreme camp in almost every area of my life and I always have been. I've observed that I'm in a minority, but I never understand people who are measured.

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

In avoiding one vice fools rush into the opposite extreme.

Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.