Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.
There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .
In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.
Olivia: What's a drunken man like, fool? Feste: Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.
The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong… most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. ... I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it.
Back in the day, I would wear up to 45 pounds of gold. It would take me four hours to get dressed!
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.
When I was coming up through the ranks, I won a lot - and probably won too much.
Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.
Being on the road has about 2 1/2 hours a day that are really great, and that's when you're onstage. The other 21 1/2 hours are very boring... It becomes like a void, and we chose to fill it with all the wrong things.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
The charitable say in effect, 'I seem to have more than I need and you seem to have less than you need. I would like to share my excess with you.' Fine, if my excess is tangible, money or goods, and fine if not, for I learned that to be charitable with gestures and words can bring enormous joy and repair injured feelings.
It is an unfortunate fact that great and foolish excess can come into prices of common stocks in the aggregate. They are valued partly like bonds, based on roughly rational projections of use value in producing future cash. But they are also valued partly like Rembrandt paintings, purchased mostly because their prices have gone up, so far.
Good is not good, unless A thousand it possess, But doth waste with greediness.
A strange species we are; we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.
John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I'm just telling you, when you've got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That's rule No. 1 of business.
I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point.
From abundance springs satiety.
