Excess Quotes - Page 14

• There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.

  Edwin Land

  School, Harvard, Teach

  Edwin Land's comment after a 1977 Polaroid shareholder's meeting as quoted in Danny Miller "The Icarus Paradox: How Exceptional Companies Bring About Their Own Downfall; New Lessons in the Dynamics of Corporate Success, Decline, and Renewal"(p. 126), 1990.

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• We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

  Jack Gilbert

  Heart, Brain, Habitat

  Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.293, Knopf

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• The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics … restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this … as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound.

  John Pintard

  Running, Country, Class

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• Sad fancies do we then affect, In luxury of disrespect To our own prodigal excess Of too familiar happiness.

  William Wordsworth

  Happiness, Luxury, Disrespect

  William Wordsworth (1837). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works ...”, p.349

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• What makes me so certain that the natural human lifespan is far in excess of the actual one is this. Among all my autopsies (and I have performed over 1000), I have never seen a person who died of old age. In fact, I do not think that anyone has ever died of old age yet. We invariably die because one vital part has worn out too early in proportion to the rest of the body.

  Hans Selye

  Health, Thinking, Medicine

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• As it acts in the world, the Tao is like the bending of a bow. The top is bent downward; the bottom is bent up. It adjusts excess and deficiency so that there is perfect balance.

  Laozi

  Perfect, Taoism, Balance

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• People are rightfully upset about Wall Street abuses and excess.

  Andrew Cuomo

  Wall, People, Upset

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• The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example.

  Andy Grove

  Money, Healthy, Example

  "Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance". Interview with John Heilemann, www.wired.com. June 1, 2001.

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• Your profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation. Your income will be subject to higher taxes. Indeed in these days, when every available dollar should go to the war effort, I do not think that any American citizen should have a net income in excess of $25,000 per year after payment of taxes.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  War, Cutting, Thinking

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1950). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1942, Volume 11”, p.232, Best Books on

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• Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Looks, Common

  "Essais" by Michel de Montaigne, Book III, Ch. 9, 1595.

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• Society secretly delights in crime, excesses, and violated prohibitions of all sorts.

  Bernard Tschumi

  Delight, Prohibition, Crime

  Bernard Tschumi (1996). “Architecture and Disjunction”, p.66, MIT Press

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• O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy, In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess!

  William Shakespeare

  Rain, Love Is, Joy

  William Shakespeare, James Boswell, Alexander Pope, Edward Capell, Samuel Johnson (1821). “The plays and poems of William Shakspeare”, p.205

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• ...whatever the self-righteous excesses of the environmentalist left, it is impossible to be true to traditional conservative values (to say nothing of the Christian faith conservatives like me profess) and hold laissez faire attitudes about the use and abuse of the natural world.

  Rod Dreher

  Christian, Attitude, Self

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• A television advertisement must illustrate the scientific method to substantiate any claim.... That is why stains are lifted, ring-around-the-collar is removed, paper towels become soaked, excess stomach acid is absorbed, and headaches go away-all during the commercial.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Science, Going Away, Scientific Method

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• Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

  Ron Chernow

  Long, Healthy, Bulls

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• The infallible criterion by which to distinguish the true from the would-be strategist is the degree of originality of his conceptions. It makes little difference whether this originality is carried to excess, as was the case with Steinitz and Nimzowitsch.

  Alexander Alekhine

  Differences, Would Be, Littles

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• An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action-convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible-is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical.

  Matthew Scully

  Sports, Writing, Animal

  Matthew Scully (2003). “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy”, p.393, St. Martin's Press

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• Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.

  Blaise Pascal

  Two, Suffering, Reason

  Blaise Pascal, James M. Houston (2006). “The Mind on Fire: Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent”, p.133, David C Cook

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• Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Exaggeration Is, Generosity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.42, Courier Corporation

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• Many Christians are either woefully deficient in their knowledge of Scripture or noticeably devoid of any experience of God's power. The Lord never intended this for His people. We have all seen firsthand the joyless intellectual arrogance the absence of spiritual power can produce, as well as the fanatical emotional excess that comes from the lack of theological integrity.

  Sam Storms

  Christian, Spiritual, Integrity

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• How necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.

  Thomas Paine

  Running, Power, Watches

  Thomas Paine (1791). “Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution”, p.14

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• The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Dream, Ambition, People

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• The difference between God and the devil is in nothing except in unselfishness and selfishness. The devil knows as much as God, is as powerful as God; only he has no holiness that makes him a devil. Apply the same idea to the modern world: excess of knowledge and power, without holiness, makes human beings devils.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Powerful, Differences, Knowledge And Power

  Swami Vivekananda, Swami Adiswarananda (2006). “Vivekananda, World Teacher: His Teachings on the Spiritual Unity of Humankind”, p.102, SkyLight Paths Publishing

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• Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency.

  Aristotle

  Mean, Two, Vices

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• Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive... To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

  Bill Watterson

  Good Life, Thinking, Creating

  "Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled". Bill Watterson's commencement speech at the Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, www.graduationwisdom.com. May 20, 1990.

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