Showing posts with label excess. Show all posts
Showing posts with label excess. Show all posts

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Post #3167

These things are good in little measure and evil in large: yeast, salt, and hesitation.
—The Talmud

Sunday, August 01, 2021

Post #3083

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
―Plato

Monday, September 09, 2019

Post #2911

They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.
—William Shakespeare

Friday, September 06, 2019

Post #2910

The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date.
—Charles Caleb Colton

Thursday, September 05, 2019

Post #2909

The ass bears the load, but not the overload
—Miguel de Cervantes

Monday, May 14, 2018

Post #2576

Excess always carries its own retribution.
—Ouida

Monday, February 20, 2017

Post #2276

If a man get a fever, or a pain in the head with overdrinking, we are subject to curse the wine, when we should rather impute it to ourselves for the excess.
—Erasmus

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Post #1353

The necessities that exist are in general created by the superfluities that are enjoyed.
—Johann Georg von Zimmermann

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

The Penalty of Leadership

In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. When a man’s work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be mediocre, he will be left severely alone – if he achieve a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a -wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious, continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountebank, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy – but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as human passions – envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains – the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live — lives.
written by Theodore F. MacManus

A deadly viper once bit a hole snipe's hide; But 'twas the viper, not the snipe, that died.

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One From the Archives

Post #1234

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied...

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