Quotes About Moderation and Abstinence

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

— John Stuart Mill

Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.

— Bishop Holt

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

— Hunter S. Thompson

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be.  Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

— Thomas Paine

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything—or nothing.

— Nancy Astor

The dinosaur’s eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good, an overabundance of bigness is not necessarily better.

— Eric Johnston

You must know your limitations.  I drink a bottle of Jack Daniel’s a day, that’s mine.

— Lemmy, of Motorhead, a heavy-metal band

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

— Barry M. Goldwater

The secret to a long life is to stay busy, get plenty of exercise, and don’t drink too much.  Then again, don’t drink too little.

— Hermann Smith-Johannson, at 103 years old

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road.  They get run over.

— Aneurin Bevan

The middle of the road is all of the usable surface.  The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nothing succeeds like excess.

— Oscar Wilde

If a man is right, he can’t be too radical; if he is wrong, he can’t be too conservative.

— Josh Billings

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while the pessimist sees only the red stoplight. . . . The truly wise person is color-blind.

— Albert Schweitzer

Give me chastity and self-restraint, but do not give it yet.

— St. Augustine

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

— William Blake

To abstain from sin when a man cannot sin is to be forsaken by sin, not to forsake it.

— St. Augustine

Man’s many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket.  The more he has the more they weight him down.

— Satya Sai Baba

Many who wouldn’t dream of having an addiction are addicted to normalcy.

— John-Roger and Peter McWilliams

Insanity is a matter of degree.

— Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Moderation in all things.

— Terence