Extremes Quotes

“Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don't know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.

And extremes--whether of dullness or fury--successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies--unconscious strategies--to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too--sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.

It takes courage to feel the feeling--and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?

I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Everything is good in moderation. Even moderation.”
― Iveta Cherneva

“The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, tempering the climate and the temperaments of the Scots, as the driest land became moist and the wettest land became dry, seedlings finding a mean between extremes, and the trees constructing a moderate zone for themselves even into what I would have called tundra, until I understood the fact that Aristotle taught, while walking in a botanic garden, that the middle is fittest to discern the extremes. ("Interim")”
― William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka

“Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.”
― Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

“Extremes,' said the Controller, 'meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“...when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.”
― Cass R. Sunstein, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

“Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.”
― Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past

“In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Love is a golden bubble full of dreams,
That waking breaks, and fills us with extremes.

---From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad III”
― Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations

“This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it's an age of extreme solutions.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Now, really, how arch
Can you be when you march
With a sword,
With a spear?
You belong

To a curious team,
You're in the extreme,
Maybe left,
Maybe right,
Maybe wrong.”
― Walt Kelly, The Pogo Poop Book

“I'm dead if I'm not wired
Crucified if not proclaimed
Cut off if not in contact
Devoid of soul if not ashamed
Terminal if not content
Last in line if not number one
Sorrowful if not elated
All is lost if all's not won
Eternal tipping of the scales
They fail to balance out
Doomed to drown in rushing floods
Or perish in a drought”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“How can I even think of such a fate . . . Better to commit murder.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Wisdom’ and ‘greed’ sit at opposite ends of the continuum. And interestingly enough, they share the same place on the same continuum as ‘life’ and ‘death.’ And the person who is daring enough to be honest with themselves knows exactly which end they share.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Naturally the principles vary with the party; but owing to the mere fact that the individual members are a part of a crowd, they are always inclined to exaggerate the worth of their principles, and to push them to their extreme consequences. In consequence parliaments are more especially representative of extreme opinions.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Qualities carried to excess are bad for us and cannot be perceived; we no longer feel them, we suffer them. Excessive youth and excessive age impair thought; so do too much and too little learning.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“The world, however, can’t survive exclusively either by cooperation or by competition. If there is no growth without competition, there is no love and peace without cooperation either. Extremes of both are unhealthy. A happy man is one who learns to balance these two extremes. He competes with his rivals and yet does not lose compassion for them.”
― Awdhesh Singh, 31 Ways to Happiness

“Riot was her element, as surely as this dark room almost creeping with amassed objects. The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“For the first half-billion years, Earth was a molten inferno some 8,000 degrees Celsius—hotter than today's sun. Scientists call this violent era the Hadean, from the Greek word Hades, or hell. Time and again, the young Earth built up a crust, only to see it incinerated by storms of flaming meteors.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Too much of a good thing—is not a good thing.”
― Black Mike

“Humanity appears trapped in an unceasing struggle between disorder and order, perpetually seeking a delicate balance between these two extremes, hoping to survive yet another day”
― Ryan Gelpke, We Tragic Few

“I’d rather kill you than let him have you,” Maya whispers, and then she lunges, her elbow circling Harper’s throat, her body pressed to his back. “Either of you.”

“Thanks,” Harper manages to grunt.”
― Addison Lane, Blackpines: The Antlers Witch: The Black Tree Chaise

“Most of our mistakes are not made in haste, but rather in the state of extreme carefulness.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“The relationships that last the longest are the ones where people take the highs with the lows and continue on to the next high.”
― Steven Magee

“Bran said, "Why should some of the Riders of the Dark be dressed all in white and the rest all in black?"

"Without colour...." Will said reflectively. "I don't know. Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes--blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.”
― Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree

“One aspect I recognize about life: life is a playground of extremes.”
― Karah Khalia