Extremes meet. [ Mercier ]

No violent extreme endures. [ Carlyle ]

There is danger in all extremes. [ James Ellis ]

Extremity is the trier of spirits. [ William Shakespeare ]

Perfect reason avoids all extremes. [ Moliere ]

Extremes in nature equal good produce,
Extremes in man concur to general use. [ Pope ]

Keep a mid course between the two extremes. [ Ovid ]

Avoid extremes, and shun the fault of such
Who still are pleased too little or too much. [ Pope ]

Those edges soonest turn, that are most keen;
A sober moderation stands secure.
No violent extremes endure. [ Aleyn ]

Thus each extreme to equal danger tends,
Plenty, as well as Want, can separate friends. [ Cowley ]

Let wealth come in by comely thrift,
And not by any sordid shift;
It is haste makes waste;
Extremes have still their fault.
Who gripes too hard the dry and slippery sand,
Holds none at all, or little, in his hand. [ Herrick ]

Shun equally a sombre air and vivacious sallies. [ Marcus Antoninus ]

It is in worldly accidents.
As in the world itself, where things most distant
Meet one another: Thus the east and west.
Upon the globe a mathematical point
Only divides: Thus happiness and misery.
And all extremes, are still contiguous. [ Denham ]

Like to the time of the year between the extremes
Of hot and cold, he was nor sad nor merry. [ William Shakespeare ]

All extremes are error.
The reverse of error is not truth, but error still.
Truth lies between these extremes. [ Cecil ]

Extremes in everything is a characteristic of woman. [ De Goncourt ]

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction. [ Rufus Choate ]

In conversation avoid the extremes of forwardness and reserve. [ Cato ]

Extremes are ever neighbors; it is a step from one to the other. [ Sheridan Knowles ]

Women are ever in extremes; they are either better or worse than men. [ Bruyere ]

The mean of true valor lies between the extremes of cowardice and rashness. [ Cervantes ]

Our age knows nothing but reactions, and leaps from one extreme to another. [ Niebuhr ]

In everything the middle course is best; all things in excess bring trouble. [ Plautus ]

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice. [ Swift ]

Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity. [ Burke ]

Extremes are vicious, and proceed from men; compensation is just, and proceeds from God. [ Bruyere ]

Extremes of fortune are true wisdom's test, and he's of men most wise who bears them best. [ Cumberland ]

Happiness and misery are the names of two extremes, the utmost bounds whereof we know not. [ Locke ]

It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out. [ Herder ]

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind. [ Colton ]

We must remember how apt man is to extremes - rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data. [ Beaconsfield ]

Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them. [ Pascal ]

Fortitude has its extremes as well as the rest of the virtues, and ought, like them, to be always attended by prudence. [ Voet ]

There is a mean in all things. Even virtue itself hath its stated limits; which not being strictly observed it ceases to be virtue. [ Horace ]

Mistrust the man who finds everything good, the man who finds everything evil, and still more, the man who is indifferent to everything. [ Lavater ]

Gruel men are the greatest lovers of mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in others, not in themselves. [ Colton ]

Extremes, though contrary, have the like effect; extreme heat mortifies, like extreme cold; extreme love breeds satiety, as well as extreme hatred. [ Chapman ]

Some have a violent and turgid manner of talking and thinking: they are always in extremes, and pronounce concerning everything in the superlative. [ Dr. Watts ]

Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious, if unmixed, and to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. [ Emerson ]

Too austere a philosophy makes few wise men; too rigorous politics, few good subjects; too hard a religion, few religious persons whose devotion is of long continuance. [ St. Evremond ]

Extremes are dangerous: a middle estate is safest; as a middle temper of the sea, between a still calm and a violent tempest, is most helpful to convey the mariner to his haven. [ Swinnock ]

Extremes touch: he who wants no favors from Fortune may be said to have obtained the very greatest that she can bestow, in realizing an independence which no changes can diminish. [ Chatfield ]

The greatest flood has the soonest ebb; the sorest tempest the most sudden calm; the hottest love the coldest end; and from the deepest desire oftentimes ensues the deadliest hate. [ Socrates ]

As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls. [ Montaigne ]

He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind. [ Montaigne ]

We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold; qualities that are in excess are so much at variance with our feelings that they are impalpable: we do not feel them, though we suffer from their effects. [ Pascal ]

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying. [ Charron ]

Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor. [ Macaulay ]

Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys. [ Pascal ]

We meet with few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between, these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. [ La Bruyere ]

Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression. [ J. Beaumont ]

So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. [ Lamb ]

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]