Moderate things are best. [ Proverb ]
It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires. [ Landor ]
Moderate pleasure relaxes the spirit, and moderates it. [ Seneca ]
Absence cools moderate passions, but inflames violent ones. [ Proverb ]
Moderate riches will carry you, if you have more, you must carry them. [ Proverb ]
Pride, which inspires us with so much envy, serves also to moderate it. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Custom, which diminishes the intense, increases the moderate, pleasures. [ Ramsay ]
Minds of moderate calibre ordinarily condemn everything which is beyond their range. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead: excessive grief the enemy to the living. [ William Shakespeare ]
Evils have their comfort; good none can support (to wit) with a moderate and contented heart. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men leave their riches either to their kindred or their friends, and moderate portions prosper best in both. [ Bacon ]
Now learn what and how great benefits a moderate diet brings with it. Before all, you will enjoy good health. [ Horace ]
The art of using moderate abilities to advantage wins praise, and often acquires more reputation than actual brilliancy. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The art of being able to make a good use of moderate abilities wins esteem and often confers more reputation than real merit. [ La Bruyere ]
He is an eloquent man who can treat humble subjects with delicacy, lofty things impressively, and moderate things temperately. [ Cicero ]
There is nothing which continues longer than a moderate fortune; nothing of which one sees sooner the end than a large fortune. [ Bruyere ]
He is an eloquent man who can speak of low things acutely, and of great things with dignity, and of moderate things with temper. [ Cicero ]
We must avoid fastidiousness; neatness, when it is moderate, is a virtue; but when it is carried to an extreme, it narrows the mind. [ Fenelon ]
Everybody takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many go so far as to acknowledge moderate ones; but there is hardly anyone who does not repay great obligations with ingratitude. [ Rochefoucauld ]
If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiencies. Nothing is denied to well-directed labor: nothing is ever to be attained without it. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
Individuals possessing moderate sized brains easily find their proper sphere, and enjoy in it scope for all their energy. In ordinary circumstances they distinguish themselves, but they sink when difficulties accumulate around them. Persons with large brains, on the other hand, do not readily attain their appropriate place; common occurrences do not rouse or call them forth. [ George Combe ]
Whosoever shall look heedfully upon those who are eminent for their riches will not think their condition such as that he should hazard his quiet, and much less his virtue, to obtain it, for all that great wealth generally gives above a moderate fortune is more room for the freaks of caprice, and more privilege for ignorance and vice, a quicker succession of flatteries, and a larger circle of voluptuousness. [ Johnson ]
Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon. [ Hillard ]
Nothing raises the price of a blessing like its removal; whereas it was its continuance which should have taught us its value. There are three requisitions to the proper enjoyment of earthly blessings, - a thankful reflection on the goodness of the Giver, a deep sense of our unworthiness, a recollection of the uncertainty of long possessing them. The first would make us grateful; the second, humble; and the third, moderate. [ Hannah More ]
We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art: but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning. [ Montaigne ]