Quotes about moderation

When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

[T]here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

... vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

You can now, if you choose, employ your present success to advantage, so as to keep what you have got and gain honour and reputation besides, and you can avoid the mistake of those who meet with an extraordinary piece of good fortune, and are led on by hope to grasp continually at something further, through having already succeeded without expecting it.

And it is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best.

To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws.

He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches. He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.

All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; but the dose makes it clear that a thing is not a poison.

To introduce into the philosophy of War itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.