Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Extremes
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook.
Campbell—Gertrude of Wyoming.
Avoid extremes.
Attributed to Cleobulus of Lindos.
Thus each extreme to equal danger tends,
Plenty, as well as Want, can separate friends.
Cowley—Davideis. Bk. III. L. 205.
Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility.
Emerson—Letters and Social Aims. Greatness.
Extremes are faulty and proceed from men: compensation is just, and proceeds from God.
La Bruyère—The Characters or Manners of the Present Age. Ch. XVII.
Extremes meet.
Mercier—Tableaux de Paris. Vol. IV. Title of Ch. 348.
And feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce.
Milton—Paradise Lost. II. 599.
He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met 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—Essays. Bk. I. Ch. XXVI.
Avoid Extremes; and shun the fault of such
Who still are pleas’d too little or too much.
Pope—Essay on Criticism. L. 385.
Extremes in nature equal good produce;
Extremes in man concur to general use.
Pope—Moral Essays. Ep. III. L. 161.
Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco.
No one tries extreme remedies at first.
Seneca—Agamemnon. 153.
Like to the time o’ the year between the extremes
Of hot and cold, he was nor sad nor merry.
Antony and Cleopatra. Act I. Sc. 5. L. 51.
Not fearing death, nor shrinking for distress,
But always resolute in most extremes.
Henry VI. Pt. I. Act IV. Sc. 1. L. 37.
Who can be patient in such extremes?
Henry VI. Pt. III. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 215.
And where two raging fires meet together,
They do consume the thing that feeds their fury:
Though little fire grows great with little wind,
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.
Taming of the Shrew. Act II. Sc. 1. L. 133.
O brother, speak with possibilities,
And do not break into these deep extremes.
Titus Andronicus. Act III. Sc. 1.