Extremes

Extremes are measures falling far outside the norm, and may include drastic or foolhardy expedients undertaken in a crisis.

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• Should there be danger of such an event — should he be the cause of adding a single more trouble to her existence — Why, I think, I shall be justified in going to extremes!
  • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847); Heathcliff (Chapter XIV).

• To "go to extremes" is ever symptomatic of genius and greatness.
  • Ragnar Redbeard (pseudonym), Might is Right (1890).

• Darling I don't know why I go to extremes
  Too high or too low there ain't no in-betweens.
  • Billy Joel, "I Go To Extremes", Storm Front (1989).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 246.

• The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook.
  • Thomas 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.
  • Abraham Cowley, Davideis, Book III, line 205.

• Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims (1876), Greatness.

• Extremes are faulty and proceed from men: compensation is just, and proceeds from God.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, The Characters or Manners of the Present Age (1688), Chapter XVII.

• Extremes meet.
  • Honoré Mercier, Tableaux de Paris, Volume IV. Title of Chapter 348.

• And feel by turns the bitter change
  Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), 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.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, Chapter XXVI.

• Avoid Extremes; and shun the fault of such
  Who still are pleas'd too little or too much.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), line 385.

• Extremes in nature equal good produce;
  Extremes in man concur to general use.
  • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle III, line 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.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act I, scene 5, line 51.

• Not fearing death, nor shrinking for distress,
  But always resolute in most extremes.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part I (c. 1588-90), Act IV, scene 1, line 37.

• Who can be patient in such extremes?
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part III (c. 1591), Act I, scene 1, line 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.
  • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act II, scene 1, line 133.

• O brother, speak with possibilities,
  And do not break into these deep extremes.
  • William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (c. 1584-1590), Act III, scene 1.