“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
“Our nature hardly allows us to have enough of anything without having too much.”
On Dr. Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury : as cited in The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors: 1639-1729 , ed. Charles Wells Moulton, H. Malkan (1910) p. 591.
“Can we ever have too much of a good thing?”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book I, Ch. 6.
"The Mathematician", in The Works of the Mind (1947) edited by R. B. Heywood, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Context: I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is … governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.
“I’m not accusing you of anything, but we both have studied too much history to ignore coincidence.”
Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 17, “Dead Voices” (p. 170)
