Literary notes about Excessive (AI summary)
The word "excessive" is often deployed to emphasize surplus or intensity, serving as a device to heighten both emotional states and physical conditions. In some instances, it reveals an overabundance that colors character traits or artistic expressions, as when a writer highlights an abundance of sensibility or vanity [1], [2]. Elsewhere, it underscores extremes in natural phenomena or bodily sensations—the toll of heat, rain, or fatigue [3], [4]—or even the exaggerated responses of human behavior, such as overwhelming grief or astonishment [5], [6]. In philosophical and moral critiques, it illuminates the dangers of lacking restraint or balance, whether in folly, pride, or the excessive exercise of power [7], [8]. This multifaceted usage renders "excessive" a potent literary tool that vividly paints extremes in both nature and human emotion.
- An excessive sensibility, or the capacity for fine feelings and emotions, is a marked characteristic of Thackeray, as it is of Dickens and Carlyle.
— from English Literature by William J. Long - This last betrayed that manner which denotes Excessive vanity in man or brute.
— from The Fables of La Fontaine by Jean de La Fontaine - According to these three afflictions, viz. 1. Excessive heat.
— from The Complete Herbal by Nicholas Culpeper - In a season of excessive rains, the Tyber swelled above its banks, and rushed with irresistible violence into the valleys of the seven hills.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - “Your praise is, perhaps, excessive,” I replied.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - ‘You don’t mean that ‘ere, Sir?’ said Sam, starting back in excessive surprise.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens - What he wished to resist and to overthrow was their supremacy, their excessive power.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II by Nietzsche - And, again, the melancholy, once established, displayed, as one of its symptoms , an excessive reflection on the required deed.
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley
