Literary notes about Intemperance (AI summary)
The term “intemperance” has long been wielded by writers to signify not just overindulgence but a broader lack of self-restraint that permeates both personal conduct and societal ills. In classical literature, as seen in Plato’s Republic ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]), it is invoked to critique the abandonment of reason and moderation, linking it with other corrupting vices such as injustice and folly ([8], [9], [10]). Cicero’s writings ([11], [8], [12]) similarly associate intemperance with the root of mental perturbations and moral decay, a theme that is echoed in later texts where its influence is blamed for maladies ranging from bodily dysfunction ([13], [14], [15]) to the societal challenges of poverty and vice ([16], [17]). In works addressing broader social issues—from suffrage debates ([18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23]) to sociological studies ([24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29]) and even literary reflections on the human condition ([30], [31], [32], [33])—intemperance emerges as a multifaceted vice that demands both personal and collective correction.
- You would compare them, I said, to those invalids who, having no self-restraint, will not leave off their habits of intemperance?
— from The Republic by Plato - Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to approach true love?
— from The Republic by Plato - Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?
— from The Republic by Plato - Yes, he said, there are all the evils which we were just now passing in review: unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance.
— from The Republic by Plato - You would compare them, I said, to those invalids who, having no self-restraint, will not leave off their habits of intemperance?
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato - Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato - Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to approach true love?
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato - for what seed could there be of injustice, intemperance, and cowardice, if reason were not laid as the foundation of these vices?
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero - And analogously, there are also four species of the disgraceful: injustice, and cowardice, and intemperance, and folly.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius - Of these, we call those things bad, which are invariably capable of doing injury, such as intemperance, folly, injustice, and things of that sort.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius - Thus, grief and fear, and every other perturbation of the mind, have their rise from intemperance.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero - One imagines pleasure to be a good, another money; and yet the one may be called off from intemperance, the other from covetousness.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero - Which speaks of an intemperance in the splenetic parenchyma ; that is to say, the spleen.
— from The Imaginary Invalid by Molière - What unnatural Motions and Counterferments must such a Medley of Intemperance produce in the Body?
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - What unnatural Motions and Counterferments must such a Medley of Intemperance produce in the Body?
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele - Poverty, disease, crime, vice, intemperance, or war, these are definite situations which challenge human effort and human ingenuity.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - But Hillsboro was by no means exempt from the prevailing scourge of intemperance.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - We have come together at this time to consult each other as to what woman may do in banishing the vice of intemperance from the land.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - Mrs. Lydia F. Fowler then gave several very touching recitals of the evils of intemperance in family circles within her own observation.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - But here we have nothing to do with them, any more than with the question of intemperance, or Kansas, in my opinion.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - This vice, horribly revolting as it is, seems to go hand in hand with intemperance.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - Intemperance, [Pg 733] for instance, burdens a wife worse than a husband, owing to the present state of society.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - In the State of Vermont, a wife sought a divorce from her husband on the ground of his intemperance.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - v, "The Intemperance of Women," pp.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - Prematurely induced by intemperance of knowledge the old age of the world drew on.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition by Edgar Allan Poe - Modern Economy and the Psychology of Intemperance.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - No doubt intemperance bears a large share of the blame for it; judging from the stand-point of the policeman perhaps the greater share.
— from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis - If their propensity to drunkenness be gratified to the extent of their wishes, intemperance proves as effectual in subduing them as the force of arms.
— from The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus by Cornelius Tacitus - D. Alcoholism and Drug Addiction (1) Partridge, George E. Studies in the Psychology of Intemperance.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - Intemperance is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather its seasoning.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne - [675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance.
— from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson - In fine, there is no pleasure so just and lawful, where intemperance and excess are not to be condemned.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne - [“We carry intemperance into the study of literature, as well as into everything else.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne
