Abstemious Quotes & Sayings

I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I — P.G. Wodehouse

The only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping and showing off his shortcomings. — David Niven

I'm looking for a deal from one of you TV networks to give Snoop Dogg his own hood TV show where I can find America's hottest hood artists. — Snoop Dogg

The academy awards in England; it's a classy affair as well. — Brenda Blethyn

If you run for election with a particular agenda about saving jobs, about strengthening manufacturing and farming jobs, about tackling predatory gambling and making governments accountable, if there's an opportunity to achieve that agenda with either side of politics, particularly if you come from the political centre, then it's an opportunity you should take up. — Nick Xenophon

paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable's job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he'd dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves — Iain M. Banks

Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted. — A.J. Liebling

I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. — Edmund White

Bremmer stared uneasily and Bosch dismissed him with his hand. The reporter closed the door and went to his own car. — Michael Connelly

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to. — William S. Burroughs

AS IN THE REGIMENT HE HAD BEEN NOT MERELY AN IRREPROACHABLE OFFICER but had exceeded his duties, widened the borders of perfection, also as a monk he tried to be perfect, was always industrious, abstemious, submissive, meek, as well as pure both in deed and
in thought and obedient. If many of the demands of life in the monastery which was near the capital, much frequented, did not please him, and were temptations to him, they were all nullified by obedience — Leo Tolstoy

We are so incredibly skilled at adapting to even the most hostile of environments, and so often we use those skills to be more efficient at killing each other. — Marko Kloos

The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste? — Dave Barry

Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity. — Ilana Mercer

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh. — Edward Gibbon

If I ran the world, I would find a way to bring the wealth of human good intentions and corporate good intentions together - to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that produces shared hard, tangible results. — Cindy Gallop

In a flash of self-comprehension, Roger Brevard knew that he would never, as he had hped, leave Salem. He was abstemious man, one of a family of long lives, and he would linger here, increasingly unimportant, for a great while, an old man in new epochs, isolated among strange people and prejudices. Whatever the cause - the small safety or an inward flaw - he had never been part of the corporate sweating humanity where, in the war of spirit and flesh, the vital rewards and accomplishments were found. — Joseph Hergesheimer

Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. — Paul Graham