It is of our nature to exceed ourselves. Overflowing the mesaure is built into what we are. So, too, is rejoicing in this superabundance for its own sake. Yet too lavish an excess, like too vaulting an ambition, may lead us to overreach ourselves and bring ourselves to nothing. Like Lady Macbeh, one can forget that constraints (the demands of kinship or hospitality, for example) are costitutive of the self, not simply obstacles to its expression.
-Terry Eagleton
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