"It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living"
About this Quote
Le Gallienne’s line is a velvet-gloved provocation: life doesn’t earn its keep through moderation, but through the moments that spill over the rim. “Fine excesses” is the key phrase, a deliberate rescue of indulgence from vulgarity. He isn’t praising mere appetite or chaos; he’s praising surplus with taste - the kind of overdoing that becomes art rather than accident. The adjective “fine” works like a moral filter, suggesting that certain extravagances (beauty, romance, aesthetic rapture, a night that runs too late) aren’t sins against responsibility but proofs of being fully awake.
As a poet writing in the long afterglow of late-Victorian decadence and aestheticism, Le Gallienne sits near the tradition that treated sensibility as a philosophy. The era’s public pieties prized restraint, productivity, and good behavior; the counter-current prized intensity, style, and the right to experience. In that context, “worth living” reads less like self-help than like quiet rebellion: a defense brief for pleasure in a culture that often demanded people justify joy in moral or economic terms.
The subtext is also slightly melancholic. You don’t argue so hard for the value of “excesses” unless ordinary life feels thin, dutiful, repetitive. The line romanticizes the spikes in the graph - the feast days, the luminous mistakes, the luxurious attention paid to art and desire - implying that meaning is not found in balance, but in overflow.
As a poet writing in the long afterglow of late-Victorian decadence and aestheticism, Le Gallienne sits near the tradition that treated sensibility as a philosophy. The era’s public pieties prized restraint, productivity, and good behavior; the counter-current prized intensity, style, and the right to experience. In that context, “worth living” reads less like self-help than like quiet rebellion: a defense brief for pleasure in a culture that often demanded people justify joy in moral or economic terms.
The subtext is also slightly melancholic. You don’t argue so hard for the value of “excesses” unless ordinary life feels thin, dutiful, repetitive. The line romanticizes the spikes in the graph - the feast days, the luminous mistakes, the luxurious attention paid to art and desire - implying that meaning is not found in balance, but in overflow.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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