"Sometimes something worth doing is worth overdoing"
About this Quote
Aphorisms usually sell restraint: moderation, balance, the virtuous middle. Stanislaw Lec flips that piety with a wink. "Sometimes something worth doing is worth overdoing" isn’t a self-help permission slip so much as a sly diagnosis of how real commitments actually look when the stakes are honest. If a thing truly matters, it won’t stay tidy. It will spill past polite limits, past "reasonable" effort, past the point where onlookers start calling it obsessive.
The key word is "sometimes", a small brake that keeps the line from becoming macho excess. Lec isn’t praising indiscriminate maximalism; he’s mocking the social reflex that treats intensity as a character flaw. Overdoing, here, is a kind of moral counterpunch: the reminder that transformative work (art, love, dissent, survival) often requires a surplus that looks irrational from the outside. The subtext is political as much as personal. Lec, a Polish Jewish poet who lived through war, totalitarian pressure, and the anxious compromises of postwar life, knew how often "be sensible" functions as an instrument of control. In that world, moderation can be another name for compliance.
The line works because it weaponizes a familiar proverb structure and then sabotages it. It grants the reader a dangerous freedom: to choose a cause, a craft, a truth, and pursue it past the socially sanctioned quota. Lec’s irony isn’t merely playful; it’s a survival strategy, insisting that sometimes the only adequate response to an absurd world is an immoderate one.
The key word is "sometimes", a small brake that keeps the line from becoming macho excess. Lec isn’t praising indiscriminate maximalism; he’s mocking the social reflex that treats intensity as a character flaw. Overdoing, here, is a kind of moral counterpunch: the reminder that transformative work (art, love, dissent, survival) often requires a surplus that looks irrational from the outside. The subtext is political as much as personal. Lec, a Polish Jewish poet who lived through war, totalitarian pressure, and the anxious compromises of postwar life, knew how often "be sensible" functions as an instrument of control. In that world, moderation can be another name for compliance.
The line works because it weaponizes a familiar proverb structure and then sabotages it. It grants the reader a dangerous freedom: to choose a cause, a craft, a truth, and pursue it past the socially sanctioned quota. Lec’s irony isn’t merely playful; it’s a survival strategy, insisting that sometimes the only adequate response to an absurd world is an immoderate one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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