"When sages commend excess, Desire is sick"
About this Quote
Aphorisms like this work because they sound like ancient advice and then quietly poison it. Cooley sets up a familiar moral equation - sages, commendation, excess - and then flips the expected diagnosis. You think the “sick” party will be the hedonist, the glutton, the libertine. Instead it’s Desire itself, personified as a patient, failing not from deprivation but from bad counsel.
“Sages” is the key barb. Cooley isn’t scolding ordinary weakness; he’s suspicious of prestige. When the culture’s designated wise people start praising excess, that isn’t liberation, it’s a symptom. It suggests a world where moderation has lost credibility, so appetite has to be laundered through authority: indulgence recast as enlightenment, compulsion rebranded as authenticity. The line reads like a small, cold warning about intellectuals and tastemakers who sanctify what they should interrogate.
“Commend” is also doing covert work. Excess doesn’t need advertising when it’s healthy; it sells itself. If it requires endorsement from “sages,” something has already gone off. Desire, in Cooley’s framing, isn’t inherently noble or shameful; it’s a diagnostic instrument. It can be vigorous, curious, alive. Or it can be “sick”: restless, overfed, unable to be satisfied, confusing intensity with meaning.
Contextually, Cooley wrote in an era when postwar abundance and late-20th-century self-making blurred into consumer pleasure, therapeutic rhetoric, and the glamor of transgression. The aphorism lands as a critique of that moral atmosphere: when excess becomes a virtue, it’s not progress. It’s appetite wearing a graduation cap.
“Sages” is the key barb. Cooley isn’t scolding ordinary weakness; he’s suspicious of prestige. When the culture’s designated wise people start praising excess, that isn’t liberation, it’s a symptom. It suggests a world where moderation has lost credibility, so appetite has to be laundered through authority: indulgence recast as enlightenment, compulsion rebranded as authenticity. The line reads like a small, cold warning about intellectuals and tastemakers who sanctify what they should interrogate.
“Commend” is also doing covert work. Excess doesn’t need advertising when it’s healthy; it sells itself. If it requires endorsement from “sages,” something has already gone off. Desire, in Cooley’s framing, isn’t inherently noble or shameful; it’s a diagnostic instrument. It can be vigorous, curious, alive. Or it can be “sick”: restless, overfed, unable to be satisfied, confusing intensity with meaning.
Contextually, Cooley wrote in an era when postwar abundance and late-20th-century self-making blurred into consumer pleasure, therapeutic rhetoric, and the glamor of transgression. The aphorism lands as a critique of that moral atmosphere: when excess becomes a virtue, it’s not progress. It’s appetite wearing a graduation cap.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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