Hippocrates — "Everything in excess is opposed to nature."
Everything in excess is opposed to nature.
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More from Hippocrates
"The art of medicine is to heal, not to kill."
"To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy."
"The best thing is to prevent disease."
"The healthy stomach makes a good digestion."
"As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
When anything goes beyond what the body or nature needs — food, rest, exertion, medicine — it works against the body's inherent balance rather than supporting it. Nature tends toward equilibrium; excess tips that equilibrium into disorder. The principle is practical: overeating harms as much as starvation, overexertion as much as inactivity. Balance is not a middle ground chosen arbitrarily but the state nature defaults to when undisturbed.
Relevance to Hippocrates
Hippocrates built Greek medicine on humoral theory — health as balance among blood, phlegm, and two biles. Excess or deficiency in any humor caused disease. He prescribed diet, exercise, and lifestyle adjustments before drugs, because restoring natural proportion was the cure. His Hippocratic Corpus repeatedly returns to moderation in eating and physical regimen. This quote is essentially the philosophical foundation for everything he practiced and taught.
The era
In 5th-century BCE Greece, medicine was separating from religious ritual — Asclepius temples still competed with rational physicians. Greek philosophy independently arrived at the golden mean concept. Wealthy Athenians feasted heavily on wine and meat; athletic training pushed bodies to extremes. Hippocrates argued, against priestly mysticism and physical excess alike, that nature itself imposes limits — a radical empirical claim in a world that blamed disease on divine punishment.
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