“Everything in Moderation, Including Moderation”: Not Marcus Aurelius

The joke gives it away. "Everything in moderation, including moderation" only works if the original, "everything in moderation," is already a cliché. It is a punchline about an old saying, which makes it newer than the saying, and much newer than Marcus Aurelius.

It is not in the Meditations. Searching George Long’s translation for "including moderation" finds nothing. There is a trap, though: Long’s own introduction to the book describes temperance as "moderation in all things." That is Long, writing in the nineteenth century, not Marcus.

Where it actually comes from

The best research on this one was done by Quote Investigator, which published its findings in 2022. The earliest versions it found are all from 1927 and 1928, and none has a named author:

• A comic verse in a 1927 book called Pagan Pictures, freely "expanded" from the Greek, which ends "Be moderate in moderation."
• A line in a Hull newspaper at the end of 1927: "Our Advice.—Be moderate in everything including moderation."
• A 1928 trade magazine, crediting it to a Yale student paper.

From there it travelled as a joke, and the wording drifted. A 1966 New York Times item reported a Latin motto on an office ceiling, translated as "Everything in moderation, including moderation itself," which is close to the version people quote now.

Quote Investigator’s verdict on the famous names is blunt: it found "no substantive support" for any of them. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Petronius, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Socrates: all came later, all without a source. Julia Child is credited all over the internet too, also with no source anyone has produced.

Wilde is a nice irony. What he actually wrote, in A Woman of No Importance (1893), is the opposite: "Nothing succeeds like excess."

The ancient maxim underneath

The saying being joked about is genuinely ancient. "Nothing too much" was one of the maxims inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, alongside "Know thyself." Hesiod, writing around 700 BC, put the idea this way:

Observe due measure: and proportion is best in all things.Hesiod, Works and Days 694, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

And one of the Seven Sages, Cleobulus, was remembered for a three-word version:

His apophthegm was: Moderation is best.Diogenes Laertius, Lives I.93, trans. R. D. Hicks (1925)

So "everything in moderation" has a respectable ancestry. "Including moderation" is the twentieth century having fun with it.

What Marcus actually said about moderation

He wrote about temperance as a virtue, and he did not mean a joke. His clearest description is of his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius, whom he admired for exactly this:

But to be strong enough both to bear the one and to be sober in the other is the mark of a man who has a perfect and invincible soul.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I.16, trans. George Long

The "one" and "other" are abstaining from pleasures and enjoying them. Marcus praises a man who could do either without losing himself, which is what Stoic temperance means: not avoiding good things, but not being owned by them. He ranks it among the virtues that matter most:

I see a virtue which is opposed to love of pleasure, and that is temperance.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VIII.39, trans. George Long

That is a serious idea about self-command. "Including moderation" is a good joke. They are not the same thing, and only one of them is his.

This is on our list of misattributed Stoic quotes. For temperance as the Stoics meant it, see the four Stoic virtues.

Sources: Quote Investigator, "Be Moderate In Everything Including Moderation" (May 13, 2022); Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. George Long, Project Gutenberg #15877; Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Project Gutenberg #348; Diogenes Laertius, Lives I.93, trans. R. D. Hicks (1925), on Wikisource.

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