Meaning
Even something pleasant or beneficial turns unpleasant or harmful when taken to excess. Usually said with wry resignation about indulgence - food, sunshine, praise, free time - and often as the fixed retort that one really can have an excess of a pleasure. Everyday and conversational in register. In the play the line was a flirtatious rhetorical question; the modern idiom is a flat assertion that excess spoils pleasure. Conversational and usually wry; frames excess, not the thing itself, as the problem. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean origin).
Origin
As You Like It, Act 4 Scene 1 (c. 1600). Disguised as the young man Ganymede, Rosalind is playfully 'curing' Orlando of his love for Rosalind; when he agrees that he is virtuous, she answers, 'Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?' (Folger text). The line is generally credited as the earliest recorded use of the expression. The underlying idea - that excess spoils pleasure - had proverbial antecedents in Latin and medieval tradition, so Shakespeare's claim is to the wording rather than the thought. Detached entirely from the wooing plot, it passed into English as a free-standing proverb, usually in the flat assertion 'you can have too much of a good thing'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- can one desire too much of a good thing
- you can get too much of a good thing
- you can have too much of a good thing
Usage Examples
- The tasting menu ran to fourteen courses, which felt like too much of a good thing by dessert.
- You can have too much of a good thing: even her favourite band is hard to enjoy on a nine-hour loop.
- He had hoped for a quiet retirement, but the grandchildren's visits, much as he loves them, proved you can get too much of a good thing.