Sirach 18:32

Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon

30 Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites. 31 If you allow your soul to take pleasure in base desire, it will make you the laughingstock of your enemies. 32 Do not revel in great luxury, or you may become impoverished by its expense. 33 Do not become a beggar by feasting with borrowed money, when you have nothing in your purse.

Clement of Alexandria The Instructor 2.1

Paedagogus
Patristic

For those that are absorbed in pots, and exquisitely prepared niceties of condiments, are they not plainly abject, earth-born, leading an ephemeral kind of life, as if they were not to live [hereafter]? Those the Holy Spirit, by Isaiah, denounces as wretched, depriving them tacitly of the name of love (agape), since their feasting was not in accordance with the word. But they made mirth, killing calves, and sacrificing sheep, saying, Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. And that He reckons such luxury to be sin, is shown by what He adds, And your sin shall not be forgiven you till you die — not conveying the idea that death, which deprives of sensation, is the forgiveness of sin, but meaning that death of salvation which is the recompense of sin. Take no pleasure in abominable delicacies, says Wisdom. At this point, too, we have to advert to what are called things sacrificed to idols, in order to show how we are enjoined to abstain from them. Polluted and abominable those things seem to me, to the blood of which, fly Souls from Erebus of inanimate corpses.

 Notes and References

"... The eighty-fifth of the Apostolical Canons gives a list of the books of the Hebrew Canon, and adds the first three books of the Maccabees and the Wisdom of Sirach; these last four are not, however, included in the Canon, though the Wisdom of Sirach is specially recommended for the instruction of the young. Again, in the Apostolical Constitutions, 6:14, 15, quotations from Sirach are given with the same formula as those from the books of the Hebrew Canon, but in the list given in 2:57 of the same work, there is no mention of any of the books of the Apocrypha ... The evidence of Clement of Alexandria is conflicting; in his Paedagogus he quotes very often from Sirach, and speaks of it as 'scripture', from which it would evidently appear that he regarded it as canonical Scripture; but, according to Eusebius, Clement reckoned Sirach among the 'Antilegomena', for in speaking of Clement's works he mentions the Stromateis, or 'Medleys', and says: 'He quotes in them passages from the disputed Scriptures, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, for example, and of Jesus the son of Sirach, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, and those of Barnabas, Clement, and Jude ..."

Charles, R. H. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (p. 299) Oxford University Press, 1913

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