Quotes About Balance

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.

All things want to float.

There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

For somewhere reigns an old hostility / between living one's Life and doing one's Work.

Vielleicht sind gewisse meiner neulich ausgesprochenen Bedenken sehr übertrieben; so viel, wie ich mich kenne, scheint mir sicher, daß, wenn man mir meine Teufel austriebe, auch meinen Engeln ein kleinen, ein ganz kleiner (sagen wir) Schrecken geschähe, - und - fühlen Sie - gerade darauf darf ich es auf keinen Preis ankommen lassen.

like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow.

Aufklärung heißt nichts anderes, als die Unschuld messen mit dem Maaße der Schuld!

You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.

Only those are in the right who keep an open door for both good and ill, so that each may come but also leave according to its needs. (Letters on Life)

perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys

Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured.

You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.

All that we have gained, the machine threatens- once a tool assumes a force of its own. Instead of letting us get used to mastery, for buildings more severe it cuts the stone.

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right.

Who among us would not have to strive for this above everything else: to reach such security in one's ability that one has always the correct counterweights ready within one's conscience to offset the judgment that arrives from the outside.

We let go of one or the other always yet again: this joyfulness and that sadness. We still do not own either of them.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up, that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you... Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided uncertain extremes of the scale.

Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man....