Quotes About Balance

Try to fall for a stable person who is also stimulating. They really do exist.

In fact, we do not suffer from a deficit of attention. Just the opposite. We've got an overabundance of attention, more attention than we can cope with; our constant challenge is to control it.

While we all need external structure in our lives—some degree of predictability, routine, organization—those with ADD need it much more than most people. They need external structure so much because they so lack internal structure.

They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important.

A reasonable amount o' fleas is good fer a dog-keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog, mebbe.

Too bad. Lesson: It doesn't pay to push the other party to their absolute limit. A small extra gain is generally not worth the substantial risk the deal will break up.

Success on Wall Street was getting the most money. Success for us was having the best life.

The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.

Destroying forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots—the outsized equivalents of ants.

Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

I believe that the ten billion people expected to be present at the end of the century will enjoy a far better quality of life if we conserve half of the planet for nature than if we consume nature entirely.

if we save the living world, we will also automatically save the physical world, because in order to achieve the first we must also achieve the second. But if we save only the physical world, which appears our present inclination, we will ultimately lose them both.

The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck—good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever. All

The human species is, in a word, an environmental hazard. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere.

While our species continues to manufacture its radically different and untested all-human world, the rest of life should be allowed to endure, for our own safety. While preserving our own deep history, it will, if we choose to let it, continue on its own trajectory through evolutionary time. By thus maintaining two parallel worlds on the planet, humanity will ensure the survival and continued advanced of the rest of life, and of ourselves.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.

Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.

The conscious mind, ungrounded by the wisdom of the body, is remarkably incapable of taking care of business.

If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like "effortless action" or spontaneous action.

People who are in wu-wei has de, typically translated as "virtue," "power," or "charismatic power." De is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei.

We also have to reevaluate the historic benefits of intoxication, at both the individual and group level, in light of the unprecedented threats that intoxicants pose in the modern world. The relatively recent innovations of distillation and social isolation entirely change intoxicants' balance on the razor's edge between order and chaos, creating novel dangers that we only dimly appreciate.