Quotes About Balance

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously. [ Writer's Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer's Digest , February 1976)]

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again?

Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.

Too much of anything isn't good for anyone.

If you had your way you'd pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you'd leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you'd have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn't go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a hot trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

Man had become too much man and not enough animal

Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.

Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

Too much of anything isn't good for anyone.

In real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.

Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don't we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?

He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.

Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools.

Some day our cities would open up and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big.

Sure, it's money runs the world, Doone agreed, seated there. But it is music that holds down the friction.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?

We might start off by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde's poem, substituting the word 'Art' for 'Love'. Art will fly if held too lightly, Art will die if held too tightly, Lightly, tightly, how do I know Whether I'm holding or letting Art go?

You have a right to youth. Go now, if you want. Because if you stay you'll have no time for anything but working and growing old and dying at your work. But it is good work.