Quotes About Balance

Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair.

Le plus heureux des hommes serait celui qui, possédant la science de son labeur, et travaillant de ses mains, puisant le bien-être et la liberté dans l'exercice de sa force intelligente, aurait le temps de vivre par le cur et par le cerveau, de comprendre son uvre et d'aimer celle de Dieu.

But it's different with a woman. Her work in the house is to keep not to get.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Though firm, we are never too firm, though we love fun, we never have fun in a silly way that makes us appear ridiculous, unless that is our intent.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. Succeeding, whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that succeeding will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can't because you're balancing a ball on your head. Or you're driving and there's this old guy on crutches and you go, to Mr. Feder, your Driver's Ed teacher, Should I swerve? And he's like, Uh, probably. But then you hear this big clunk and Feder makes a negative mark in his book.

But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.

Over the years I've felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I'll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It's a cycle that can go on … well, forever.

Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively). Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully. It's like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, "correct" viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters. In other words, like life.

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

courage is the bridge between our minds and our bodies.

The symmetries of immanence are cruel.

I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.

MORAL AMBIGUITIES constitute a fairly stable system of equilibrium

La maladie nous révèle des fonctions normales au moment précis où elle nous en interdit l'exercice.

La santé c'est une marge de tolérance des infidélités du milieu.

Mais il en est des états de l'organisme comme de la musique : les lois de l'acoustique ne sont pas violées dans une cacophonie, cela n'entraîne pas que toute combinaison de sons soit agréable.

Quien no trabaja no come, sí, pero quien trabaja no vive.