Quotes About Balance

Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it. What

diversity is an ineluctable component of every successful attempt to establish order.

The alarming situation here for humanity is that H. sapiens, though it has asserted itself as the dominant species on Earth, is at the same time the potential victim of its domination over virtually all Earth's ecosystems. If H. sapiens were to become extinct, the event would simply be regarded as evolution continuing to unfold, a biological future for life but not one that any longer included humanity.

The wolf was the one animal that, again, did two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves.

There is not the raw material in the woods, or beyond, to make all of us rich. And in striving for it, we will only make ourselves, all of us, poor.

According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.

Practical wisdom, Aristotle told us, is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality.

And once people are in the position to be able to work at any time from any place, they face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.

If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.

Learning to accept "good enough" will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.

Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y....There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.

Restricting yourself in this way may seem both difficult and arbitrary, but actually, this is the kind of discipline we exercise in other aspects of life. You may have a rule of thumb never to have more than two glasses of wine at a sitting.

But if you've been convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to adopt, and live with, a "two options is my limit" rule. It's worth a try.

the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.

It's not always about being satisfied, sometimes it's about being practical

you will depend on how you do your accounting. People often talk jokingly about how "creative" accountants can make a corporate balance sheet look as good or as bad as they want it to look. Well, the point here is that we are all creative accountants when it comes to keeping our own psychological balance sheet.

people won't ignore alternatives if they don't realize that too many alternatives can create a problem.

So by using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make life more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can't or don't want to avoid.

So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one's autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.

To function efficiently - to function at all - we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statement of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavor and lawful profit. And we have maps.

But if we don't figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don't live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.

April's air stirs in Willow-leaves...a butterfly Floats and balances

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.