Quotes About Balance

Too much of anything is bad, but too much whiskey is just enough. — Mark Twain

ART VS. COMMERCE he artist stood back to view the geometric precision of his latest creation. Beautiful, he murmured, but will it sell? No time to examine the philosophic implications. Customers, buzzing with excitement, hovered near the piece. He wrapped up a deal quickly. This is business, the spider said with a vicious smile. It ain't art.

The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.

Make sure you've always got one foot on his brakes and another on yours.

Would a diet high in omega-3 lead to world peace?

It is easy to get seduced by complexity; but there is virtue in simplicity too.

When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

35 million fewer females than males in the population.

We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need? -Lee Iacocca, former chairman, Ford Motor Company

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":

If we're going to survive as a planet with more than 6 billion people without destroying the complex balance of our natural ecosystems, the best way to do it is to crowd as many of those humans into metropolitan spaces and return the rest of the planet to Mother Nature.

How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"?

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,"24 William Blake

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.

If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.

A quick search on Google yields over 11.5 billion hits for the word "time." In comparison, more obvious topics of interest like sex and money rank a paltry 2.75 billion and 2 billion, respectively. Time and how to make the most of it, appears to be about five times more important to us than making love or money.

Flow is an alternative path toward mastery, but, like any path, not without its pitfalls. There's a serious dark side to flow

The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.

harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits).

At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.9 Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of good.

It makes no sense to scrimp all your life so that you can have one hell of a ninetieth birthday bash.