Quotes About Balance

I have kids and I want to have a long life and there are certain things that are conducive to that and certain things that aren't. I've opted for the road of happiness and long life.

People's ways are all so different. It's rather infernal—trying to please everybody

Isn't it possible—sometime—to try to know too much? There is such a thing as looking too closely, mon ami. And then we pay the price.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.

I still made a short detour to seek out a flower stall, and went home with a large bunch of roses. They are just as real as all the misery I witness each day.

The inner world is as real as the outer world. One ought to be conscious of that… These two worlds are fed by each other, you must not neglect one at the expense of the other, must not deem one more important than the other.

One should accept things as they are and not try to lift them to impossible heights; only if you let them be will they reveal their true worth.

Lord, give me wisdom, not knowledge. Or rather the knowledge that leads to wisdom and true happiness and not the kind that leads to power.

One must marry one's feelings to one's beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one's life.

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.

A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.

Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.

When the proportions are too perfect it detracts from a sense of the sublime. (13 January 1857)

Artists who seek perfection in everything achieve it in nothing (14 March 1858)

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

We haven't the time to take our time.

Pravé umÄ›ní", kÃ…â"¢i?el Mistr, "je bezú?elné, bezcílné!

What are you thinking of?" he would cry. "You know already that you should not grieve over bad shots; learn now not to rejoice over the good ones. You must free yourself from the buffetings of pleasure and pain, and learn to rise above them in easy equanimity, to rejoice as though not you but another had shot well. This, too, you must practise unceasingly – you cannot conceive how important it is.

How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?

The very moment you separate body and spirit, you end up with a corpse. Separate faith and works and you get the same thing: a corpse.

Language consists in equal parts of speaking and silence.

To live only for some future goals is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have the sides. It's the top that defines the sides."8

Psalm 127 shows a way to work that is neither sheer activity nor pure passivity. It doesn't glorify work as such, and it doesn't condemn work as such. It doesn't say, "God has a great work for you to do; go and do it." Nor does it say, "God has done everything; go fishing." If we want simple solutions in regard to work, we can become workaholics or dropouts. If we want to experience the fullness of work, we will do better to study Psalm 127.