Quotes About Balance

One did one's work against a steady barrage of demands, of people

And the discipline of work provides an exercise bar, so that the wild, irrational motions of the soul become formal and creative. It literally keeps one from falling on one's face.

There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour-put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.

The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without. The light goes early.

Today I feel centered and time is a friend instead of the old enemy.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.

Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.

The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

The intensity with which young people live demands that they blank out as often as possible.

You must take the good that people do and put the bright light on that good, but human beings can never withstand such light without showing their shadows and warts. All mortals have their shortcomings and weaknesses.

You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together.

The more you cry, the less you'll pee, and peeing is more important.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education

At last life was getting itself in joint.

We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway.

I want a woman completely devoted to me and my needs. In return, I would take care of her and provide for her every need. But I would be in control.

She smiled and squeezed his hand. "I swear I don't know what to do with you, Steele. You are forever keeping me off balance. Just about the time I think I have you figured out, you do something that completely changes everything." "Good," he said in a smug tone. "I'd hate to think I was becoming predictable.

I think you know I want you, Josie. I certainly haven't made it a secret. But you also need to think about all I would take. I take a lot. I give more, but I take everything.