Quotes About Balance

There is within you a lamb and a lion. Spiritual maturity is the ability to let lamb and lion lie down together.

The question that must guide all organizing activity in a parish is not how to keep people busy, but how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence.

I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.

Your way of being present to your community may require times of absence, prayer, writing, or solitude. These too are times for your community.

However, if I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential. It's so easy to spend your whole time being preoccupied with urgent matters and never starting to live, really live.

We all are children and parents, students and teachers, healers and in need of care.

When you get exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, or run down, your body is saying that you are doing things that are none of your business. God does not require of you what is beyond your ability, what leads you away from God, or what makes you depressed or sad.

When you heed only your lion, you will find yourself overextended and exhausted. When you take notice only of your lamb, you will easily become a victim of your need for other people's attention.

The gospel proclaims human freedom and dignity more than human enslavement and depravity. What is needed is a balance of biblical values and emphasis on the empowering quality of the gospel. The spiritual values of humility, long suffering, endurance, and obedience are to be affirmed alongside self-reliance, freedom, proclamation, mission, and authority.

We often are very, very busy, and usually very tired as a result, but we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center.

Together, Yet Not Too Near When we try to shake off our loneliness by creating a milieu without limiting boundaries, we may become entangled in a stagnating closeness.

While busy with and worried about many things, we seldom feel truly satisfied, at peace, or at home.

Nouwen's wisdom is a fusion of the psychological and the spiritual.

Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure.

The world can absorb only doses of truth, he said; too much would kill it. One sought education in order to adjust the dose.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well-balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force with a limited mind.

Tatsächlich hat der arbeitende Mensch heute nicht mehr die Muße, sein Leben Tag für Tag wirklich sinnvoll zu gestalten.Wahrhaft menschliche Beziehungen zu seinen Mitmenschen kann er sich nicht leisten; es würde den Marktwert seiner Arbeit herabsetzen. Es fehlt ihm an Zeit, etwas anderes zu sein als eine Maschine.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.