Quotes About Balance

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual... And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.

Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world.

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

It often happens, as a matter of fact, that so called "pious souls" take their "spiritual life" with a wrong kind of seriousness.

Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.

To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without

Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

the need to develop a mutually enhancing mode of human presence to the natural world will be a central concern in every phase of human activity.

To know when to stop To know when you can get no further By your own action, This is the right beginning!

It is easy to stand still and leave no trace, but it is hard to walk without touching the ground. (p. 53)

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

Excerpt from Leaving Things Alone) You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason.

Like all life, it grows sick and dies when it is uprooted from its proper element.

Fishes are born in water Man is born in Tao. If fishes, born in water, Seek the deep shadow Of pond and pool, All their needs Are satisfied. If man, born in Tao, Sinks into the deep shadow Of non-action To forget aggression and concern, He lacks nothing His life is secure. Moral: "All the fish needs Is to get lost in water. All man needs is to get lost In Tao.

Tao is obscured when men understand only one of a pair of opposites, or concentrate only on a partial aspect of being. (p. 42)

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. It destroys one's own capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes the work fruitful.

It's the pausing and the stopping, perhaps going backward and losing some time, not being able to do everything we're supposed to do, that serves the soul. That's the enchantment that feeds the soul.

Learn to live small and you will discover great pleasures. You will accomplish more in your life than you could ever predict if you were overly ambitious.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.

If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever be a line, or even if there is a line at all.

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth