Quotes About Balance

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass...if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass...slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own...structure.

They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather.

What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world—and loses his health?

Can any man possibly be a success who is paying for business advancement with stomach ulcers and heart trouble?

Plato said that "the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately"!

Charles Evans Hughes, former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said: "Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry." Yes, from dissipation of their energies—and worry because they never seem to get their work done.

Don't you know I am just as busy as you are – or, at least, I like to think I am.

We cannot be pepped up and enthusiastic about doing something exciting and feel dragged down by worry at the very same time. One kind of emotion drives out the other.

SEVEN WAYS TO PEACE AND HAPPINESS

When we start in the morning, there are hundreds of tasks which we feel that we must accomplish that day, but if we do not take them one at a time and let them pass through the day slowly and evenly, as do the grains of sand passing through the narrow neck of the hourglass, then we are bound to break our own physical or mental structure.

Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; Speech is human, Silence is divine.

School - You can get all A's and still flunk life.

I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.

There are three motives for which we live; we live for the body, we live for the mind, we live for the soul. No one of these is better or holier than the other; all are alike desirable, and no one of the three—body, mind, or soul—can live fully if either of the others is cut short of full life and expression.

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.

This was a career, not an emotional disorder.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place.

Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together.

O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.