Quotes About Balance

For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.

The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it.

Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always work here that I need to be doing and I have many worries, for life on the edge seems always threatening to go over the edge. But I am always surprised, when I look back on times here that I know to have been laborious or worrisome or sad, to discover that they were never out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself.

One thing work gives is the joy of not working, a minute here or there when I stand and only breathe, receiving the good of the air. It comes back. Good work done comes back into the mind, a free breath drawn.

It's sad that we live in a society that has the refrain 'thank God it's Friday, that means you despise 5/7ths of your life.

When you have gone too far, as I think he did, the only mending is to come home.

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

The Founders believed that liberty depended on persons with the maturity to avoid both radical self-assertion and a timid reliance on the state.

Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.5 But

I should do something about the cigarettes I quite accept that it's bad for your health, but you know a moderate tipple is positively beneficial and, at certain times, absolutely essential.

children always wake after they have slept exactly as long as is good for them..

The essence of foreign policy, is deciding which son of a bitch to support -in 1941, Hitler or Stalin; in 1972, Brezhnev or Mao; in 1979, Somoza or Ortega. One has to choose. A blanket anti-son of a bitch policy, like a blanket anti-ethnic cleansing policy, is soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.

We've had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepherd rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea's is today.

America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics--because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.

Healing means bringing the person into a right relationship with the physical, mental and spiritual laws of God.

Virginia Satir has suggested that we need from four to twelve hugs a day as part of our health maintenance.

When we think or act this way, we do so at either one extreme or the other. For example, either we love someone completely or we hate them. There is no middle ground. We see the people around us as either good or bad, and not the composite they really are. We judge ourselves equally as harshly. The more we use all-or-none thinking, the more it opens us up to behaving in an all-or-none fashion. Both of these actions tend to get us into trouble and to cause us to suffer unnecessarily.

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.