Quotes About Balance

I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.

A nuclear reactor is a proposed solution to the energy problem. But like all big-technological solutions, this one solves a single problem by causing many... A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense.

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

But, my dear boy, you don't eat or drink the law, or sit in the shade of it or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.

This is the justice that we are learning from the ecologists: you cannot damage what you are dependent upon without damaging yourself.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness. Sabbaths 2000 V

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only few years, after all) to 'need.

The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)

That grief should come and bring joy with it was not something I felt able, or even called upon, to sort out or understand. I accepted the grief. I accepted the joy. I accepted that they came to me out of the same world.

Everything there seemed to belong where it was. That was why I went there.

The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods. Twelfth

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, and our dwelling places to consumption.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.

We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men, and that has bent my mind and made me think of darkness and wish for the dumb life of roots.

our great modern error is the belief that we must invariably give up one thing in order to have another. But it is possible, for instance, to find comfort, pleasure, and beauty in food, clothing, and shelter. It is possible to find pleasure and beauty and even recreation in work. It is possible to have farms that do not waste and poison the natural world.

he patiently tolerated as much of him as he thought tolerable. The rest he ignored.