Quotes About Balance

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature.

No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its own sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

Farming cannot take place except in nature; therefore, if nature does not thrive, farming cannot thrive. But we know too that nature includes us. It is not a place into which we reach from some safe standpoint outside it. We are in it and are a part of it while we use it. If it does not thrive, we cannot thrive. The appropriate measure of farming then is the world's health and our health, and this is inescapably one measure.

Well, sir," Athey said, "where I used to be limber I'm stiff and where I used to be stiff I'm limber. Do you know what I'm talking about?

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

I pursued education not instead of being a good mother, but because being a good mother required that I build a better life for my family.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

Don't you believe that the punishment should fit the crime? Isn't that what justice is? Letely, though, I wonder if we've gotten more into vengenance than justice.

Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if only you pull it in the right way.

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.

I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.

We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. How it was I don't understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another's way. When I wanted to go upstairs, there was my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down there was I coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.

Look where we may, the dark threads and the light cross each other perpetually in the texture of human life.

Cuando yo sentía necesidad de dirigirme escaleras arriba, he aquí que mi esposa descendía por ella, o bien, cuando ella sentía necesidad de bajar, he aquí que yo ascendía. En eso consiste la vida matrimonial, según mi experiencia.

On the small neutral ground of self-importance, the best men and the worst meet on the same terms.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole.

but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth

When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other.