Quotes About Balance

Opposites are joined at the hip. Night and day, poisons and pleasures, innovation and destruction are usually different facets of the very same thing. [...] Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem - not tearing each other to bits or threatening to annihilate each other.

We've not had one Republican president in 34 years balance the budget. You can't trust right-wing Republicans with your money. You ought to hire somebody who has balanced a budget. I'm much more conservative with money than George Bush is.

Perhaps nature rations tears. That would be very sensible. You are born with three million one hundred and seventy-two potential tears, and you can use them up by the time you are eighteen or you can conserve them.

There—you mean to eat? No, no—I hold with my blessed mentor, Hippocrates, that three quarters of the physical evils that beset mankind flow from eating too much, not too little.

Eighty-five percent of spirituality is a good night's sleep.

Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink wouldn't take would stay on the kitchen table. Treslove liked that about her. She didn't believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn't a price to pay for pleasure.

He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.

David Young, in his excellent book The Discovery of Evolution, strikes just the right note of balance in our interpretation of science; his words can serve as a coda for this chapter:

Scepticism and pessimism aren't synonymous. Scepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.

When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing—you have its skeleton.

Adolf introduces Fascism to Germany, spreads war throughout Europe, murders millions in concentration camps—but he's a strict vegetarian and loves his dog. Tossing in a touching scene with his German shepherd Blondie and a dish of lentils won't make Hitler's character 'balanced.' Hitler's character isn't balanced.

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

Life should always take precedence; when a wedding meets a funeral on the road, the funeral should step aside.

I stand accused of bringing you more bad than good news. At times, and we are in such a time now, at times in human history, bad is disproportionate to good, and so I own up to the indictment. It's a fact of life, my Canadian brethren, that we cannot always control where the truth comes from, or how bad it turns out to be, or what it reveals about human nature.

Sometimes, you know, it seems I'm only allowed to live life between headaches.

The heart is seldom rational - the mind, sometimes.

Grow with discipline. Balance intuition with rigor. Innovate around the core. Don't embrace the status quo.

Yes, I believe blue material is funny, but if that's all you've got, you're dead in the water. It's not good.

This world is not heaven, but it doesn't have to be hell.

They loved Israel, but they seem to have loved security more. They made their public peace with Rome and went on about the business of living.

It is good to make an end of movement, to come to a point of rest, a place of pause. There is some strange magic in activity, in keeping at it, in continuing to be involved in many things that excite the mind and keep the hours swiftly passing. But it is a deadly magic; one is not wise to trust it with too much confidence. The moment of pause, the point of rest, has its own magic.

Work and rest are one entity.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves.