Quotes About Balance

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.

The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.

Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.

The Stoics denied the concept of progress. There might be a little advance here, some improvement there—cosmology in their time, dentistry in ours—but in the long run the balance of things, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, remains constant.

something has been said for sobriety but very little.

The knowledge of God's Word without love is a destructive force because it puffs us up with pride and legalism.

When we possess solely a head knowledge, two things can happen: (1) we are easily susceptible to hype or emotionalism, or (2) we are bound by our intellect.

Should I not partake of anything the world consumes? If so, how can I live and function in this world?

And here I am, back from the metaphysical world with first hand knowledge and I too am an animist; everything in nature really does have its own spirit. Maybe that's our job in this world, to nurture and to balance the creative manifestations of Nature, the same thing our ancestors did for tens of thousands of years, instead of reaping the natural world for profit.

Decisions without actions are pointless. Actions without decisions are reckless.

Some things are just sitting there, waiting to be discovered. Other things are probably better off left alone

I married up several times. And then across once or twice. And then beneath me. I never quite found the right level somehow. Perhaps I should have married diagonally or in a slightly curved direction.

DYNAMIC HOMEOSTASIS Dynamic homeostasis means that whenever a part of the system is out of balance, the rest of the members of the system will try to bring it back into balance.

He saw healthy shame as the guardian of our humanness. Shame, he posited, is the emotion that signals our human finitude, our human limits. Unhealthy shame results when we try to be more than human or when we act less than human. This insight was what I needed.

We humans are finite, "perfectly imperfect." Limitation is our essential nature. Grave problems result from refusing to accept our limits. Healthy shame is an emotion that teaches us about our limits. Like all emotions, shame moves us to get our basic needs met.

The more dysfunctional the system, the more closed and rigid are the roles it assigns. In families that are chemically, sexually or violently dysfunctional, the needs of the system are overt. The system dispenses its roles for the members to play in order to keep balance. All the rigid roles set up by family dysfunction are forms of abandonment.

When shame underlies the control and release it seems to intensify both sides of the tension. . . . Shame makes the control dynamic more rigidly demanding and unforgiving and the release more dynamic and self-destructive. The more intensely one controls, the more one requires the balance of release and the more abusingly or self destructively one releases, the more intensely one requires control.

but each has the same function: to keep the family system in balance, frozen and protected from the possibility of change.

There is an anonymous saying, "Of all the masks of freedom, discipline (limits) is the hardest to understand." We cannot be truly free without having limits.

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family's precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

If you're willing to love and accept yourself unconditionally, you will allow yourself time to just be. You will set aside times when there's nothing you have to do and nowhere you have to go. You will allow yourself solitude, a nourishing time of aloneness. You will take time for hygiene and exercise. You will take time for fun and entertainment. You will take vacations. You will take time to work at your sex life.

Because the roles maintain the balance of the system, they exist for the system. The children give up their own reality to take care of the family system—to keep it whole and balanced. Each form of abandonment breaks the interpersonal bridge and the mutual-intimacy bond. A child is precious and incomparable. Unless treated with value and love, this sense of preciousness and incomparability diminishes. In toxic, internalized shame, it disappears completely.

Page: Don't keep the world on tenterhooks, Tom! Out with it! What's the best thing we can do to ensure a long, happy, healthy future for mankind? Grey: We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on-in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we've been doing for the past half century-if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species. Page: Follow that if you can, Mr. President.