Quotes About Balance

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species

he wrote in retirement: "Two magnitudes are complementary when the measurement of one of them prevents the accurate simultaneous measurement of the other.

In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.

If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.

Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There's no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That's how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. —from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both "a lever and a place to stand" before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.

We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb "rest," as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.

The opposite of contemplation is not action, it is reaction.

life seems to be a collision of opposites.

But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.

Genuine humility is based on a realistic self-appraisal and a healthy feeling of self-worth.

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting, pushing or pulling, you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic. You can take that as axiomatic: in most cases, you become a mirror image of both what you oppose and what you love (see Ephesians 5:14).

The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: "Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.

You eventually have to return there to get most ordinary jobs done, but even those you will now do in a less compulsive or driven way.

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted."7

Traveling the road of healthy religion and true contemplation will lead to calmly held boundaries, which need neither to be defended constantly nor abdicated in the name of "friendship." This road is a "narrow road that few travel upon" these days (Matt. 7:14). It is what many of us like to call "the Third Way": the tertium quid that emerges only when you hold the tension of opposites.

eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

The most effective organizations, I am told, have both a "good boss" and a "bad boss," who work closely together. One holds us strongly, while the other speaks hard truth to us and sets clear goals and limits for us.

this preoccupation with order, control

Matter and Spirit mirror one another and reveal the depths of one another.

You can't do all your homework at the end.