Quotes About Balance

La lectura sin la meditación es infructuosa; la meditación sin la lectura es dañina; meditar y leer sin orar por ambas no da bendición[14].

Worship empowers serving; serving expresses worship. Godliness requires a disciplined balance between the two.

Too much attention to a particular sin or sins, and/or too little attention to communion with God (two things that often occur in tandem) inevitably shrivel the soul of a Christian.

A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation.

If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

We can no more get out of a relationship with nature than we can get out of history.

The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system's performance.

You think that because you understand "one" that you must therefore understand "two" because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand "and." -Sufi teaching story

In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.

Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.

There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed.

Now imagine starting again with a full tub, and again open the drain, but this time, when the tub is about half empty, turn on the inflow faucet so the rate of water flowing in is just equal to that flowing out. What happens? The amount of water in the tub stays constant at whatever level it had reached when the inflow became equal to the outflow. It is in a state of dynamic equilibrium—its level does not change, although water is continuously flowing through it.

Every balancing feedback loop has its breakdown point, where other loops pull the stock away from its goal more strongly than it can pull back.

we sometimes miss seeing that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate.

The presence of stocks allows inflows and outflows to be independent of each other and temporarily out of balance with each other.

To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system—there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing.

the competitive exclusion principle.

Most individual and institutional decisions are designed to regulate the levels in stocks.

The more users there are, the more resource is used. The more resource is used, the less there is per user.

Understanding layers of limits and keeping an eye on the next upcoming limiting factor is not a recipe for perpetual growth, however. For any physical entity in a finite environment, perpetual growth is impossible. Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.

There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.

If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon.

A heart that boils over with rage blisters the mind and scalds reason.