Selected balance quotes

1. Spend some time alone every day.

2. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

3. Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme.

4. Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming, But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.

5. A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

6. Although I don't take myself very seriously, I do take my work extraordinarily seriously.

7. You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

8. Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after The Princess Diaries. It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy.

9. Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

10. The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

11. Any man who concentrates his energies totally on one passion is, by definition, someone who hurts the people close to him.

12. If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think.

13. Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

14. Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

15. Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.

16. A man must take the fat with the lean.

17. You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips.

18. I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.

19. You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

20. Revere thyself, and yet thyself despise.

21. A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

22. The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

23. Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.

24. Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.

25. Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

26. The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.

27. Cure the disease and kill the patient.

28. Hope of consciousness is strength Hope of feelings is slavery Hope of body is disease.

29. To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

30. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

31. Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

32. Sanity is madness put to good uses.

33. Oh, he was the sun burning bright and brittle And she was the moon shining back his light a little He was a shooting star She was softer and more slowly He could not make things possible But, she could make them holy.

34. I have other duties equally sacred ... Duties to myself.

35. The phases of fire are craving and satiety.

36. Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.

37. You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

38. A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.

39. I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.

40. A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings.

41. Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

42. Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.

43. By the time we've made it, we've had it.

44. Men who never get carried away should be.

45. All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

46. Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

47. A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night.

48. Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

49. The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

50. Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.

51. The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

52. There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

53. What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

54. Alas for him who seeks salvation in good only! Balanced on God's strong shoulders, Good and Evil flap together like two mighty wings and lift him high.

55. If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

56. Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.

57. There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.

58. What is without periods of rest will not endure.

59. A fit of laughter, which has been indulged to excess, almost always produces a violent reaction.

60. A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

61. Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

62. Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

63. For all my good intentions, there are days when things go wrong or I fall into old habits. When things are not going well, when I'm grumpy or mad, I'll realize that I've not been paying attention to my soul and I've not been following my best routine.

64. You say to me-wards your affection's strong; Pray love me little, so you love me long.

65. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

66. Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

67. Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

68. May the outward and inward man be at one.

69. What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

70. The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

71. Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within - for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.

72. The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

73. Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

74. The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

75. There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.

76. A man should never neglect his family for business.

77. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

78. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

79. Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

80. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

81. Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

82. A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow.

83. Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun.

84. We wish to continue in following up the legacy of the Second Vatican Council whose wise regulations have still to be led to their fulfilment, being careful that a push, generous perhaps, but unduly timed, does not detract from the content and meaning of the council, and on the other hand being careful and reined and timid efforts do not slow up the magnificent drive of renewal and of life.

85. Want to learn to eat a lot? Here it is: Eat a little. That way, you will be around long enough to eat a lot.

86. Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited ... and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult-to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

87. It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

88. The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

89. 'I think people can handle 150 to 200 miles a week. But something has to give somewhere. If he's a student, how's he going to study? He may be at the age of chasing and courtship, and that's an important form of sport and recreation, too.'

90. The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart; if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease.

91. :vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

92. There is a wisdom of the Head, and ... there is a wisdom of the Heart.

93. Strong families use the word 'we' a lot, but 'I' is never forgotten. Family members know they have the freedom to go off on their own, even if the direction is one that 'we' have never followed before. The family message is, 'We're behind you, so you can be you.'

94. My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends - It gives a lovely light.

95. To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times - The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

96. I think the hard thing about this job [stand-up] - I mean, I think this part is great - but that the traveling is y'know, 'cause - 'cause I'm gone a lot from home and this time I'm out for three-and-a-half weeks without going home, and that's hard, to be gone three-and-a-half weeks 'cause then I have to ask my friends, 'Would you mind going to the house and watering the plants, and turn some lights on and make it look like somebody's home, and make sure that the mobile over the crib isn't tangled or the baby's gonna get bored...'

97. If a man watches three football games in a row he should be declared legally dead.

98. Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.

99. The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.

100. Who reflects too much will accomplish little.