Balance Quotes

“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.”
― Carl Sagan

“Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it while it remains unmoved. You had to be the centre of the seesaw so the pain flowed through you, not into you. It was very hard. But she could do it!”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“The universe, they say, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness.”
― Terry Pratchett , The Light Fantastic

“I want to caution you against the idea that balance has to be a routine that looks the same week in and week out.”
― Kevin Thoman

“Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.”
― Plutarch

“It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“I see now how things even up, how they are squared away, and how they balance under the law of love and justice. No year of life is emotionally, spiritually or even materially, all drought or all rainfall; nor is it all sun. The road turns a little every day, and one day there's a sudden twist we didn't dream was there, and for every loss there is somewhere a gain, for every grief a happiness, for every deprivation a giving.”
― Faith Baldwin, Many Windows, Seasons of the Heart

“The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ...”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace

“There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“Success works as a cycle - growth and contraction, balancing and unbalancing - all while you're encountering hurdles that get higher and higher over time.”
― Julien Smith, The Flinch

“My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
"It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“We will never know peace and stability in the world without balance. And we will never know balance without justice for all. Yet, justice exists only where there is fairness and equality -- when every man and country is treated and viewed equally. No country should be given power over another. In addition, no country should be granted privileges that are denied to others. No one country has the authority to decide which country will be embargoed, denied to protect itself, and will be favored based on the weight of their resources. Eliminate the hypocrisy.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders & The Fisher of Men

“Life is a balance between emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) and intelligence quotient (IQ).”
― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management

“There is nothing wrong with loving your work and wanting to apply yourself to it. But there is so much more to life. Balance is what is important, maintaining balance.”
― Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing

“For there to be harmony and peace, everything must be balanced. And for there to be balance, there must be equality. And where there is equality, there will be justice. And where justice is honored and preserved, there will always be truth. Eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, and nationality. We are all equals with a common pulse to survive. Every human requires food and water. Every human has a dream and desire to be happy. Every human responds to love, suffering and pain. Every human bleeds the same color and occupies the same world. Let us recognize that we are all part of each other. We are all human. We are all one.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“If you think too much heaven within your mind,
you may have no time for simple things in this life.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow-Chinese paper, the brushes, and slab of India ink. In cleanest, severest outline he had traced the Great Wheel with its six spokes, whose centre is the conjoined Hog, Snake, and Dove (Ignorance, Anger, and Lust), and whose compartments are all the heavens and hells, and all the chances of human life.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Kim

“Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.
People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.
Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.”
― Dean Koontz, Dead and Alive

“The dogged determination and patience of one person to do what is Right and Necessary may not always win the day or even be noticed, but it will tip the balance just a little in the direction of good.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.”
― William A. Dembski, Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design

“The act of speaking our intentions aloud shifts them from wishful thinking into action.”
― Michael Thomas Sunnarborg, 21 Days to Better Balance: Find More Balance in a Busy World

“We will be able to depart this life with the quiet peace-giving notion, that we were permitted to contribute to the happiness of many who will live after us. In our long lives we endeavored to unfold the collective consciousness. In our lives we have known hell and heaven; the final balance, however, is that we helped pave the way to dynamic harmony in this earthly house. That, I believe, is the meaning of life.”
― R.W. van Bemmelen

“It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they’d be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They’re all full of it. Nothing balances out.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

“We need to be those that revere Apollo, yet do not ignore Dionysus. We must give Dionysus his due, but always in a subordinate sense to Apollo. As things stand, we live in a primitive Dionysian world where Apollo scarcely gets a look in. We need an Apollonian world by day (work hard, intelligently, rationally and logically) and a Dionysian world by night (play hard, satisfying our deepest needs in sublimated, ritualistic, and staged ways, avoiding the horror of the untamed, bestial Dionysian).”
― Thomas Stark, Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence

“Don’t work too hard. Try to maintain balance. Don’t make work your whole life.”
― Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing

“Why should I keep holiday / When other men have none? / Why but because, when these are gay, / I sit and mourn alone? / And why, when mirth unseals all tongues, / Should mine alone be dumb? / Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs, / And now their hour is come.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“And we remember that there must be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back, and from him who takes and does not give back, who would tip the balance of the river, from him all will be taken. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live. And so it goes.”
― Jessica Khoury, Origin