Quotes about Balance

No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness. Sabbaths 2000 V

Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

That grief should come and bring joy with it was not something I felt able, or even called upon, to sort out or understand. I accepted the grief. I accepted the joy. I accepted that they came to me out of the same world.

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.