Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Balance

"If peace and survival are to be achieved, the search must almost certainly go beyond the effort to find a balance in thermonuclear terror." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

"On every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons." - John Stuart Mill

"Disarm, disarm. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession." - Julia Ward Howe

"Life is growth - a challenge of environment. If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction, then this splendid balance of cosmic forces which we call life is on the road toward misfortune, misery and destruction. Therefore, health is the most precious of all things." - Luther Burbank

"Discipline is the tool required to solve life's problems. What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems directly? Delaying gratification, accepting responsibility, dedication to truth, and balance." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck

"Being selective about the media we consume, reading between the lines, and opening our hearts while we feed our minds will enable us to act more in balance." - Michael Toms

"Anybody can do just about anything with himself that he really wants to and makes up his mind to do. We are capable of greater things than we realize. How much one actually achieves depends largely on: 1. Desire. 2. Faith. 3. Persistent Effort. 4. Ability. But if you are lacking the first three factors, your ability will not balance out the lack. So concentrate on the first three and the results will amaze you." - Norman Vincent Peale

"The data from indigenous science are not used to control the forces of nature; instead, the data tell us ways and means of accommodating nature... The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance... Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all senses including the spiritual and psychic realm. Indigenous science collapses time ands space, with the result that our fields of participation and inquiry extend into and overlap with past and present." - Apela Colorado, aka Pamela Colorado

"Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

"The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole... time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a compensation but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whatever you do in life, do with love! We have no alternative save to act from motives of hate - yet how doleful to make this our choice! For hate is the destroyer of life, where love is its guardian. Hate blinds our vision and warps our talents; but love releases our energies for the creative action that sustains mankind. while all human behavior springs from a mixture of both these great forces of nature, it is within our power to determine which shall prevail as we journey through life... We must tip the balance ever in favor of love if we wish to hurdle the obstacles before us on the road to normal happiness and success." - Smiley Blanton

"The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity." - Sogyal Rinpoche

"The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance may not be a lie." - Susan Sontag

"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." - Susan Sontag

"There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Not tension alone, not relaxation alone, but both in balance is the key to creative living." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"Justice, though due to the accused, is due to the accuser also. The concept of fairness must not be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep the balance true." - Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo

"The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play." - Erik Erickson

"A very strong military posture is vitally necessary today. How long it must continue I am not prepared to estimate, but I am sure that it is too narrow a basis on which to build a dependable, long-enduring peace. The guarantee for a long continued peace will depend on other factors in addition to a moderated military strength, and no less important. Perhaps the most important single factor will be a spiritual regeneration to develop goodwill, faith, and understanding among nations. Economic factors will undoubtedly play an important part. Agreements to secure a balance of power, however disagreeable they may seem, must likewise be considered. And with all these there must be wisdom and the will to act on that wisdom." - George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.

"The secret of life is balance, and the absence of balance is life’s destruction." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

"Two opposing mysteries are in the world – goodness and evil. If we deny God, then goodness is a mystery, for no one has ever suggested how spiritual life could rise of an unspiritual source, how souls could come from dust. If we affirm God, then evil is a mystery, for why, we ask, should love create a world with so much pain and sin? Our task is not to solve insoluble problems. It is to balance these alternatives – no God and the mystery of man’s spiritual life, against God and the mystery of evil." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"When men acquire something, they never get only what they desire and nothing more; when men reject something, they never rid themselves only of what they hate and nothing more. Therefore, when men act, it must be on the basis of some scale or standard. If a balance is not properly adjusted, then heavy objects will rise in the air and men will suppose they are light, and light objects will sink down so that men suppose they are heavy. Hence men become deluded as to the true weight of the objects." - Hsun-Tzu NULL

"The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality. " - Irving Babbitt

"The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them." - Ivan Illich

"That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity." - James Joyce

"Muriel seeks happiness and beauty. Dan informs her that life is a balance between the two, between suffering and laughter, beauty and ugliness. 'There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death. Not happy, Muriel. Say that you have tried to make them CREATE." - Jean Toomer

"There’s no one more openly irreverent than a lover. He or she jumps up on the scale opposite eternity and claims to balance it. And no one more secretly reverent." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil." - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

"We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race. " - John Naisbitt

"Regarding balance — it’s the most important component in basketball and it is a very important part of life. We must always keep things in perspective so that we can maintain emotional control." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated. " - Joseph Wood Krutch

"For the strategic mind to work creatively, it needs the stimulus of a good, insightful analysis. In order to conduct a good analysis, it takes a strategic and inquisitive mind to come up with the right questions and phrase them as solution-oriented issues... Decisions made for the sake of vindicating one’s own preconceived notions do not lead to creative solutions. Intuitive or gut-feel alone does not ensure secure business plans. It takes a good balance between the two to come up with a successful strategy." - Kenichi Ohmae

"Ecology teaches us “that the total economy of the planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone,” wrote Burke more than 70 years ago, “but that the exploiting part must eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole." - Kenneth Burke

"The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive." - Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn

"The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature – a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions." - Lawren Harris, fully Lawren Stewart Harris

"Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking." - Malcolm Gladwell

"Manage the remarkable balance between acting from your heart and close to your gifts with completing the obligations that your labor and tasks require of you. Leverage opportunity AND seize joy." - Mary Anne Radmacher

"Find your balance and stand with it. Find your song and sing it out. Find your cadence and let it appear like a dance. Find the questions that only you know how to ask and The answers that you are content to not know." - Mary Anne Radmacher

"There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls." - Max Planck, fully Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

"There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it." - May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton

"The values of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation...may calm an inner storm. But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive." - May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton

"It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends." - Madeleine L’Engle

"All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"The new integrity of the world, in our view, can be built only on the principles of the freedom of choice and balance of interests. Every State, and now also a number of existing or emerging regional interstate groups, have their own interests. They are all equal and deserve respect. We consider it dangerously outdated when suspicions are aroused by, for instance, improved Soviet-Chinese or Soviet-German, German-French, Soviet- US or US-Indian relations, etc. In our times, good relations benefit all. Any worsening of relations anywhere is a common loss." - Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

"The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer--a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on the 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, and to funerals." - Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom

"Courage is illusion, balance is the best we can get." - Moroccan Proverbs