Quotes about Balance

The "spiritual life" is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete man who is in God and with God and from God and for God. One man in whom God is all in all. One man in whom God carries out His own will without obstacle.

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual... And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.

To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without

Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

To know when to stop To know when you can get no further By your own action, This is the right beginning!

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

Excerpt from Leaving Things Alone) You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason.

Like all life, it grows sick and dies when it is uprooted from its proper element.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. It destroys one's own capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes the work fruitful.

In a 1977 interview with Christianity Today, Billy Graham said, "One of my great regrets is that I have not studied enough. I wish I had studied more and preached less. People have pressured me into speaking to groups when I should have been studying and preparing.