Quotes & Sayings About Being Off Balance

To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained. "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads. — Aldous Huxley

Every challenge we take on has the power to knock us to our knees. But what's even more disconcerting than the jolt itself is our fear that we won't withstand it. When we feel the ground beneath us shifting, we panic. We forget everything we know and allow fear to freeze us. Just the thought of what could happen is enough to throw us off balance. What I know for sure is that the only way to endure the quake is to adjust your stance. You can't avoid the daily tremors. They come with being alive. But I believe these experiences are gifts that force us to step to the right or left in search of a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Let them help you adjust your footing. — Oprah Winfrey

I do think there is a sort of natural balance in nature between men and women, and that it's being thrown off-balance by the social and economic inequities between men and women. — Natalie Portman

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman. — May Sarton

Life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The thing everyone should realize is that the key to happiness is being happy by yourself and for yourself. Happiness comes from within. You have the power to change your own mindset so that all the negative, horrible thoughts that try to invade your psyche are replaced with happy, positive, wonderful thoughts. — Ellen DeGeneres

Not being secure affects us as humans. It throws us off our balance. It puts us in disarray. — Sonequa Martin-Green

The wilderness is a place of rest - not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance. — David Douglas

Every day we see allurements of one kind or another that tell us what we have is not enough. Someone or something is forever telling us we need to be more handsome or more wealthy, more applauded or more admired than we see ourselves as being. We are told we haven't collected enough possessions or gone to enough fun places. We are bombarded with the message that on the world's scale of things we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Some days it is if we have been locked in a cubicle of a great and spacious building where the only thing on the TV is a never-ending soap opera entitled Vain Imaginations. But God does not work this way. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve this we need to balance education for careers with education for twenty-first century life. — Ken Robinson

I find being a mother is a huge advantage. Of course, I'm probably a little more tired than I might be if I didn't have children, but I think they provide me the balance that I need to keep my mind off of lifting. — Melanie Roach

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life's leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. — Thomas Merton

I'd learned balance is internal; that there really wasn't one set formula for how to live your life nor how to handle the wife-mother-businesswoman juggling act. Maybe it was just being tuned in to every role and knowing when one or the other needed to be the focus. — Kaira Rouda

You say you love your wife. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, 'As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don't I begin to hate you. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies - though shifting the balance matters - but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. — Rebecca Solnit

There is a gambling element to being somebody who is going to take on the job of constantly trying to represent and prop up people who might be somewhat shady. That notion is probably part of how they got the rap. But, I have to find the balance of being colorful, being at times despicable, and also being somebody who does believe in something. — Greg Kinnear

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. — Ivan Goncharov

Being a correspondent on 'The Daily Show' is some combination of doing a character and doing stand-up. It's a juggling act to find a balance between being you and playing a role. — Kristen Schaal

It's a constant challenge trying to find balance between styling, designing and being a mom. — Rachel Zoe

The path to happiness at work starts with a simple decision: You must want to be happy. If you don't commit to being happy at work, you won't be. You won't make the choices that make you happy. You won't take the actions needed to get there. You won't change the things that need to change. — Alexander Kjerulf

I don't strive for balance. I just try to get through my to-do list, with my kids' homework being at the top of it, and then try to prepare for the next audition or whatever scene I'm shooting next. Balance. — Adina Porter

Subtle brain differences often cause people like me to respond differently - strangely even - to common life situations. Most of us have a hard time with social situations; some of us feel downright crippled. We get frustrated because we're so good at some things, while being completely inept at others. There's just no balance. It's a very difficult way to live, because our strengths seem to contrast so sharply with our weaknesses. "You read so well, and you're so smart! I can't believe you can't do what I told you. You must be faking!" I heard that a lot as a kid. — John Elder Robison

To just be--to be--amidst all doings, achievings, and becomings. This is the natural state of mind, or original, most fundamental state of being. This is unadulterated Buddha-nature. This is like finding our balance. — Lama Surya Das

Don't waste time worrying about work/life balance, or looking for your best self, sham "secrets" or any other snake oil being pushed by sloppy hippies who have never built a business, let alone a bankroll, or you will wake up 20 years from now poor, pissed off and primed for a midlife crisis. — Ari Gold

You don't fix a man the way you do a fault in a pipe or a leak in a roof. You take him as he is, Mary Brenna, or you don't take him at all ... adjustments can't be all made on one side, darling, else the balance goes off and what's being built just falls down. — Nora Roberts

There are times when each of us has to have some gumption to take a stand as to what we wish to preserve or change in order to maintain our self-respect and not be as "a reed shaken with the wind" (Matt. 11:7) ... We lose much credibility and strength, and we risk being weighed on an uneven balance, when, Don Quixote-like, we go around "tilting windmills". — James E. Faust

So the peasants are used as targets in war?" I doubted. "Does the Overhead feel that is necessary to kill off one of their own? Peasants are being placed as diversions on the front line like they mean nothing - "
"Would you rather save the strong, or spare the weak?" Mother questioned me.
"Why can we not do both?" I returned.
"Because Heaven has its reasons, Anastasia," Mother chimed quietly. "It is Heavens way to balance those who are strong and those who are weak. It cannot be changed. — Barbara C. Doyle

It's scary being loved. Because life is complicated and all too often it throws you off balance by sending you the right person at the wrong time. — Guillaume Musso

I don't personally see my work as being dark. What interests me is a balance between light and dark. — Carter Burwell

I'd heard that swimming feels so good when you're pregnant, and I love being in the ocean. I was even paddle boarding up until 17 weeks, but then my center of gravity and balance were completely off. — Marisa Miller

Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth? — Ursula K. Le Guin

To her it was like being alone in the ocean, holding a kite string in one hand and an anchor chain in the other and finding the balance so she wouldn't sink. — Kate Evangelista

What has helped me prevent injuries is being connected and having my body aligned. Every morning, I roll out and then work on my core and my balance. — Julia Mancuso

When I'm in the gym, I'm in the gym, and that is my focus. But when I'm not in the gym, I'm enjoying being a mom and taking care of those responsibilities .. They really do provide me with the balance that I need to be a more complete athlete. — Melanie Roach

Increasingly, the balance between living in the world and not being of the world is becoming more delicate. Publications, radio, television, and the Internet have surrounded us with worldliness ... We are fortunate to have been blessed with a special power to direct us in making important decisions between right and wrong. — L. Tom Perry

All we are asking for is balance. I would like to think that I could walk into a public library and find not only works by Gloria Steinem but also those of Phyllis Schlafly. I would like to think a teenager could be taught in sex education that a serious alternative to abortion is teenage abstinence, or should pregnancy occur, that adoption might be preferable. I am not trying, as the ad says, to shove religion down anyone's throat. But I do think everyone has a right, and that the Christian voice is being chocked off. — Cal Thomas

Being judgmental is a form of attack keeping others off balance. — David W. Earle

Understand: people judge you by appearances, the image you project through your
actions, words, and style. If you do not take control of this process, then people will see
and define you the way they want to, often to your detriment. You might think that
being consistent with this image will make others respect and trust you, but in fact it is
the opposite - over time you seem predictable and weak. Consistency is an illusion
anyway - each passing day brings changes within you. You must not be afraid to
express these evolutions. The powerful learn early in life that they have the freedom to
mold their image, fitting the needs and moods of the moment. In this way, they keep
others off balance and maintain an air of mystery. You must follow this path and find
great pleasure in reinventing yourself, as if you were the author writing your own
drama — 50 Cent

Besides, I was myself the one who spoke to me. I sat and stood at the same time, hushed and spoke and formed two persons from my own alone. It was, wasn't it, as if with the greatest levity and astonishing velocity thinkable one stood up from where one sat to stand speaking to the person one was a moment before and now no longer was, and yet remained that person still, because one is seeing oneself in imagination, which enriches life, which I employ as often as I want or can or may, which throws me off balance and always restores it, which is the continuous emotion for the sake of which I always and never go too far, which as today for instance, multiplies me or at least doubles me now and then, which is strange and is pleasurable and keeps me active and therefore rejuvenated and foolish, so that one can experience being pleasured alive, so that it won't be all too self-evident, and not too lonesome, either. — Robert Walser

In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world. — Thomas Moore

We need to learn how to live consciously and, trusting ourselves, purposefully on that inevitable balance point between form and emptiness, relative and absolute, being and non-being, self and non-self, time and eternity, the finite and infinite. It is between all such dichotomies and poles that our life actually flows. — Lama Surya Das

Alltami (n.)
The ancient art of being able to balance the hot and cold shower taps. — Douglas Adams

For men, it's absolutely essential to stop believing that they're superior to women because that very belief engenders ego, which sets them off-balance. Therefore, they don't realize that they're being manipulated by the second attention of woman because their ego won't permit them. — Frederick Lenz

It's really hard to balance work and being a mother. — Lisa Loeb

When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music. — Lenny Kravitz

The chaos doesn't end, you kinda' just become the calm. — Nikki Rowe

Concentration and mindfulness are the internal ways in which the mind restores itself from being out of balance and lost in confusion to a condition of ease, clarity, and wisdom. No external action needs to happen. — Sylvia Boorstein

What it means: The world focuses on what people look like on the outside. God focuses on what people look like on the inside. Do you put more time and effort into being pretty on the outside or the inside? As you get older, you will meet Christian girls who spend more time trying to find the perfect outfit, get the perfect tan, find the perfect lip gloss, and have the perfect body. While there's nothing wrong with wanting to look pretty, we need to make sure it's in balance. God would rather see us work on becoming drop-dead gorgeous on the inside. You know, the kind of girl who talks to Him on a regular basis (prayer) and reads her Bible. — Vicki Courtney

As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. — Helen Fielding

It seems like a necessary balance to life, being part of the community. — Eddie Vedder

Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it's supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful - something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that's not what love is all about. Loving behaviour doesn't grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn't hurt, it feels good. Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace. — Susan Forward

My sisters both are working mothers. I understand that my being an actress as well as being at home isn't some heroic thing. That doesn't mean it isn't confusing or difficult - especially that question of how you find a balance. — Jennifer Garner

So for me the essence of life is very simple. It is just this, awareness that allows us to trust in our own truths (without feeling any need to convince others), living gracefully amidst the chaos, maintaining a sense of balance (not being pulled around by the supposed opposites or false paradoxes), and being able to choose how we direct our lives. — Julia Woodman

But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human? — Edward W. Said

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. — Stephen Schneider

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? — James Joyce

There are no choices that are really a detour that will take you far from where you're wanting to be - because your Inner Being is always guiding you to the next, and the next, and the next. So don't be concerned that you may make a fatal choice, because there aren't any of those. You are always finding your balance. It's a never ending process. — Esther Hicks

More than any of the other new states that came into being at war's end, Poland changed the balance of power in eastern Europe. It was not large enough to be a great power, but it was large enough to be a problem for any great power with plans of expansion. It separated Russia from Germany, for the first time in more than a century. Poland's very existence created a buffer to both Russian and German power, and was much resented in Moscow and Berlin. — Timothy Snyder

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

It's very hard to balance being there for somebody else and taking care of yourself. — Jennifer Grey

It's Grandmother Dorothy," Elizabeth shrieked as she raced down the stairs, slid on the wooden floor, regained her balance and headed for the front door. "We saw from the window, and she's brought. . . . everybody." "She even brought the puppies!" Thaddeus yelled as he rushed past Millie. "I didn't see my peacocks." Rose charged after her siblings. "They're going to be mad at being left behind." Breaking — Jen Turano

This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. — Stephen Schneider

I think there should be a good balance between being a good student and being able to enjoy your high school life. — Vanessa Minnillo

Being able to check your balance on the phone is the best invention ever. — Lemar

I grew up in a show business family, so we've always had a great sense of balance, being so close to my parents. I've always known what is and isn't reality. — Andy Gibb

The physical universe was created when Oneness became duality, and we can see this duality, this yin and yang, everywhere in the universe, in every atom, every action, and in every function of the human body. Yin and yang are manifest everywhere, except at the very center of being, the perfect point of balance, at that infinite moment where the future becomes the past. — Robert Tisserand

How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover. — Frank Herbert

As reason and revelation both tell us that this state of being is but a preparation for another of a still higher and more spiritual order, all the interests of life are of comparatively little importance, when put in the balance against the future. — James F. Cooper

What would she tell me, about the Commander, if she were here? Probably she'd disapprove. She disapproved of Luke, back then. Not of Luke but of the fact that he was married. She said I was poaching, on another woman's ground. I said Luke wasn't a fish or a piece of dirt either, he was a human being and could make his own decisions. She said I was rationalizing. I said I was in love. She said that was no excuse. Moira was always more logical than I am. I said she didn't have that problem herself anymore, since she'd decided to prefer women, and as far as I could see she had no scruples about stealing them or borrowing them when she felt like it. She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even Steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated I was living with my head in the sand. We — Margaret Atwood