A Quote by Laozi

Heaven's Way is like stretching a bow. The high is lowered and the low is raised. Excess is reduced and deficiency is replenished. Heaven's Way reduces excess and replenishes deficiency. People's Way is not so. They reduce the deficient and supply the excessive.

Laozi

Quote Topics

Bow Deficiency Excess Excessive Heaven High Like Low People Raised Reduce Reduced Stretching Supply Way

Quote Author

Laozi
Chinese - Philosopher
604 BC - 531 BC

Is not the action of nature like the stretching of a bow? The high, it pulls down; the low, it lifts up; It takes from what is in excess In order to make good of what is deficient. Who can take what they have in excess and offer it to others?

Laozi

As it acts in the world, the Tao is like the bending of a bow. The top is bent downward; the bottom is bent up. It adjusts excess and deficiency so that there is perfect balance.

Laozi

Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.

Confucius

Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency . . .

Aristotle

Your medical documents will say Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome that is AIDS. What that means you have got this challenge of immune deficiency. Alright what causes immune deficiency? HIV. Alright. Is that all that causes immune deficiency? The medical textbooks will say there are other things that cause immune deficiency. There is also genetic immune deficiency that is a different phenomenon.

Thabo Mbeki

Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.

Aristotle

Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency.

Aristotle

He who holds on to the Way seeks no excess. Since he lacks excess, he can grow old in no need to be renewed.

Laozi

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.

John Stuart Mill

In order to create an image almost similar to that of a pencil case standing up and walking, I try to eliminate all excess by cutting. I have the feeling that this process (of "cutting off") is linked in some way to "elegance". Elegance and so-called "eliminating excess", or the beauty that remains after excess has beeen eliminated...

Yohji Yamamoto

Error is multiform (for evil is a form of the unlimited, as in the old Pythagorean imagery, and good of the limited), whereas success is possible in one way only (which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed - easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it); so this is another reason why excess and deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of virtue: Goodness is simple, badness is manifold.

Aristotle

If someone has failed, that is not a deficiency for me. I think that he has more motivation. I've seen many examples where someone was successful first and failed later and failed first and then succeeded. If they failed in an honest way, I don't see it as a deficiency.

Yossi Vardi

Jesus is not a good way to heaven, nor even the best way. He is the only way to heaven.

Steven J Lawson

People are always trading their excess for somebody else's excess. One country has a lot of aluminum so they trade aluminum for sugar. It's the law of supply and demand.

Carl Andre

The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.