Balance

"there is no thing that is not counterbalanced by another (...) There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away."

Jorge Luis Borges, in The Immortal, from the book "The Aleph".

Two different ways

“It's like when my doctor told me the story of these two brothers whose dad was a bad alcoholic. One brother grew up to be a successful carpenter and never drank. The other brother ended up being a drinker as bad as his dad was. When they asked the first brother why he didn't drink, he said that after he saw what it did to his father, he could never bring himself to even try it. When they asked the other brother, he said that he guessed he learned how to drink on his father's knee. So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.” 

Stephen Chbosky, in The perks of being a wallflower.