Quotes About Chaos And Order

“When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.”

— David Sheff

“The reality of life is chaos; the fantasy of man is order. (..) The world of art, the world of games, the world of politics, so many worlds men make for themselves, are in a very fundamental way fantastic.”

— Eric S. Rabkin

“Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.”

— Hakim Bey

“What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. For instance, we think we know how food is ingested, digested, divided into energy and excrement. The neat theory, however, is one thing; control of the process is another; consciousness of the process yet another. Are we aware of protein in the stomach being acted on by pepsin, the appropriate enzyme? Digestion, thinking and breathing are all functions we perform without knowing how we perform them. The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work, whether they happen to be the action of saliva or sexual love from adolescence to old age.”

— Craig Raine

“Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.”

— Russell Kirk

“Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.”

— Dimitri A. Bogazianos

“The universe sings a deep, eternal song, sound in waves, in deep sighs, in whispers, in swirling chords and rising, falling tones. The music of the worlds, weaving in a pattern that is both chaos and order, both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”

— Jessica Khoury

“Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos ... A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing.”

— John Brunner

“Dear Child of God, I write these words because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair, and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end. I want to share with you my faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed. There is no such thing as a totally hopeless case. Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine. God created order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, and God can do so always, can do so now
in our personal lives and in our lives as nations, globally ... Indeed, God is transforming the world now
through us
because God loves us.”

— Desmond Tutu

“Pushing through some viney branches, she comes into a clearing andfinds a sight that makes her hush
and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts ...
It's something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene
as though what she's looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs.”

— Alden Bell

“Cop a squat, animals and folks. I don't want to be here any more than the rest of you so make it fast and get out of my hair. Let's quickly run down the bullshit pedagogy. Hear ye ... Who the hell wrote this crap? ... Welcome to the Omegrion Chamber. Here we gather, one rep from each branch of the two patrias. We come in peace (he paused to snort derisively) to make peace. I'm your mediator, Savitar, and if you don't know that by now, you need to be hit in the head with a jackhammer and replaced because you're too stupid to represent your patria. But in case you're dense and forgot, I am the summation of all that was and what will one day be again. I make order from chaos and chaos from order, which is how I got drafted into this shit. Now let's get on with this before I start splitting your hairs. (Savitar)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.”

— Kate Atkinson

“As a magician, you must think about chaos and order. Those are the two forces that control the universe.”

— Rick Riordan

“Apophis the god of Chaos Anubis the god of funerals and death Babi the baboon god Bast the cat goddess Bes the dwarf god Disturber a god of judgement who works for Osiris Geb the earth god Gengen-Wer the goose god Hapi the god of the Nile Heket the frog goddess Horus the war god, son of Isis and Osiris Isis the goddess of magic, wife of her brother Osiris and mother of Horus Khepri the scarab god, Ra's aspect in the morning Khonsu the moon god Mekhit minor lion goddess, married to Onuris Neith the hunting goddess Nekhbet the vulture goddess Nut the sky goddess Osiris the god of the Underworld, husband of Isis and father of Horus Ra the sun god, the god of order; also known as Amun-Ra Sekhmet the lion goddess Serqet the scorpion goddess Set the god of evil Shu the air god, great-grandfather of Anubis Sobek the crocodile god Tawaret the hippo goddess Thoth the god of knowledge”

— Rick Riordan

“I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. that's the thing about the cure, isn't it? It isn't just about deliria at all. It's about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That's what the DFA is about. That's what I belevied in-what I've had to believe in. Because otherwise, it's just ... chaos.”

— Lauren Oliver

“If the structure of the world with all its order and beauty is only an effect of matter left to its own universal laws of motion, and if the blind mechanics of the natural forces can evolve so glorious a product out of chaos, and can attain to such perfection of themselves, then the proof of the Divine Author which is drawn from the spectacle of the beauty of the universe wholly loses its force. Nature is thus sufficient for itself; the Divine government is unnecessary. ...”

— Carl Sagan

“But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.”

— Philip K. Dick

“Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?”

— Kerry Thornley

“He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order.”

— Joseph Heller

“To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don't think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes.”

— Jennifer Egan

“And there are
what
gods of chaos and order, then?"
"That is correct."
"Sounds like a series of rotten fantasy novels."
"Oh no. It is the basis of magic: the imposition of order on formless chaos, the release of joyous chaos into the gray monotony of order ... This is true magic. All else is shadow.”

— Neil Gaiman

“Our soldiers have done a valiant effort in fighting terrorism and bringing a semblance of law and order to the chaos in the region and it would be shortsighted to lay out a specific timetable to bring U.S. troops home prematurely before their mission is accomplished.”

— James T. Walsh

“Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”

— Don DeLillo

“To say that spiritual engagement somehow causes humanity to become violent is to ignore the obvious pressures on all human societies throughout history to accrue scarce resources, to shore up status and power, and to impose order on chaos. If anything, every new religion emerged at least in part as a protest against violence and oppression.”

— Anonymous.

“My journey has always been the balance between chaos and order.”

— Philippe Petit

“Few people make sound or sustainable decisions in an atmosphere of chaos. The more serious the situation, usually accompanied by a deadline, the more likely everyone will get excited and bounce around like water on a hot skillet. At those times I try to establish a calm zone but retain a sense of urgency. Calmness protects order, ensures that we consider all the possibilities, restores order when it breaks down, and keeps people from shouting over each other. You are in a storm. The captain must steady the ship, watch all the gauges, listen to all the department heads, and steer through it. If the leader loses his head, confidence in him will be lost and the glue that holds the team together will start to give way. So assess the situation, move fast, be decisive, but remain calm and never let them see you sweat.”

— Colin Powell

“No person has ever held all the power. There must be a balance between chaos and order, dark and light. With the Temple magic bound to you, the realms are no longer in balance. The power could change you ... and you could change the magic.”

— Libba Bray

“There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Chaos and Order are not enemies, only opposites. Chaos and Order combined equal balance.”

— Richard Garriott

“Let's imagine that 95 percent of the food on Earth magically disappears tonight, guaranteeing that almost all of us will starve to death within two months. Law and order collapse. Chaos and mayhem ensue. Who among us will still be alive a year from now? Will it be the biggest, strongest, and most violent individuals in each town? Or will it be the people who manage to work together in groups to monopolize, hide, and share the remaining food supplies among themselves?”

— Jonathan Haidt

“The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

“When the meaning of life has been suppressed, there still remains life. "I live," says Ivan, "in spite of logic." And again: "If I no longer had any faith in life, if I doubted a woman I loved, or the universal order of things, if I were persuaded, on the contrary, that everything was only an infernal and accursed chaos-even then I would want to live." Ivan will live,
then, and will love as well "without knowing why." But to live is also to act. To act in the name of what?
If there is no immortality, then there is neither reward nor punishment. "I believe that there is no virtue
without immortality." And also: "I only know that suffering exists, that no one is guilty, that everything is
connected, that everything passes away and equals out." But if there is no virtue, there is no law:
"Everything is permitted.”

— Albert Camus

“But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.”

— Molly Haskell

“The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.”

— Bridget Riley

“Use design as a framework to bring order out of chaos.”

— Nita Leland

“Contradictions, most of all, a balance between chaos and order. It needs neighborhoods vibrating with energy just as much as cozy little corners and parks; well-tended, middle-class sections as well as an alternative scene; technology centers for innovative youth and social facilities for older people.”

— Charles Landry

“Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.”

— Rollo May

“One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos.”

— Dean Koontz

“I closed the gulf of anarchy and brought order out of chaos. I rewarded merit regardless of birth or wealth, wherever I found it. I abolished feudalism and restored equality to all regardless of religion and before the law. I fought the decrepit monarchies of the Old Regime because the alternative was the destruction of all this. I purified the Revolution.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“The tonal is the sense of place. It is order and reason in a world of chaos.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.”

— Tom Stoppard

“You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order - order out of chaos. But we will.”

— George W. Bush

“Among creatures born into chaos, a majority will imagine an order, a minority will question the order, and the rest will be pronounced insane.”

— Robert Breault

“What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.”

— Katherine Paterson

“Solve it before it happens. Order it before chaos emerges.”

— Laozi