Quotes About The World In Chaos

“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

“You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

“It is a different matter entirely to commit military resources to keep peace in such areas, where often no peace can be kept, or to build nations in our own image before they are ready for our freedoms - or even want them. The military need not do the work of sanctions and diplomacy. As we carry on in this new century, we would do well to remember the importance of balancing the twin goals of our foreign policy: preserving national security and promoting democratic principles. And we must remember that historic conflicts between enemies can be won on moral force, without firing a single bullet or missile; that cultural, market, political, and perhaps religious forces can be far more transformative in areas of the world where chaos and violence reign; and that America can contribute to the building of nations by any and all of these means - while preserving our military and reserving our sovereign right to wage war to maintain true peace.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

“He puts it on, and his gaze locks to mine. His jewels flicker between passion and defiance-an evocative and intimidating combination. Fair warning, I intend to make good use of that time. I will be gentle, but I will not be a gentleman. You will be the center of my world. I'll show you the wonders of Wonderland, and when you're drunk on the beauty and chaos that your heart so yearns to know, I will take you under my wings and make you forget the human realm ever existed. You'll never want to leave Wonderland or me again.”

— A.G. Howard

“Like Chaos, before the world was created”

— Friedrich Schleiermacher

“It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name ... That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.”

— Frederick Buechner

“People need something to worship, lad. They need a belief in something beyond this world. Look at it now. This world is in chaos. People are killing each other for conquest, stealing, bringing each other down whenever they get the chance. Believe it or not, most people know this in one way or another. Perhaps they don't understand the magnitude, but they see that this world is anything but perfect. They need something that makes their comings and goings here worthwhile.”

— J.K. Miller II

“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

“Sometimes you wish to escape to another part of the book.
You stop reading and riffle the pages, catching sight of the story as it races ahead, not above the world but through it, through forests and complications, the chaos of intentions and cities.
As you near the last few pages you are hurtling through the book at increasing speed, until all is a blur of restlessness, and then suddenly your thumb loses its grip and you sail out of the story and back into yourself. The book is once again a fragile vessel of cloth and paper. You have gone everywhere and nowhere.”

— Thomas Wharton

“I had hoped that the rest of the world would stand still while I got myself together again, but Chaos and Tragedy had marched into other lives close to mine as well.”

— Julie Metz

“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.”

— Edward O. Wilson

“Dare to change the world
There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity. I can't think of a better life than one dedicated to passion, to dreams, to the stubborness that defies chaos and disillusionment.”

— Gioconda Belli

“The reason I love rules and plans and religions is that people feel safe in them for a while. And, personally, I don't have any rules. I don't need them. There's a sense of order that goes on all the time as things move and change, and I am that harmony, and so are you. Not knowing is the only way to understand ... Meanings, rules, the whole world of right and wrong, are secondary at best. I understand how some people think they need to live by rules ... It's very frightening for them to watch the world unfolding in apparent chaos and not realize that the chaos itself is God in his infinite intelligence.”

— Byron Katie

“And do you know what a full-fledged war would look like, Percy?"
"Bad?" I guessed.
"Imagine the world in chaos. Nature at war with itself. Olympians forced to choose sides between Zeus amd Poseidon. Destruction. Carnage. Millions dead. Western civilization turned into a battleground so big it will make the Trojan War look like a water-balloon fight."
"Bad," I repeated.”

— Rick Riordan

“The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where be broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become.”

— Colson Whitehead

“Legend says the
world will end when Ra gets too tired to continue living in his weakened state. Apophis will swallow the
sun. Darkness will reign. Chaos will overcome Ma'at, and the Serpent will reign forever.
Part of me thought this was absurd. The planets would not simply stop spinning. The sun would not
cease to rise.
On the other hand, here I was riding a boat through the Land of the Dead with a demon and a god. If
Apophis was real too, I didn't fancy meeting him.”

— Rick Riordan

“This
is the language of the world before-a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair-before
the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.”

— Lauren Oliver

“The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.”

— James Gleick

“As I continued through the streets, through the smoke of the burnings and the rubble of the fires and explosions
for during the chaos of the quarantine parts of the city had become something like war zones
my heart began to perceive that there was a wound in the material world that no amount of science could heal, that in fact science itself was only the helpful lie told to a dying man.”

— Tad Williams

“It seems like the chaos of this world is accelerating, but so is the beauty in the consciousness of more and more people.”

— Anthony Kiedis

“We focus so much on our differences, and that is creating, I think, a lot of chaos and negativity and bullying in the world. And I think if everybody focused on what we all have in common - which is - we all want to be happy.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.”

— Auguste Comte

“The events of September 11 and what has happened since have made people understand that even a small, distant and far away country like Afghanistan cannot be left to break up into anarchy and chaos without consequences for the whole world.”

— Lakhdar Brahimi

“There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.”

— Wesley Morris

“The world is a dysfunctional place in so many ways. It is unstable. So even though that chaos can be reflected in our own homes, I suppose we have to fight that by creating our own versions of safety, which can also turn into ignoring the state of the world.”

— Jennifer Gilmore

“Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.”

— Dennis Lehane

“If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.”

— Natalie Goldberg

“Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility.”

— Sarah Waters

“When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”

— Annie Dillard

“How can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?”

— Amy Tan

“He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.”

— Michael Cunningham

“These are the figures of steel whose eagle eyes dart between whirling propellers to pierce the cloud; who dare the hellish crossing through fields of roaring craters, gripped in the chaos of tank engines ... men relentlessly saturated with the spirit of battle, men whose urgent wanting discharges itself in a single concentrated and determined release of energy.
As I watch them noiselessly slicing alleyways into barbed wire, digging steps to storm outward, synchronizing luminous watches, finding the North by the stars, the recognition flashes: this is the new man. The pioneers of storm, the elect of central Europe. A whole new race, intelligent, strong, men of will ... supple predators straining with energy. They will be architects building on the ruined foundations of the world.”

— Ernst Jünger

“Writing is an act of hope. It means carving order out of chaos, of challenging one's own beliefs and assumptions, of facing the world with eyes and heart wide open. Through writing we declare a personal identity amid faceless anonymity. We find purpose and beauty and meaning even when the rational mind argues that none of these exist. Writing therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page?”

— Jack Heffron

“No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can't even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation.”

— Veronica Roth

“The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense
it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.”

— Robert Wilson Lynd

“Photos tend to organize chaos, to define what we're doing here. It is essential that individuals' voices depict the world around us, as we are increasingly controlled by large institutions, large companies and large systems.”

— Martin Parr

“The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one's own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears ... .”

— Arthur Koestler

“I love chaos ... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.”

— Ben Shahn

“I was definitely looking for a reason to impose rules in the story during the writing process ... a set of reasons that you could graph for why it's not chaos and anarchy - for why it has to be order, and why you need architects and an architectural brain to create the world of the dream for the subject to enter.”

— Jonathan Nolan

“All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.”

— Joseph De Maistre

“Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain Here earth and water seem to strive again, Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised, But, as the world, harmoniously confused: Where order in variety we see, And where, though all things differ, all agree.”

— Alexander Pope

“Were it not for the mind change of Sai devotees the world would already have fallen into complete chaos. The deterioration of mind and man has been very rapid and abrupt, even precipitous during the last fifteen years. That the world is not in total destruction is due to the change of mind of Sai devotees and to Sai's grace.”

— Sathya Sai Baba

“I felt angry, frustrated. I felt I didn't belong, not in my church, not in my home, not in my skin. Amidst the chaos, i felt alone, in need of a friend instead of a sister, someone detached from my world. The "woman's role" theory disgusted me. I would soon be a woman, and I knew I could never perform as expected. I was tired of my mom's submission to her religion, to her husband's sick quest for an heir, to his abuse. I was sick of my dad, of reaching for him as he fell farther away from us and into the arms of Johnnie WB.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos ...”

— Paul Cezanne

“I use the word inquiry as synonymous with The Work ... Inquiry is a way to end confusion and to experience internal peace, even in a world of apparent chaos. Above all else, inquiry is about realizing that all the answers we ever need are always available inside us.”

— Byron Katie

“Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Four years ago, the perpetrators believed they would bring America and the rest of the world to chaos, ... But they were mistaken.”

— Vladimir Putin

“A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused.”

— Chogyam Trungpa