On Order & Chaos

The most beautiful universe is just a lot of waste collected at random (Heraclitus).

There is a good principle which created order, light, and man; and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman (Pythagoras).

The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos (Ilya Prigogine).

Beauty by confusion, truth by collision (Daniel Richter).

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena (Wilhelm Reich).

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos (William Irwin Thompson).

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered (William Irwin Thompson).

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs (John Dos Passos).

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning (Hermann Hesse).

Dada has reaped the harvest of confusion that it sowed (Hans Richter).

Chaos furnishes the building blocks for order, and order breaks down to replenish chaos (Betty Brooks).

My goal is to communicate the organization and beauty that exists in our universe underneath the appearance of random chaos (Aleta Pippin).

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed (Erma Bombeck).

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject (Thomas Mann).

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work (Flaubert).

Order is a lovely thing; on disarray it lays its wing, teaching simplicity to sing (Anna Branch).

Order is Heaven's first law (Alexander Pope).

Good order is the foundation of all good things (Edmund Burke).

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language. One can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end (George Orwell).

One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star (Friedrich Nietzsche).

The splendid discontent of God with chaos made the world. And from the discontent of man the world's best progress springs (Ella Wheeler Wilcox).

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos (Kerry Thornley).

When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts, it makes only chaos (Edith Hamilton).

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago; if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos (E.O. Wilson).

Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people (Lord Byron).

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains (John Updike).

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable (Robert Bork).

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos (Robert Quillen).

Among those born into chaos, some will imagine an order and become scientists; a few will recognize the chaos and become abstract artists; most others will turn to faith for understanding; and the rest will become lost souls (Robert Brault).

Painting is dancing with chaos (Melanie Circle).

So quick bright things come to confusion (William Shakespeare).

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist (Richard M. Nixon).

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos (Francis Ford Coppola).

The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often (Murray Gell-Mann).

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos (Stephen Sondheim).

Chaos is order to which you do not have the key (Robert Derr).

Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous (Yehudi Menuhin).

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order (Theodor Adorno).

If chaos did not develop out of order we would have no reason to 'create,' to handle it, live within it and handle being surrounded by it (Carolynn Doan).

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order (Pablo Picasso).

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together (Wolfgang von Goethe).

Today is all chaos and creativity. As the sign down at the local Chevron station says, 'If you aren't harried, worried, and a little bit nuts you don't understand what's going on around here.' Nobody can predict the shape of tomorrow's world (Sam Keen).

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos (Joyce Grenfell).

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world (Georg Buchner).

Mozart let his music run off in chaotic directions but then always brought it back under control (James McConnel).

We live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though this is how it sometimes appears (M.C. Escher).

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order (Carl Jung).

The World, form'd out of Chaos. Man is made (George Sands).

In a world without the law of God, you have chaos, oppression, tyranny, and everyone doing what is right in their own eyes (Randall Terry).

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos (Doug Coupland).

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle (Marcus Aurelius).

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends (Pearl S. Buck).

The urban world is full of chaotic compositions that seem to make sense in a way that earlier decades and centuries could never have imagined (Nicoletta Baumeister).

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself (Emile M. Cioran).

Chaos often breeds life, when Order breeds habit (Henry B. Adams).

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man (Henry B. Adams).

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos (Will Durant).

It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos (Manly Hall).

Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don't let them take you alive (Sid Vicious).

Freedom is just chaos, with better lighting (Alan Dean Foster).

We live in a rainbow of chaos (Paul Cezanne).

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos (Spalding Gray).

No chaos, no creation. Evidence: the kitchen at mealtime (Mason Cooley).

No one welcomes chaos, but why crave stability and predictability? (Hugh Mackay).

Gandhi has asked that the British Government should walk out of India and leave the Indian people to settle differences among themselves, even if it means chaos and confusion (Stafford Cripps).

Living in continuous chaos is exhausting, frightening. The catch is that it's also very addictive (Lorna Luft).

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing (Charles Sanders Peirce).

Order is repetition of units. Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm (M.C. Escher).

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos (Dean Koontz).

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written (Henry Miller).

Chaos and Order are not enemies, only opposites (Richard Garriott).

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is (Steve Martin).

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds (George Santayana).

We adore chaos because we love to produce order (Mauritis Cornelius Escher).

I think frankly when it comes to chaos you ain't seen nothing yet (Nigel Farage).