Quotes About Chaos

Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.

Cole is in what Wendy refers to as his E.T. stage, wherein he waddles around the house like E.T., exploring and trashing everything within reach, making strange little noises as he goes.

The cop looks annoyed, like we're giving him a headache. I want to explain everything to him, show him that it's really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.

Order is the stability of your marriage. It's buttressed by the traditions of the past and by your expectations-grounded, often invisibly, in those traditions. Chaos is that stability crumbling under your feet when you discover your partner's infidelity. Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse.

We require routine and tradition. That's order. Order can become excessive, and that's not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown— and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.

Life without law remains chaotic, effectively intolerable. Life that is pure law becomes sterile, equally unbearable. The domination of chaos or sterility equally breeds murderous resentment and hatred.

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice–it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.

Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything — anything — to defend ourselves against that return.

But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.

When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. When we've been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes--often at the worst possible moment. It is then that we see what focused intent, precision of aim and careful attention protects us from.

And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.

An artist constantly risks falling fully into chaos, instead of transforming it.

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.

When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It's stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can't hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new, better ruts, with people aiming at better things.

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

You're in order, when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair.

Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.*1 Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.

Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.

Order is the Shire of Tolkien's hobbits: peaceful, productive and safely inhabitable, even by the naive. Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding serpent.

Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly.

the 1960s, a decade whose excesses led to a general denigration of adulthood, an unthinking disbelief in the existence of competent power, and the inability to distinguish between the chaos of immaturity and responsible freedom.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them.