Quotes About Order

A library may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so useful as one that is small but well arranged. In the same way, a man may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly pondered.

Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.

Rahel's "list" was an attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.

Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.

Even totally random patterns will often appear non-random to us.

human beings are inconsistent: we are easily influenced by suggestion, the order in which we see things, recent experience, distractions, and the way information is framed.

Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.

It is sometimes both the curse and the blessing of the poet to perceive without yet being able to order those perceptions, and that is another name for Chaos.

Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature.

I will put it in another way: if a creation were to take place—which personally I cannot conceive—then the level of knowledge that it would require would be of such an order that there would be no place in it for silly jokes.

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves. And all myths however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

The world is ordered according to universal rules called laws of Nature, but the same rule may manifest itself differently at different intensities.

So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?

La vita di un puntuale è un inferno di solitudini immeritate

Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.

And it wasn't just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She's always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she'd never fully imagined this side of their civilisation.

Because is a word used by ordered, order-loving beings about a world which they like to think is ordered. Because is for storybooks. This is... Well, I know this is difficult to understand, but what we see here is becauselessness itself.

Flaubert said — I assume about the balance between repression and freedom — "Be regular and orderly in your daily life, so you can be violent and original in your work.

Discipline is what makes an army—and civilization.

It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

The Greek word for 'everything that is the case', what we could call 'the universe', is COSMOS. And at the moment - although 'moment' is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase 'just now') - at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and only Chaos because Chaos is the only thing that is the case.

Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos.