quotations about order
We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Songs of the Damned
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit Redux
I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.
ELIZABETH MOON
The Speed of Dark
Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another.
HENRY MILLER
"Creation", Henry Miller on Writing
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
UMBERTO ECO
The Name of the Rose
For the world was built in order
And the atoms march in tune;
Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them, and the moon.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Monadnock
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
JOSE SARAMAGO
The Double
All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Cyrus' Garden
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
ALBERTO MANGUEL
The Library at Night
Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Conversations with Goethe
Set thine house in order.
BIBLE
Isaiah 38:1
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
Order is Heaven's first law.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
But order is not itself a virtue: it is only a means to an end. The end is general comfort and general convenience, and she never sacrifices the end to the means.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam's front parlor?
VERA NAZARIAN
Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons
It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order -- and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man -- social and political -- and to the entire universe as a whole.
DMITRI MENDELEEV
Mendeleev on the Periodic Law: Selected Writings, 1869-1905
Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams