order Quotes

“The proper order of things is often a mystery to me.”

“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”

“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. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”

“Tidy in the right order. As we’ve seen, there are only two tasks involved--discarding and deciding where to keep things. Just two, but discarding must come first. Be sure to completely finish the first task before starting the next. Do not even think of putting your things away until you have finished the process of discarding.”

“The best sequence is this: clothes first, then books, papers, komono (miscellany), and lastly, mementos.”

“By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.”

“I never spoke more plainly in my life. Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected.”

“And now (he felt sure) Mike was about to be treated as a sovereign by those nabobs—with the world watching. Let ‘em try to roust the boy around after this!”

“So for Old Gumbie Cats let us now give three cheers— On whom well-ordered households depend, it appears.”

“A prude thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”

“You can play no pranks with Skimbleshanks! He’s a Cat that cannot be ignored; So nothing goes wrong on the Northern Mail When Skimbleshanks is aboard.”

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

“You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think—so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies too!”

“You are like a captain navigating a ship. You must give the right orders, thoughts and images to your subconscious which controls and governs all your experiences.”

″‘How could any Lord have made this world?’ she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.”

″‘Your name is Lift, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘And your order?’ ‘More food.‘”

“That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

“Connor knows his situation calls for justified caution—not just tonight, but for the next two years. Then once he turns eighteen, he’s home free.”

“All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence, my next, method.”

“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

“After a few words touching (Bartleby’s) qualifications, I engaged him, glad to have among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey and the fiery one of Nippers.”

“As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.”

″‘Make no mistake about it: What we do here is highly illegal, but that does not mean we don’t follow the rule of law. My law.‘”

″‘They can’t unwind me now—there are laws against unwinding the disabled—but if I got the operation, they’d unwind me the moment I was healed. This way I get to stay whole.’ She smiles at him triumphantly. ‘So you’re not the only one who beat the system.‘”

″‘They do it all the time,’ says Hayden. ‘That’s what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.‘”

“For where the laws do not rule there is no regime.”

“Order is present in the earthly kingdom when all beings understand their place.”

“I oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of women . . . and the words that trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to order.”

“Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper. What delights me is the confusion, the height, the indifference, and the fury.”

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner. They reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”

″...she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.”

“William was right to have chosen Aunt Grace for refuge. Although surprised, she was entirely practical. Her life was in order, her house clean and neat, her advice would be to the point.”