quotations about order
In ordering one's self aright one helps others to do the same.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Jack and Jill: A Village Story
The only order in the universe is just a cycle of calm and chaos.
TOBA BETA
Master of Stupidity
The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789
Rules meant order. Without them they'd be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.
LOUISE PENNY
A Rule Against Murder
However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
letter to Andre Gide, February 10, 1935
All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal -- a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world -- two snake-pits.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar
Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined;
Till at his second bidding darkness fled,
Light shone, and order from disorder sprung.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Order and disorder ... they each have their beauty.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
Speaker for the Dead
All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.
JULIO CORTAZAR
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The Common Reader
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.
KARL PEARSON
The Grammar of Science
From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.
TONY HILLERMAN
Coyote Waits
True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.
TOM ROBBINS
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues