Chaos Quotes - Page 32

• In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

  Cornel West

  Expression, Self, People

  Cornel West (1999). “The Cornel West Reader”, p.272, Basic Books

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• Ye who amid this feverish world would wear A body free of pain, of cares a mind, Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air; Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke And volatile corruption, from the dead, The dying, sickening, and the living world Exhal'd, to sully heaven's transparent dome With dim mortality.

  John Armstrong

  Pain, Air, Cities

  John Armstrong, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The Poems of Armstrong and Johnson”, p.25

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• Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Reality, Space, Discovery

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

  Wallace Stevens

  Opposites, Imagination, Abnormal

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.153, Vintage

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• This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience.

  Steven G. Krantz

  Pain, Hate, Book

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• All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Thinking, Times Are Changing, People

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “Tales from Earthsea”, p.368, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Long, Paper, Lines

  Hilaire Belloc (2015). “Delphi Works of Hilaire Belloc (Illustrated)”, p.795, Delphi Classics

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• Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Men, Years, Psychics

  "The Function of the Orgasm". Book by Wilhelm Reich, 1927.

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• Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and - to perfect it.

  Max Beckmann

  Jobs, Heart, Order

  "Letters of the great artists - from Blake to Pollock". Book by Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, 1963.

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• All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.

  Isaac Asimov

  Choices, Insanity, Humanity

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• To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Ambition, Men, Primitive Man

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), December 4, 1893.

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• Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.

  Andre Malraux

  Art, Struggle, Dark

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, Part IV, Chapter VII, 1953.

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• The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible.

  Aleister Crowley

  Organization, Ideas, Light

  "Magick Book IV: Liber ABA". Book by Aleister Crowley. Appendix VI: A few principal rituals - Liber Reguli, 1936.

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• I believe in one secret and ineffable Lord; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name Chaos, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes. And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name Babalon.

  Aleister Crowley

  Mother, Stars, Father

  "Liber XV, The Gnostic Mass". Book by Aleister Crowley, www.scarletwoman.org. 1913.

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• To break out of the chaos of my darkness Into a lucid day is all my will. My words like eyes in night, stare to reach A centre for their light: and my acts thrown To distant places by impatient violence Yet lock together to mould a path of stone Out of my darkness into a lucid day.

  Stephen Spender

  Eye, Night, Light

  Stephen Spender (1966). “World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

  James Gleick

  Becoming, States, Process

  1987 Chaos.

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• Were it not for the mind change of Sai devotees the world would already have fallen into complete chaos. The deterioration of mind and man has been very rapid and abrupt, even precipitous during the last fifteen years. That the world is not in total destruction is due to the change of mind of Sai devotees and to Sai's grace.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Men, Years, Grace

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• Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Men, Order, Levels

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• Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.

  E. O. Wilson

  Frustration, Waste, Stage

  "Letters to a Young Scientist". Book by E. O. Wilson, 2013.

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• The oldOld winds that blewWhen chaos was, what doThey tell the clattered trees that IShould weep?

  Adelaide Crapsey

  Wind, Tree

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• All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.

  Cassandra Clare

  Stars, Moving, Fall

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.1992, Simon and Schuster

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• The president and others say that if we leave, it will just be chaos in Iraq. Well, right now when you come to Iraq, you can't even drive from the airport to the Green Zone.

  Russ Feingold

  Airports, Iraq, President

  "Feingold Leads Way on Iraq War". archive.boston.com. October 08, 2005.

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• If in heroic conduct, whether of warriors, philosophers or scientists, we see what is of essential nature, then we know that all heroism groups itself around a supreme value. This has always been the idea of honour, spiritual and mental. But the idea of honour, like its corporeal representatives, was involved in a war of soul and spirit against the values represented by alien races or the offspring of racial chaos.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Spiritual, War, Ideas

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, 1930.

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• Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

  Andrew Sullivan

  War, Mean, Giving

  "Of Their Choosing". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. September 20, 2007.

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• What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Oasis, Vacuums, Desert

  Robert Charles Wilson (2011). “Vortex”, p.304, Macmillan

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