#Chaos Quotes

“Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.”

“The time is out of joint.”

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

“How soar sweet music is, when time is broke, and no proportion kept!”

“Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!”

“But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?”

“Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions.”

“Contention, like a horse,Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose,And bears down all before him.”

“The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.”

“Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.”

“War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.”

“If there were reason for these miseries, then into limits could I bind my woes. If the winds rages, doth not the sea wax mad, threat'ning the welkin with its big-swoll'n face? And wilt though have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth.”

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

“The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.”

“The wind-shak'd surge, with high and monstrous main,Seems to cast water on the burning Bear,And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole.”

“Overcome the Empyrean; hurlHeaven and Earth out of their places,That in the same calamityBrother and brother, friend and friend,Family and family,City and city may contend.”

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

“Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.”

“A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!”

“Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.”

“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

“Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.”

“Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.”

“You know the old joke, I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out.”

“If all simply insist on rights and no duties, there will be utter confusion and chaos.”

“Coercion cannot but result in chaos in the end.”

“Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.”

“Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.”

“Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.”

“Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection. - The Babies speech 1879”

“The pieces all fit together. Yet everything was falling apart.”

“For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.”

“In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.”

“I'm addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos.”

“Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”

“Either an ordered Universe or a medley heaped together mechanically but still an order; or can order subsist in you and disorder in the Whole! And that, too, when all things are so distinguished and yet intermingled and sympathetic.”

“When the Way governs the world, the proud stallions drag dung carriages. When the Way is lost to the world, war horses are bred outside the city.”

“There is great disorder in the heavens, and the situation is excellent.”

“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”

“If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.”

“If Heaven were not clear it might rend. If Earth were not firm it might crumble.”

“It is like sitting in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway with your windows rolled up and Portuguese music booming out of the surround-sound speakers while animals gnaw on your neck and diseased bill collectors hammer on your doors with golf clubs.”

“When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.”

“The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.”

“We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.”

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

“Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.”

“The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.”

“I never worry that all hell will break loose. My concern is that only part of hell will break loose and be much harder to detect.”

“There's only two things you can start without a plan: a riot and a family, for everything else you need a plan.”