quotations about order
Order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
Order is what exists before you start arranging things.
MARTY RUBIN
attributed, The Secrets of Hidden Knowledge
When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.
ROBERT VENTURI
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Order is the framer of great things.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Dominations and Powers
Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.
STANISLAW LEM
Highcastle: A Remembrance
Let all things be done decently and in order.
PAUL OF TARSUS
1 Corinthians, 14:40
Good order is the foundation of all good things.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Order lives in chaos.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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 renders all things easy.
MARTIAL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Fall of the Towers
If there be any beauty and comeliness in order, where should we more expect to find it than in Divine government, and in the conduct and management of the affairs of the supreme and celestial kingdom.
J. HOWE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Belief and order give strength. Have to clear rubble before you can build.
ROBERT JORDAN
Lord of Chaos
Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?
PAUL VALERY
Dialogue of the Tree
Order is the law of all intelligible existence.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"The Creation of the World", Lay Sermons
Better trust a horse without a bridle than a discourse without order.
THEOPHRASTUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
What is called chance is the instrument of Providence and the secret agent that counteracts what men call wisdom, and preserves order and regularity, and continuation in the whole, for ... I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery; and therefore if we could correct the world to our fancies, and with the best intentions imaginable, probably we should only produce more misery and confusion.
HORACE WALPOLE
letter, January 19, 1777
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