chaos quotes

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

- Henry Brooks Adams
  The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.16.

She was one of those born to make chaos cosmic.

- Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) Beerbohm
Zuleika Dobson, ch.2.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

- Saul Bellow
  Interview in The Paris Review, no.37, winter issue.

   Be no longer a chaos, but a world, or even worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name!'Tistheutmostthou hast inthee: out with it, then.

-Thomas Carlyle
^4  Sartor Resartus, bk.2, ch.9.

A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone.

-Walter de la Mare
  'The Ghost'.

It wassaid of Metternichthat hewasso conservativethat had he been present at the Creation, he would have begged God to have retained Chaos.

- Bergen Evans
  Note in his Dictionary of Quotations.

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

-James Gleick
  Chaos.

And the motive for recording these scraps of the past? It Greenspan is much the same motive that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity.

- (Henry) Graham Greene
A Sort of Life, preface.

Wer in Europa die Brandfackel des Krieges erhebt, kann nur das Chaos wu« n schen. Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos.

- Adolf Hitler
  Speech in the Reichstag, Berlin, 21 May.

If the art of poetry is†the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

- Archibald MacLeish
On his work in government. Quoted in Scott Donaldson Archibald MacLeish (1992).

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

- Henry Valentine Miller
  Tropic of Cancer.

A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.

-John Milton
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.542^3.

Chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray By which he reigns; next him high arbiter Chance governs all.

-John Milton
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.2, l.681^4.

Ich sage euch: man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einem tanzenden Stern geb a« ren zu k o« nnen. I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

- FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche
^92  Also sprach Zarathustra ( Thus Spake Zarathustra), prologue, section 5 (translated by R  J Hollingdale).

Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles. Chaos, a rough unordered mass.

-Ovid full name Publius OvidiusNaso   4317
Metamorphoses, bk.1, l.7.

Lo! thy dread empire,Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.

- Alexander Pope
  The Dunciad, bk.4, l.653^6.

Poetry†is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.

- I(vor) A(rmstrong) Richards
  Science and Poetry, ch.7.

From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais, stanza19.

In ten thousand years the Sierras Will be dryand dead, home of the scorpion. Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, Only the weathering land The wheeling sky, Man, with his Satan Scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh Hell!

- Gary Sherman Snyder
  Riprap,'Milton By Firelight (Piute Creek, August1955)'.

'Humour,' he said,'is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.' SeeWordsworth 925:10.

-James Grover Thurber
  In the NewYork Post, 29 Feb.

Bah! the thing is not a nose at all, but a bit of primordial chaos clapped on to my face.

- H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
  Select Conversations with an Uncle,'The Man with a Nose'.

Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreamscan breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man My haunt, and the main region of my song.

-William Wordsworth
  'The Excursion', preface, l.35^41.