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order quotes

  • Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

  • La'  , tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute  , Luxe, calme et volupte  . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.

    - Charles Baudelaire
      Les Fleurs du mal,'L'Invitation au Voyage'.

  • On se fait une ide  e pre  cise de l'ordre, mais non pas du de s ordre. La beaute  , la vertu, le bonheur, ont des proportions; la laideur, le vice, et le malheur, n'en ont point. We can form a precise idea of order, but not of disorder. Beauty, virtue, happiness, all have their proportions; ugliness, vice and unhappiness have none.

    -Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
      Paul et Virginie.

  • The L hath sworn, and will not repent,Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    ORDPsalms110:4.

  •   Let all things be done decentlyand in order.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Corinthians14:40.

  • All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.

    - SirThomas Browne
      The Garden of Cyrus, ch.5.

  • Good order is the foundation of all good things.

    - Edmund Burke
      Reflections on the Revolution in France.

  •    How true it is, that there isnothing dead inthis Universe; that what we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse order! 'The leaf that lies rotting in moist winds,'says one,'has still force; else how could it rot?'

    -Thomas Carlyle
      History of the French Revolution, vol.2, bk.3, ch.1.

  • Prose = words in their best order;poetry = the best words in the best order.

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      Table Talk (published1835), entry for12  Jul.

  • In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, pervert and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe. For him, truth is so seldom the sudden lightthat showsneworderand beauty; more often, truth is the uncharted rock that sinks his ship in the dark.

    - SirJohnWarcup Cornforth
      Nobel prize speech.

  • Lo! all in silence, all in order stand, And mighty folios first, a lordly band: Then quartos their well-ordered ranks maintain, And light octavos fill a spacious plain; See yonder, ranged in more frequented rows, A humbler band of duodecimos.

    - George Crabbe
    The Library (published1808), l.128^33.

  • Remember that a paintingbefore it is a battlehorse, a nude woman, or someanecdoteis essentiallya flat surface covered with colours assembled ina certainorder.

    - Daniel Henry Deniehy
      The  ories:1890^1910.

  • If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.

    - Dwight D(avid) Eisenhower
       Address to the nation on Israel's invasion of Egypt, 20 Feb.

  • Experience shows that great enterprises seldom end with a tidy and satisfactory flourish. Together, we are doingourbesttore-establishpeaceand civil order inthe Gulf region, and to help those members of civil and ethnic minorities who continuetosuffer through no fault oftheirown.If wesucceed,ourmilitarysuccesswill have achieved its true objective.

    -Elizabeth II
      Commenting on the aftermath of the Gulf  War in the first address by a British monarch to Congress,16 May.

  • L'univers†je l'en estime plus depuis que je sais qu'il ressemble a'   une montre; il est surprenant que l'ordre de la nature, tout admirable qu'il est, ne roule que sur des choses si simples. I have come to esteem the universe more now that I know it resembles a watch; it is surprising that the order of nature, as admirable as it is, only runs on such simple things.

    - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
      Entretiens sur la pluralite   des mondes.

  • Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
    Two Cheers for Democracy,'Art for  Art's Sake'.

  • To disarm the strong and arm the weak would be to change the social order which it's my job to preserve. Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.

    -Thibault
    Crainquebille.

  • England's foreign policy should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom one lays the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

    -W(illiam) E(wart) Gladstone
      Speech, West Calder, 27 Nov.

  • 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.

  • Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.

    - Germaine Greer
      In the NewYork Times, 24 Mar.

  • Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.

    -Thomas Hardy
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles, ch.11.

  • Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.

    -Joseph Heller
    Catch-22, ch.17.

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

    -Heraclitus   fl.500
    Collected in Charles H Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (1979).

  • To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and, finally, it isthe subversion of good order, of all equityand justice.

    -John Knox
      First Blast of the Trumpet against theMonstrous Regiment of Women.

  • The day consists of twenty-four hours only. This regulates the size of the house and the ro"  le it has to fulfil. For the twenty-four hour day is short, and our acts and thoughts are spurred on by time. If we were taught to regard the hand of the clock as a beneficent but implacable god, we should order our lives more rationally.

    -Le Corbusier pseudonym of  Charles EŁ  douard Jeanneret
      'Twentieth-century living and twentieth-century building'. Collected in Dennis Sharp (ed)  The Rationalists: Theory and Design in the Modern Movement (1978).

  • Modern man lives more and more in a preponderantly geometric order. All human creation mechanical or industrial is dependent upon geometric intentions.

    - Fernand Le  ger
      'The  Aesthetic of the Machine', in Bulletin de l'Effort Moderne.

  • To me the'female principle' is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power Lehmann-Haupt structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

    - Ursula ne  e Kroeber Le Guin
    'Is Gender Necessary?', in  Anderson and McIntyre (eds)  Aurora (1976).

  •    Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.

    - George Meredith
      Vittoria, ch.24.

  • I have been a rock of order.

    - Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel Metternich
       Attributed, shortly before his death. Quoted in  Andrew Milne Metternich (1975).

  • The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      Sexus, ch.9.

  • Social life ismutual negotiation and society, social order, relies on this mutual negotiation between individuals; this represents both creed and particular reality in American society. In no other society is this creed and the corresponding reality as prominent as the United States.

    - Richard Friedrich Mu«  nch
      'The  American Creed in Sociological Theory', in Sociological Theory, vol.4, issue 43.

  • The underlying motive of many Socialists is, I believe, a hypertrophied sense of order†what they desire, basically, istoreducetheworld tosomething resembling a chessboard.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      The Road to Wigan Pier, ch.11.

  • Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and non-living matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind.It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeplyconcernus. Scienceshowsuswhat existsbut not what to do about it.

    - Heinz R(udolf) Pagels
      The Dreams of Reason. US writer, Professor of Humanities  at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.  Her  works  include  Sexual  Personae  (1990)  and Vamps andTramps (1994).

  • Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.

    - Boris Pasternak
      Doctor Zhivago.

  • Order is Heaven's first law.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle to 4, l.49.

  • Art very possibly ought to be the supreme achievement, the'accomplished', but there is the other satisfactory effectthat of a man hurling himself at an indomitable chaos and yanking and hauling as much of it as possible into some sort of order (or beauty) aware of it both as chaos and as potential.

    - Ezra Loomis Pound
    Quoted in H Kenner (ed) The Pound Era (1973).

  • La vie cre  e l'ordre, mais l'ordre ne cre  e pas la vie. Life creates order, but order does not create life.

    - Antoine de Saint-Exupe  ry
      Lettre a'   un otage.

  • For seasons change, And order, truth, and beauty range, Adjust, attract, and fill: The grass the polyanthus cheques; And polished porphyry reflects, By the descending rill.

    - Christopher Smart
    ADORATION1763  A Song to David, stanza 52.

  • The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'The Passing of Arthur', l.408^10.

  • No philosopher now looks for anything but the gradual evolutionoftheneworder fromtheold†Historyshows us no example of the sudden substitutions of Utopian and revolutionary romance.

    - SidneyJames Webb
      Fabian Essays.

  • The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference.

    - Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
      Of the Battle of Waterloo. Letter, 8 Aug.

  •    The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarilyperhaps not possiblychronological† It isthe continuousthread of revelation.

    - Eudora Welty
      OneWriter's Beginnings, II.'Learning to See'.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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