53 Quotes About Order

In a world brimming with chaos and unpredictability, the concept of order stands as a beacon of structure and clarity. Whether it’s the meticulous organization of our daily routines, the harmony found in nature, or the rules that govern society, order plays a crucial role in fostering a sense of balance and peace. This collection of 53 thought-provoking quotes about order offers wisdom from various perspectives, reminding us of the importance of structure in our lives. Dive into these reflections to inspire a more organized and fulfilling existence.

1. “He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game.” - Sheri S. Tepper

2. “During the day, the library is a realm of order.” - Alberto Manguel

3. “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.” - George Mikes

4. “In einer Welt, die unübersichtlich geworden ist, wächst das Bedürfnis nach der Geordnetheit des Krippleins.” - Heribert Prantl

5. “We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.” - Hunter S. Thompson

6. “Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order” - Tom Stoppard

7. “For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.” - Virginia Woolf

8. “Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty.” - Orson Scott Card

9. “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” - Frank Herbert

10. “Art serves to confront that which is outside order, to give form to the obscene. In the process, it opens it to transformations that can not only make it safe for public consumption, not a powerful vehicle through which to address the public imagination.” - Jennifer Birkett

11. “Le savant doit ordonner ; on fait la science avec des faits comme une maison avec des pierres ; mais une accumulation de faits n'est pas plus une science qu'un tas de pierres n'est une maison.The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” - Henri Poincare

12. “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.” - Stanisław Lem

13. “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

14. “The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.” - Umberto Eco

15. “The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.” - Auguste Comte

16. “No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines--ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives...” - Marisha Pessl

17. “For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam’s front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.” - Vera Nazarian

18. “The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.” - Henry Miller

19. “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” - Jacques Derrida

20. “The apostolic gift to the body of Christ brings order and maturity.” - Sherry K. White

21. “Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security. ” - Tom Stoppard

22. “Segala hal yang dikatakan Komandan mengenai Orde adalah kebenaran yang tidak dilebih-lebihkan. Orde memang bersinonim dengan kebaikan. Orde menghargai kemajuan. Orde mencintai kehidupan. Orde bahkan mengajarkan pertobatan. Semua yang dijabarkan di dalam Kitab pada dasarnya akan berakhir pada kebahagiaan, pun setelah kematian.Akan tetapi Orde dan Kitab adalah takdir. Yang tidak dapat dibantah dan harus diterima semua orang dengan pasrah.Sama seperti penglihatanku, Orde tidak memberikan pilihan.” - Fredrik Nael

23. “-Mikhail?...Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you're doing, and I'll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.-You will not find it.-Why am I not surprised?” - Christine Feehan

24. “Man is guaranteed only those rights which he can defend.” - Jack McCoy

25. “There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.” - José Saramago

26. “The order I found was the order of disorder” - William Saroyan

27. “Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.” - W.G. Sebald

28. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.” - Henri Poincare

29. “Current science and technology have unlocked all mysteries.We make sense of it in a gradual process under law and order.” - Toba Beta

30. “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” - Henry Adams

31. “Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.” - Walter Benjamin

32. “Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.” - George Eliot

33. “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” - Gustave Flaubert

34. “Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him.” - Wolfgang Pauli

35. “Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.” - Deepak Chopra

36. “It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.” - Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev

37. “I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.” - Elizabeth Moon

38. “If for a moment you are inclined to regard these taluses as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, and run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of these magnificent rock piles -- a fine lesson; and all Nature's wildness tells the same story -- the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort -- each and all are the orderly beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.” - John Muir

39. “The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.” - Catherine Keller

40. “Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.” - Karl Pearson

41. “The law is so complex and voluminousthat no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand itall. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their wayto make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legalprofessionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try tokeep the law mysterious and inaccessible.” - Jay Feinman

42. “In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.” - Tom Robbins

43. “Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.' 'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth.Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.” - Tom Robbins

44. “...that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.” - Patricia A. McKillip

45. “Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject” - Thomas Mann

46. “words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.” - Seamus Heaney

47. “We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.” - Alain De Botton

48. “Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.” - Francis Parker Yockey

49. “Too many kings can ruin an army” - Homer

50. “If I had to choose a motto for myself, I would take this one — pure, dure, sûre, [Pure, hard, certain] — in other words: unalterable. I would express by this the ideal of the Strong, that which nothing brings down, nothing corrupts, nothing changes; those on whom one can count, because their life is order and fidelity, in accord with the eternal.” - Savitri Devi

51. “In a justly ordereduniverse, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute.” - James Allen

52. “Where two or more are gathered in the name of Man; that is civilization; that is Order; and that is the beginnings of brutality and suffering.” - Christopher Dutton

53. “To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything.” - YVOR WINTERS