84 Quotes About Chaos

In a world where unpredictability often rules, chaos can be both a source of inspiration and introspection. Whether it's the tumultuous nature of life or the creative disorder that fuels innovation, chaos plays an integral role in shaping our experiences and perspectives. In this curated collection, we delve into 84 enlightening quotes that capture the essence and complexity of chaos. Join us as we explore how thinkers, artists, and leaders from different eras and disciplines have embraced and expressed their understanding of chaos, revealing insights that resonate with the unpredictable dance of life.

1. “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

2. “Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.” - Chuck Palahniuk

3. “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

4. “Eve: All this riot and uproar, V... is this Anarchy? Is this the Land of Do-As-You-Please? V: No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means "without leaders", not "without order". With anarchy comes an age or ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos.” - Alan Moore

5. “There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.” - Chuck Palahniuk

6. “I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.” - Neil Gaiman

7. “Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos were lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting 'All Gods are bastards.” - Terry Pratchett

8. “Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.” - Edward Bellamy

9. “It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.” - Hiromu Arakawa

10. “Life is nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting.” - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

11. “It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.” - Haruki Murakami

12. “In chaos, there is fertility.” - Anais Nin

13. “that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.” - Robert Hughes

14. “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.” - Douglas R. Hofstadter

15. “I had hoped that the rest of the world would stand still while I got myself together again, but Chaos and Tragedy had marched into other lives close to mine as well.” - Julie Metz

16. “If chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one's universe, then I was well on my way.” - Wendelin Van Draanen

17. “One person's data is another person's noise.” - K.C. Cole

18. “One must be cold if one wishes to savor chaos.” - Ferdinand Hardekopf

19. “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” - Sylvia Plath

20. “Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)” - Brandon Sanderson

21. “It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.” - John Green

22. “I finally figured out that not every crisis can be managed. As much as we want to keep ourselves safe, we can't protect ourselves from everything. If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

23. “Wat zou José Saramago over Carlos zeggen?Dit.'Mensen als deze heb je overal, ze besteden hun tijd, of de tijd die er in hun ogen naast het leven voor rest, aan het verzamelen van postzegels, munten, medailles, vazen, ansichtkaarten, luciferdoosjes, boeken, horloges, sportshirts, handtekeningen, stenen, kleien beeldjes, lege frisblikjes, engeltjes, cactussen, libretto's, aanstekers, vulpennen, uilen, speeldozen, flessen, bonsais, schilderijen, bierglazen, pijpen, kristallen obelisken, porseleinen eenden, antiek speelgoed of carnavalsmaskers, en dat doen ze vermoedelijk uit iets watje metafysische angst zou kunnen noemen, omdat het idee van de chaos als alleenheerser over het heelal onverdraaglijk voor hen is, misschien proberen ze daarom met hun bescheiden vermogens en zonder goddelijke hulp enige orde te scheppen in de wereld, waar ze voor korte tijd nog in slagen ook, maar alleen zolang ze hun verzameling in stand kunnen houden, want op de dag dat daar de klad in komt, en die dag komt altijd, hetzij door de dood, hetzij doordat de verzamelaar er genoeg van heeft, is alles terug bij af, loopt alles weer door elkaar.' ” - Dimitri Verhulst

24. “War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.” - Libba Bray

25. “The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed... Like thief in the night, aliens invade human. Chaos happens prior to the new order of coexistence. The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed.” - Toba Beta

26. “Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.” - Terence McKenna

27. “It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.” - Mircea Eliade

28. “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

29. “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.” - Ray Bradbury

30. “Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.” - Samuel R. Delany

31. “All the most powerful emotions come from chaos -fear,anger,love- especially love. Love is chaos itself. Think about it! Love makes no sense. It shakes you up and spins you around. And then, eventually , it falls apart.” - Kirsten Miller

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

33. “Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?” - Emil Cioran

34. “The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.” - Audrey Niffenegger

35. “The only order in the universe is just a cycle of calm and chaos.” - Toba Beta

36. “They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another.” - Pandora Poikilos

37. “If everything were anything," Chance said softly, "the barriers would break down, and we'd all lose ourselves to chaos. And then there would be no cotton candy.” - Jordan Castillo Price

38. “I'm beginning to think that to hope isn't the same as to expect something. To hope is to believe that life is an acceptable chaos.” - Goenawan Mohamad

39. “I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?” - Umberto Eco

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

41. “We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.” - Colin Meloy

42. “I want you here. I don't care if it's a hundred degrees and every blade of grass dies. Without you, none of that matters to me.” - Kami Garcia

43. “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

44. “The ocean pulsed outside our window. The sound of the waves crashing on the rocks below usually calmed me down, but the fear and chaos that were tangled in my mind made that an impossibility.” - Chelsie Shakespeare

45. “The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.” - B.F. Skinner

46. “It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.” - Virginia Woolf

47. “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

48. “Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!” - Winfried Georg Sebald

49. “Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.” - Stéphane Lupasco

50. “[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?” - Iain Pears

51. “Stop blaming outside circumstances for your inside chaos.” - Steve Maraboli

52. “He's the only stable thing in the swirling chaos.” - Beth Revis

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are. Can you believe that? Can you trust God for that?” - Elisabeth Elliot

56. “The reflection of chaos is creativity.” - Lionel Suggs

57. “Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.” - James Gleick

58. “To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task.” - Hermann Hesse

59. “Nature" doesn't really have intentions, per se. Nature is a drunk waking up from a weekend bender, ambling through a messy kitchen in a pair of mismatched slippers, seeing its car in the neighbor's pool and saying, "Ah good. It was dirty. Just the thing.” - Pat Connid

60. “I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.” - Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm

61. “Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.” - Robert Higgs

62. “Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

63. “There is no part of one’s beliefs about oneself which cannot be modified by sufficiently powerful psychological techniques. There is nothing about oneself which cannot be taken away or changed. The proper stimuli can, if correctly applied, turn communists into fascists, saints into devils, the meek into heroes, and vice-versa. There is no sovereign sanctuary within ourseles which represents our real nature. There is nobody at home in the internal fortress. Everything we cherish as our ego, everything we believe in, is just what we have cobbled together out of the accident of our birth and subsequent experiences. With drugs, brainwashing, and other techniques of extreme persuasion, we can quite readily make a man a devotee of a different ideology, the patriot of a different country, or the follower of a different religion.” - Peter J. Carroll

64. “What is discipline? Discipline means creating an order within you. As you are, you are a chaos.” - Osho

65. “-and then what happened?- I asked him, but I had no desire to know. Whatever it was, it has to be ugly.” - Michael F. Moore

66. “Strategy is methodical, but the one who steers chaos and randomness can steer God.” - Lionel Suggs

67. “I want us to enter into the laughter of the God that is before, during and after the experience of being human, to swim in grace, to revel in messiness, to find joy in the suffering and love in the chaos.” - Tobin Wilson

68. “Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.” - Frank Herbert

69. “At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.” - Michael Crichton

70. “Upset The Established Order Of Your Life And Everything Becomes Chaos...To A Degree That You Wont Be Able To Differentiate Between Mere Illusions And Solid Reality” - Sherif A. El-Mawardy

71. “Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.” - Robert McKee

72. “But when you have order, you don't need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,' I said carefully, 'then there's no room left for magic. It's only when you're lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that's why they like us to live in chaos.” - Bernard Cornwell

73. “Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artistsjob to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefsshattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought andemotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has beendone so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get shittier.” - Jonathan Culver

74. “We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -” - Terence McKenna

75. “Think about Isis,” Jaz repeated. “And Sadie…thereis a purpose. You taught us that. We choose to believe in Ma'at. We create order out of chaos, beauty and meaning out of ugly randomness. That's what Egypt is all about. That's why its name, its ren, has endured for millennia. Don't despair. Otherwise Chaos wins.” - Rick Riordan

76. “design is so important because chaos is so hard” - Jules Feiffer

77. “the hinder portion scalding-house good eating Curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of "mold" on the "muff" sense of "talk" on the "surface" konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascalthat's chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said” - Donald Barthelme

78. “If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov

79. “Isn't it funny how true peace describes war and chaos?” - Lionel Suggs

80. “Where the Divine and the Human Meet" shows how important it is to meet the world with the creativity of an artist, particularly in these uncertain times: "What do we do with chaos? Creativity has an answer. We are told by those who have studied the processes of nature that creativity happens at the border between chaos and order. Chaos is a prelude to creativity. We need to learn, as every artist needs to learn, to live with chaos and indeed to dance with it as we listen to it and attempt some ordering. Artists wrestle with chaos, take it apart, deconstruct and reconstruct from it. Accept the challenge to convert chaos into some kind of order, respecting the timing of it all, not pushing beyond what is possible—combining holy patience with holy impatience--that is the role of the artist. It is each of our roles as we launch the twenty-first century because we are all called to be artists in our own way. We were all artists as children. We need to study the chaos around us in order to turn it into something beautiful. Something sustainable. Something that remains".” - Matthew Fox

81. “In the black chaos where the seas and the skies become confused let the projectors blow their white trumpets of silence("Roundness")” - Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

82. “May feel like you're falling', Tabby, but remember, I'm at the bottom ready to catch you.” - Kristen Ashley

83. “Life is a cracked surface at best. Fiction is a nice edifice. / every word/sentence/paragraph gives a writer an opportunity to reinforce or deliberately crack the edifice by screwing with meaning, structure, grammar, the fourth wall, etc. / different types and degrees of cracking produce different arrangements of order and chaos.” - K. J. Bishop

84. “Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos. Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me. Brand new.News.” - Jeanne Marie Laskas