Quotes on Order

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.

The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.

The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.