Sunday, February 3, 2019 – Chaos Theory
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. ~ Hermann Hesse
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos. ~ Will Durant
Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true. ~ Luigi Pirandello
In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered. ~ José Saramago
I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom. ~ Jim Morrison
Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don’t let them take you ALIVE. ~ Sid Vicious
Chaos is a friend of mine. ~ Bob Dylan
I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me. ~ Bob Dylan
We adore chaos because we love to produce order. ~ M. C. Escher
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness. ~ Werner Herzog
The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs. ~ John Dos Passos
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
Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence. ~ Buddha
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
In chaos, there is fertility. ~ Anaïs Nin
We live in a rainbow of chaos. ~ Paul Cezanne
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. ~ George Santayana
Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man. ~ Henry Adams
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. ~ Alan Dean Foster
Chaos is the first condition. Order is the first law. Continuity is the first reflection. Quietude is the first happiness. ~ James Stephens
I’m a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy. ~ Oscar Levant
I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head. ~ Dwight Yoakam
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself. ~ Emile M. Cioran
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
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, Zen in the Art of Writing
The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
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, Walden Two
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. ~ George Santayana
Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
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
All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal – a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world – two snake pits. ~ John Gardner, Grendel
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. ~ E. O. Wilson
Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena. ~ Wilhelm Reich
Blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos. ~ Douglas Coupland
It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos. ~ Manly Hall
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. ~ James Thurber
Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is. ~ Steve Martin
You know, how much order is good? And when does order become too restrictive? Is a little bit of chaos okay, or is chaos always an evil force? I mean, these are questions that any kid who’s ever been in a school cafeteria can relate to. ~ Rick Riordan
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
There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman. ~ Pythagoras
Chaos is complexity viewed through a reductionist filter. ~ Silvia Hartmann
As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning, and meaningful statements lose precision. ~ Lotfi Zadeh
When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder. ~ James H. Boren
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which. ~ Douglas Adams
But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys. ~ James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta”, catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. ~ Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. ~ Douglas Adams
Just Above Sunset 