order

I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's conversation?""Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.""All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Light was the first thing that came into existence, first in the order of creation.

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

Dharma is precisely this 'discipline of ordered existence', a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.

For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam__ 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.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

Looking down from the heavens, she saw how small, and yet how important each human life is. Drops in the bucket of eternity. She saw her minute place in the organic machine of the Cosmos, witnessed the give and take and the slow, steady swinging of life's pendulum. The world relies on order, pattern, and repetition. The earth spins and swings around the sun with rational, mathematical predictability. But she also saw the chaotic nature of things. No matter what, you can never know with certainty what will happen. Lightening can strike, the ground can open up and swallow you, and the very air you breathe can tear your life away.

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.

Do Not Dictate a Child through Someone, it Ruins the Child's Experience.

Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities _ wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves_ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another _ attests to religion__ longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe__ turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos _ obligatory obeisance to a deity _ pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.

Precedence exists in humanity as it does with law.

The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives.

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 __appiness_; 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.

When coming to sex: First served, first come.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?

Life was complicated, I thought. Not just the living but dealing with the realities and the instinct for order that other people have, that I didn't always grasp.