Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

Miscellaneous is always the largest category.

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

I like things in their proper places.

Lists have always implied social order.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

Never label anything 'Miscellaneous.'

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin.

I like organizing things. I like organizing my closets, so that I know where everything is. And and I used to color code it.

i happen to enjoy categorization.

The idea of dates, boxes, categories are very scary for me.

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.