Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

I like things in their proper places.

Never label anything 'Miscellaneous.'

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

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

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos.

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.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people - they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

My preference for clear structures is the result of my desire - perhaps illusory - to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world.

Order is heaven's first law.

There is no instant step from disorder to order.

You guys, line up alphabetically by height.

I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It's how we create meaning.

All things have their place, knew wee how to place them.

The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

It is a law, that every event depends on some law.

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, and what mind is to matter.

The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.

I am just relating to the world we live in. I see some order in it, even though it looks like mush.