Katharine Whitehorn Quotes

If everybody knows where everything is kept you can avoid wasting time looking for things.

He wished he was with his mom in her library, where everything was safe and numbered and organized by the Dewey decimal system. Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for, like the meaning of your dream, or your dad.

The trouble with having a place for everything is how often it gets filled up with everything else.

My filing system's really crap because I can never decide whether to sort things by studio, or year, or where I lived.

I think something that's really understudied and misunderstood is the use of information.

You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing.

The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.

It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human, and disorder is our worst enemy.

I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

I'm kind of in between organized and messy, so if I have the right things to keep me organized, it's easier for me to stay that way. If I don't have the right tools, I'm a train wreck.

I hate a messy closet. I totally freak out when my closet is messy and I can't find anything.

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

One must be prepared to reject not only the schema of the physical library, which is essentially a response to books and their proliferation, but the schema of the book itself, and even that of the printed page as a long term storage device, if one is to discover the kinds of procognitive systems needed in the future.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

I have got to figure out a system because I have bad filing, sorting, and organizing habits.

The larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

Organizations cannot make a genius out of an incompetent. On the other hand, disorganization can scarcely fail to result in efficiency.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

If you always use your stapler in one place, keep it there, instead of thinking that all the office supplies should go in one place. I've moved a lot of things around in my house because of that.

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key -- and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre, Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.