Marquis de Sade Quotes

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused.

I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well.

Don't express your ideas too clearly. Most people think little of what they understand, and venerate what they do not.

The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.

For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.

I couldn't possibly tell you. But I would say be very careful with your suppositions. People are so quick to jump. That's what I love about playing the character. People are so quick to draw conclusions about who he is. The whole thing about Loki is that he's dancing on this liminal line between redemption and destruction. Just be very careful about drawing conclusions based on what you see.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.

Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.

The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.

It is not confused. We are.

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent

Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth.

To the ignorant, even the words of wise seem foolishness.

Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?

If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered.