Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

It’s important for you to accept this instead of fighting it. Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola warns us that “anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.” In other words, get used to it and get over it.

The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph — not merely in the end but in every moment.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

Chaos is a powerful weapon. And we all have our weapons for creating chaos. Teresa advises us to recognize chaos as a power we use too often and to recognize that each of us has an actual relationship to chaos. Chaos is, in fact, a force throughout the universe, its own entity, an archetype of destruction and transformation that operates in every life.

To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.