On Chaos and Disorder

‘Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.’
— Henry Brooks Adams

‘It is important to do what you don’t know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.’
— Carlos Castaneda

‘We live in a rainbow of chaos.’
— Paul Cézanne

‘Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.’
— Michael Gelb

‘Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.’
— Peter Greenaway

‘Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.’
— Heraclitus

‘Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.’
— Eric Hoffer

‘Power and beauty are antithetical. Power strives to build stable structures that can exist for all of time, while beauty shifts the earth from beneath our feet; as soon as we glimpse it, it is already gone.’
— Michael Jones

‘The creative person prefers the richness of the disordered to the stark barrenness of the simple.’
— Donald W. MacKinnon

‘The key to achieving competitive advantage isn’t reacting to chaos; it’s producing that chaos. And the key to being a chaos producer is being an innovation leader.’
— Ed McCracken

‘Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet invented.’
— Henry Miller

‘One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.’
— A. A. Milne

‘Order and creativity are complementary.’
— Lewis Mumford

‘And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche

‘One must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to the dancing star.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche

‘Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.’
— Ovid

‘Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.’
— Pablo Picasso

‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of voice, but out of chaos.’
— Mary Shelley

‘What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.’
— Kerry Thornley

‘The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—are the primary sources of creativity.’
— Margaret J. Wheatley