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Chaos Art Quotes

45 art quotes about Chaos | Submit more Chaos art quotes

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. (Henry Brooks Adams)

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. (Theodor W. Adorno)

I believe in deeply ordered chaos. (Francis Bacon)

The urban world is full of chaotic compositions that seem to make sense in a way that earlier decades and centuries could never have imagined. (Nicoletta Baumeister)

Art is the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. (Saul Bellow)

-foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, 1987...
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves. (Saul Bellow)

Among those born into chaos, some will imagine an order and become scientists; a few will recognize the chaos and become abstract artists; most others will turn to faith for understanding; and the rest will become lost souls. (Robert Brault)

Chaos furnishes the building blocks for order, and order breaks down to replenish chaos. (Betty Brooks)

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence. (Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha)

We live in a rainbow of chaos. (Paul Cezanne)

Painting is dancing with chaos. (Melanie Circle)

Chaos is order to which you do not have the key. (Robert Derr)

If chaos did not develop out of order we would have no reason to 'create,' to handle it, live within it and handle being surrounded by it. (Carolynn Doan)

-on seeing studio canvases...
...exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange. (Stephen Dunn)

We adore chaos because we love to produce order. (M. C. Escher)

The creative process requires chaos before form emerges. (Marilyn Ferguson)

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. (Hermann Hesse)

The creation of true art requires some mysterious innate ability to thrive in chaos. (Sharon Hubbard)

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. (Carl Gustav Jung)

Chaos in nature is immediately challenging and forces a good artist to impose some type of order on his or her perception of a site. (Wolf Kahn)

Today is all chaos and creativity. As the sign down at the local Chevron station says, 'If you aren't harried, worried, and a little bit nuts you don't understand what's going on around here.' Nobody can predict the shape of tomorrow's world. (Sam Keen)

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos. (Dean Koontz)

Chaos is everywhere – and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio. (Eric Maisel)

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. (Rollo May)

Mozart let his music run off in chaotic directions but then always brought it back under control. (James McConnel)

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. (Henry Miller)

A painting that goes through a very abstract stage or 'chaos' is a better painting in the end and the longer it stays abstract before the defining shapes are added, the better the painting. (Sandra Moore)

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

He searched disorder for its unifying principle. (Brian O'Doherty)

Out of chaos we make a world, a consequence of art, which in turn reveals our proper structure to us. (Richard Ozenfant)

Photos tend to organize chaos, to define what we're doing here. It is essential that individuals' voices depict the world around us, as we are increasingly controlled by large institutions, large companies and large systems. (Martin Parr)

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order. (Pablo Picasso)

My goal is to communicate the organization and beauty that exists in our universe underneath the appearance of random chaos. (Aleta Pippin)

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. (Katherine Anne Porter)

Beauty by confusion, truth by collision. (Daniel Richter)

Dada has reaped the harvest of confusion that it sowed. (Hans Richter)

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)

And this mess is so big / And so deep and so tall, / We cannot pick it up. / There is no way at all! (Dr. Seuss)

So quick bright things come to confusion. (William Shakespeare)

Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable. (Rupert Sheldrake)

When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little. (Stephen Spender)

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos. (Kerry Thornley)

Very beautiful situations have developed using chaos as part of the enlightened approach. There is chaos of all kinds developing all the time... If you are trying to stop those situations, you are looking for external means of liberating yourself, another answer. But if we are able to look into the basic situation, then chaos is the inspiration, confusion is the inspiration. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche)

While creating, I sometimes have a small transistor radio, CNN News and PC music playing all at the same time. This gives me an opportunity to shut off and open the 4th track in my mind. (Milos Vujasinovic)


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Editor: Robert Genn

Assistant Editor: Shawn Jackson

Associate Editors:

Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Sara Genn, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,
And many others who have so far contributed one quote or a few. Please join us and add more at

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Last modified: June 20, 2013