The Muses once taught Hesiod beautiful song (…): “Rustic shepherds, worthless reproaches, mere stomachs, we know how to say many lies like the truth and, whenever we wish, we know how to tell the truth.”

(..)From the beginning , also tell the one of them who came first.

First of all Chaos came into being.

But then Gaia broad-chested, always the unshakable seat of all the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dark Tartaros in the recesses of the wide-wayed earth, and Eros, the most beautiful among the immortal gods, loosener of limbs, who subdues the mind and prudent counsel in the chests of all gods and of all men.

From Chaos were born Erebos (darkness) and Nýx (black Night).

From Night, again, were born Aether (light) and Heméra (day), whom she conceived and bore after mingling with Erebos in philotês.(…)

 

Theogony – Hesiod

 

 

The Primal Chaos

Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos: a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place. There was no Titan yet, shining his light on the world, or waxing Phoebe renewing her white horns, or the earth hovering in surrounding air balanced by her own weight, or watery  Amphitrite  stretching out her arms along the vast shores of the world. Though there was land and sea and air, it was unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light. Nothing retained its shape, one thing obstructed another, because in the one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft with hard, and weight with weightless things.

 

Metamorphoses – Ovid

 

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”

Henry Adams

 

“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

Henry Miller

 

“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“The worst thing you could do is tame the chaos in you. It is like being told not to feel when you are thrown in the fire.”

Robert M. Drake

 

“All great changes are preceded by chaos.”

Deepak Chopra

 

“In the midst of chaos there is also opportunity.”

Sun-Tzu

 

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

Kerry Thornley