A Quote by Adam Curtis

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.

Adam Curtis

Quote Topics

Both Chaos Individuals Make Make Sense Messy Reality Sense Simplify Societies Stories Tell Themselves

Quote Author

Adam Curtis
British - Director
Born: May 26, 1955

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.

John Dufresne

History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.

Paul Murray

Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.

John Cameron Mitchell

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Ben Okri

CBC has a very important mandate to bind Canada together in both official languages, tell local stories, and make sure we have a sense of our strength, our culture, our stories.

Justin Trudeau

Truth be told, I hear stories every day that would make you say, 'If you put that in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.' Real life really is kinda incredible; the stories from people's actual lives defy credibility. People's lives are messy, humans are messy, and they're flawed.

Lynn Shelton

Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories, and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.

Adam Curtis

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further.

Steve Wozniak

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

Ben Okri

We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before.

Idries Shah

Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.

Joyce Carol Oates

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

Ralph Ellison

If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.

Carlos Castaneda

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!