Quotes & Sayings About Messiness

It's easy to slip into guardedness and close ourselves off from the world when dealing with the messiness involved in navigating expectations, misunderstandings, and collaborative disagreements. This is especially true when we are busy or feel like we don't have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with the complexity of relationships. — Todd Henry

Everything was okay. Maybe not perfect, but life wasn't meant to be perfect. It was messy and sometimes it was a disaster, but there was beauty in the messiness and there could be peace in the disaster. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...
And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?
And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The reason his father has no time for poetry is that he is afraid of the messiness of life. Poetry feeds on all that spills over the boundaries of the usual things, the everyday things with which most people are obsessed, so William has no time for it. — Elliot Perlman

Thorne's voice pitched high in imitation of the queen. The impostor of my beloved niece is vanquished ... Let us put this messiness behind us while we go forward with the coronations ... I am a psychotic, power-hungry nut basket and my breath smells really bad under this veil. — Marissa Meyer

If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner. — Alexander McCall Smith

Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things. — T. E. Hulme

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs. — Kurt Vonnegut

You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Despite their inherent messiness, consumers aren't about to
give up on a mode of savings that is so much under their control.
Afer all, the price savings from a coupon is guaranteed to go
directly to the consumer using it. A coupon can allow a consumer
to purchase brand-name products at the same, or sometimes even
a lower price, than a store brand. And only the coupon-using consumer
obtains those benefits. — Mary Potter Kenyon

My epiphany: Printed words were the shadows of referents. Things: rock, sand, onion. Ideas: carpool, justice, maximization, irrevocability. Paragraphs were composite shadows of the scenarios and subjects they captured: the overwhelming richness and messiness of the world distilled to bare, chiaroscuroed necessity. — Tim Horvath

The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-It notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer. — Ellen Ullman

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. — Zadie Smith

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. And yes, I suppose I was interested in that story in the gap between memory itself, the real business of being alive, and the imagination. — Colm Toibin

I like my messiness on stage, though I watch comics who come at a joke from every angle and I think, 'Yeah! That's how it's done!' But for me it's the audience. If I feel connected to them, I have so much fun, and if not, it stinks. — Sarah Silverman

I think the messiness and embodied nature of modern life just produces an enhanced signal for our attention. — Richard Davidson

Stop trying to distinguish the joy of meditation from the messiness of life. Begin to see the divine in everything. She is in the joy just as much as the misery. — Rod Stryker

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas. — Rupert Sheldrake

Dearest Amabot,
If you only had a heart to absorb our hatred...
Thanks for nothing, you jury-rigged rust bucket.
The gorgeous messiness of flesh and blood with prevail! — Brad Stone

People are messy; therefore, relationships will be messy. Don't be surprised by messiness. — Timothy Keller

All the vital components that make a relationship successful, without any of the emotional messiness to drag it down. It's about respect, caring, and commitment. Shared goals and compatible priorities. It's about treating marriage like a partnership instead of some romantic fantasy. It's about two people liking each other. — Mira Lyn Kelly

Perhaps the messiness of life makes a nonsense of morality and the simplistic notions of right and wrong upon which 'the law' was founded. — Robert Partridge

messiness stimulates creative thought. — Eric Weiner

God is erratic, sometimes vindictive, sometimes merciful. The people I was taught were heroes - Jacob or Moses or David - were ambivalent figures, or worse. But that messiness was joyful, and challenging. I loved having a Bible that I could argue with. — David Plotz

I've let a lot of my type A personality go. When you have a kid, the messiness doesn't matter anymore. — Tiffani Thiessen

She couldn't help thinking of it as life after that, as if Julian were trying to bite into the bloody matter of his life, to cauterize the messiness somehow. — Cassandra Clare

Wisdom isn't about finding a quick answer key to life - like turning to the index, finding your problem, and turning to the right page so it all works out. Wisdom is about learning how to work through the unpredictable, uncontrollable messiness of life so you can figure things out on your own in real time. Both — Peter Enns

I think that church membership is a huge consideration, precisely because there is no such thing as a perfect church, and in our day and age in the West, we have so many options to choose from. Churches are full of sinners, so there will always be some messiness in a church. Churches are like families that way. So when a person stays in a church for a long period of time, there is evidence that she has been able to see that everything's not perfect, but she nevertheless said, I'm going to stay. I'm going to try to make this work. My commitment is more important than my desire to run away. — Matt Chandler

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state. — Brian Greene

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore

California seemed to me to be all about secrets and the need for safety. And this leads to this thematic messiness I'm still trying to figure out what to do with. I mean, when it comes to the themes, this is nothing like an Atwood novel. — Edan Lepucki

The messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Choosing life is always messy.

But it is there in the messiness, in the conflicted and often confused ways we live our lives, that we can learn how much mercy matters to us all. — Mathew N. Schmalz

Great sermon helped me to reflect on scape goats, forgiveness, revenge and the messiness of community.. where I referenced this sermon. Thanks! Keep preaching the damn Gospel! — Bill Peterson

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness. — Bill Bryson

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too. — Edan Lepucki

When new cooks come to work for me, they obviously make mistakes at the beginning or there's some messiness to the presentation. What I always say to them is: 'If you were cooking this for your mother or your girlfriend, would you make those mistakes?' — Joel Robuchon

My love for math eventually became a passion. I went to math camp when I was fourteen and came home clutching a Rubik's Cube to my chest. Math provided a neat refuge from the messiness of the real world. It marched forward, its field of knowledge expanding relentlessly, proof by proof. And — Cathy O'Neil

Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life - that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough. — Victoria Erickson

True courage is facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, and the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right.' She — Robin Hobb

Leroy helped me process the reality that when we engage in the messiness and tension of a suffering community, we experience the positive and negative ways that people respond to that suffering. As a result, we live in the tension between desperation and excess; while we live in the black, others fight for survival in the red. This becomes a real aspect of community: struggling through loving our neighbors when our neighbors do not enjoy the same blessings we do. — Jeff Shinabarger

But I like labels," she admitted. "They make everything so much clearer." Her sister Bree always told her she liked things to be wrapped up too neatly, and that part of the point of life was its messiness, its refusal to be wrapped up. Brett always took the advice with a grain of salt - it was probably Bree's excuse for a messy room, or for breaking up with boys she'd dated without actually telling them. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

Live your life in any way, London says. It encourages defiance. I loved what it gave me, who it allowed me to be. On the nights I could afford a minicab home, I rolled down the window while crossing the river and watched the lights on the water, knowing most late-night minicabbers were reaffirming their love of London with the same view. I loved its messiness, its attempts at order. I loved the anonymity it afforded; — Craig Taylor

You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out. — Timothy Egan

So endgames are naturally messy.

They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that's what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control. — Venkatesh G. Rao

There is no control and perfection is arrogant. Practice messiness, letting go, and doing things badly. — SARK

Zane Hollander stood in profile a few feet away. Sophie's breath caught. Up close, he looked like he'd been carved from the most glorious, most gorgeous stone on the planet. His blond hair was straight, on the longer side and sticking up in GQ messiness. Square jaw, high cheekbones, perfect nose. Then he turned and pierced her with ice-blue eyes that knocked her off-balance.
Literally.
She tripped over her own feet and face-planted right into the sand. — Robin Bielman

It was with some surprise that I saw that the person waiting for me at the airport's exit was Adrian. A grin spread over my face, and I picked up the pace. I threw my arms around him, astonishing both of us.
"I have never been happier to see you in my life," I said.
He squeezed me tightly and then let me go, regarding me admiringly. "The dreams never do justice to real life, little dhampir. You look amazing."
"And you look ... " I studied him. He was dressed as nicely as always. His dark brown hair had that crafted messiness he liked, but his face - ah, well. As I'd noted before, Simon had gotten a few good punches on him. One of Adrian's eyes was swollen and ringed with bruises.
Nonetheless, thinking about him and everything he'd done ... Well, none of the flaws mattered.
" ... Gorgeous."
"Liar," he said.
"Couldn't Lissa have healed that black eye away?"
"It's a badge of honor. Makes me seem manly. — Richelle Mead

I embrace the messiness of life, I find it so beautiful actually. — Brad Pitt

Many people who come to spiritual practice are frightened by their feelings. They hope meditation will help them to transcend the messiness of the world and leave them invulnerable to difficult feelings. But this is a false transcendence, a denial of life. It is fear masquerading as wisdom. — Jack Kornfield

Messy stuff irritates me. I don't like messiness. If you leave something around my house, I'll tell you to move it back, clean it up, throw it in the trash - don't matter, just get rid of it. I need stuff neat, organized. And once I start cleaning stuff, I don't stop until it's done. Otherwise I'm irritated all day. — Russell Westbrook

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It's easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion. — John C. Maxwell

The app saved three minutes of my time. But in the process, it cut a neighborhood business out of the economic equation. And, in a way, I had cut off myself from the inconvenient, maddening, but all-too-necessary messiness of human interaction. — Nick Bilton

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect. — Kate Zambreno

They (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It shall be an offence for any man, either a husband or other person of the male sex, married or otherwise, being over the age of twelve years, to throw any item of clothing having been worn by the said person for whatever length of time, upon the floor of any bathroom or any room adjacent to and connected to a bathroom, without good cause. — Alexander McCall Smith

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement. — J.D. Salinger

Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die.

True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right. — Robin Hobb

I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf ... Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction. — Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield

I made a creativity out of that messiness. — Marc Almond

He'd been so convinced that Lucetta was a victim in the play called Life that he'd completely neglected to take the time to see past his misconceptions. She was not searching for a knight in shining armor, she was searching for a partner, someone she could share her experiences with - not someone who'd want to take over her life and make everything easy for her. Miss Lucetta Plum was certainly not a lady who would enjoy easy, at least not all of the time. She was too complicated, too accomplished, and too intelligent to live a life of mundane pleasantness. She was also a lady who deserved an equal partner, not a gentleman who wanted to set her up on a shelf, away from the messiness of living, something he'd been determined to do. "That's — Jen Turano

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories. — Stephen Jay Gould

Work is a mess" encourages us to first recognize that we can never have a completely neat relationship with our livelihood. Treating work's messiness as if it were a mistake or liability only creates further unnecessary distress and resentment. By developing the attitude that work is a mess, we can learn to relax and be curious about the surprises and interruptions. By engaging the messiness of work directly - appreciating both the advantages and disadvantages - we become fully equipped to engage such events in all their variations. — Michael Carroll

As a general rule, I didn't like guys who styled their hair like they just woke up. Messiness should never be a goal. It should be a consequence. — Veronica Rossi

Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else. — Leah Raeder

I want us to enter into the laughter of the God that is before, during and after the experience of being human, to swim in grace, to revel in messiness, to find joy in the suffering and love in the chaos. — Tobin Wilson

As parents we carry the blueprints, the dreams of what our family could be. The plans change, the whole thing goes way over budget, there are unexpected additions, and the work never ends. Still, through the messiness of construction we see each other with such depth and hope. Our five year-old boy is still so clearly the baby he once was and sometimes - can you see it? - the young man he will one day be. We draw energy and inspiration from our dreams; our simple, common motivations.
SIMPLICITY PARENTING — Lisa Ross

Don't get distracted by the messiness. Keep pushing toward a CPM. — Steve Smith

Grime is not like messiness or some fingerprints on a cabinet; it takes a long time to accumulate. — Roz Chast

Kissing Jack wasn't what he'd expected. Not letting himself
do it for this long now seemed kind of stupid ... or a lot
stupid. What had he been afraid of? Too intimate, too
romantic, too ... just too. Sex was okay, even sucking dick
was okay. That was to get off. Kissing, though ... that you did
only because you had something to say that words didn't
quite do it for. That meant feelings and messiness. — Jane Seville