Lists Quotes

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.

Umberto Eco

I list, therefore I am.

For me, writing down a task is almost as good as doing it. In fact, it is often such a satisfactory substitute that the need to actually do the job vanishes.

Naomi Bluestone

List-making is a brilliant way of storing, organising and transferring knowledge.

Mel Campbell

Lists are sequences of words. They allow us to condense our experience in a profound, poetic way, to seize the essence of a moment. With a list, there is no verbal fog to conceal what we are trying to express.

Dominique Loreau

Lists can…be explicitly hierarchical repositories of cultural capital – that is, deliberate rankings of knowledge, calculated to improve your social status. Reading, you don’t just get a powerful sense of the writers’ tastes, you also sense their authority to pronounce upon matters of taste.

Mel Campbell

Lists – the last tool for lazy writers.

Every topic is like a border, a demarcation. Editing means eliminating everything which has no purpose, then rearranging what remains in a way which is logical, coherent and clear. In order to do that, everything which lies outside that system must be ‘dealt with’, and by that I mean deleted or moved elsewhere, so it doesn’t blur the clear vision which is essential to the order of the list. Beauty and clarity will follow.

Dominique Loreau

Lists always want to predict great leaps of innovation.

Mel Campbell

Fragments: a fortunate excuse for writers who cannot put a whole book together.

Pitigrilli

Lists aim to transform our understanding of the world – and ourselves. Ultimately, we read and write them to become better people.

Mel Campbell

List – an activity that permits the periodic sampling or polling of any large field of activity with maximum efficiency.

List – a meaningful whole referring beyond itself to the real world.

List – an item overused in lieu of actually creating anything.

The bureaucracy’s appetite for information exceeded its capacity to digest it. Making lists was in danger of becoming a substitute for action.

Michael T Clanchy

Life itself is fuelled by lists – to flicker out only when I can find no more entries to make.

Naomi Bluestone

The best thing to do is to enumerate everything. To keep a list in order to understand.

Lists are effective, concise work and teaching tools.

Mel Campbell

Each item of a list is a repetition and novelty at once, conflates the past and the future, makes things co-present.

Robert Harbison

A good list is compelling because its items are not only individually striking but also strikingly juxtaposed. It’s kind of a pageantry, really, just as each float in a parade makes sense only as part of a larger spectacle, items on a list draw a wider, more coherent meaning from the way they are selected and arranged.

Mel Campbell

Listers and cataloguers often seem to have left their material in too rough a form; it is only the raw matter of learning and needs transforming by digestion.

Robert Harbison

A catalogue is the only book that is always written instead of something grander, a preparation for something else that never comes.

Robert Harbison

Humans have been making lists for even longer than they’ve been writing letters. They are the shorthand for what really matters to us: our hopes and aspirations, likes and dislikes, rules for living and loving, records of our memories and reminders of the things we want to do before we die.

Shaun Usher

Lists arouse in the reader a strange craving to acquire the knowledge displayed on the list in order to share its writer’s authority.

Mel Campbell

Since we first began walking the earth, humans have been creating lists of one kind or another, calmly content in the knowledge that all Things are being assigned, prioritised, ranked and streamlined to within an inch of their lives. It doesn’t bear thinking about but to live in a world without them would, I reluctantly imagine, be a chaotic existence, not a single to-do list, shopping list, wish list, dictionary, list of favourites, rulebook, list of predictions, list of resolutions, address book, list of advice, list of contents – just a world of things, muddled and overflowing, without a sense of purpose or collective identity.

Sometimes the most important things don't fit on lists.

Andrew David MacDonald

A list is a collection with purchase.

Adam Savage

I can make another list because the choice is mine. A list of what to do. So I won’t be listless ever again.

Johnny Rich

Love them or hate them, informational posts presented in list format are easily digestible, and allow for an efficient transfer of your value proposition to the reader.

Brian Clark

Don’t write list posts because they’re quick to write. Instead, write them because they’re the best format for communicating your idea and helping your readers.

Henneke Duistermaat

List, list, O, list!

William Shakespeare

Mostly I make lists for projects. This can be daunting. Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of the task.

Adam Savage

The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists.

Umberto Eco

It took naturalists 80 years to come up with a definition of a platypus. They found it endlessly difficult to describe the essence of this animal. So what did that definition look like? It was a list, a list of characteristics.

Umberto Eco

At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures … But, in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures.

Umberto Eco

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.

Umberto Eco

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Umberto Eco

Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.

Dani Shapiro

I made a list of things I wanted to do with my life, but it ended up mostly being a list of books I wanted to write.

Ellie Rose McKee

I refuse to tolerate lists. They're lazy. And listy.

Greg Gutfeld

Busy people make to-do lists when what they need is to reflect and create stop-doing lists.

Francis Shenstone

What differentiates lists from other ways of storing information – whether written, audio or visual – is the way the information must be organised, classified, selected and edited.

Dominique Loreau

A complete and accurately defined list of projects, kept current and reviewed on at least a weekly basis, is a master key to stress-free productivity.

David Allen

If I am not persistent with my desire to think about other things, and consciously initiate new circuits of thought, then those uninvited loops can generate new strength and begin monopolizing my mind again. To counter their activities, I keep a handy list of three things available for me to turn my consciousness toward when I am in a state of need: 1) I remember something I find fascinating that I would like to ponder more deeply, 2) I think about something that brings me terrific joy, or 3) I think about something I would like to do.

Jill Bolte Taylor

We read and write lists to become better people.

Many people feel the need to make lists, to take notes, to collect ideas, images and thoughts. By sorting them, and recording them in a systematic way, over the course of time and over the course of our thoughts, we can connect different parts of our lives and develop certain subjects.

Dominique Loreau

Lists are a form of power.

A S Byatt

Lists are how I parse and manage the world.

Adam Savage

I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.

Blue Balliett

Making lists is a way of bringing order to chaos, or categorizing things.

Dominique Loreau

The list is the most concise form of expression available to us. But, paradoxically, its elliptical nature allows us to be as exhaustive as possible. Its brevity leads us to the truth of things. And it can often do that far more powerfully than phrases weighed down by syntax. Writing lists teaches us to reduce the number of words and phrases we use; to employ short, succinct formulations that are easy to write, read, reread and understand; to achieve maximum meaning in minimum words…Lists can become art forms, like haikus.

Dominique Loreau

The key to a good collection of lists lies in the concision with which you demarcate the content.

Dominique Loreau

What a liberating tool lists are!

Dominique Loreau

Lists help you to exercise restraint and self-control.

Dominique Loreau

Lists force us to define and to clarify…they allow us to become more decisive and more precise.

Dominique Loreau

We don’t keep or archive our lists; we don’t give them the recognition they deserve. And yet they help us so much: to keep control of our lives, to save time, to avoid confusion, stress and forgetting.

Dominique Loreau

We make lists to unburden ourselves. Making lists is a way of moving on. A way of sorting, extracting, sweeping, discarding and purging.

Dominique Loreau

Lists are an ideal way of letting off steam…They allow you to organize different things under one heading, to combine them, to accumulate information, signs and details, to become conscious of how things really are…They allow you to rid yourself of the superfluous, so that only the essential remains.

Dominique Loreau

Listing gives us energy.

Dominique Loreau

The refuge of lists.

Making lists is a way of writing a diary, albeit in a very minimalistic form. Making lists shows a fierce determination to understand life and to give it meaning. Making lists is a way of trying to put your life in order, of finding the logic in it.

Dominique Loreau

Making lists can console you, make you happy, change you, calm you…inspire you and open your heart and your head to deeper reflections. It can even help you shake off depression.

Dominique Loreau

To make lists is to reorder your life, and to become more deeply aware of things, events and situations.

Dominique Loreau

Life is chaotic – often unbearably so. The ability to divide some of that chaos into lists, to make the onslaught manageable, can bring much-needed relief.

Shaun Usher

Human beings are fearful of the unknown and as such have a real need to label and group things, to assign them to comfortable lists.

Shaun Usher

Lists can make us more productive and can eliminate procrastination. Nothing on earth, resignation aside, cuts through the thick fog of a daunting workload as effectively as a to-do list.

Shaun Usher

Everyone is a critic. Ranking things – best to worst, biggest to smallest, fastest to slowest – can be strangely addictive, no doubt because it makes us feel knowledgeable.

Shaun Usher

Each item of a list is a repetition and novelty at once, conflates the past and the future, makes things co-present.

Time is precious. Distilling huge swathes of monotonous information into easily digestible lists ensures that we have more time to enjoy ourselves and make lists.

Shaun Usher

Those who can’t write, list.

The point of making lists is to strip away words and superfluous things, to keep only the essential.

Dominique Loreau

Items on a list draw a wider, more coherent meaning from the way they are selected and arranged.

Lists help us to see our lives more clearly.

Dominique Loreau

The structure of a list doesn’t only represent order. It creates order.

Dominique Loreau

Because lists are ‘fixed’, they allow us to find our bearings. They bring us a sense of unity, and enable us to discover a way of life and a way of thinking which are unique to who we are.

Dominique Loreau

The list is by far the strongest structure in nature. A bee’s honeycomb consists of an unordered list of hexagons. Trees are assigned a list of leaves that annually drop off to be subsequently re-appended.

David Bell

In listing, there is no verbal fog to conceal what we are trying to express.

A list can give us objectives. But in order to gain understanding, we need to bring subjectivity to the table. Writing lists brings order to disparate elements by forcing us to group them under headings.

Dominique Loreau

Making lists helps you to live more fully.

Dominique Loreau

The older the list, the higher its value.

Dominique Loreau

By virtue of its concise, contained form, the simplicity of its presentation and the immediacy of its approach, the list gives us an entry point into a potentially unlimited exploration of our lives.

Dominique Loreau

Lists allow us to clarify our thoughts and take the weight off our minds.

Dominique Loreau

Making lists is a way of savouring life; it is also a way of stretching time, of punctuating it, measuring it and collecting its precious moments.

Dominique Loreau

Lists are necessary, useful and precious.

Dominique Loreau

A good, trusty list will give you peace of mind and a sense of calm.

Dominique Loreau

Lists allow us to rethink and restructure our ideas. They give us a panoramic view of our lives. They breathe fresh life into our writing, make the important things more visible, make rereading a pleasure.

Dominique Loreau

The passion some people have for lists can also be explained by the desire to be completist. They think the world, once written down, can be mastered. The world is more knowable, it is better suited to their needs. Everything now seems less immense, less complex, less strange – less worrying.

Dominique Loreau

Lists are a practical way of saving time when we feel overwhelmed by everything we have to do or want to do.

Dominique Loreau