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Literary notes about Classify (AI summary)

The term "classify" is employed in literature as a versatile tool for ordering, distinguishing, and systematizing various phenomena, ideas, and even people. In some works, it reflects the inherent challenge of placing elements into neat categories—as seen when a character is deemed unclassifiable in any known kingdom [1] or when the instability of language itself renders classification uncertain [2]. Other texts use the term more constructively, offering frameworks to differentiate experiences, phases of life, or social orders [3], [4], [5]. At times, classification becomes a method of critiquing or even poking fun at the process of categorization, whether in the context of intellect [6], the natural world [7], or even human relationships [8]. Overall, "classify" bridges empirical analysis and imaginative interpretation, underscoring both the necessity and the limitations of our attempts to organize the world around us [9], [10], [11].
  1. So, not being able to classify me in any animal or vegetable kingdom that they know, they have long since given me up and left me stolidly alone.
    — from The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories by Rabindranath Tagore
  2. Many phenomena are difficult to classify and even language is uncertain in its usage.
    — from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross
  3. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present.
    — from The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
  4. It is of course possible to classify in a general way the various valuable phases of life.
    — from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey
  5. Our attempt to classify society is now complete.
    — from Mosses from an old manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  6. It will classify intellect.
    — from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
  7. I. Fairies being creatures of the imagination, it is not possible to classify them by fixed and immutable rules.
    — from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes
  8. To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence.
    — from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
  9. What groups are difficult to classify?
    — from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park
  10. It can arrange, classify, by such standards as its fancy may select, the phenomena in nature; but this must be in accordance with some sensuous form.
    — from Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation by Jesse Henry Jones
  11. MEPHISTOPHELES Your mind will shortly be set aright, When you have learned, all things reducing, To classify them for your using.
    — from Faust [part 1]. Translated Into English in the Original Metres by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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