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].
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - Our attempt to classify society is now complete.
— from Mosses from an old manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne - It will classify intellect.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - 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 - To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence.
— from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde - What groups are difficult to classify?
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - 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 - 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