Top 100 The Improbable Quotes
#1. Lucas kicked back in his chair, and thought, Let's go to Sherlock Holmes. When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever was left, however improbable, must be the truth. Or something like that.
John Sandford
#2. And tomorrow
who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows
it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#3. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable
Robert James Waller
#4. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
C.S. Lewis
#5. The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Stephen Jay Gould
#6. I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#7. Dreams are what life is made of and although most things are improbable, nothing is impossible. Be the dreamer of the impossible and you can see probability.
Peace Gypsy
#8. Some things cannont possibly happen, because they are both too improbable and too perfect. The U.S. hockey team cannot beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. Jack Nicklaus cannot shoot 65 to win the Masters at age forty-six. Nothing else comes immediately to mind.
Thomas Boswell
#9. For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.
Amor Towles
#10. Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.
Rod Sterling
#11. Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in doing what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead.
Oscar Wilde
#12. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#13. The prospect of the UK without a BBC funded by the licence fee is anywhere between improbable and impossible.
Tessa Jowell
#14. The planetary phase of history has begun, but the future shape of global society remains profoundly uncertain. Though perhaps improbable, a shift toward a planetary civilization of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability is still possible.
Paul Raskin
#15. But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve.
Mary Oliver
#16. It is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#17. The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.
Michael Denton
#18. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to consider the unexpected. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to entertain the improbable opportunity that comes looking for you.
Elizabeth Warren
#19. The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.
Douglas Adams
#20. The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable- from table tapping to the superiority of their children- has never been plumbed.
Robert A. Heinlein
#21. Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.
Terry Pratchett
#22. There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.
Thomas Schelling
#23. Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
Patrick O'Brian
#24. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.
Richard Dawkins
#25. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
Edith Wharton
#26. Once you have discovered the physical facts of a situation, all that remains - no matter how improbable - is more interesting.
Tod Foley
#27. It's far easier to brush off death if the death in question seems impossible or improbable as a personal threat.
Jennifer Armintrout
#28. If there's - one person on the face of this earth who makes me sick it's the ninny who calls a thing 'improbable' because it happens to be outside his own special, puny experience of life.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
#29. Tell the truth, but lead so improbable a life that the truth will never be believed.
Aleister Crowley
#30. Once in a while there are things the brain simply refuses to accept as being true because they appear too improbable, too unlikely, too preposterous.
Walter Abish
#31. I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.
Padgett Powell
#32. I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.
Isaiah Berlin
#33. Logically, he understood air travel was completely possible.
Emotionally, he found the idea of an enormous, tremendously heavy metal object filled with people propelling itself through the sky for thousands of miles completely improbable.
Marshall Thornton
#34. You're a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."
"Beautiful and full of monsters?"
"All the best stories are.
Laini Taylor
#35. Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
Galileo Galilei
#36. A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.
Peter Carey
#37. But in the absence of eye-witness there's always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says 'reasonable doubt', but I think a defendant's entitled to the shadow of doubt. There's always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he's innocent.
Harper Lee
#38. In the beginning there was dust, and one day the great, improbable experiment of life will return to dust. We are not secure. Just as our ultimate genesis was entangled with the birth of suns, and the terrifying tumult of asteroids and meteorites, so we are still bound to the cosmos.
Richard Fortey
#39. As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, "Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information." And even when the information is not false, the problem is "that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.
Arianna Huffington
#41. My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.
Barack Obama
#42. The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its improbability.
William Poundstone
#43. Always plan no matter how improbable it seems. The bill for hindsight is much more expensive than the reciept for foresight.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
#44. It is easy today to deny God's creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man's creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction.
Allan Bloom
#45. I will never consider defeat and I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools. I
Og Mandino
#46. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#47. And, with a kiss, Shahrzad let herself fall.
For the boy who was an impossible, improbable study in contrasts. The boy who burned her life to cinder, only to remake of it a world unlike any she had ever known.
Renee Ahdieh
#48. The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.
Rashers Tierney
#49. You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.
Jean Rhys
#50. starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It
Arthur Conan Doyle
#51. The future is what it is," said Largeman. "Your people have been poisoned with the myths of lone men turning the tide, improbable tales of heroes outrunning explosions with their feet. Such tales are forbidden here. Events are laid forth and they cannot be turned. There are no heroes, Mr. Wong.
David Wong
#52. I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools.
Og Mandino
#53. The absurd ... the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
Soren Kierkegaard
#54. Proving one's innocence is as improbable as going to Pluto for
a honeymoon. It could take away everything you had in life, dear
ones, dreams, hopes and, most importantly, the right to have your
freedom.
Sheeja Jose
#56. The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.
Vilem Flusser
#57. Anything you want to do is possible; fear is not meant to prevent but to motivate your heart into the life you naturally think is improbable
Craig Stone
#58. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
Alfred Hitchcock
#59. Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.
Michael McDowell
#60. It is exceedingly improbable that the identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina is the result of a certain habituation, or of the influence of the mind.
Johannes P. Muller
#61. Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#62. I reject your impossible. Most of what others tell me is impossible I know to be improbable. If it is impossible you have nothing more to do but if it is improbable ... you can choose to ask the unasked question or walk the unwalked step. For me that has made all the difference.
Gary Holder-Winfield
#63. Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You're an improbable person, and so am I.
Douglas Preston
#64. Don't ever give up. Don't see the obstacles, just the way around them. For me, of course it looked improbable, but not impossible. So as long as there was a way, I would not be discouraged.
Evanna Lynch
#65. Avoid restaurants with names that are improbable descriptions, such as the Purple Goose, the Blue Kangaroo or the Quilted Orangutan.
Calvin Trillin
#66. In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.
Vin Scully
#67. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
Christopher Reeve
#68. They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.
Steven Pinker
#69. You'd be surprised what people will believe. Usually, the bigger and the more improbable the lie, the more willing they are to believe it.
John Flanagan
#70. The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
Oscar Wilde
#71. Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.
Agatha Christie
#72. America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.
Mario Cuomo
#73. I am always will be- the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes. The dreamer of improbable dreams.
The Doctor
#75. The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable.
Louis Sachar
#76. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde
#77. I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences,
Bill Bryson
#78. In dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.
Cormac McCarthy
#79. If you couldn't handle someone who did the impossible, the improbable, the implausible, then you couldn't handle the VRMMO player known as Kirito.
Reki Kawahara
#80. It seemed as if the train would never depart. Local trains are always somehow overzealous. At first they panic everyone into believing they are just about to thunder off down the track with an almighty jolt, then, at the very last minute, there is always some improbable hitch.
Dezso Kosztolanyi
#81. It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault in those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd.
Michel De Montaigne
#82. Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine.
Richard Dawkins
#83. Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#84. For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn't beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn't an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.
Linda Hunt
#85. The universe is specifically tweaked to enable life on earth-a planet with scores of improbable and interdependent life-supporting conditions that make it a tiny oasis in a vast and hostile universe.
Norman Geisler
#86. This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.
J. Jack Halberstam
#87. On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer.
Lewis Mumford
#88. Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant.
Janice Erlbaum
#89. Do what feels right to you, in whatever circumstance you find yourself in, even if it seems improbable or even impossible. And have faith. Everything else will follow.
Virginia Boecker
#90. Life is precarious and improbable, a flame in matter, easily snuffed out. Nature shows no regard for the individual spark, in this creature or that, but only for the spreading of the fire, like an ember passed from cell to cell.
Scott Russell Sanders
#91. Thoughts can propel our lives in many different directions. However, it is our choice which ones to believe. And those are the ones capable of making the improbable possible.
Charles F. Glassman
#92. I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.
Allan Sandage
#93. Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable.
Jean-Christophe Valtat
#94. It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.
Jordan Ellenberg
#95. Functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physically impossible. The
Douglas Axe
#96. If a man had a little button sewn on the inner pocket of his coat 'on principle' his otherwise unimportant and quite serviceable action would become charged with importance
it is not improbable that it would result in the formation of a society.
Soren Kierkegaard
#97. Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.
Hans Jonas
#98. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species.
Anonymous
#99. I'm not standard; I'm deviant. But I'm not alone. I'm a complete freak of nature, and I emerged from a set of circumstances that are improbable on an astronomic scale. The same is probably true for you too.
Tarah Wheeler
#100. Mr. False! No, don't start grabbing the chickens! Better off farmer with no chickens than a load of chickens with no farmer! Anyway, they'll probably float, or fly, or something!
Terry Pratchett
