The Possibility Of Quotes

#1. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Donald Barthelme

#2. There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Alain Badiou

#3. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

Italo Calvino

#4. But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything?

Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.

Ellen Ullman

#5. Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so Wild Flag was not a sure thing, it was a 'maybe,' a 'possibility.' But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts.

Carrie Brownstein

#6. The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

Edmund Wilson

#7. Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

Robert Charles Wilson

#8. From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#9. What was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty.

Piper Kerman

#10. The universe is an infinite opportunity creation machine. In every instant, the possibility of greater possibility is programmed into the nature of things. Love creates the conduit through which new possibility enters our experience, and lovelessness keeps it at bay.

Marianne Williamson

#11. The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.

Roger Scruton

#12. We are the relationships that make us; we have our being in and through relationships that place us into reality, and therefore we are open ontologically to the possibility of encounter.

Andrew Root

#13. People rise out of the ashes because, at some point, they are invested with a belief in the possibility of triumph over seemingly impossible odds,

Robert Downey Jr.

#14. Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

Richard Perle

#15. The possibility of a musical modernity that was not characterized by sensationalism

Alain Frogley

#16. For the first time, we live in a society that shows any sign of the possibility of women changing this condition.

Frederick Lenz

#17. Begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

Rolf Potts

#18. There are a few obvious consequences and perhaps one subtle possibility. One obvious thing is that, to stimulate the economy, President Obama has committed to creating millions of green jobs that will leave a legacy - much as Roosevelt's public works did during the new deal.

Denis Hayes

#19. The classic business story is much like the classic human story. There is rise and fall; the overcoming of great odds, the upholding of principles despite the cost, questions of rivalry and succession, and even the possibility of descent into madness.

Mark Helprin

#20. The E.U.'s Eastern Partnership programme is designed to bind the so-called focus states tightly to itself, shutting down the possibility of co-operation with Russia.

Sergei Lavrov

#21. As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours. Robert

Noam Chomsky

#22. I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

Gottfried Leibniz

#23. Being brave means to know something is scary, difficult, and dangerous, and doing it anyway, because the possibility of winning the fight is worth the chance of losing it.

Emilie Autumn

#24. know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the possibility of tragic consequences for everybody yet (b) be brave in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the forgiving love of God.

Frederick Buechner

#25. The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.

Rachel Naomi Remen

#26. When in doubt, you face the possibility of deception.. when you are decieved, you face the possibility of diversion... when you are diverted, you face the possibility of disobedience...and these are the D's to every man's Defeat.

Hope D. Blackwell

#27. There exists in every person a place that is free from disease, that never feels pain, that cannot age or die. When you go to this place, limitations which all of us accept, cease to exist. They are not even entertained as a possibility. This is the place called perfect health.

Deepak Chopra

#28. When we consider the possibility that God will not be good to us, we stand on the precipice of despair and peer into the darkness below.

G.K. Chesterton

#29. This is the picture of the spirit world. It is the world of the optimist. The pessimist has no share in its great glory, because he refuses to accept the possibility which is the nature of life. Thus he denies to himself all he desires, and even the possibility of achieving his desires.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#30. Given the irreversibility of the death penalty, the possibility of a wrongful conviction can never be overstated

George Gascon

#31. Well, I'm not excusing the fact that planning and preparedness was not where it should be. We've known for 20 years about this hurricane, this possibility of this kind of hurricane.

Michael Chertoff

#32. The perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.

Viktor E. Frankl

#33. Dreams may be conceived as the ovulation of fate when they hold the possibility of becoming more than a concept or idea.

Dew Platt

#34. The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.

Chris Weedon

#35. I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.

James Surowiecki

#36. Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class.

G.H. Hardy

#37. It is always a high possibility to see lights after midnight in the house of a writer! That is the light of the love for words!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#38. Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.

Arthur C. Clarke

#39. Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.

Sherman Edwards

#40. The fundamental driving force for me is to create a change in the world we live in ... It is about exploitation, plundering and degradation. I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work.

Henning Mankell

#41. Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise

Victor Turner

#42. Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.

Leo Tolstoy

#43. Mrs. Weslin was one of those women who had clearly had some work done. That or she had sold her soul to the devil and although that was probably a possibility, I was pretty sure none of the Weslins had souls to sell.

Joann I. Martin Sowles

#44. The effort flops like a just-caught fish inside her. A brief burst of possibility as the name is typed onto the screen, as she clicks to activate the search. Hope thrashing in the process of turning cold.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#45. How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.

Aldo Leopold

#46. There should of course be left a field of work for the sake of experiment but at all times one must remember that there will always remain open a possibility of err.

Sri Aurobindo

#47. When the preacher says it's for better or worse, you're so blinded by the possibility of better you fail to see the reality of worse.

Bette Lee Crosby

#48. It's just hard to accept
the possibility of ... I don't know,
being less."
"Then don't accept it.

Kiera Cass

#49. "Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standig on a street corner and shouting "There is no freedom here!

Yoani Sanchez

#50. All those small glimmers...connecting, collecting...have turned into an undeniable possibility...casting a light that cuts through the darkness of despair - ! So I...made up my mind. I'll never stop reaching for that light!!!

Jun Mochizuki

#51. The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

Maria Montessori

#52. The human birthright includes the possibility of an easy death at extreme old age if we are healthy. Alternatively, we may experience a lot of disease, but with medical intervention probably live almost as long, suffering from suboptimum health all the way through. It's our choice.

Steve Solomon

#53. Every sinner is now on trial once for all. He is now invited by the bleeding Saviour, urged by all the horrors of hell, to enter heaven. But death closes the possibility for ever.

Asahel Nettleton

#54. Mrs. Astor had long held that artists of any ilk - painters, authors, actors and the like - merit no recognition unless safely dead, and that meeting them risks both needless mental fatigue and the possibility of social contamination.

Paula Cohen

#55. To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.

Gordon W. Allport

#56. In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#57. The possibility of success was motivating me more than the fear of failure.

Herman Cain

#58. I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.

D.W. Griffith

#59. I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

Amanda Palmer

#60. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that.

Tom Robbins

#61. Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto.

Tristram Stuart

#62. Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.

Michael Eric Dyson

#63. And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.

Sebastian Faulks

#64. Following your heart means allowing the possibility of finding true love to be stronger than the fear of rejection.

Susane Colasanti

#65. A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.

Michel Houellebecq

#66. If you don't allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.

Steven Galloway

#67. It is crucial that we realize the great value of human existence, the opportunity and the potential that our brief lives afford us. It is only as humans that we have the possibility of implementing changes in our lives.

Dalai Lama

#68. The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing "smart dust," dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that "smart dust" might be sent to the nearby stars.

Michio Kaku

#69. We are going to alter the structure of our beings and also totally change what we are. This is the possibility and inevitability that meditation offers us.

Frederick Lenz

#70. The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.

Junot Diaz

#71. Consider the possibility that many of the things you hear and say are utter nonsense and meaningless repetitions of noise.

Bryant McGill

#72. In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

Bjarke Ingels

#73. Motherhood by definition means a journey into the depths of one's possibility.

H. L. Balcomb

#74. Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.

Laurence Heller

#75. Towards the end of 2003 it was hard to get through training - and the darkest point was when a doctor told me there was a possibility I could end up in a wheelchair.

Jonah Lomu

#76. You can live constrained within the confines of a solely material perspective, or choose instead the infinite field of quantum possibility.

Marianne Williamson

#77. Give yourself the freedom to explore the possibility of life without limits. Goals are dreams with deadlines, a means to an end but not the ultimate purpose of life.

Glynis Nunn

#78. That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.

Donna Tartt

#79. We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once.

Dexter Palmer

#80. Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Al Alvarez

#81. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world.

Orson Scott Card

#82. Other peoples' success represents the possibility of what you can do.

Tyrese Gibson

#83. I feel like there's a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens. When I go to that space, I'm completely in the world of possibility.

Laura Owens

#84. It's not supposed to make you distracted from your life, it's supposed to make you challenge the ongoing distraction with focused intention. Simply discussing how asleep we can be gives credence to the possibility of finding moments of true honest alertness.

Dan Mangan

#85. Isn't that wonderful? That feeling of not knowing too much about something ... Incomplete information ... Endless possibilities ... When you don't know much about something, it's the most exciting sensation.
-Kutsnetz in TALUS

Erol Ozan

#86. Lane watched her for a moment with mounting irritation. Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating. In any case, he surely was concerned over the possibility that this bug Franny had might bitch up the whole weekend.

J.D. Salinger

#87. Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.

Nathaniel Branden

#88. Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

Susan Sontag

#89. The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility. The danger is here now
not only from a military enemy but from an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#90. When you're faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realize that life is worth living and there are a lots of things you want to do.

Stephen Hawking

#91. History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.

John H. Arnold

#92. I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.

Jesmyn Ward

#93. Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

Max Ernst

#94. A man, engaged in his simple reflections in everyday life, will comprehend neither the possibility, nor the benefits of self-sacrifice, but, when given ("qu'on lui donne", Fr.) a great cause to defend, and he will find only natural to sacrifice oneself for it.

African Spir

#95. More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.

Billy Collins

#96. I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.

Frances Burney

#97. Evil devastates any possibility of an intellectual response; the tools of the rational intellect are as helpless incoping with the aftereffects of evil as it was in preventing it.

Paul Levy

#98. Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.

Joan Halifax

#99. If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.

Honore De Balzac

#100. Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could not choose or direct or destroy the powerful flow of possibility.

Janet Frame