Top 100 The Possible Quotes
#1. All true cultural creativity happens at the edges of the horizons of the possible, so by definition our most culturally creative endeavors have a high risk of failure.
Andy Crouch
#2. There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.
Jerome Bruner
#3. In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.
Cormac McCarthy
#4. A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. There is no day that one should skip
But one should seize, without distrust,
The possible with iron grip
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#6. Hope isn't an abstract theory about where human aspirations end and the impossible begins; it's a never-ending experiment, continually expanding the boundaries of the possible.
Paul Rogat Loeb
#7. Temptation only works if the possible futures open to you are concealed. Consequences, including those of Judgment Day, must be hidden from view or outright denied.
Russell D. Moore
#10. I took my time and observed Ryder Kingscott - the legend, the most envied, desired, talked about, etc., guy in school - mutating before my eyes into Ryder Kingscott, the ... possible stalker?
Ramona Wray
#11. Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal...
Rebecca Solnit
#12. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. We have forfeited our calling for the simple reason that we've ignored the God who says that the 'possible' is never bound by the 'probable,' and instead we've dutifully heeded the god of fear that incessantly says the 'possible' is anything but 'probable.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#14. I'd say Harvard graduates leave here with a sense of the possible and the limit - and a sense that there are no limits to what humans can do and that you can always be pushing, whatever limit you think might be there.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#15. The possible impact of the virus [Zika] an extraordinary event and a public health threat to other parts of the world.
Margaret Chan
#16. Often we had no choice: we couldn't reform the whole world. And didn't somebody once say 'Politics is the art of the possible'?" "Quite true - which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
#17. Source reduction is, on the face it, perhaps the most appealing of all the possible approaches to solid-waste management.
William Rathje
#18. He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.
Charlie Jane Anders
#19. 'Dirty Jobs' is maybe the simplest show in the history of TV, with the possible exception of 'The Gong Show'. I go around the country; we've shot in every state. And we spend a day with people who do jobs that are dirty or dangerous or ridiculous or difficult.
Mike Rowe
#20. In all of the possible scenarios Kian had envisioned, encountering a lunatic had not been one of them. It just showed him that he could never be completely prepared.
D.A. Rhine
#21. The Czechs are downright crazy about mushrooms! In late summer and autumn, a foreigner might even get the impression that the number of sponge-hunting Czechs roaming about in the forests with a punnet largely exceeds the possible number of mushrooms.
Terje B. Englund
#23. It doesn't include math or logic, nor does it address issues of judgment, such as aesthetics or morality. Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is. There's
Sean Carroll
#24. My final, considered judgment is that the hardy bulb [garlic] blesses and ennobles everything it touches - with the possible exception of ice cream and pie.
Angelo Pellegrini
#25. The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
Herophilos
#26. When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.
Joan Didion
#27. When ... we realize the possibilities of deep sea life still unknown to us, every haul of the dredge should be welcomed by an expectant enthusiasm equaled in other fields only by the possible hope of communication with our sister planets.
William Beebe
#28. Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.
Paul Schrader
#29. With the possible exception of having more pleasing lines to the eye while in flight, the monoplane possesses no material advantage over the biplane.
Glenn Curtiss
#30. Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing 'Embraceable You' in spats.
Woody Allen
#31. How often are the beauties of nature unheeded by man, who, musing on past ills, brooding over the possible calamities of the future, building castles in the air, or wrapped up in his own self-love and self-importance, forgets to look abroad, or looks with a vacant stare.
Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps
#32. Did we ever find out for sure about the possible forked penis?
Rachel Vincent
#33. Zealous statesmen perhaps did more mischief than anything in the Galaxy--with the possible exception of procrastinating soldiers. That could indicate the fundamental difference between statecraft and war.
H. Beam Piper
#34. Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.
Barry Ritholtz
#35. If you have a pair of contradictory ideas, discuss all the possible consequences with your peers.
Eraldo Banovac
#36. No faith is required to do the possible; actually only a morsel of this atom-powered stuff is needed to do the impossible, for a piece as large as a mustard seed will do more than we have ever dreamed of.
Leonard Ravenhill
#37. Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy elegant ...
Moshe Feldenkrais
#38. Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.
Max Born
#39. We classify things as easy or difficult, but this is not right, tasks should be classified as possible or impossible and the possible ones can be easy or hard
Hatem A. Aly
#40. Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.
Michael Arrington
#41. All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false.
Kurt Godel
#42. Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#43. Somewhere there exists all the possible variations of all the possible people I could be. I could be any of them- but I cannot be all. I can only be one of the variations. I will be the variation of myself that pleases me the most.
David Gerrold
#44. Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
Barbara Tuchman
#45. The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. Hope is the belief in the probability of the possible rather than the necessity of the probable.
Marshall Ganz
#47. Would you really want to live in world where only the possible is possible?
Polly Shulman
#48. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
George Santayana
#49. But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.
Lev Shestov
#50. Every short statement about economics is misleading (with the possible exception of my present one).
Alfred Marshall
#51. It has never yet been supposed, that all the facts of nature, and all the means of acquiring precision in the computation and analysis of those facts, and all the connections of objects with each other, and all the possible combinations of ideas, can be exhausted by the human mind.
Nicolas De Condorcet
#52. The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream.
Sheryl Sandberg
#53. Doing a route at the absolute limit of the possible demands and encourages a coordination of all peripheral factors. It is, at the same time, a sign of joy and contentment with that moment, perhaps even a mirror of the equlibrium in your inner spirit, a mirror of a liberated state of mind.
Wolfgang Gullich
#54. Our marriage has always been a 50-50 proposition - with the possible exception of closet space.
Gene Perret
#55. The impossible lives next door to the possible; people ring its door bell by accident all the time.
Tibor Fischer
#56. When you can't see the reason for something, look for the possible result - and ask yourself who might benefit from it.
John Flanagan
#57. Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.
Alexander Hamilton
#58. I maintain that the greatest crime committed by America - with the possible exception of the carpet-bombing of Laos - was the Disneyfication of Winnie The Pooh.
Robert Wyatt
#59. The possible solutions to a given problem emerge as the leaves of a tree, each node representing a point of deliberation and decision.
Niklaus Wirth
#60. I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
Ayn Rand
#61. Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.
Isaac Asimov
#62. At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
Henry David Thoreau
#63. To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again.
Hermann Hesse
#64. Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
Northrop Frye
#66. My job is to take care of the possible and to trust God with the impossible.
Ruth Graham
#67. I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.
Gloria Swanson
#68. As this body of knowledge has evolved, a much more critical job for researchers and scientists has evolved into explaining and educating policy makers and the public to the risks of global warming and the possible consequences of action or of no action.
John Olver
#69. When we talk about GOD,
we're like a school of fish,
discussing the possible existence of the sea.
Rumi
#70. The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
Norman Mailer
#71. There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.
Ben Katchor
#72. The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil.
Washington Irving
#73. The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.
Barack Obama
#74. Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.
Alfie Kohn
#75. True hope dwells on the possible, even when life seems to be a plot written by someone who wants to see how much adversity we can overcome.
Walter Inglis Anderson
#76. I don't think you can name a good picture where the production or the possible promotion isn't "cast-contingent." That means the film needs not just star power but star box office power.
Larry Gelbart
#77. We are not here to question the possible,
we are here to challenge the impossible
Natasha Tsakos
#78. God is the God of the impossible, as well as the God of the possible.
Lester Roloff
#79. Reflection is and remains the hardest creditor in existence; hitherto it has cunningly bought up all the possible views of life, but it cannot buy the essentially religious and eternal view of life.
Soren Kierkegaard
#80. The forces of nature aren't arbitrarily selected in some way by
chance or design, they are simply the possible directions of time.
Gevin Giorbran
#81. Politics may be the art of the possible, but at least in life, give the impossible a go.
Tony Blair
#82. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#83. The role of a clown and a physician are the same - it's to elevate the possible and to relieve suffering.
Patch Adams
#84. Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible
Cherie Carter-Scott
#85. I believe that none can "save" his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and
without illusion.
Erich Fromm
#86. With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction - mysteries, fantasy, and adventure - as eccentric or merely antiquarian.
Michael Dirda
#87. Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.
John Ferling
#88. Prejudice and bigotry are brought down ... by the sheer force of determination of individuals to succeed and the refusal of a human being to let prejudice define the parameters of the possible.
Condoleezza Rice
#89. Not that which is inspires the creation, but that which may be; not the actual, but the possible.
Rudolf Steiner
#90. But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What's the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality? With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don't think there is one.
Chuck Klosterman
#91. In all discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves.
C.S. Lewis
#92. She understood the risks, the limits, the possible consequences, and she was willing to accept all of that in return for the sheer joy of being with him. One night with him ... one hundred ... whatever fate allowed her, she would take.
Lisa Kleypas
#93. Don't do small stuff early in your energy cycle or you'll blow your 'golden hours,' but occasionally you have to do the 'possible' to develop the momentum for the killer task.
Helen Gurley Brown
#94. In every circumstance, all my life, my mind shows me the possible bad outcome: someone walks down steps, and before I can do anything to head the image off, I see a fall, a catastrophe.
Richard Bausch
#95. My vision of what God can do is nothing more than a fleeting glance of the backside of the 'possible,' while God is inviting me to the forefront of the 'impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#96. Regarding the Hall of Fame, when they decided I was going to be one of the possible candidates, when I heard that, I was so thrilled. You're always hoping for something like that.
Gabriela Sabatini
#97. Awkward approximations, dull stammerings which cannot convey my sense of exhilaration as I seem to burst impediments, to exceed bounds of the possible, to experience, in the ruins of the human, the birth of something utterly new.
Steven Millhauser
#98. The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.
Ralph Nader
#100. I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.
Terry Pratchett
