“Impossible!” he said, as if he believed it—or as if he wanted awfully badly to believe it.

He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.

He had always thought of himself as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out successfully.

Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience.

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

He was suddenly struck by an idea so brilliant that he was quite sure it could not possibly work.

He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness.

Who so loves believes the impossible.

[Visionaries] not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done.

To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried by despondency, and been strangled in the birth by a cowardly imagination?

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

He had a startling genius, but somehow it did n't emerge;
Always on the evolution of things that would n't evolve;
Always verging toward some climax, but he never reached the verge;
Always nearing the solution of some theme he could not solve.

it seemed inconceivable to him that he and mankind in general should not have been intended to develop to the fullest their specifically human potential.

It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways.