51 Quotes Tagged: possibility

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'

[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than their facts.

A bird is like an instrument working according to mathematical law, and it is in the capacity of man to reproduce such an instrument

It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.

Though you can live for as much as you like, but your longevity is stupidity if you were leading a worthless life.

"There is no such thing as bad weather," he used to say, "only inappropriate clothing."

We did everything possible to keep up the spirits of the men, but it was exceedingly difficult because there was nothing for them to do.

Dreams taught me never to doubt myself, by letting me do the impossible.

I think of Gould and his essay every time I have a patient with a terminal illness. There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets — and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.

Coordinating there
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.

I dwell in possibility…

The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.

In their faces — plenty of them were handsome, but ruined — I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.