Possibility Quotes

“My dad said that the impossible is only impossible if you don’t even try. So I want to try.”
― Ashley Poston, Geekerella

“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.

Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.

While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.”
― Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

“If nature has taught us anything it is that the impossible is probable”
― Ilyas Kassam

“October had tremendous possibility. The summer's oppressive heat was a distant memory, and the golden leaves promised a world full of beautiful adventures. They made me believe in miracles.”
― Sarah Guillory, Reclaimed

“Do not think it impossible just because it has never happened.
- Friar Tuck”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, Tuck

“Today is an ephemeral ghost...

A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not "exist."

In mundane terms, it marks a "leap" in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up!

But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability...

A day of unlocked potential.

Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you?

Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.”
― Mark Twain

“The morning felt like a mixing bowl just waiting for its ingredients; there was a sense of possibility to it, a promise of something more to come.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, This Is What Happy Looks Like

“Act as if it was, and it will be.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“A disciple...can never imitate his guide's steps. You have your own way of living your life, of dealing with problems, and of winning. Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it.”
― Aristotle, Poetics

“Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Impossibility only lasts until you find new unbelievable hard evidences.”
― Toba Beta

“It’s strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next.
After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless.
We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete.
We live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very lives.
The picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look and consumed souls without defense. They’re everywhere. Some are people we know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives.”
― Christopher Hawke

“The possibility of the dream gives strength.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Anything at all is possible. Some things are unlikely. Some things will never happen. But they always could, at any time.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Before I had a chance to feel too sorry for myself, I turned toward the front of the cabin and found the bookcases carved right into the wall. Hundreds of leather-bound volumes rested in dim alcoves. I had no idea what stories or information they held. It didn’t matter. I wanted to absorb anything they had to say.”
― Jodi Meadows, Incarnate

“those who are ignorant naturally consider everything possible.”
― Franz Kafka, The Castle

“Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?”
― Brian Evenson, Fugue State

“All life is rife with possibilities. Seeds have possibilities, but all their tomorrows are caught by the patterning of their life cycle. Animals have possibilities that are greater than that of a fir tree or a blade of grass. Still, though, for most animals, the pattern of instinct, the patterns of their lives, are very strong. Humanity has a far greater range of possibilities, especially the very young. Who will children grow up to be? Who will they marry, what will they believe, what will they create? Creation is a very powerful seed of possibility.”
― Patricia Briggs, River Marked

“As the sun knows; even the sky is not the limit...”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.”
― Benjamin Zander

“Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“We often think that there is just one way to look at things - the way we always have. In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to look at most everything. An open mind allows for a multitude of perspectives from which to choose in any given moment. That suppleness of mind allows for true choice, and opens us to a whole new realm of possibility.”
― Jeffrey R. Anderson, The Nature of Things - Navigating Everyday Life with Grace

“Still, if I don't believe in the possibility, I might go mad from fear.”
― Libbie Hawker, Daughter of Sand and Stone

“Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.”
― Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality