Impossibility Quotes - Page 12

• If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a good man.

  Ben Jonson

  Men, Office, Good Man

  Ben Jonson (2016). “Volpone”, p.34, Ben Jonson

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• [On alcohol:] Total abstinence is an impossibility and ... it will not do to insist on it as a general practice.

  Queen Victoria

  Drinking, Practice, Alcohol

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• It is impossible, maybe undesirable, to take partisanship out of the political process.

  David Souter

  Political, Impossible, Process

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• It seemed like an impossible task to do full justice to all Luther classics. And yet these landmark artists have done just that. Memorable performances of wonderful songs that ensure Luther's legacy will live on forever.

  Clive Davis

  Song, Memorable, Artist

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• The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Energy, Novelists, Culture

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.65, Macmillan

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• In the midst of the happiness they brought there was always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the impossibility of being at once bound and free. The garden breeds a longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden.

  Dorothy Richardson

  Garden, Shadow, Longing

  Dorothy Miller Richardson (1925). “The Trap”

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• As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.

  Thomas Huxley

  Animal, Men, Brain

  Thomas H. Huxley (2013). “Man's Place in Nature”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerableconcessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Giving Up, Party, Unity

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.248, Oxford Paperbacks

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• There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.

  Florence Nightingale

  Want, Moral, States

  Florence Nightingale (2008). “The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale”

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• Waiting for opportunities in the entertainment industry is an impossibility; they are not coming. You have to make your own.

  Thomas Lennon

  Opportunity, Waiting, Entertainment

  Source: collider.com

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• The war on drugs was an ideology the government came up with, and there never really was a war on drugs. I mean, to stop the importation of drugs into the United States of America is an impossibility.

  George Jung

  War, Mean, Government

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Prayer is an impossibility without a living faith in the presence of God within.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Faith, Prayer, Presence Of God

  Mahatma Gandhi (1967). “The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi”, p.92, Rajpal & Sons

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• Non-co-operation in an angry atmosphere is an impossibility.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Atmosphere, Operations, Angry

  Mahatma Gandhi (1965). “Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi”

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• A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

  Saul Bellow

  Soul, Would Be, Millennials

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.258, Penguin

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• In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

  Albert Camus

  Unity, Demand, Rebellion

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.255, Vintage

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• The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Life, Fiction, Facts

  Jerome K. Jerome “The Selected Work of Jerome K. Jerome”, Library of Alexandria

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• Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.

  Laura Riding

  Long, Giving, May

  "The Promise of Words". London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23, September 07, 1995.

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• God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Struggle, Forgive Me, Feelings

  Leo Tolstoy (1998). “Anna Karenina”, p.760, Oxford Paperbacks

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• When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.

  Anne Lamott

  Faith, Hardship, Wonderful

  Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.33, Penguin

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• I think it's just recognizing that who you are is not any of the stuff that you have. It's not any of the things of the ego. Coming to that awareness is a very hard thing for most people to do - but that's an excuse. If you tell yourself it's too hard, then you won't take it on. But right now, for most people, it's almost an impossibility to do so, because they're so attached to "I am what I have"; "I am what I do"; "I am what my reputation is"; or "I am all of this material stuff."

  Wayne Dyer

  Thinking, People, Ego

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• Hope calculates its scenes for a long and durable life; presses forward to imaginary points of bliss; and grasps at impossibilities; and consequently very often ensnares men into beggary, ruin and dishonor.

  Joseph Addison

  Hope, Men, Long

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1819). “The Spectator”, p.19

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• Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

  John Updike

  Song, Attitude, War

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit at Rest”, p.462, Random House

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• My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

  John Updike

  Father, Fall, Clothes

  John Updike (1963). “The Centaur”, Ballantine Books

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• We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.

  Agnes Repplier

  Travel, Law, Tolerance

  Agnes Repplier (1904). “Compromises”

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• For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Spiritual, Term, Inconsistency

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