Impossibility Quotes - Page 8

• Long may Louis de Broglie continue to inspire those who suspect that what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.

  John Stewart Bell

  Inspiration, Long, Imagination

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• An undevout poet is an impossibility.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Poetry, Poet

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1908). “Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets”

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• On the path to love, impossibilities are resolved by turning non-love into love.

  Deepak Chopra

  Love, Marriage, Spiritual

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• Have you ever been torn between two impossibilities and knew in your heart that no matter which way you went or which path you chose that you were doomed to unhappiness?

  Maya Banks

  Heart, Two, Matter

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• I had no idea, however, that in Pennsylvania, the cradle of toleration and freedom of religion, it [fanaticism] could have arisen to the height you describe. This must be owing to the growth of Presbyterianism. The blasphemy of the five points of Calvin, and the impossibility of defending them, render their advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable, and prone to denunciation.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Ideas, Growth

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson”, p.358

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• She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.

  Anais Nin

  Heart, Two, Desire

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• The first [quality] to be named must always be the power of attention, of giving one's whole mind to the patient without the interposition of anything of oneself. It sounds simple but only the very greatest doctors ever fully attain it. ... The second thing to be striven for is intuition. This sounds an impossibility, for who can control that small quiet monitor? But intuition is only interference from experience stored and not actively recalled. ... The last aptitude I shall mention that must be attained by the good physician is that of handling the sick man's mind.

  Wilfred Trotter

  Science, Simple, Greatness

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• The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for 
the existence of God.

  Charles Darwin

  Self, Religion, Atheism

  Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin (1958). “Autobiography and Selected Letters”, p.61, Courier Corporation

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• But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.

  Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet

  Hard Work, Thinking, Reason

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• It's important to understand that an atheist is someone who believes the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything. Some fundamental atheists will deny this by trying to redefine 'nothing' as being 'something,' because such a thought makes them look like a fool, which is precisely what the Bible says that they are

  Ray Comfort

  Atheist, Believe, Important

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• Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.

  Alain Badiou

  War, Risk

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• One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change.

  Diane Ravitch

  Change, Reform, Irony

  Diane Ravitch (1974). “The great school wars, New York City, 1805-1973: a history of the public schools as battlefield of social change”

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• Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.

  Andrew Sean Greer

  Memories, Finding Yourself, Path

  Andrew Sean Greer (2007). “The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel”, p.65, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom

  Leo Buscaglia

  Lying, Love Is, Ebb And Flow

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• The man of true genius never lives before his time, he never undertakes impossibilities, and always embarks on his enterprise at the suitable place and period. Though he may catch a glimpse of the coming light as it gilds the mountain top long before it reaches the eyes of his contemporaries, and he may hazard a prediction as to the future, he acts with the present.

  Joseph Henry

  Life, Future, Eye

  Joseph Henry (1886). “Scientific Writings”

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• The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white... the Negros will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.

  Carter G. Woodson

  White, Receiving, Way

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• First, In showing in how to avoid attempting impossibilities. Second, In securing us from important mistakes in attempting what is, in itself possible, by means either inadequate or actually opposed to the end in view. Thirdly, In enabling us to accomplish our ends in the easiest, shortest, most economical, and most effectual manner. Fourth, In inducing us to attempt, and enabling us to accomplish, object which, but for such knowledge, we should never have thought of understanding.
  On the ways that a knowledge of the order of nature can be of use.

  John Herschel

  Mistake, Knowledge, Mean

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• Atheistic evolutionists believe that nothing created everything - a scientific impossibility. It couldn't happen. So they redefine the word 'nothing' to mean 'something,' so that in their unthinking minds, they can justify their foolishness.

  Ray Comfort

  Believe, Mean, Mind

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• I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

  Sinclair Lewis

  Inspiration, Impossible, Week

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• The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

  Sigmund Freud

  Dream, Influence, Contradiction

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• Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

  Elie Wiesel

  Past, My Past

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• A precondition for being a science fiction writer other than an interest in the future is that, an interest - at least an understanding of science, not necessarily a science degree but you must have a feeling for the science and its possibilities and its impossibilities, otherwise you're writing fantasy. Now, fantasy is also fine, but there is a distinction, although no one's ever been able to say just where the dividing lines come.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Writing, Understanding, Feelings

  Source: www.salon.com

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• But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Lying, Writing

  William Carlos Williams (1920). “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”

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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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• From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

  Edmund Wilson

  Real, Europe, Cities

  Edmund Wilson (1966). “Europe without Baedeker: sketches among the ruins of Italy, Greece and England, together with, Notes from a European diary, 1963-1964”, Vintage

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