Improbable Quotes

• The world is divided into two classes - invalids and nurses.

  James Whistler

  Class, Two, Nurse

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• One should always be a little improbable.

  Oscar Wilde

  Littles, Consciousness, Should

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Miscellanies”, p.173, Oscar Wilde

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• Anything you want to do is possible; fear is not meant to prevent but to motivate your heart into the life you naturally think is improbable.

  Craig Stone

  Fear, Heart, Thinking

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• We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.

  J. William Fulbright

  Change, Thinking, World

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• The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

  James Surowiecki

  Important, Groupthink, Dissent

  James Surowiecki (2005). “The Wisdom of Crowds”, p.37, Anchor

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• That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.

  Aristotle

  Impossible

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• With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

  Aristotle

  Art, Requirements, Impossible

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• As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

  Al Gore

  Inspirational, Confusing, Everyday

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• Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

  Oscar Wilde

  Believe, Men, Religion

  Epigrams: Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young Sebastian Melmoth

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• Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simple, Difficult, Science And Religion

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• The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

  Al Gore

  Threatening Us, Climate, Catastrophe

  Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, delivered 10 December 2007, Oslo, Norway

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• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Faith, Freedom, Believe

  Prejudices, Third Series ch. 14 (1922)

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• Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Cousin, Successful, Science

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History".

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• If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

  William Shakespeare

  Memorable, Fiction, Stage

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 3, sc. 4, l. [142]

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• The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got to the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.

  Terry Pratchett

  Real, Hints, World

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Feet Of Clay: (Discworld Novel 19)”, p.205, Random House

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• Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

  Luke Salisbury

  Baseball, Art, War

  Luke Salisbury (1990). “The answer is baseball: a book of questions that illuminate the great game”, Vintage Books

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• The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Quirky, Pathways, Evolution

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• I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simple, People, Feelings

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• The part of you that is unhampered by illusion-the illusion of time, the illusion of powerlessness, the illusion of impossibility-i s waiting for you to slow down and open up so that it can speak to your consciousness. In some unguarded moment, you will hear its wildly improbable words and know that they are guiding you home.

  Martha Beck

  Home, Waiting, Down And

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• Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.

  Peter Kreeft

  Atheist, Typewriters, Years

  Peter Kreeft (1988). “Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics”, p.26, Ignatius Press

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• Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.

  George P. Baker

  Farce, Impossible, Treats

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• As one studies these preconditions, one becomes saddened by the ease with which human potentiality can be destroyed or repressed, so that a fully-human person can seem like a miracle, so improbable a happening as to be awe-inspiring. And simultaneously one is heartened by the fact that self-actualizing persons do in fact exist, that they are therefore possible, that the gauntlet of dangers can be run, that the finish line can be crossed.

  Abraham Maslow

  Running, Motivation, Self

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• Just supposing for the sake of the argument that there is a being of such a kind as that He may with any propriety be called "God", it does seem antecedently very improbable that weak and limited creatures of a day, such as we are, should discover Him by our own efforts.... who could be discovered in that way would hardly be worth discovering. I think we ought to stick to that principle rather firmly. I think we ought to be rather sure that we cannot know God unless God has been pleased to reveal Himself to us.

  John Gresham Machen

  Thinking, Effort, May

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• You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.

  Richard Dawkins

  Designer, Stills, Creatures

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• We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

  Richard Dawkins

  Chance, Existence, Living Things

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.51, W. W. Norton & Company

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