Improbable Quotes - Page 6

• A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Hunting, Animal, Facts

  Jose Ortega y Gasset (2007). “Meditations on Hunting”, p.106, Wilderness Adventures Press

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• One can't logically argue that because something highly improbable happens, some occult force had to make it happen that way.

  Gary Sloan

  Religion, Atheism, Way

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• No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Matter, Enough, Made

  Erich Maria Remarque (2013). “The Black Obelisk: A Novel”, p.197, Random House

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• The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.

  Niklas Luhmann

  Art, Art Is, Works Of Art

  Niklas Luhmann (2000). “Art as a Social System”, p.153, Stanford University Press

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• That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.

  Thomas Browne

  Laughed

  Sir Thomas Browne (1835). “Repertorium. A letter to a friend. Christian morals. Certain miscellany tracts. Unpublished papers”, p.359

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• There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Mistake, Science, Opportunity

  "The New Industrial State". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208, 1967.

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• There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

  Meryl Streep

  Space, Earth, Suspended

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• I esteem his understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of his work, where the author studies things of little use or when he builds on the improbable principle of attraction. Writing about Newton's Principia. Huygens had some time earlier indicated he did not believe the theory of universal gravitation, saying it 'appears to me absurd.'

  Christiaan Huygens

  Believe, Writing, Science

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• Once in a while there are things the brain simply refuses to accept as being true because they appear too improbable, too unlikely, too preposterous.

  Walter Abish

  Truth, Brain, Accepting

  Walter Abish (1980). “How German Is It”, p.44, New Directions Publishing

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• [Attributing the origin of life to spontaneous generation.] However improbable we regard this event, it will almost certainly happen at least once.... The time... is of the order of two billion years.... Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

  George Wald

  Science, Origin Of Life, Order

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• It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Light, Evolution

  "Evolution as a Process". Book edited by J. S. Huxley, A. C. Hardy and E. B. Ford, 1954.

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• For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn't beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn't an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.

  Linda Hunt

  Beautiful, Ideas, Actors

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• It is exceedingly improbable that the identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina is the result of a certain habituation, or of the influence of the mind.

  Johannes Peter Muller

  Two, Mind, Action

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• Don’t ever give up. Don’t see the obstacles, just the way around them. For me, of course it looked improbable, but not impossible. So as long as there was a way, I would not be discouraged.

  Evanna Lynch

  Giving Up, Long, Way

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• We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Confused, War, Winter

  Journal entry on December 11, 1941. "The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh". Book by Charles Lindbergh, 1970.

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• It could be argued that all leadership is appreciative leadership. It’s the capacity to see the best in the world around us, in our colleagues, and in the groups we are trying to lead. It’s the capacity to see the most creative and improbable opportunities in the marketplace. It’s the capacity to see with an appreciative eye the true and the good, the better and the possible.

  David Cooperrider

  Eye, Opportunity, Creative

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• Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Men, Track, Heaven

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• I believe that Communism is necessary to the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men's hopes in a way which was essential to the realization of Communism in the future. Regarded as a splendid attempt, without which ultimate success would have been very improbable, Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind.

  Bertrand Russell

  Gratitude, Believe, Men

  Bertrand Russell (1972). “Bolshevism: practice and theory”, Ayer Co Pub

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• And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Tomorrow, Ends, Unpredictable

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007). “We”, p.128, Modern Library

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• For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.

  Amor Towles

  Wind, Promise, Arriving

  Amor Towles (2011). “Rules of Civility: A Novel”, p.229, Penguin

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• A nap is not to be confused with sleeping. We sleep to recharge our bodies. We nap to care for our souls. When we nap, we are resting our eyes while our imaginations soar. Getting ready for the next round. Sorting, sifting, separating the profound from the profane, the possible from the improbable. Rehearsing our acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, our surprise on receiving the MacArthur genius award. This requires a prone position. If we're lucky, we might drift off, but we won't drift far. Just far enough to ransom our creativity from chaos.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Confused, Creativity, Sleep

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• Habit hath so vast a prevalence over the human mind that there is scarce anything too strange or too strong to be asserted of it. The story of the miser who, from long accustoming to cheat others, came at last to cheat himself, and with great delight and triumph picked his own pocket of a guinea to convey to his hoard, is not impossible or improbable.

  Henry Fielding

  Strong, Long, Mind

  Henry Fielding (2012). “Joseph Andrews”, p.186, tredition

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• Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

  Diane Ackerman

  Life, Dream, Crazy

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir”, p.90, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

  Ada Leverson

  Real, Literature, Unexpected

  Ada Leverson (1907). “The Twelfth Hour”

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• Seurat and Signac mixed paintings with the dry and abstract laws of science. This approach, in my opinion, usually strays from the purpose of art in general. Because it means that one cannot expect from an artifact, that is created with mathematical laws, to establish an improbable and irrational relationship between the work and the viewer.

  Guity Novin

  Art, Mean, Law

  Negin magazine, No 77, p. 57, 1971.

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