“Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.”

— Ambrose Bierce , book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

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Ambrose Bierce 204

American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabu… 1842–1914

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Some Lines from Whitman”, p. 119
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“Because truths of different kinds exhibit the characteristics of incommensurability (their difference is such that they cannot be measured by a single standard or reduced to members of one series) and incompossibility (their difference is such that they cannot co-exist within the same system), such openness introduces both multiplicity and contradiction, and the creature in question stands “divided against himself.””

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), pp. 9-10

“In the case of the cosmos, […] even if we don’t understand how it came about, it’s not helpful to postulate a creator, because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation - and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin of the universe came into being - how matter and energy, how one or two physical constants came into existence - although it’s difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a God comes into existence - difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence, and even more difficult to think of - how a Christian God, who actually cares about things like sin and gets Himself born of a virgin.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins vs. John Lennox, 21/10/2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UIbd0eLxw&t=10m38s
"Has Science Buried God?" Debate (2008)

“We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.”

Robert James Waller (1939–2017) American writer

“A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Greeks and Us", p. 15
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

“I'd have to be really quick
to describe clouds —
a split second's enough
for them to start being something else.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Clouds"
Poems New and Collected (1998), New Poems 1993 - 97
Context: I'd have to be really quick
to describe clouds —
a split second's enough
for them to start being something else. Their trademark:
they don't repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

“I dedicate this book to the man who inspired it — to the man who of all men past and present that I have known has the most exalted moral nature — to Walt Whitman.”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

Dedication
Man's Moral Nature (1879)

“I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i. e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter (12 January 1936); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“When mercy was created, mercy existed.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
Context: The creative faculty, the god-power, is not used here with anything less than literalness. When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed, as surely as the paintings of Botticelli or the concerti of Vivaldi exist. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as 'pouring into us' from elsewhere. Thus, we do not know our own godhood and we are perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but they can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee. And when we as a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, invented original sin and other horrors of that sort, and made us even more 'dependent' upon them.

“Know that the difficulties which lead to confusion in the question what is the purpose of the Universe or of any of its parts, arise from two causes: first, man has an erroneous idea of himself, and believes that the whole world exists only for his sake; secondly, he is ignorant both about the nature of the sublunary world, and about the Creator's intention to give existence to all beings whose existence is possible, because existence is undoubtedly good.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

“Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.”

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Ambrose Bierce 204

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