Quotes about possible
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Oscar Wilde photo
Ayn Rand photo

“I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”

Variant: Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
Source: Anthem

Cassandra Clare photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: Education and the Social Order

Terry Pratchett photo
Barack Obama photo

“Change is never easy, but always possible.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
Terry Pratchett photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Anne Rice photo
Thomas Moore photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Ralph Ellison photo

“…the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.”

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 7.

Terry Pratchett photo
Fernando Pessoa photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Walker Percy photo

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Variant: What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Source: The Moviegoer (1961)
Context: To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

“Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Albert Einstein photo

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
C.G. Jung photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

“A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.”

Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.
4.464
Original German: Die Wahrheit der Tautologie ist gewiss, des Satzes möglich, der Kontradiktion unmöglich
Source: 1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

V.S. Naipaul photo
Hayao Miyazaki photo
Lynn Margulis photo

“Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before ten or twenty thousand years ago, life hit a peek of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time

B.F. Skinner photo
Dilgo Khyentse photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Not everything is about you," Clary said furiously.
"Possibly," Jace said, "but you do have to admit that the majority of things are.”

Variant: Not everything, Jace, is," Clary said furiously.

"Possibly," Jace said, "but you have to admit that the majority of things are.
Source: City of Glass

Oscar Wilde photo
Hannah Arendt photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Joseph Hall photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Barack Obama photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Smedley D. Butler photo
Steven Weinberg photo

“One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)

Douglas Adams photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Marcus Aurelius photo
Teresa of Ávila photo
John Lennon photo

“The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Interview for KFRC RKO Radio (8 December 1980)

Terry Pratchett photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Angelina Jolie photo

“Anything that feels good couldn't possibly be bad.”

Angelina Jolie (1975) American actress, film director, and screenwriter
Jacques Derrida photo
Edward Gorey photo

“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator

Source: Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

George Santayana photo
Steve Martin photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
George Washington photo
Sylvia Plath photo

“Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Mark Twain photo

“…I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 115

Monica Ali photo
Corrie ten Boom photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Stephen King photo

“It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: Wolves of the Calla

Oscar Wilde photo
George Burns photo
Adrienne Rich photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Recollection by Gilbert J. Greene, quoted in The Speaking Oak (1902) by Ferdinand C. Iglehart and Latest Light on Abraham Lincoln (1917) by Ervin S. Chapman
Posthumous attributions

Bertrand Russell photo
Groucho Marx photo
William Shakespeare photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
Jonathan Maberry photo
Phil Collins photo
Fernando Pessoa photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Mark Twain photo

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
Misquoted as "Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." by Laurence J. Peter in "Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time", among many others.
Following the Equator (1897)
Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Haruki Murakami photo
Christopher Paolini photo
Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo
Karen Blixen photo
Matt Haig photo

“An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: A Boy Called Christmas

Terry Pratchett photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Oscar Wilde photo

“Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.”

Lord Goring, Act III.
Variant: The only possible society is oneself.
Source: An Ideal Husband (1895)

Robert Browning photo

“Our aspirations are our possibilities.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era
Christopher Paolini photo
Whoopi Goldberg photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Christopher Paolini photo
Pablo Picasso photo

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer