Impossibility Quotes - Page 11

• The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

  Marquis de Sade

  Men, Anguish, Knows

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• Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

  William Goldman

  Writing, Ideas, Dancing

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• If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you can feel good. You would free yourself of all of that cumbersome impossibility of needing to control the world, or control your mate, or control your child. You are the only one who creates your reality. For no one else can think for you, no one else can do it. It is only you, every bit of it you.

  Esther Hicks

  Children, Reality, Thinking

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• Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant--the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past--imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world--despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb--a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture.

  Hakim Bey

  Memories, Regret, Past

  Hakim Bey (2003). “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, p.34, Autonomedia

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• Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.

  Jeremy Collier

  Hope, Heart, Men

  Jeremy Collier (1732). “Essays upon several moral subjects”

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• We have a God who delights in impossibilities.

  Billy Sunday

  God, Christian, Missionary

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• My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

  Antony Flew

  Believe, Thinking, Dna

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• There is not a point that needs to be dwelt upon more earnestly, repeated more frequently, or established more firmly in the minds of all than the impossibility of fallen man meriting anything by his own best good works. Salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

  Ellen G. White

  Jesus, Men, Mind

  Ellen G. White (2003). “Faith and Works”, p.19, Review and Herald Pub Assoc

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• Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

  Adam Gopnik

  Accomplishment, Adults, Relief

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• It is difficult to put into words what I suffered-the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold through my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying. Shakespeare himself never described this torture; but he counts it, in Hamlet, among the terrible of all the evils of existence. I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left to me-to suffer.

  Hector Berlioz

  Depression, Running, Heart

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• Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can do all things.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Love, Believe, Loving Someone

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• Without risk, faith is an impossibility.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Risk, Trying

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• Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

  Saul Bellow

  Taken, Keys, People

  Saul Bellow (2010). “Saul Bellow: Letters”, p.422, Penguin

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• Unsatisfied desire is the characteristic feature of human life. That is the common fact out of which both pessimism and optimism are constructed. Dwell on the impossibility of ever getting a state of complete and permanent satisfaction with what you have, and you become a pessimist. Dwell on the opportunity for endless growth and conquest which this same fact makes possible, and you become an optimist.

  William DeWitt Hyde

  Opportunity, Optimism, Growth

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• They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.

  James Frey

  Dream, Reality

  James Frey (2009). “Bright Shiny Morning”, p.2, Harper Collins

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• ...If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise?" "Of course it is," she replied calmly. "How did you reach that conclusion?" Beldin demanded. "Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear." "But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty?" "Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?

  David Eddings

  Uncles, Animal, Talking

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• Without compassion, true gratitude is an impossibility. If we are to feel gratitude towards another for their deeds, then we must have compassion for the suffering and self-sacrifice which they endured in carrying out those deeds. If their actions were free of suffering or sacrifice, then are they truly deserving of gratitude?

  Derek R. Audette

  Life, Gratitude, Sacrifice

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• A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

  Cynthia Ozick

  Cousin, Uncles, Book

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• Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.

  Laurie R. King

  Fire, Fire Of Love, Thrown

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• A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

  Henri Poincare

  Independent, Science, Reality

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• Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.

  Michael Chabon

  Stories, World, Stuff

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• When faith lays hold, impossibilities must yield.

  Smith Wigglesworth

  Yield, Lays

  Smith Wigglesworth (2013). “Smith Wigglesworth on Manifesting the Divine Nature: Abiding in Power Every Day of the Year”, p.215, Destiny Image Publishers

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• This is the best day in the history of the world, even though yesterday that seemed an impossibility.

  Jack Kent Cooke

  Attitude, Yesterday, World

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• When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem

  Ernest Becker

  Religious, Real, Men

  Ernest Becker (1997). “The Denial of Death”, p.166, Simon and Schuster

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• The condition for a miracle is difficulty, however the condition for a great miracle is not difficulty, but impossibility.

  Angus Buchan

  Miracle, Potatoes, Difficulty

  "Fictional character: Angus Buchan". Faith Like Potatoes, www.imdb.com. 2006.

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