Improbable Quotes

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

  James Whistler

  Class, Two, Nurse

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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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• 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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• The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.

  Douglas Adams

  Integrity, Impossible, Kind

  Douglas Adams (2014). “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.130, Simon and Schuster

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Writing, Thinking, Different

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

  Meryl Streep

  Space, Earth, Suspended

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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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• 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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• 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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• [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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• 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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• 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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