Possibility Quotes - Page 12

• There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Life, Attitude, Men

  Viktor E. Frankl (2006). “Man's Search for Meaning”, p.73, Beacon Press

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• One of the significant facts about the moment of birth is that it is an unconscious moment. No one ever knows when he is being born that the event is actually taking place, and sometimes we don't find out about it until quite a long time afterward. Sometimes, we never do really find out that we have been born. So frequently, we don't know why we were born; we don't know where we came from; we don't know what the purpose of life is; nor do we understand the possibilities of our godly destiny.

  Sterling W Sill

  Life, Godly, Destiny

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• There is a silence that matches our best possibilities when we have learned to listen to others. We can master the art of being quiet in order to be able to hear clearly what others are saying. . . . We need to cut off the garbled static of our own preoccupations to give to people who want our quiet attention.

  Eugene Kennedy

  Art, Cutting, Order

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• ...I have great hopes for the possibility of a dynamic universalism that respects all our people.

  Anthony Braxton

  Music, People, Universalism

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• Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation.

  Derek Bailey

  Music, Degrees, Intimacy

  Derek Bailey (1992). “Improvisation: its nature and practice in music”

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• So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

  Tony Hoagland

  Beautiful, Running, Hurt

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• When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.

  George Grosz

  Morning, Successful, Knowing

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• Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God.

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Design, Benevolent

  "Defeating Darwinism in Our Culture" panel discussion, National Religious Broadcasters meeting, Anaheim, February 06, 2000. "Why Darwin Matters". Book by Michael Shermer, 2006.

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• The mere possibility provides no warrant for denying what I clearly grasp.

  William Lane Craig

  Mere, Warrants

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• I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling

  Fanny Burney

  Character, Wish, Behaviour

  "The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney", vol. 1, p. 8, 1768.

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• Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases - which does not seem very likely.

  Louis Pasteur

  Light, Years, Humanity

  "Louis Pasteur: The man and his theories" by Hilaire Cuny, translated by P. Evans. London: The Scientific Book Club, 1965.

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• Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.231, Macmillan

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• Our ascent, of course, does not end the possibility for new accomplishments on El Capitan. The day will probably come when this climb will be done in five days, perhaps less; and a younger generation will make a new route on the west face.

  Royal Robbins

  Climbing, Accomplishment, Doe

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• Nature is infinitely creative. It is always producing the possibility of new beginnings.

  Marianne Williamson

  Inspirational, New Beginnings, Creative

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• Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

  Kate DiCamillo

  Writing, Drawing, Childhood

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• Possibilities are completely different. When you ask 'what is possible?' you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not 'what are my options?' but 'What is possible?'

  Nicholas Lore

  Imagination, Different, Mediocre

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• Everyone has options. They are a fixed set of predetermined scenarios, points of view, perceived limitations that already reside in your data bank. If you depend on your options to formulate your future, that future will be no more than a rearrangement of your past. Then he says, “Possibilities are completely different. When you ask ‘what is possible?’ you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not ‘what are my options?’ but ‘What is possible?’

  Nicholas Lore

  Past, Views, Data

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• Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

  Paul Gauguin

  Law, Weakness, Anomalies

  Paul Gauguin (1987). “Gauguin: a retrospective”, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates

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• At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.

  Camille Pissarro

  Ideas, Unity, Fifty

  "Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art". Book by David W. Galenson, p. 84, June 30, 2009.

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• Without the possibility of death,
  adventure is not possible.

  Reinhold Messner

  Adventure

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• I am convinced that most companies don't maximize their barter possibilities. Instead of aggressively reducing costs by trading their services with those of their suppliers, they seem content to pay top dollar for everything.

  Mark McCormack

  Business, Pay, Dollars

  Mark H. McCormack (1990). “What They Still Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School”, Bantam

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• I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

  Aldous Huxley

  Business, Writing, Mean

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• Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

  Adam Gopnik

  Magic, Mind, Mazes

  "The real work" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. March 17, 2008.

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• There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There's no single answer - not even a single starting point. Even the 'teachers' ... don't offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Teacher, Simple, Thinking

  Frances Moore Lappé, Paul Martin Du Bois (1994). “The quickening of America: rebuilding our nation, remaking our lives”, Jossey-Bass

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• No "natural" resource is more precious and to be used more wisely than time. These mortal moments matter more than we know. There are no idle hours; there are only idle people. In true righteousness there is serenity, but there is an array of reminders that the "sacred present" is packed with possibilities which are slipping by us, which are going away from us each moment.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  People, Serenity, Balance

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