Quotes About Possibility

It had always seemed to her that what people thought of as possible only revealed the borders of their own fragment of eternity. Two hundred years earlier, flight had been unimaginable, germs were undreamed of, and doctors treated the sick by bleeding them, sometimes to death. For Hallie, the only certainty was that the world and their knowledge of it would keep changing, which made the thing denoted by the word "impossible" itself an impossibility.

But extraordinary life is possible—find it. There's a better, higher, eternal life that can begin during this earthly life. It is an awesome life found in Christ! And we can live it now!

A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.

Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

But what resounds most deeply in the life of Copernicus is the journey that made knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the journey successful.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility.

We look on childhood and youth as those "times of life" rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise: *everything* that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.

To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself. There

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.

We can become inspired to shape a higher, more ideal future, and when we do, miracles happen.

In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.

There are a thousand paths into the future, forks after forks in the road ahead. Who knows, if one road closes, maybe another opens in another universe . . . and your soul, your consciousness, leaps over to continue that journey ever forward, always finding the right path." Still

There are a thousand paths into the future, forks after forks in the road ahead. Who knows, if one road closes, maybe another opens in another universe . . . and your soul, your consciousness, leaps over to continue that journey ever forward, always finding the right path.

Whatever ought to be, can be.

The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what is was; I suppose we never do.

What if - is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions-? Where does it say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe soemtimes-the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or spin it another way, soemtiems you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did.

Does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

Mack turned to the real reason for dropping by—to sound out Franklin on the possibility of running for an Assembly seat from the district that included Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, the village where Roosevelt had grown up and where his mother still lived.