Quotes About Possibility

Kierkegaard once said, "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.

Commitmentphobics tend to resist being defined by a job or a career, even when they are successful. An example of this is the lawyer/writer who teaches and plays in a jazz band weekends. The bottom line is that they always want to feel that the possibility exists that they can get out from any job situation, should they want to. Some want to fairly often.

Storytellers need their stories to resonate with their listeners. So when you envision a goal and describe the action needed to reach that goal, you transform your vision into a portrayal that depicts what's truly possible to move people to action. While you need enough material (data and reasoned analysis) to flesh out the tale, you don't want to bombard people with charts and tables.

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

The same pattern appears again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.

The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet.

Had Hurley, Chen, and Karim tried to execute the exact same idea for YouTube ten years earlier, in 1995, it would have been a spectacular flop, because a site for sharing video was not within the adjacent possible of the early Web.

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.

The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

Being wrong on its own doesn't unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

This is a very important point. Flow carries within it delicious possibility. In the state, we are aligned with our core passion and, because of flow's incredible impact on performance, expressing that passion to our utmost. Under normal conditions (playing chess, writing a report), this is empowering.

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go. — E. E. CUMMINGS

Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.

Perhaps you will live along some distant day into the answer

Well, for starters, the obvious: we all seem to agree genius begins with feats of mental greatness. The thinking needs to be novel, so the results need to be beyond what most can envision. As it takes courage to push past the confines of culture, the thinking must also be brave. Because an athlete's canvas is nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible for the human body.

Provided the right environment and the proper encouragement, it meant that everyone had a shot at perfection.

When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It's the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?

Most of us arrive in our fifties feeling that the cage has gotten smaller. What's actually shrunk is our mindset. We're in a prison of our own making. Once we discover we can keep on learning later in life, that mindset shifts. The cage vanishes. This changes everything.

There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical.

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge; but that's the problem.

Why should the laws of nature have allowed exactly one physically possible way of satisfying a human desire, no more and no less?

We're all doing what we love. It's how we express ourselves - operating in a space where you don't know if something is possible or not.