Quotes About Improbability

They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately.

When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years.

Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling.

Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You're an improbable person, and so am I.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

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.

We were very much in love—the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.

In an infinite universe, all things are not only possible but, no matter how improbable, certain to exist somewhere at some time.

Secondo me le basi della speranza sono, semplicemente: ignorare cosa succederà e sapere che l'improbabile e l'inimmaginabile accadranno con una certa regolarità. E che la storia non ufficiale nel mondo mostra come l'impegno degli individui e i movimenti popolari possano influenzarla e ottenere qualcosa, anche se non si può prevedere come e se ce la faremo, né quanto tempo ci vorrà.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable. It systematically seizes the minority of random changes that have what it takes to survive, and accumulates them, step by tiny step over unimaginable timescales, until evolution eventually climbs mountains of improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called 'Mount Improbable'.

Maybe the psychological reason for this amazing blindness has something to do with the fact that many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability. J.

If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets.

As I have put it before, if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

El valor de una casualidad es igual a su tasa de improbabilidad.

A dice maker agreed with Scarne: "Once in a blue moon you might find a single store die that classes as a perfect, but the chance of finding two of them in a box of 60 and the chance that they would both be sold to the same purchaser as a pair is so small you can forget about it. It never happened.

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

It is logical to look for a green fowl in a dark room even if you know the chance of finding a green fowl in a dark room is slim.

As verdades inverosímeis prestam-se a isso e a vida está cheia delas, muito mais que o pior romance, nenhum se atreveria a acolher no seu seio todos os acasos e coincidências possíveis, infinitos numa só existência sem falar na soma das que houve e das que ainda decorrem. É sufocante que a realidade não imponha limites.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.