Quotes About Improbability

But that outcome looked more and more unlikely.

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

si realmente podemos esperar toda la eternidad, hasta las cosas más improbables acabarán sucediendo.

Coincidence has been cancelled, honey," Susannah said. "What we're living in these days is more like the Charles Dickens version of reality.

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.

When you're trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.

it is probable that improbable things will happen. Granted this, one might argue that what is improbable is probable.

Improbability, as described here, is a relative notion, not an absolute one; when we say an outcome is improbable, we are always saying, explicitly or not, that it is improbable under some set of hypotheses we've made about the underling mechanisms of the world.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

When people run out of probable things to do, they do improbable things.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

Unlikely things are often true . . .

The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.

How much evidence would it take to convince us that something we consider improbable has actually happened? When does a hypothesis cross the line from impossibility to improbability and even to probability or virtual certainty?

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.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet

I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences

Il est à peine besoin de dire que beaucoup de choses que la science moderne prend pour des fantaisies sont — ou étaient — des réalités. Il est curieux de constater que certains procédés d'une science qui veut être « exacte » sont foncièrement illogiques : par exemple, prendre une improbabilité pour une impossibilité, ou conclure à l'inexistence d'une chose dont on ne possède pas de preuves positives.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Me da la sensación —dijo—, de que en la vida humana la casualidad no se rige por el cálculo de probabilidades. Quiero decir con esto que nos ocurren muchas cosas casuales tan improbables que no podemos justificarlas matemáticamente.