Quotes About Improbability

Choose: of all wars, the one that will not take place. Of all possibilities, the least probable. Of all concepts, the most inconceivable. Of all meditations, the most untimely. Of all possible enemies, the one beneath all suspicion.

What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?

Might human sapience be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said—"Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the fifty billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.

It's the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.

Alf Todd, said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle.

Could be. Unlikely, but

All of this is really impossible, in the way that it is really impossible that monkeys should by chance type out a copy of Hamlet.

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story: plausibility disappears at the same time as friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness. But on the other hand, everything improbable, everything which nobody would ever believe in a cafe, comes your way.

I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis.

The chances of you winning are the same as the chances of HELL freezing over.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable. He had seen that we don't come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another.

Improbability is no barrier to gossip.

This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent;

Those were long odds. Really, really long odds. Ridiculously long odds, really. When you have to measure them in astronomical units, it probably isn't a good bet.

The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.

That's what got her, of course. That everyone thought it so unbelievable that she could possibly attract a man like him. It shouldn't upset her because it was true. She couldn't. Not in this world, in this lifetime. Yet she didn't appreciated everyone else acting as if they were the most improbable twosome since Quasimodo hit on Esmeralda.

It's the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

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

For an instant Stile was daunted by the improbability of it all: a man, a cyborg, a robot, an animalhead, and a wooden golem, all riding unicorns through a battlefield strewn with goblins and dragons, pursuing an invaluable ball of power-rock that rolled along a channel cleared by plastic explosive. What a mishmash!

It was not very likely, of course, but then all kinds of things are possible, after all.

This is the time and place to be alive: when the daily furniture of our lives stirs, when the improbable arrives. Pots and pans bang together in celebration, clang past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices, fly by the ceiling fan. No one is looking for the door. In all this excitement I'm wondering where I've left my feet, and why my hands are outside, clapping.