Quotes About Impossibility

It occurred to him that what he had taken for a perfect impossibility—that he had not lived his life as one should—might in fact be the truth. It occurred to him that those scarcely detected impulses to struggle against what the people of highest social rank considered good, those feeble tendencies that he barely noticed and immediately suppressed, might in fact be what was real, and everything else what was false.

The General belonged to the learned type of military men who believed that liberal and humane views can be reconciled with their profession. But being by nature a kind and intelligent man, he soon felt the impossibility of such a reconciliation.

In real life humans didn't slay giants, because it was impossible. It would be like killing an apartment building with your bare hands.

It is obvious that he has set himself an impossible task; slow and gradual transformations are possible, they even happen quite frequently, but they do not lead us to a new life; they only take us from one old life to another old life. The new life always makes itself known abruptly, without any approach or preparation, and it keeps its strange enigmatical character in the midst of events whose course has been determined by the old laws.

But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.

Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that?

Well, that's it. I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically...impossible. Good thing, too, reply Landon. It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't.

Europe's} is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the impossibility of their realization. (The US'} is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence.

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can extend ad-infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals).

I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.

Miracle Max: Have fun stormin' da castle. Valerie: Think it'll work? Miracle Max: It would take a miracle.

They call it a reunion for a reason. It's called bringing the original members back to what it was. So there's a lot of these things that they call reunions that aren't really reunions. They've got one dude from the band floating around in them, you know. That's not a true reunion. With Pantera, it'll never be possible.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

If you can, you can then take risks without "violating" this carefully tended structure of meaning. You can put all of your life at stake, in the service of whatever "designated impossibility" is important to you, because you know all of your life, to date, is meaningless.

It was impossible to imagine the aloof, dignified, powerful High Lord living as, of all things, a slave .

No human has ever killed a dragon," his mother pointed out. "It's not possible. You might as well walk into their cave and offer to be their lunch.

how could any young man merely sit back and wait for divine justice to take its course? It was asking the impossible.

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.

If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise? Of course it is, she replied calmly. How did you reach that conclusion? Beldin demanded. Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear. But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty? Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?