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Improbable Quotes

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Improbable Quotes

“If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.”

IfsLightWould BeFoundIgnoranceShapesWorshipIntellectualNonsenseAdsNeverthelessPropositionsGalaxyUnlikelyImprobableNeutralityMeticulous
Author:Robert A. Heinlein
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“She gave him a wan smile. "And then you came, Eragon. You and Saphira. After hope had deserted me and I was about to be taken to Galbatorix in Uru'baen, a Rider appeared to rescue me. A rider and a dragon!" "And Morzan's son," he said. "Both of Morzan's sons." "Describe it how you will, it was such an improbable rescue, I occasionally think that I did go mad and that I've imagined everything since.”

ThinkingSaidTakenSonMadDragonsRescueRidersImprobableDesertedEragonRescue MeSaphira
Author:Christopher Paolini
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“Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”

KnowsWorldWayMindMatterEnoughBodyCertainDiesJudgingSmartTragedyMakeupArrangementsMisunderstandingAdaptedCognitiveImprobableOld SayingPerplexity
Author:Steven Pinker
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“The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.”

IdeasFactsFitWorthyConsiderationBentMundaneImprobable
Book:Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
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“I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.”

HumansWellsLittlesBigsSeemsHappensDiesMemoriesExistenceMistakeImagineEmptyBoundsLeavingOneselfSpiteSlipsSooner Or LaterHuman ExistenceImprobableBig Mistake
Book:Whatever: A Novel
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“This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.”

RealDreamPastEnemyAirSlaveryFruitRedemptionParadiseSubtleCosmicExileUnrealImprobableFuture DreamsUprooting
Book:If this is a Man: Remembering Auschwitz
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“I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.”

ThinkingHas BeensBookEnoughSeemsNaturalCommonExistenceWonderSkyWallUnderstoodExtraordinaryIncrediblesBreadPassagesAppreciatedMiraculousImprobableDaily BreadOur Daily Bread
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
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“Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him--she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.”

DoeHas BeensSeemsMightAgeYoungGirlRecordsPiecesSpecialTypeFemaleIdealsLuckNotesParksSpiteExceptionAfternoonHesitationEmbodimentImprobableFixationSmall PiecesQualms
Book:Collected Novels Volume Four
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“People can do great things. However, there are somethings they just can't do. I, for instance, have not been able to transform myself into a Popsicle, despite years of effort. I could, however, make myself insane, if I wished. (Though if I achieved the second, I might be able to make myself think I'd achieved the first....) Anyway, if there's a lesson to be learned, it's this: great success often depends on being able to distinguish between the impossible and the improbable. Or, in easier terms, distinguishing between Popsicles and insanity. Any questions?”

PeopleIfsThinkingYearsFirstsMightAbleTermCan DoEffortImpossibleDependsEasierLessonsGreat ThingsInsaneDespiteInstanceInsanityGreat SuccessImprobableLessons To Be LearnedPopsicles
Book:Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians
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“He splayed a hand out over the photographs, trembling fingers not quite touching the shiny surface, and then he turned and leaned toward me, slowly, with the improbable grace of a tall tree falling. He buried his face in my shoulder and went very quietly and thoroughly to pieces.”

HandsFacesFallGracePiecesTreeFingersPhotographSurfaceShouldersTallTouchingBuriedTremblingImprobableTall Trees
Book:The Outlander Series 8-Book Bundle: Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, An Echo in the Bone, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
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“If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise--if regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.”

IfsFirstsHas BeensSaidTwoMightGivenInterestingObjectsSourceGratitudeRegardMethodFoundationIllAffectionTrialsEsteemInterviewsLatterComparisonAttachmentSentimentsDefenceUnnaturalUnreasonableImprobablePartiality
Book:Pride and Prejudice
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“Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.”

WellsSaidHandsTogetherPleasureWonderCreaturesRateClubsPeterDucksVansImprobableExtendingSwollenAugustusPlatypusPeter Van Houten
Book:The Fault in Our Stars
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“Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.”

TruthAnswersImpossibleRemainsHolmesImprobable
Book:Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
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“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.”

KindImpossibleIntegrityInstinctRationalExplanationRespecting OthersImprobable
Book:The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
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“In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.”

PeopleGivingBelieveReasonAgeEarthScienceBeliefModernMiddlePercentEvidenceExtraordinaryRoundsObviousConvincedSensesFlatsMiddle AgesOutrageousHeartlessImprobableModern ScienceQuaint
Author:George Bernard Shaw
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“The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock - full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat - like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I took such months to get.”

MenMindFirstsBelieveRememberGirlFatherLike YouMonthsDaughterThreatShoesTerrorDragonsHeelsRescueBentScratchesSeekersBicycleImprobableBest FatherDaughter To FatherFunny FatherFunny Happy Fathers DayQualmsFather Daughter LoveQualms About
Book:Wonders and surprises: a collection of poems
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“It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.”

IfsWayLooksKindSaidFeelingsSpiritualSpiritualityWonderOne ThingSpecialHigherCreaturesEnlightenmentUniversalIntenseUsualAmazedImprobableGiraffeOdditiesRhinoceros
Book:The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
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“Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportional to its size, and all of them together forming a system of vallies, communicating with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join the principal valley on too high or too low a level; a circumstance which would be infinitely improbable if each of these vallies were not the work of the stream that flows in it.”

IfsWould BeRunningTogetherScienceLevelsNiceHard WorkCircumstancesLowsFlowRiversSizeCommunicateVarietyStreamsBranchesFedsValleysPrincipalAdjustmentImprobableTrunks
Author:John Playfair
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“As one studies these preconditions, one becomes saddened by the ease with which human potentiality can be destroyed or repressed, so that a fully-human person can seem like a miracle, so improbable a happening as to be awe-inspiring. And simultaneously one is heartened by the fact that self-actualizing persons do in fact exist, that they are therefore possible, that the gauntlet of dangers can be run, that the finish line can be crossed.”

HumansPersonsSelfFactsSeemsRunningMotivationLinesStudyDangerPersonalityHappeningsMiracleDestroyedEaseAweImprobableRepressedHuman PotentialFinish LineSaddenedAwe InspiringGauntlet
Author:Abraham Maslow
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“Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.”

IfsNeedsYearsDoeSaidUseReligionUniverseChanceWonderMillionsAtheismTypeAtheistPsychologicalExplanationSatLogicalMonkeysTypewritersImprobableYear One
Book:Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics
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“I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.”

PeopleWantI CanReasonEnoughFeelingsBigsDifficultSimpleKnownStudyOne ThingAtheismPositionEvolutionAddComplexesPositive AtheismDisappearSignificanceSuspectsAgnosticImprobableBiologistPushed Away
Author:Richard Dawkins
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