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1 " The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. "
― Douglas Adams , The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Dirk Gently, #2)
2 " The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers...of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good...They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found...This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all other communities. "
― Allan Bloom , The Closing of the American Mind
3 " Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: " I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, " for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." " But," says Man, " The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." " Oh dear," says God, " I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic." Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir
7 " 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. "
― , Ms. Match (The Wrong Bed #49)
8 " I am, and always will be, the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes, and the dreamer of improbable dreams. "
9 " I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings. "
― Mary Oliver , Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
10 " The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist. "
― Ruth Stone , In the Next Galaxy
11 " Optimists enrich the present, enhance the future,challenge the improbable and attain the impossible "
― William Arthur Ward
12 " Our difference are beautiful yet sometimes connection requires us to focus on our similarities, like the fact that we are all trying, all struggling, all wanting to be seen and to be loved. Perhaps if we start there, with this basic understanding of what it means to be alive, we will grow in our connection to one another and learn to love the beautiful difference that embody our improbable human reality. "
― Scott Stabile
13 " Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands. "
― Stanisław Lem , Solaris
14 " Our differences are beautiful, yet sometimes connection requires us to focus on our similarities, like the fact that we are all trying, all struggling, all wanting to be seen and to be loved. Perhaps if we start there, with this basic understanding of what it means to be alive, we will grow in our connection to one another and learn to love the beautiful differences that embody our improbable human reality. "
15 " Approaching the forest from the west was no army, but a delegation of Grailsundanian master surgeons on their way to an appendix conference . . . But that isn't the craziest part of the story - oh, no, my boy, for approaching from the east was a party of itinerant watchmakers bound for the pocket-watch fair at Wimbleton . . . But not even that is the craziest part of the story! For apporaching from the south were over a hundred armourers and locksmiths on their way to Florinth, where some power-hungry prince had commissioned them to build a monstrous war machine . . . Well, that would be enough crazy coincedences for an averagely crazy story but the battle of Nurn Forest involved the most improbable coincedences in the history of Zamonia. For entering the forest, this time from the north came a delegation of alchemists. "
― Walter Moers , Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures (Zamonia, #3)
16 " In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. "
17 " ... the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world (...) where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive. "
― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion
18 " What remains to us here, behind the Yser, is not much more than a strip of land almost impossible to defend; a few rain-soaked trenches around razed villages; roads blown to smithereens, unusable by any vehicle; a creaky old horse cart we haul around ourselves, loaded with crates of damp ammunition that are constantly on the verge of sliding into a canal, forcing us to slog like madmen for every ten yards of progress as we stifle our warning cries; the snarling officers in the larger dug-outs, walled off with boards, where the privates have to bail water every day and brush the perpetual muck off their superiors’ boots; the endless crouching as we walk the trenches, grimy and smelly; our louse-ridden uniforms; our arseholes burning with irritation because we have no clean water for washing them after our regular attacks of diarrhoea; our stomach cramps as we crawl over heavy clods of earth like trolls in some gruesome fairy tale; the evening sun slanting down over the barren expanse; infected fingers torn by barbed wire; the startling memory of another, improbable life, when a thrush bursts into song in a mulberry bush or a spring breeze carries the smell of grassy fields from far behind the front line, and we throw ourselves flat on our bellies again as howitzers open fire out of nowhere, the crusts of bread in our hands falling into the sludge at the boot-mashed bottom of the stinking trench. "
― Stefan Hertmans , War and Turpentine
19 " in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace. "
― Cormac McCarthy , Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy, #3)
20 " 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. "
― Primo Levi , If This Is a Man • The Truce
