Impossibility Quotes

Impossibility Quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt, Franz Kafka, Stephanie Land, Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet, Graydon Carter, John Wooden and many others.

When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’
The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.
We need to look marginalized people in our community in the eye and listen to their stories of struggle, heartache and impossibility.
But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.
Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet
A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time.
Perfection is impossibility but striving for perfection is not. Do the best you can. That is what counts.
Have you ever been torn between two impossibilities and knew in your heart that no matter which way you went or which path you chose that you were doomed to unhappiness?
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person‘s skin.
The war on drugs was an ideology the government came up with, and there never really was a war on drugs. I mean, to stop the importation of drugs into the United States of America is an impossibility.
All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
Alleged ‘impossibilities’ are opportunities for our capacities to be stretched.
Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done
The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.
You can forget about recovery. There is no recovery – and there’s not going to be any recovery. Recovery is an impossibility.
An infallible way to make your child miserable is to satisfy all his demands. Passion swells by gratification; and the impossibility of satisfying every one of his demands will oblige you to stop short at last, after he has become a little headstrong.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
The green is so narrow that if you over-club, you’ve got an impossible bunker shot. If you’re short, you’re pretty much dead.
Impossible desires are the height of unreason.
Atheistic evolutionists believe that nothing created everything – a scientific impossibility. It couldn’t happen. So they redefine the word ‘nothing’ to mean ‘something,’ so that in their unthinking minds, they can justify their foolishness.
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell’s stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.
Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.
In inventing a model we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities.
When we come to the place of impossibilities, it is the grandest place for us to see the possibilities of God.
Marriage: This terrible insoluble problem of civilisation, which created all the evil. This unnatural state of union in disunion which exacted impossibilities and forced together elements absolutely and inherently antagonistic to each other!
I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?
The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.
Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.
Unless we are able to evolve a spirit of mutual tolerance for diametrically opposite views, non co-operation is an impossibility.
The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.
Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.
There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”
To expect an impossibility is madness.
Roger Federer moves like a whisper and executes like a wrecking ball. It is simply impossible to explain how he does what he does.
Nick Bollettieri
It would be stupid of me to rule out ever being the leader because that’s an impossible thing to rule out. I can’t predict future events.
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
You will free yourself from the cumbersome impossibilities of needing to control the world, your friends, your mate, your children.
There is not a point that needs to be dwelt upon more earnestly, repeated more frequently, or established more firmly in the minds of all than the impossibility of fallen man meriting anything by his own best good works. Salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover‘s most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover’s most venial sin.
One great difference between a wise man and a fool is, the former only wishes for what he may possibly obtain; the latter desires impossibilities.
A mature mind is one who understands the impossibility of knowing the ultimate, and with this understanding there is a new dimension: the dimension of being.
I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
Long may Louis de Broglie continue to inspire those who suspect that what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.
The very impossibility which I find to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.
It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
The secret of Christian quietness is not indifference, but the knowledge that God is my Father, He loves me, and I shall never think of anything He will forget. With this knowledge, worry becomes an impossibility.
Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can do all things.
We need to look resolutely away from the impossibilities and to the Lord. His help will come.
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities.
A nonviolent system of government is clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists.
Without risk, faith is an impossibility.
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.
There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.
It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.
When you refuse to teach on the radical depravity of men, it is an impossibility that you bring glory to God, His Christ, and His cross, because the cross of Jesus Christ and the glory thereof is most magnified when it’s placed in front of the backdrop of our depravity!
the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.
Th’invention all admir’d, and each, how he to be th’inventor miss’d; so easy it seem‘d once found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.
An infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.
Whatever bliss we think we’re going to find, we may find it in brief flashes, fleeting moments that come and go. There’s an impossibility to nailing down any good feeling.
The novel that’s contemporary in the sense of being wholly ‘of now’ is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the ‘now’ with which they begin will be defunct by the time they’re finished.
Impossibility is more possible than everything which we hold to be possible.
What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.
A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.
I’ve always regretted that I’m made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.
Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.
When a writer looked at an empty computer screen, what did she see? Tristan wondered. A movie screen ready to be lit with faces? A night sky with one small star blinking at the top, a universe ready to be written on? Endless possibilities. Love’s endless twists and turns – and all love’s impossibilities.
An undevout poet is an impossibility.
If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.
To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.
[Lat., Simul flare sorbereque haud facile
Est: ego hic esse et illic simul, haud potui.]
[On alcohol:] Total abstinence is an impossibility and … it will not do to insist on it as a general practice.
There can be no peace among men and nations, so long as the strong continues to oppress the weak, so long as injustice is done to other peoples, just so long we will have cause for war, and make a lasting peace an impossibility.
So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It’s not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.
When you do your best, there is no impossibility.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
If someone says can’t, that shows you what to do.
Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees, And looks to God alone; Laughs at impossibilities, And cries it shall be done.
Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities.
In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
Rilla’s heart skipped a beat — or, if that be a physiological impossibility, she thought it did.
. . . idealism is one of the greatest forces in the world. It makes seeming impossibilities possible and succeeds where prudence fails. But unless the idealist is brave and has the courage to face the truth, his idealism creates nothing.
Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together. True nonviolence is an impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.
From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.
For the believer, nothing is impossible. We put limitations on ourselves.
I think it would be nearly impossible to find someone who has contributed more to South Carolina than Carroll Campbell. His efforts to transform South Carolina‘s economy and raise our state’s income levels are still paying dividends today.
Progress is what happens when impossibility yields to necessity.
Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.
I think the story of DiMaggio was alluring precisely for its impossibility.
Nature decrees that we do not exceed the speed of light. All other impossibilities are optional.
Once that Gauntlet is on, as the poster of Doctor Strange says, “the impossibilities are endless.”
As a writer, I find it a literal impossibility to disengage from whatever the location might be, given how everything that eventually transpires as part of the ongoing narrative is informed by it. In other words, try relocating the stories elsewhere, and what’s the effect? They almost immediately cease to exist.
If you want to make a substantial reduction in your carbon footprint, doing it on your own is virtually impossible, especially if you’re driving a car. Here are tools available in the marketplace, enabling our customers to have this conversation.
Prayer is an impossibility without a living faith in the presence of God within.
Nelson Mandela said: ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done.’ Peace is possible.
John Bonifaz
You are treading the path to your greatness: no one shall follow you here! Your passage has effaced the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility.
And what ‘s impossible can’t be, And never, never comes to pass.
George Colman the Elder
I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity
To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
Duty is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity.
The state of faith allows no mention of impossibility.
to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
The condition for a miracle is difficulty, however the condition for a great miracle is not difficulty, but impossibility.
Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen.
Every man is an impossibility until he is born.
Every nation sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses which if persisted in, must make peace impossible.
However, when we shift our awareness or “frequency” from self-consciousness – where fear, impossibility or feelings of separation reside – to cosmic consciousness, which is in total harmony with the universe and where none of those feelings exist, then anything is possible.
Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.
It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when ‘my appetite for the absolute and for unity’ meets ‘the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.’
We must look to Mary‘s example to know how to deal with the glorious impossibilities of God. Look how she turned the world upside down by making one simple statement.
Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.
The impossibility of a retreat makes no difference in the situation of men resolved to conquer or die; and, believe me, my friends, if your conquest could be bought with the blood of your general, he would most cheerfully resign a life which he has long devoted to his country.
There are so many people out there who will tell you that you can’t. What you’ve got to do is turn around and say “Watch me.”
It is the act of a madman to pursue impossibilities .
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.
A perception of impossibility should never go unchallenged.
When faith lays hold, impossibilities must yield.
So long as untouchability disfigures Hinduism, so long do I hold the attainment of Swaraj to be an utter impossibility.
Differences in approaches do exist, and in one short moment it is impossible to overcome all of them, but i’m convinced ahead of us we have a constructive dialogue.
‘Gone Girl‘ is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife.
There is no impossibility to him who stands prepared to conquer every hazard. The fearful are the failing.
I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there’s always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense… This is what drives you to the next picture.
‘Supercentenarian’ is the term used by longevity experts to signify a near numerical impossibility: those who’ve outpaced 99.9999 percent of the population and landed in the 110+ Club.
It is a fundamental impossibility to have a magazine that is anarchic and yet formulaic. Those can’t coincide.
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
These things are difficulties, not impossibilities. — Macon
Every new idea is impossibility until it is born.
Ron Brown
Outperforming the market with low volatility on a consistent basis is an impossibility. I outperformed the market for 30-odd years, but not with low volatility.
The truth is that we don’t need everyone to like us; we need a few people to love us. Because what’s better than being roundly liked is being fully known – an impossibility both professionally and personally if you’re so busy being likable that you forget to be yourself.
There is nothing impossible to him who will try.
Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life. Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking’s writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?
Possibility is far more frightening than impossibility.
If something’s not impossible, there must be a way of doing it.
It was never the case that prisoners were simply allowed unlimited parcels – books or otherwise… It would be a logistical impossibility to search them all, and they would provide an easy route for illegal materials.
As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.
The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for 
the existence of God.
To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.
It is dangerous to attach probability zero to anything other than a logical impossibility.
What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.
We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.
Todays impossibilities are tomorrows miracles.
There is a mortal breed most full of futility. In contempt of what is at hand, they strain into the future, hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes.
Waiting for Godot has achieved a theoretical impossibility — a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps the audience glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.
Vivian Mercier
If defamation of religion was illegal it would be a crime for me to say that the notion of transubstantiation is so ridiculous that even a small child should be able to see the insanity and utter physical impossibility of a piece of bread and some wine somehow taking on corporeal form.
When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man… Love, then, is seen a religious problem
Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. it was an impossibility.
Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
I am highly favored by God, I experience great victories, supernatural turnarounds, and miraculous breakthroughs in the midst of great impossibilities.
The distance separating the statute and constitutionality is so abysmal that negotiations are impossible.
Too many people today believe that you can fight fascism with fascism. This of course is an impossibility. Fascism times any other number always equals fascism.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
It is a natural impossibility for any man to make a binding contract, by which he shall surrender to others a single one of what are commonly called his ‘natural, inherent, inalienable rights.’
For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I’m trying to, I’ll be defeated by it.
They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.
The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible.
It is abnormal for a Christian not to have an appetite for the impossible. It has been written into our spiritual DNA to hunger for the impossibilities around us to bow at the name of Jesus.
The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.
Some things are impossible.
The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.
Spencer Silver
I know nobody believes in peace anymore, but what else is there to work toward? As the years have gone by, peace seems like more and more of an impossibility.
The system he (President Hosni Mubarak) is recommending would make it virtually impossible for truly independent parties to participate. Sham democracy should be exposed for what it truly is.
There’s not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.
Impossibility never prevented anything from happening.
I have described Swaraj as Ramarajya and Ramarajya is an impossibility unless we have thousands of Sitas.
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.
On the path to love, impossibilities are resolved by turning non-love into love.
This is the best day in the history of the world, even though yesterday that seemed an impossibility.
I met soldiers coming back from war and I was impressed by their description of PTSD, all the symptoms: the outburst of violence, the impossibility to cope with reality anymore, all that stuff.
Alice Winocour
I could not limit my values and pursuits to what makes others comfortable. Being possessed by a promise I live without options. I will spend the rest of my life exploring what could happen through the life of one who is willing to cultivate the God-given appetite to see impossibilities bow to the name of Jesus.
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
We plan tours months in advance, and you leave a few days off here and there where you feel you’ll be tired after some shows, but if other opportunities keep coming in, those days get swallowed very quickly, and it’s an impossibility to get this stuff right.
Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.
What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.
My love is of a birth as rare As ‘tis, for object, strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.
There’s a huge seal called ‘impossibility’ pasted all over this world. And don’t ever forget that we’re the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.
God doesn’t care what you’re not. He cares who you are. You are His, you come from the Master, and when He adds His extra to your ordinary and His super to your natural, nothing is impossible for you.
It seemed like an impossible task to do full justice to all Luther classics. And yet these landmark artists have done just that. Memorable performances of wonderful songs that ensure Luther’s legacy will live on forever.
From now on, nothing is impossible for Israel, which is a normal country like any other. We won’t wait another half a century to sit on the Security Council.
Dan Gillerman
Hope calculates its scenes for a long and durable life; presses forward to imaginary points of bliss; and grasps at impossibilities; and consequently very often ensnares men into beggary, ruin and dishonor.
If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.
The only difference between elements and compounds consists in the supposed impossibility of proving the so-called elements to be compounds.
It always seems impossible until its done.