Once you‘ve ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.

It is highly improbable that the bureaucrat will put his life on the line. It is absolutely impossible that he‘ll put his job on the line.

My 40 years in the foreign service and the careers of many of my friends became associated with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the putting in order of what came after – the building of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. It`s hard to recall today how improbable victory in the Cold War appeared.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

I see worries in the fact that we have the power to manipulate genes in ways that would be improbable or impossible through conventional evolution. We shouldn’t be complacent in thinking that we can predict the results.

…(that) any general system of conveying passengers would … go at a velocity exceeding ten miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable.

Nothing is Improbable until it moves into the Past Tense.

People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness – that is, the improbable – with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

The universe is specifically tweaked to enable life on earth-a planet with scores of improbable and interdependent life-supporting conditions that make it a tiny oasis in a vast and hostile universe.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.

And tomorrow–who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don’t know and no one knows–it’s all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.

We are a people of improbable hope.

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.

That term, ‘David and Goliath,’ has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

It is easy today to deny God’s creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man’s creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God’s, exercises a strange attraction.

Anything you want to do is possible; fear is not meant to prevent but to motivate your heart into the life you naturally think is improbable.

‘Thirteen Orphans‘ is the name of a specific limit hand. The same combination is also called ‘Thirteen Improbable.’ Once I’d decided I wanted to write a tale where mah-jong would be at the heart, I also knew I wanted to use limit hands.

For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.

Optimists enrich the present, enhance the future,challenge the improbable and attain the impossible

Once in a while there are things the brain simply refuses to accept as being true because they appear too improbable, too unlikely, too preposterous.

I am writing a book more improbable than ‘The Interrogative Mood’ that I call ‘Manifesto‘. It’s two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn’t. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

As a hopeless romantic, I’m drawn to stories of improbable beginnings.

Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

Life after death is as improbable as sex after marriage!

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.

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.

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.

The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable – it could not have been any other way– a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

It is exceedingly improbable that the identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina is the result of a certain habituation, or of the influence of the mind.

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

Nothing is impossible, only mathematically improbable.

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

When people say impossible, they usually mean improbable.

Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you.

What I can’t understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you’re shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.

His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain — why he did not instantly disappear.

The planetary phase of history has begun, but the future shape of global society remains profoundly uncertain. Though perhaps improbable, a shift toward a planetary civilization of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability is still possible.

My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.

For an entrepreneur with ‘improbable’ and ‘impossible’ dreams, the alleged stability that comes from getting ‘a real job‘ is nothing but a sign of slavery.

The world is divided into two classes – invalids and nurses.

Tell the truth, but lead so improbable a life that the truth will never be believed.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.

I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.

Exactly! It is absurd – improbable – it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.

it’s been my experience that while impossible things happen frequently, improbable ones never do.

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

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.

The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.

I was a vegetarian for a really long time, from 7 to 23, so I feel like some things aren’t that weird but they seem weird to me, like blood sausage or snails. Those are things I’ve eaten now that, years ago, it would have been totally improbable that I would have eaten.

Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant.

Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.

Some things cannont possibly happen, because they are both too improbable and too perfect. The U.S. hockey team cannot beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. Jack Nicklaus cannot shoot 65 to win the Masters at age forty-six. Nothing else comes immediately to mind.

Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven‘t quite finished Villette.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

It is exceedingly improbable that the identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina is the result of a certain habituation, or of the influence of the mind.

The more improbable the message, the less “compressible” it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon‘s point: the essence is its improbability.

Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to consider the unexpected. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to entertain the improbable opportunity that comes looking for you.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Be proud of your heritage, and don’t be discouraged from the improbable.

At first, dreams seem impossible, then improbable, and eventually inevitable.

Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.

Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real.

For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn’t beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn’t an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.

This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.

The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable.

Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.

And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of ‘The Book of Mormon,’ the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central‘s ‘South Park,’ are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike.

Improbable things happen a lot…

It’s far easier to brush off death if the death in question seems impossible or improbable as a personal threat.

The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don’t like to do too much that’s improbable.

Never let someone tell you that you or your dreams are impossible, improbable, or not ‘good enough’ for their liking, especially when they have no experience or knowledge of your true heart and powers.

Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

Today, in 2011, I’m giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration‘s improbable MVP in the technology realm.

Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.

In Sea affairs, nothing is impossible, and nothing is improbable.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

I reject your impossible. Most of what others tell me is impossible I know to be improbable. If it is impossible you have nothing more to do but if it is improbable…you can choose to ask the unasked question or walk the unwalked step. For me that has made all the difference.

In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened…

That Edison or Lincoln could have been Edison or Lincoln after four years of Harvard is improbable.

I have a huge admiration for the ability of people to go, ‘I don’t care if it can’t happen. I don’t care if you say it’s impossible. I am gonna do it anyway.’ I think it’s an amazing part of human nature. It feeds into faith and belief in human beings to not only do the improbable but almost the impossible.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

The Brigadier had no wish to shake hands with the improbable young man in the ridiculous frock-coat.