Possibility Quotes
-
I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.
Charles D'Ambrosio
-
Might have, could have, may have, should have—the haves and have nots reduced to pointless possibilities.
Terry Brooks
-
'Taking charge of one's life' involves risk, because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.
Anthony Giddens
-
I think social change work is some of the most extraordinary dreaming that any of us have the possibility of doing.
Amber Hollibaugh
-
Nobody should have any illusion about the possibility of gaining military superiority over Russia. We will never allow this to happen.
Vladimir Putin
-
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude — even dishonor and betrayal — to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the “others,” disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom — on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.
Ernest Becker
-
The first job of a leader-at work or at home-is to inspire trust. It's to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardships, and to create an environment in which high-trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility.
Stephen Covey
-
The ACE study group concluded: “Although widely understood to be harmful to health, each adaptation such as smoking, drinking, drugs, obesity is notably difficult to give up. Little consideration is given to the possibility that many long-term health risks might also be personally beneficial in the short term. We repeatedly hear from patients of the benefits of these ‘health risks.’ The idea of the problem being a solution, while understandably disturbing to many, is certainly in keeping with the fact that opposing forces routinely coexist in biological systems. . . . What one sees, the presenting problem, is often only the marker for the real problem, which lies buried in time, concealed by patient shame, secrecy and sometimes amnesia—and frequently clinician discomfort.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
When human reason has exhausted every possibility, the children can go to their Father and receive all they need. ... For only when you have become utterly dependent upon prayer and faith, only when all human possibilities have been exhausted, can you begin to reckon that God will intervene and work His miracles.
Basilea Schlink
-
Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.
Betty Rollin
-
For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered in tinsel, while the trees opened our presents." "What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo. "Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?
Norton Juster
-
We have it all. We have great diversity of people, we have a wonderful land, and we have great possibilities. So all those things combined there's nowhere else I'd rather be.
Bob Rae
-
There are other places, surely, for other people, but for me there is one place, Ann
Arbor, for there it was I discovered what lifes bright possibilities were.
William Shawn
-
We stand for a use of color free from the imitation of things as colored objects. We stand for an aerial vision in which the material of color is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create.
Carlo Carra
-
We should open ourselves to the impossible and embrace a psychology of possibility.
Ellen Langer
-
Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.
Michael Eric Dyson
-
The leader is a person who has the possibility through destiny to know the people, to recognize their capacities, and to bring them to bear on the problem.
Arthur Zajonc
-
Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
Paul Gauguin
