Defying The Odds Quotes

We could return from sand if we had to
form into a beautiful mosaic of glass that told our story in colors. ~ Addison Moore

I keep defying the odds, you know. ~ Bubba Watson

Since the day he was born, he'd been defying the odds. Today was not the day to stop that trend. Unlike Ambrose, he wasn't about to give up or give in.
So long as there was breath in his body, there was life. So long as there was life, there was hope. And so long as there was hope, there was the possibility of victory.
Life wasn't about just getting by. It was about getting through, no matter what, and making the most of every minute.
A chill went down his spine as he remembered what his father had said to him. <>.
Nick Gautier would not be remembered as a coward or a villain. He was going out a hero and a champion.
And he would not go down without a vicious, vicious fight. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I ONCE READ somewhere that the odds of getting hit by lightning are one in a million. One in a friggin' million. So, if this situation were to be viewed optimistically, I'm a pretty unique individual. But here's the thing - I just got hit by lighting on my birthday, so optimism can go kiss pessimism's ~ E.J. Mellow

A happy life is impossible, the highest thing that man can aspire to is a heroic life; such as a man lives, who is always fighting against unequal odds for the good of others; and wins in the end without any thanks. After the battle is over, he stands like the Prince in the re corvo of Gozzi, with dignity and nobility in his eyes, but turned to stone. His memory remains, and will be reverenced as a hero's; his will, that has been mortified all his life by toiling and struggling, by evil payment and ingratitude, is absorbed into Nirvana. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

This was combat. You created the chaos, but at the same time, tried not to be a part of it, tried not to be affected by it. It was a strange mix of hot-blooded instinct, and cold-blooded logic. It was fighting with emotion, but thinking with your head, almost as though your mind was the handler and your body the beast, the two of them at odds, and yet oddly the same. And when the two forces fell into step with each other, it was sickening and exhilarating all at once. ~ D.J. Molles

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination. ~ Douglas Adams

Every time someone starts a project he is considered nuts, until he beats all the odds and laughs the last. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

... for there are times when disobedience heals a very ailing part of the self. It relieves the human spirit's distress at being forced into narrow boundaries. For the nearly powerless, defying authority is often the only power available. ~ Malidoma Patrice Some

I cannot tell whether diamonds appeared in his eyes or mine as the shine of adoration became the icon one sees in history, a Byzantine sparkle, Medieval armor against all odds. ~ Alice Shapiro

How is it that I could run into a gunfight against overwhelming odds and put myself between bullets and civilians, but I couldn't scrape together enough courage to speak to the one person who mattered the most to me? ~ Ilona Andrews

A high view of God's sovereignty fuels death-defying devotion to global missions. Maybe another way to put it, people, and more specifically pastors, who believe that God's sovereign over all things will lead Christians to die for the sake of all peoples. ~ David Platt

The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A 'science' that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity. ~ Angus J.L. Menuge

Against the odd's, I have persevered, I am the living attestation of the American dream. I am the extolment of this great nation. I have coffee and cocktails with presidents and dictators. I'm an international figure, a citizen of the world. I've made it. ~ Don King

Many people confuse the statement "almost all terrorists are Moslems" with "almost all Moslems are terrorists." Assume that the first statement is true, that 99 percent of terrorists are Moslems. This would mean that only about .001 percent of Moslems are terrorists, since there are more than one billion Moslems and only, say, ten thousand terrorists, one in a hundred thousand. So the logical mistake makes you (unconsciously) overestimate the odds of a randomly drawn individual Moslem person (between the age of, say, fifteen and fifty) being a terrorist by close to fifty thousand times!

[...]Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified. Consider that in a primitive environment there is no consequential difference between the statements "most killers are wild animals" and "most wild animals are killers". There is an error here, but it is almost inconsequential. Our statistical intuitions have not evolved for a habitat in which these subtleties can make a big difference. ~ Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Ain't nothin' better
We beat the odds together
I'm glad we didn't listen
Look at what we would be missin'
They said "I bet they'll never make it"
But just look at us holdin' on
We're still together still goin' strong ~ Shania Twain

And whenever you hear a condition described as a "contested disease,"
the odds are good that the "contest" is between, on the one hand, mostly
women patients who believe their condition to be an organic one and, on
the other hand, a medical establishment that assumes their "medically unexplained
symptoms" are all in their heads. ~ Maya Dusenbery

My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It's always fun to do something new. ~ Rick Smolan

The odds were so not in my favor. My situation sucked to the messed-up-degree. ~ Angela McPherson

Falling for someone can be a lot like playing roulette. You don't know what will happen when you place that bet, but you can take a deep breath anyway and put all the chips out there. And when the ball spins around and around, you pray it lands on your number. Probability says you'll likely lose, and in this game of love with Leo, odds were I would lose, too, but I had to try. ~ Ilsa Madden-Mills

I'm substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They're sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they're hitting back and forth. ~ Neil Armstrong

Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy. ~ Mark Twain

It is those who dream of the impossible who end up defying the very world. ~ Nadine Brandes

About Jews:
The phenomenon of why Jews have kept the unanimity of a distinctive culture is because combination of the persecution and specific Jewish state of mind gave a new quality of the advanced survival. What I mean by that is not only a survival but against all the odds, making progress in any area of activities: arts, business, science, politics, etc. ~ Leo Pevsner

If you're an adrenaline junkie, I understand why you'd find that exciting. But I'm not, and I don't.

To me, the only good reason to take a risk is that there's a decent possibility of a reward that outweighs the hazard. Exploring the edge of the universe and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and capability strike me as pretty significant rewards, so I accept the risks of being an astronaut, but with an abundance of caution: I want to understand them, manage them and reduce them as much as possible.

It's almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we're highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn't for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. We have to: we're responsible for equipment that has cost taxpayers many millions of dollars, and the best insurance policy we have on our lives is our own dedication to training. Studying, simulating, practicing until responses become automatic - astronauts don't do all this only to fulfill NASA's requirements. Training is something we do to reduce the odds that we'll die. ~ Chris Hadfield

Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds. ~ Tom Peters

I was going to make the little hound here part of your display, but you know, against all odds, I've found myself growing to like the little guy! You were going to be a girl transforming into a werewolf, but now I think you'll be part of my Hansel & Gretel display. I needed a trespassing little snoop! ~ Christa Carmen

Without even trying to be a teacher,
Fredrika is teaching us,
Showing us how to see things in new ways
Instead of always thinking
The same old thoughts
That have been passed along by strangers
Day after day, year after year
Without any spirit of amazement
Or wonder, ~ Margarita Engle

Therein lay the root of the problem.
Sharing was not in his nature, but nature would have to adapt. Ali
needed this kid. Finn was a modern day gunslinger. Deep down he
fucking hated it, but his girl needed this one nice and close.
Preferably wrapped around her finger and deeply concerned about
her health and happiness.Every goddamn minute of every goddamn day would be best.
Daniel did not want to share her. Not with the kid, not with anyone,
not even a little. He knew it would work, this insane idea of going
halves, he just didn't want it to. He had only recently found her and
she was his. But he couldn't keep her safe on his own, a fact that bit
deep and hard and hung on as a pit bul would. How the hell to
convince her? What Ali wanted and what would keep her safe and
alive would likely be at odds in this case. She'd accused him of
being pushy a time or two. His girl had no real idea how far he'd go
to protect her. ~ Kylie Scott

But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times
when the odds were so high against personal happiness
to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered. ~ Bernard Malamud

What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand? ~ Horace

Her attention was now drawn upon a boy whose imagination had the potential to change the face of reality. Unfortunately for him, Aerinna liked reality the way it was: fluid, slippery and with a brick in it. The case was quickly resolved by giving the young boy an appetite for procrastination. ~ Louise Blackwick

the universe is most generous when somehow, against all odds, it finds a way of telling you ur seeing something for the last time in ur life. ~ Jomny Sun

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced - and enriched - at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom," "liberty," and "free speech" have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well). ~ Victor Davis Hanson

So, if you don't fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud. ~ George Monbiot

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are. ~ Lionel Shriver

I like to be against the odds. ~ Barry Bonds

Japan has a fundamental problem with information itself: it's often lacking, and when it does exist, is fuzzy at its best, bogus at its worst. In this respect, Japan's traditional culture stands squarely at odds with modernity - and the problem will persist. The issue of hidden or falsified information strikes at such deeply rooted social attitudes that the nation may never entirely come to grips with it. Because of this, one may confidently predict that in the coming decades Japan will continue to have trouble digesting new ideas from abroad - and will find it more and more difficult to manage its own increasingly baroque and byzantine internal systems. ~ Alex Kerr

Yudenow was a controlled panic of self-preservation on two uncertain legs; abject slave to a mad desire for what beasts know as blind survival.
A comical beast, I thought, but asked myself, 'Why prolong mere living for its own sake?' The question answered itself: 'Because a beast is blind.' In Yudenow's case, he was animated by nothing but a terror of Nothing, a horror of ceasing to be; by a hopeless desire to evade consequence and issue, parry cause and duck effect. But he had - and you can read it in the faces of defeated fighters, doglike to the verge of tears in the outer offices - the hope-against-hope that, by fiddling and scraping against all the odds of the world, his ringcraft might outmaneuver the inevitable.
And do you know what? There is the Spirit of Man in this - good, bad, or indifferent, a certain heroism. ~ Gerald Kersh

Because when you finally find the one against all odds, you give him your best and let the magic of the world carry the rest. ~ E. Mellyberry

Saigon, U.S.A. aptly documents the birth of a new American community, uprooted in the aftermath of war and forever torn apart by the wounds of the past, yet one capable of healing against all odds. An engrossing yet succinct film that captures not only a major incident in Vietnamese American life, but also an important chapter of American history. A profound film that manages to confront us with the deepest sorrow while allowing us to be hopeful about what it means to be human. ~ Nguyen Qui Duc

Not that I'm bipolar, but that I'm two people, and not just two people, but two people at odds with each other. The mom and the kid, the homebody and the explorer, the strong and the weak, the logical and the emotional, the funny and the sad, the angry and the calm, the open and the closed, the loved and the hated, the hot and the cold, the alive and the dead, the beautiful and the ugly. It's exhausting. I. Am. Exhausting. ~ Stacey Turis

I'm not much older now than I was then, but in a lot of ways, obviously, I'm a different person. So it is easy for me to recognize that I made some good decisions and some bad ones. But it's telling that, with this, I knew it was a bad idea even then but I still couldn't control myself. Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn't have liked what I found, so I didn't. ~ Hank Green

He'd found himself intrigued by the way she'd weaved the lives of two very different people together, how she played off their strengths and weakness, how against all odds she brought them together and made it seem believable. Even if it was nothing more than make-believe. She was a talented writer. ~ M.K. Meredith

The value of free expression is perceived to be at odds with goals that were considered 'more important,' like inclusiveness, diversity, nondiscrimination, and tolerance. ~ Greg Lukianoff

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense. ~ Joseph Brodsky