Implausible Quotes

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction ~ David Mitchell

there are times when simply looking at him breaks her heart. Not in a sad way. It's the other kind of heartbreak. The kind that clenches the insides upon discovery of something particularly beautiful or altogether implausible. ~ Barbara Forte Abate

to some parts of biblical teaching," and "B" beliefs, which contradict Christian truth ("B" doctrines) and "lead listeners to find some Christian doctrines implausible or overtly offensive." Take a moment to identify a key "A" doctrine - a teaching from the Bible that would be generally accepted and affirmed by your target culture - and how it expresses itself in the culture through "A" beliefs. What is an example of a "B" belief in your culture, and what "B" doctrines does it conflict with directly? 4. Keller writes, "It is important to learn how to distinguish a culture's A.' doctrines from its 'B' doctrines because knowing which are which provides the key to compelling confrontation. This happens when we base our argument for 'B' doctrines directly on the A.' doctrines." Using the examples you discussed ~ Timothy J. Keller

Did the latter[The Messenger] have a predecessor, who envisaged
revelation as taking place by direct contact with a divine being rather than by
a book being sent down (whether as a whole or in instalments), who claimed
to have enjoyed such contact himself and who objected to the pagan angels -
not because they violated the dividing line between God and created beings
but rather because they were female? We do not hear of such a predecessor
elsewhere in the Quran, but we do learn that the Messenger had competitors in
his own time, at least in Yathrib (2:79, where they share his concept of revelation
as a book), so there is nothing implausible about the proposition that there
were preachers before him too, including some whose preaching anticipated
features of his own. ~ Patricia Crone

We also have to bear in mind that our own sense of what is plausible and implausible is severely limited by the fact that the modern world is dominated by an extremely narrow range of family arrangements. Looking in anthropology books on kinship and marriage is like opening a book on a huge variety of dead and dying languages, all victims of the inexorable homogenisation of the world that has been in progress since the dawn of civilisation. ~ Patricia Crone

She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses out of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren't three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things ... and when to war over them. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant, considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it's extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life. ~ Stephen Hawking

It is a miracle that New York 
works at all. The whole thing is 
implausible. ~ E.B. White

The implausible, well-nigh-miraculous functioning anarchy that we know as New York is adorned with every excellence of Western art. It is a city of manifold suggestions, which ministers to every ambition, engenders a thousand talents, nurtures ingenuity and experimentation. ~ Ibn Warraq

When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible. ~ Jean Baudrillard

That one has to be playing in order to be playing a game seems equally implausible. When professional athletes are performing in assigned games for wages, although they are certainly playing games, we are not at all inclined to conclude from that fact that they are without qualification playing. For we think of professional athletes as working when they play their games and as playing when they go home from work to romp with their children. ~ Bernard Suits

The others sat down to watch Iko work. She'd just finished teasing the hair at the crown of Scarlet's head when Scarlet asked, "Why is Wolf's tuxedo missing?"
Cinder traded looks with the others. "It ... um ... we were ..."
"Thorne came up and took it," interrupted Cress. "When you were changing."
Scarlet frowned. "What for?"
"Because .. he wanted to ..." Cress swallowed. "Um ... compare it to his own tuxedo. To make sure they were, uh ... matching?" Her gaze darted to one side as she realized how implausible that sounded, even for Thorne.
"She means," interrupted Cinder, "that Thorne was concerned that he and Wolf might have purchased the same tuxedo, which I guess is considered a big faux pas. You know how Thorne is about that sort of thing. Can't be seen in the same tux as the groom! How embarrassing, right? ~ Marissa Meyer

Investigating is a process of elimination. You have to explore all the possibilities, and whatever's left, no matter how implausible, has got to be it. ~ Joanne Fluke

It's not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it's about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that - feelings - and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them. ~ Russell Blackford

What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible. ~ Brian J. Walsh

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world ~ Terry Eagleton

The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century.

Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.

We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology. ~ Gerald Holton

To Fleming, and to his readers, James Bond was a real person living in the modern world. The details of his life appear only sporadically in the books, but they proved vitally important in grounding him in his time, which made his extraordinary and often implausible adventures seem possible. ~ Henry Chancellor

As everyone who has read the Marxists critically has not failed to see ... the gospel of St. Marx is just the old Judaeo-Christian mythology with the supernatural sanctions left out, thus making the cult the most implausible and unreasonable of all the Christian heresies. It is true that there is reciprocal hostility between Marxists and the other Christian cults, but that is merely normal. Christian sects began persecuting each other even before one of them attained political power in the decaying Roman Empire, and everyone remembers the fearful Wars of Religion that convulsed and almost ruined Europe. The Gospel of Love invariably incites the most savage and blood-thirsty hatreds. ~ Revilo P. Oliver

Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible. ~ Thrity Umrigar

All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible, and I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I hadn't made lots of mistakes and there are companies, perhaps, that we had been investors in. ~ Michael Moritz

Don't believe I've had the pleasure," she began. "Are you mad? I had you last year at Lord Addington's spring formal! We went behind his pagoda and I took you from the rear. You said I was the best you'd ever had!" The color drained from her face - clearly she didn't find my scenario entirely implausible. Stammering an explanation she hurried off, leaving me to watch the celebration solo. ~ Daniel Polansky

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible. ~ William Manchester

Too Much to Ask
It seemed too much to ask of one small virgin that she should stake shame against the will of God. All she had to hold to, later, were those soft, inward flutterings and the remembered surprise of a brief encounter - spirit with flesh. Who would think it more than a dream wish? An implausible, laughable defense.
And ~ Luci Shaw

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher. ~ Alain De Botton

Well, maybe there are one or two things about the double jeopardy concept that are overlooked. I could be charged with violating my probation. I could be charged for illegal possession of a firearm or violating his civil rights if I did kill him. But when you're making a movie, there's only so much that you can do. I know that some people, while thoroughly enjoying it, have said, It's a little bit implausible. But it's such great fun. ~ Ashley Judd

A surprising amount of my jokes sound very implausible but are true. ~ Jimmy Carr

Radionics was conceived as a diagnostic and treatment technology at a time when modern electronic theory and biomedicine had not become the dominant sciences they are today. Early radionic devices incorporated the new discoveries of radio and electronics into their design. During that period, the functional assumptions of radionic technology did not seem as implausible as it does today. However, it wasn't long before radionics became outmoded and completely non-scientific. As Mizrach has noted, radionics continued to appropriate the methods of orthodox science into its design and terminology, making the probability of understanding what it could accomplish even more difficult to assess. I will examine this appropriation in a spirit of tolerance, given the state of electronics and medicine circa 1910, when radionics was first discovered. I will do so in order to shift the focus of this interesting technology from the scientific to the metaphysical, where the reader not limited by a need for scientific approval can evaluate it. My aim is to provide a reasonable means of evaluating radionic technology as an artistic methodology. ~ Duncan Laurie

Some of the ideas that come from the fringe of the far right are just so implausible that it is hard to take those ideas seriously. ~ John Conyers

As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible. ~ Steven Weinberg

As with most of the legends surrounding the Templars, some of the conjecture about the fate of individuals seems logical, while other suggestions appear to be rather implausible and fabricated for an audience hungry for mysteries and conspiracy theories. ~ Susie Hodge

We as a species must make a decision. How absurd that sounds. It sounds absurd because we've never made a decision as a species, and it seems implausible to think that we could. But . . . continuing on our present course would threaten the entirety of human civilization. . . We could well have only a decade within which to make major changes lest we lose the opportunity to retrieve a climate balance that is favorable for human life and human civilization. Al Gore, U.S. Vice President, 1993-2001 ~ George A. Seielstad

The laws of nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present and future. In tennis, the ball always goes exactly where they say it will. And there are many other laws at work here too. They govern everything that is going on, from how the energy of the shot is produced in the players' muscles to the speed at which the grass grows beneath their feet. But what's really important is that these physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal. They apply not just to the flight of a ball, but to the motion of a planet, and everything else in the universe.
Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken - that's why they are so powerful and, when seen from a religious standpoint, controversial too.
If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: what role is there for God? This is a big part of the contradiction between science and religion, and although my views have made headlines, it is actually an ancient conflict. One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible. ~ Stephen Hawking

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you ... ~ Alexander Chee

So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible. ~ James K.A. Smith

Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible
and perhaps uninteresting as well. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The dreams were the troubling kind where I thought the action and events were genuine while asleep; upon waking and in retrospect I realized they were obviously completely implausible.The one I remembered most intensely upon waking was about losing my teeth. The fragments of bone continually fell out of my mouth every time I opened it to speak; and they ran away- though they had no legs- which, in the dream, sent me into a panic.
There is nothing quite like watching one's own legless teeth running away. ~ Penny Reid

This famous quote hangs over my desk, as well as the desks of many people with the hubris and optimism to believe they can change the world for the better. It seems implausible, yet time and again history has proven it true. Virtually every major shift in cultural history can trace its origins to the work of a small group, often gathered around an innovative thinker or body of thought. ~ Alan AtKisson

If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways. ~ Terence McKenna

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read). ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human. ~ Michael Punke

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an
accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism
were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was
hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the
past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it. ~ Lionel Shriver

I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I'm someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian ... ~ Lynne Tillman

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief. ~ Meghan O'Rourke

What the radical Enlightenment excluded as implausible based on the principle of analogy, much of today's world can accept on the same principle of analogy. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide claim to have experienced or witnessed what they believe are miracles. Eyewitness claims to dramatic recoveries appear in a wide variety of cultures, among Christians often successfully emulating models of healings found in the Gospels and Acts. Granted, such healings do not occur on every occasion and are fairly unpredictable in their occurrence; yet they seem to appear with special frequency in cultures and circles that welcome them. ~ Craig S. Keener

While fiction is often impossible, it should not be implausible. ~ Aristotle.

And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and we do not replenish and we wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more "inputs" to stay fertile. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas...then wonder why people can't afford to shop as much as they used to...At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing - a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us. ~ Naomi Klein

There is boring. There is sensational. There is mediocre. There is lazy. There is good. There is evil. People do implausible things all the time, and they run the gamut of moderately weird to truly extraordinary. But there is no normal. The world is an unbelievable place full of unbelievable people doing unbelievable things. ~ Penny Reid

Once upon a time in the West, one could become an atheist or deist only with considerable difficulty; the widespread narrative within which everyone operated rendered unbelief implausible. Today, it is exactly the opposite. To believe in the triune God of Scripture who speaks and acts in history requires an act of apostasy from the assumed creed of our age. ~ Michael Horton

Admittedly, some high school students (including those who use drugs) are dumb. Most students, however, do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate, and most students know dumb advocacy when they see it. The notion that the message on this banner ['Bong Hits 4 Jesus'] would actually persuade either the average student or even the dumbest one to change his or her behavior is most implausible. ~ John Paul Stevens

Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It it a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it. ~ Jonathan Barnes

The forces of chaos, I had learned, were only *enemy forces if you attempted to resist them. The moment you accepted the idea that your life could, and probably would, veer off in an implausible new direction at any given moment, those forces started working *for you. Because if anything was possible...well, then *anything was possible. ~ Bruno Maddox

Bryan gaped, as though that was more than he'd been expecting. "Oh. Okay. Well, um, there's a silent film festival downtown next week. Do you think you'd want to go?"
I shook my head. "No, I don't think so. I respect it as an art form but really don't get much out of watching them."
"Huh. Okay." He smoothed his hair back again, and I could almost see him groping for thoughts. Why on earth was he asking me about silent films? "What about Starships 30? It opens Friday. Do you want to see that?"
" I don't really like sci-fi either," I said. It was true, I found it completely implausible.
Bryan looked ready to rip that shaggy hair out. "Is there any movie out there you want to see?"
I ran through a mental list of current entertainment. "No. Not really." The bell rang, and with a shake of his head, Bryan slunk back to his desk. "That was weird," I muttered. "He has bad taste in movies." Glancing beside me, I was startled to see Julia with her head down on the desk while she shook with silent laughter. "What?"
"That," she gasped. "That was hilarious."
"What?" I said again. "Why?"
"Sydney, he was asking you out! ~ Richelle Mead

If you couldn't handle someone who did the impossible, the improbable, the implausible, then you couldn't handle the VRMMO player known as Kirito. ~ Reki Kawahara

To know myself as woman in the image of God to know God as Mother and to know my own mother as a window into God: these three are inseparable.If one is implausible to the heart the other two are as well. ~ Roberta C. Bondi

The human brain is the universe's most implausible science experiment. ~ Will Boast

It is also significant that the play opens with the objective presence of supernatural forces. The witches are not the figment of someone else's imagination because there is nobody else present to witness them. They are alone, and therefore they stand alone, utterly independent. We are in the real presence of evil, an evil that really exists whether we like it or not, an evil that is not merely the product of our fetid fetishes or our fevered imaginations. In its formal structure, therefore, Macbeth places us unequivocally in a supernatural cosmos, rendering implausible all materialistic interpretations of the play's intrinsic meaning. ~ William Shakespeare

The world was out there still, but I hadn't looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what - some freak accident? It seemed implausible. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

I'm thinking about Carol and Grace, my two best friends. At the same time I can't remember exactly what they look like. Did I really sit on the floor of Grace's bedroom, on her braided bedside rug, cutting out pictures of frying pans and washing machines from the Eaton's Catalogue and pasting them into a scrapbook? Already it seems implausible, and yet I know I did it. ~ Margaret Atwood

Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They're passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones. ~ Christina Baker Kline

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel. ~ Alexander Chee

Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles's living room. ~ Alice Munro

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason. ~ Steven Pinker

It's what I call common sense, properly understood,' replied Father Brown. 'It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn't the legend that I disbelieve - it's the history. ~ G.K. Chesterton