The Possibility Of An Island Quotes

All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks. ~ Michel Houellebecq

I think we live in an age of self empowerment and possibilities, the only excuse to not do something is yourself. ~ Ji Lee

I don't think I stood still more than a moment, but something changed inside of me. An awesome shift took place. In one instant I saw a vast and terrifying possibility, and in that same instant, without question, I made up my mind.

It had no words to it or scheme or plan. And I would have denied it had anyone questioned me at that moment. I would have said, "No, never, farthest from my thoughts. What do you think I am, what sort of monster" ... And yet the choice had been made.

I understood something absolute. ~ Anne Rice

Acting is an art form. If you are not creating something that's unusual and informative and at least has the possibility of being illuminating, then you are not into it as an art form. ~ Bruce Glover

If we wish to wrest an advantage from the enemy, we must not fix our minds on that alone, but allow for the possibility of the enemy also doing some harm to us, and let this enter as a factor into our calculations. ~ Sun Tzu

Remember, anoretics do eat. We have systems of eating that develop almost unconsciously. By the time we realize we´ve been running our lives with an iron system of numbers and rules, the system has begun to rule us. They are systems of Safe Foods, foods not imbued, or less imbued, with monsters and devils and dangers. These are usually "pure" foods, less likely to taint the soul with such sins as fat, or sugar, or an excess of calories. Consider the advertisements for food, the religious lexicon of eating: "sinfully rich," intones the silky voice announcer, "indulge yourself," she says, "guilt-free." Not complex foods that would send the mind spinning in a tornado of possible pitfalls contained in a given food – a possible miscalculation of calories, a loss of certainty about your control over chaos, your control over self. The horrible possibility that you are taking more than you deserve. ~ Marya Hornbacher

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation. ~ Ben Lerner

Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process; he is not merely an extant life, but is, within that life, endowed with possibilities through the freedom he possesses to make of himself what he will by the activities on which he decides. ~ Karl Jaspers

It is easy to miss the possibility that every person who crosses your path can become an event and a memory, good or bad, to fill in the hours with experience instead of tedium, to break the monotony of the passing moments. ~ R.A. Salvatore

Some people can work amid chaos or conversations, and some can't - and while there's no doubt an element of brain wiring to it, there's also the possibility of acquiring skills that improve your focus. ~ Carolyn Hax

If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a 'time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense. ~ Kedar Joshi

But if electrons can exist in parallel states hovering between existence and nonexistence, then why can't the universe? After all, at one point the universe was smaller than an electron. Once we introduce the possibility of applying the quantum principle to the universe, we are forced to consider parallel universes. ~ Michio Kaku

Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well ... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child. ~ Lisa Coyne

I Know you are asking: What if I am wrong?
What if RAGNAROK does not come? What if it does not happen the way I say it is going to happen?
I suppose that is a possibility.
Perhaps the Mayans WERE wrong.
Maybe we WILL enter a new era of consciousness.
Maybe we will NOT destroy ourselves with technology.
Perhaps it will be that some new old god comes. Say his name is DOZGOTH, the 701st, and say he takes pity on us. And a thousand years after all the suffering of RAGNOROK, he will retcon us back to the very day this book was pusblished.
You will remember nothing of what happened or what you did to survive. The only evidence that any of this ever happened will be this book, and the fact that ou now have a tentacle instead of an arm. But you will explain that away simply by saying you are wearing an octopus sleeve. The mind can explain so many things when it wants to close its eyes and sleep.
Perhaps only one person will remember what really happened, and he will be named Jonathan Coulton. But he cannot tell anyone, for he is but an animal. ~ John Hodgman

My only allegiance is to an empire that doesn't exist yet, to the possibility of Gal's future rule. Maybe that makes me a traitor. Maybe it forfeits my soul. But for him - for this disastrous boy sleeping next to me - I would, I will. ~ Emily Skrutskie

As an actor there's no autonomy, unless you're prepared to risk the possibility of starving. ~ Ben Kingsley

The political perspective of this book, ironically, is the progeny of the progressive potential of capitalism as an historical system. The joint possibility of universal material well-being and the democratization of society is a product of the capitalist era. But the history of capitalism is a chronicle of the tension between possibilities and limits: democracy and universal affluence in perpetual and ubiquitous conflict with class domination - itself a product of the social organization of capitalist production. ~ Samuel Bowles

In an area such as this the possibility of violence for the sake of robbery or even mere amusement is always something to be reckoned with. Our little expeditionary party had tried to dress as plainly as possible, but our great-cloaks simply by their cleanliness attracted the sinister attention of the loiterers on the street. ~ K.W. Jeter

Don't let psychological warfare from an advertisement campaign blind you from the truth of your beauty, possibility, worthiness, and purpose. ~ Steve Maraboli

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time. ~ Kenneth Minogue

What drives people to public service is a sense of possibility. If you haven't sensed that possibility you don't get started in the same way, you don't feel you can have an impact. ~ Henry Hampton

Death is only relevant to "genetic adaptation" insofar as it relates to the capacity for self-reproduction (what is relevant is not that an individual died, but success in gene propagation while alive). The potentially misleading phrase "genetic adaptation" means that either because or despite an organism's adaptedness to external conditions, genes were or are successful in propagating themselves. Success in reproducing genes, in other words, is the ultimate measure of so-called "genetic adaptation". The possibility of adaptation unto extinction through individualism does not contradict the Darwinian notion of adaptation for survival. On the contrary, it is only a confirmation of it. The question here is what survives, the individual or its genes? The genes, and not the individual organism, provide the measure of survival in biological evolution. This point is illustrated by the modern corporate executive who adapts to the changing economic conditions better than any of his or her competitors, but fails to produce any children. ~ Mitchell Heisman

It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is replaced by a solipsism en deux in the I-thou relationship. As a relationship between Dasein and Dasein this has its possibility only on the basis of being-in-the-world. Put otherwise, being-in-the-world is with equal originality both being-with and being-among. ~ Martin Heidegger

National Socialism made use of various means in dealing with various classes, and made various promises depending upon the social class it needed at a particular time. In the spring of 1933, for example, it was the revolutionary character of the Nazi movement that was given particular emphasis in Nazi propaganda in an effort to win over the industrial workers, and the first of May was "celebrated," but only after the aristocracy had been appeased in Potsdam. To ascribe the success solely to political swindle, however, would be to become entangled in a contradiction with the basic idea of freedom, and would practically exclude the possibility of a social revolution. What must be answered is: Why do the masses allow themselves to be politically swindled? The masses had every possibility of evaluating the propaganda of the various parties. Why didn't they see that, while promising the workers that the owners of the means of production would be disappropriated, Hitler promised the capitalists that their rights would be protected? ~ Wilhelm Reich

Let us accept the possibility that there is, at death, not an abrupt cessation of energy, rather a dispersal. This seems more than reasonable to me. Mind you, I've owned a series of old cars, and Im used to turning off the motor only to experience a series of rumblings and explosions that would shame many a volcano. This is the sort of thing I'm conceptualizing, a kind of clunky running-on. And just as some cars are more susceptible to this behavior, so people vary in the length of time, and the force with which, their energy sputters and gasps ... My example is overly dramatic, but it is not wholly unreasonable, and it serves to make this genetic mutation a player at the evolutionary table. You see what I'm getting at: a biologically and evolutionally sound model for the soul. (I didn't say I'd achieved it.) Let's conceive of the soul as an aura that human beings wear on their backs, cumberson as a tortoise's carapace. Some are larger than others. ~ Paul Quarrington

Love, true love, love that denies itself and transfers itself to another, is the awakening within oneself of the highest universal principle of life. But it is only true love and affords all the happiness it can give when it is simply love, free from anything personal, from the smallest drop of personal bias towards its object. And such love can only be felt for one's enemy, for those who hate and offend. Thus, the injunction to love not those who love us, but those who hate us, is not an exaggeration, nor an indication of possible exclusions, but simply a directive for that opportunity and possibility of receiving the supreme bliss that love can give. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. ~ Anthony Burgess

We live in an extraordinary age. These are times of stunning changes in social organization, economic well-being, moral and ethical precepts, philosophical and religious perspectives, and human self-knowledge, as well as in our understanding of that vast universe in which we are imbedded like a grain of sand in a cosmic ocean. As long as there have been human beings, we have posed the deep and fundamental questions, which evoke wonder and stir us into at least a tentative and trembling awareness, questions on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formation of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of all - on the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe. For all but the last instant of human history these issues have been the exclusive province of philosophers and poets, shamans and theologians. The diverse and mutually contradictory answers offered demonstrate that few of the proposed solutions have been correct. But today, as a result of knowledge painfully extracted from nature, through generations of careful thinking, observing, and experimenting, we are on the verge of glimpsing at least preliminary answers to many of these questions.

...If we do not destroy ourselves, most of us will be around for the answers. Had we been born fifty years earlier, we could have wondered, pondered, speculated about these issues, but we c ~ Carl Sagan

An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing. ~ Samuel Smiles

Western culture prefers us not to believe we're defined or limited. It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates', as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy. The game it compels us to play can best be justified morally if all the contestants start out with an equal shot at winning. Moreover, if we believe we're all the same, this legitimizes calls for deregulated corporation and smaller government: it means that men and women who lose simply didn't want it badly enough, that they just didn't believe - in which case, why should anyone else catch their fall? ~ Will Storr

In fact, there is one theory that states that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that surrounds the galaxy, might be ordinary matter floating in a parallel universe. As in H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man, a person would become invisible if he floated just above us in the fourth dimension. Imagine two parallel sheets of paper, with someone floating on one sheet, just above the other.

In the same way there is speculation that dark matter might be an ordinary galaxy hovering above us in another membrane universe. We could feel the gravity of this galaxy, since gravity can ooze its way between universes, but the other galaxy would be invisible to us because light moves underneath the galaxy. In this way, the galaxy would have gravity but would be invisible, which fits the description of dark matter. (Yet another possibility is that dark matter might consist of the next vibration of the superstring. Everything we see around us, such as atoms and light, is nothing but the lowest vibration of the superstring. Dark matter might be the next higher set of vibrations.) ~ Michio Kaku

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave. ~ J.G. Ballard

And another local journalist wrote an op-ed wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far.
Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far?
To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of understanding. ~ Amanda Palmer

But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream - a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever - then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you've eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you
chew on the next one. ~ Kevin Hearne

Something but not nothing because nothing is an infinite possibility. ~ Kyle Kipple

It turns out that having kissed someone, the possibility of kissing hangs over everything, no matter how terrible an idea it was the first time. ~ Holly Black

You can tell he never even considered the possibility of something like this happening to him. He's as out of his element hiring an investigator to snoop on his wife as he would be auditioning for a Russian ballet. ~ Caspar Vega

I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously ... The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big. ~ Richard Feynman

The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest. ~ Simone Weil

Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe ~ Gary Snyder

While an impulse toward wholeness is natural and exists in everyone, each of us heals in our own way. Some people heal because they have work to do. Others heal because they have been released from their work and the pressures and expectations that others place on them. Some people need music, others need silence, some need people around them, others heal alone. Many different things can activate and strengthen the life force in us. For each of us there are conditions of healing that are as unique as a fingerprint. Sometimes people ask me what I do in my sessions with patients. Often I just remind people of the possibility of healing and study their own way of dealing with them. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

In any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion ... fence sitting is an art, and it's difficult, and it's important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It's just better to have action, isn't it than to sit on the fence? Not if you're not sure which way to go, it isn't. ~ Richard P. Feynman

May every young scientist remember and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery. ~ Patrick Blackett, Baron Blackett

When Scout finds Boo Radley hiding behind her bedroom door, she says something that is scary because it is calm. Something like, "Why, there's the man right there, Mr. Tate." Or whatever his name is. Scout's not surprised to find a hollow-eyed monster in the form of Robert Duvall behind her door. She opens a line into magic, possibility. Or mystery, that's a better word than magic. Like an open hole in the ground no one noticed until Scout pointed it out, a place where men with dark secrets live behind every bedroom door. Scout's calm voice says, "The rest of you are blind. ~ Samantha Hunt

Look at that chessboard we put back in place,' said Mrs Elm softly. 'Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It's a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.'

'It's an easy game to play,' she told Nora. 'But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities...In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living...never underestimate the big importance of small things. ~ Matt Haig