The Probability Of Miracles Quotes

you can pass a football,you can gas,but you yourself cannot just pass~cam after lilly's mother informs her that lilly has passed ~ Wendy Wunder

The risk of an investment is described by both the probability and the potential amount of loss. The risk of an investment-the probability of an adverse outcome-is partly inherent in its very nature. A dollar spent on biotechnology research is a riskier investment than a dollar used to purchase utility equipment. The former has both a greater probability of loss and a greater percentage of the investment at stake. ~ Seth Klarman

Bohm and Aharonov found that under the right circumstances an electron is able to "feel" the presence of a magnetic field that is in a region where there is zero probability of finding the electron. This phenomenon is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and when the two men first published their discovery, many physicists did not believe such an effect was possible. Even today there is enough residual skepticism that, despite confirmation of the effect in numerous experiments, occasionally papers still appear arguing that it doesn't exist. ~ Michael Talbot

Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything's conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error. ~ Romain Gary

If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man's ideals that change; it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, "You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older," says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I have also thought of a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real. ~ Italo Calvino

In these pages, we keep returning to one foundational principle: providing the possibility of emotional/relational safety for our people, be they patients, children, partners, friends or strangers.

We are able to make this offer when they are experiencing their own neuroception of safety, not continuously, but as the baseline to which we return after our system has adaptively moved into sympathetic arousal or dorsal withdrawal in response to inner and outer conditions.

When we neuroceive safety, we humans automatically begin to open into vulnerability, and the movement of our "inherent treatment plan" (Sills, 2010) has a greater probability of coming forward.

When we have a neuroception of threat, we adaptively tighten down at many levels, from physical tension to activation of the protective skills we have learned over a lifetime (Levine, 2010). In that state, our innate healing path will often wisely stay hidden until more favorable conditions arrive. ~ Bonnie Badenoch

In his life so far he had known only the kind of doubt that is calculated and secure. He had known only suspicion, cynicism, probability - never the fearful unraveling that comes when one ceases to trust in one's own trusting power; never the dread panic that follows this unraveling; never the dull void that follows last of all. ~ Eleanor Catton

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology. ~ Ian Hacking

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

A Resource-Based Economy is in the application of the methods of science with human concern and environmental concern. If we used the scientific method throughout the world, the probability of war drops to zero. The probability of human suffering disappears. Deprivation, poverty, crime - all those things tend to disappear because there's no basis. I'm strictly concerned with the environment that people are raised in and if that environment is altered, so will behaviors be altered. ~ Jacque Fresco

Time Management Tips: One can make a radar-like sweep of the horizon to identify time and task challenges while these are still manageable and while we still have a choice. The organizational adage, "the more parts, the more trouble," also applies to words. Multiplying words may actually multiply the probability of being misunderstood; economies in expression (without being taciturn or aloof) not only save time, but usually are more honest and more clear. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles. ~ George Eliot

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that. ~ Alan Greenspan

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance. ~ Lewis Thomas

Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability ... they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque. ~ Arthur Koestler

We haven't got to the Sunflowers yet, said Michael.
No, we haven't, she said. You're right. OK, so Vincent hoped to set up an artists' studio down there in the South because he was keen to have friends and like-minded people around him.
I think he was probably lonely, said Michael. What with the ear thing and the darkness.
I think he was, too, said Dora. 1888 was the year, and he was waiting for another artist to join him, a man called Paul Gauguin. People say that, in all probability, he painted the Sunflowers as decoration for Gaugain'S room. Did lots of versions of them too, not just this. It's a lovely thought, though, isn't it? Some people say it's not true but I like to think it is. Painting flowers as a sign of friendship and welcome. Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things.
Never forget that, you two, she said, and she disappeared into the kitchen. ~ Sarah Winman

The probability of a fatal nuclear detonation is greater now than at any time during the Cold War. As the Russian military deteriorates, and as rogue governments and terrorists seek to acquire nuclear capabilities, the threat continues to grow. ~ Alan Cranston

It is a well-known fact that in countries in which the national debt is properly funded, and an object of established confidence, it answers most of the purposes of money. Transfers of stock, or public debt, are there equivalent to payments in specie; or, in other words, stock, in the principal transactions of business, passes current as specie. The same thing would, in all probability, happen here, under the like circumstances. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. - David L. Watson ~ James Gleick

As St. Augustine remarks (lib. 20, de Civit., C. 30), the events pertaining to the end of the world will happen in the manner they have been foretold, but as to their accidental circumstances, God alone knows the order in which they will take place. He has revealed nothing explicitly on this point, and consequently, our knowledge of them is confined to mere conjecture, possessing a greater or less degree of probability. ~ P. Huchede

The earth in its rapid motion round the sun possesses a degree of living force so vast that, if turned into the equivalent of heat, its temperature would be rendered at least one thousand times greater than that of red-hot iron, and the globe on which we tread would in all probability be rendered equal in brightness to the sun itself. ~ James Prescott Joule

When the corporation's investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company's growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can't get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive businesses can't credibly project that the business will become very big very fast, because new-market disruptions need to compete against nonconsumption and must follow an emergent strategy process. Compelling them to project big numbers forces them to declare a strategy that confidently crams the innovation into a large, existing, and obvious market whose size can be statistically substantiated. This means competing against consumption. ~ Clayton M Christensen

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

The highest historical probability can be adduced in support of the proposition that, if it were possible to annihilate the Bible, and with it all its influences, we should destroy with it the whole spiritual system of the moral world. ~ Edward Everett

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. ~ Richard P. Feynman

It follows that the word probability, in its mathematical acceptance, has reference to the state of our knowledge of the circumstances under which an event may happen or fail. With the degree of information we possess concerning the circumstances of an event, the reason we have to think that it will occur, or, to use a single term, our expectation of it will vary. Probability is the expectation founded upon partial knowledge. ~ George Boole

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis. ~ Bill Bryson

We are not good at recognizing distant threats even if their probability is 100%. Society ignoring [peak oil] is like the people of Pompeii ignoring the rumblings below Vesuvius. ~ James R. Schlesinger

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability. ~ Thomas Huxley

My advice to the unborn is, don't be born with a gambling instinct unless you have a good sense of probabilities. ~ Jack Dreyfus

Manners,[ ... ] are severly underappreciated in my opinion".
"Oh?"
Where practiced well, they remove the probability that someone in my position will be forced to go through the effort of killing someone in yours. Belive that on occasion that much death can become tedious. ~ Michelle Sagara West

The representatives of business interests are the men to start this enterprise among our people and bring them to a full realization of the very grave seriousness of this war, to make them feel that we are in this war to win, and the probability is that our entering this war is going to be the deciding factor, and that the burden of the success is going to rest upon the United States. ~ John J. Pershing

The puzzle of time, the mystery of creation, the problem of evil, the enigma of knowledge, the state of soul, the vexations of probability theory of the nature of God's grace, all reduced to a single question. What does it mean, in a world of God's creation, that man is free to choose between the paths of good and evil? ~ Bernard Beckett

Even when the corporate risk tolerance is low it is still possible to take some working interest in a risky project. Clearly, zero working interest is the lower limit and 100% working interest is the high limit. Somewhere between these two extremes there must be an optimum working interest to take which depends on both the parameters of the project (success probability, estimated gains, and estimated costs) and on the corporate risk tolerance. ~ Ian Lerche

It is not the absolute degree of probability that matters, only its relative probability compared with other possible alternatives.

It is the simple suggestion that the only valid reason for rejecting a statistical hypothesis is that some alternative explains the observed events with a greater degree of probability. ~ Herbert I. Weisberg

Liberty is a blessing so inestimable, that, wherever there appears any probability of recovering it, a nation may willingly run many hazards, and ought not even to repine at the greatest effusion of blood or dissipation of treasure. ~ David Hume

The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82%. But it isn't a government spending program. It's called marriage. ~ Marco Rubio

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom
it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner. ~ M.L. Von Franz

On Improbability:
There's an infinite number of things that can go wrong but only a finite number of things that can go right.
In the infinitude of unlikely events many will happen with unnerving frequency.
Tautology: A given improbable event isn't likely to happen.
Corollary: Shit happens, but you'll not know its ilk.
I'm certain that nothing is certain. ~ Kalifer Deil

Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of an adult. ~ Thomas Reid

Okay, look at it this way: if the evening news has a very high probability of being accurate, then it's highly improbable that they would inaccurately report the numbers chosen in the lottery. That counterbalances any improbability in the choosing of those numbers, so you're quite rational to believe in this highly improbable event. ~ William Lane Craig

It is unanimously agreed that statistics depends somehow on probability. But, as to what probability is and how it is connected with statistics, there has seldom been such complete disagreement and breakdown of communication since the Tower of Babel. Doubtless, much of the disagreement is merely terminological and would disappear under sufficiently sharp analysis. ~ Leonard J. Savage