Best Thinkable Quotes & Sayings

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. — Salman Rushdie

You adapt: the impossible becomes imaginable, thinkable, logical. Three easy steps. from Best Friends — Martha Moody

What we learned on September 11 is that the unthinkable is now thinkable in the world. — John Ashcroft

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread. — Adolf Hitler

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.
pp. 181-182 — Timothy Snyder

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on. — Francis Schaeffer

Besides, I was myself the one who spoke to me. I sat and stood at the same time, hushed and spoke and formed two persons from my own alone. It was, wasn't it, as if with the greatest levity and astonishing velocity thinkable one stood up from where one sat to stand speaking to the person one was a moment before and now no longer was, and yet remained that person still, because one is seeing oneself in imagination, which enriches life, which I employ as often as I want or can or may, which throws me off balance and always restores it, which is the continuous emotion for the sake of which I always and never go too far, which as today for instance, multiplies me or at least doubles me now and then, which is strange and is pleasurable and keeps me active and therefore rejuvenated and foolish, so that one can experience being pleasured alive, so that it won't be all too self-evident, and not too lonesome, either. — Robert Walser

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. — Helene Cixous

A God is thinkable, therefore a God is also actually present. — Moses Mendelssohn

Every soul belongs to God and exists by His pleasure. God being Who and What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and complete submission on ours. We owe Him every honor that it is in our power to give Him. Our everlasting grief lies in giving Him anything less. — A.W. Tozer

A lot of the things that until now seemed unthinkable are starting to be thinkable. — Nick Johnson

There are things you think you won't be able to do, that need the actual to become possible. There are things that only become thinkable once you're already doing them. — Glen Duncan

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything. — G.K. Chesterton

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened — Arundhati Roy

It felt as if a thing that had been impossible had become possible, a thing that had been unthinkable had become thinkable, and Luka did not want to give that terrifying thing a name. — Salman Rushdie

The God who is human in his divinity is the precise opposite of an essence which in ill-willed fashion closes itself to all human thought and knowledge... As love, rather, God is thinkable, without a distinction capable of made between essence and existence. Love is essentially existing lovingly. — Eberhard Jungel

What is thinkable is also possible. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. — Walter Brueggemann

The implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a World Organization ... Political unification in some sort of World Government will be required ... Even though ... any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable. — Julian Huxley

Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable. — George Santayana

Americans, like people everywhere, are in thrall to their visions of the past, rarely realizing the extent to which their understanding of history shapes behavior in the here and now. Historical understanding defines people's very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today. — Oliver Stone

There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again. — Gary Zukav

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled. — Albert Einstein

Well, where did it come from?" I asked. "How did I get it?"
"How do we get most things?" he answered.
"We buy them? — David Sedaris

For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order. — Adolf Hitler

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working. — Jeffrey Bernard

It's hard running as an independent. I wouldn't have won the Senate election if I hadn't been governor. I had credibility. The hard part is getting voters to the point where they think it's thinkable and not a waste of time. — Angus King

It is thinkable to think that A is not-A; to reverse this is but to revert to the normal. Yet by forcing the brain to accept propositions of which one set is absurdity, the other truism, a new function of the brain is established. Vague and mysterious and all indefinite are the contents of this new consciousness; yet they are somehow vital. Unreason becomes experience. This lifts the leaden-footed Soul to the Experience of THAT of which Reason is the blasphemy. But without that Experience these words are the Lies of a Looby. — Aleister Crowley

God being Who and What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and complete submission on ours. — A.W. Tozer