How Anything Is Possible Quotes & Sayings

Couples in distress too often turn to solutions that can be summed up by "You do your thing and I'll do my thing" or "You take care of yourself and I'll take care of myself." We hear pop psychology pronouncements such as "I'm not ready to be in a relationship" and "You have to love yourself before anyone can love you."

Is any of this true? Is it really possible to love yourself before someone ever loves you?

Think about it. How could this be true? If it were true, babies would come into this world already self-loving or self-hating. And we know they don't. In fact, human beings don't start by thinking anything about themselves, good or bad. We learn to love ourselves precisely because we have experienced being loved by someone. We learn to take care of ourselves because somebody has taken care of us. — Stan Tatkin

Westcliff thinks that St. Vincent is in love with you."
Evie choked a little and didn't dare look up from her tea. "Wh-why does he think that?"
"He's known St. Vincent from childhood, and can read him fairly well. And Westcliff sees an odd sort of logic in why you would finally be the one to win St. Vincent's heart. He says a girl like you would appeal to ... hmm, how did he put it? ... I can't remember the exact words, but it was something like ... you would appeal to St. Vincent's deepest, most secret fantasy."
Evie felt her cheeks flushing while a skirmish of pain and hope took place in the tired confines of her chest. She tried to respond sardonically. "I should think his fantasy is to consort with as many women as possible."
A grin crossed Lillian's lips. "Dear, that is not St. Vincent's fantasy, it's his reality. And you're probably the first sweet, decent girl he's ever had anything to do with. — Lisa Kleypas

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me. — Margaret Atwood

It would be something, being in another place.'
A spark of an idea caught tinder. 'Where would you most like to go?'
'I don't know. I know nothing about the world. Enfield is my world.'
It was the saddest thing Dany had ever heard. 'How about this: when I come next time, I'll bring the world to you.'
Though he didn't understand, Colton looked interested. 'Is that possible?'
'Anything is possible'. — Tara Sim

Anything is possible, and the truth is any human being at any given moment, no matter how good they are - not only at their job but also as a person - they're capable of anything, and it's not always a conscious thing. — Sarah Paulson

Changing anything in the past, if you believe it's possible, could alter the entire future of the world, including my own birth, so I'd change nothing. Not a thing. As for the future ... I think I'd like to see how it all ends, which is probably why I write about the future apocalypse so frequently. — Jeremy Robinson

How is it possible, as you get to know someone better, to realize how good his past is at not letting you find out anything more about him? — Angelos Michalopoulos

Westcliff sees an odd sort of logic in why you would finally be the one to win St. Vincent's heart. He says a girl like you would appeal to ... hmm, how did he put it? ... I can't remember the exact words, but it was something like ... you would appeal to St. Vincent's deepest, most secret fantasy."
Evie felt her cheeks flushing while a skirmish of pain and hope took place in the tired confines of her chest. She tried to respond sardonically. "I should think his fantasy is to consort with as many women as possible."
A grin crossed Lillian's lips. "Dear, that is not St. Vincent's fantasy, it's his reality. And you're probably the first sweet, decent girl he's ever had anything to do with."
"He spent quite a lot of time with you and Daisy in Hampshire," Evie countered.
That seemed to amuse Lillian further. "I'm not at all sweet, dear. And neither is my sister. Don't say you have been laboring under that misconception all this time? — Lisa Kleypas

Immortality: "It is impossible to be conscious of being unconscious."

It is not possible to be aware of being unconscious from your own perspective. You cannot be aware of not being aware. You can be less aware/conscious, such as when you are asleep, but not completely unconscious (dead), because time would stand still for you. A billion years could pass, and you would not know it.

How do you know you are dead? It is not possible to be aware of any gaps in life; it is continuous and never-ending from your own point of view.

Death and birth are a continuous event from your own perspective.

You will die physically, but you will be born into a new physical body. Being born happens, or you would not be here now. You were born into this life. It is what we know happens. There is no evidence anything else happens. True or false? — Michael Smith

What is forgiving? Forgiving is giving up all claims on the one who has hurt you and letting go of the emotional consequences of the hurt. How can we do that? It's done at the price of beating back our pride. By nature we are selfish. Forgiving by definition is unselfish. Being hurt by another person wounds our pride. Pride stands in the way of forgiving. We cannot forgive without God's help. It might be possible for us to forgive something inconsequential without God's help; but in significant matters, we're unlikely to accomplish anything without God's involvement in the process. — Richard Walters

The worst possible thing you can do when you're down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you. First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors' reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can. They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom. — Anne Lamott

So long as you have a society with a lot of guns- and America has more guns per capita than any other county in the world- children will be at risk of being shot. The questions are how much risk, and what, if anything, is being done to minimize it? If one thinks of various ways in which commonplace items, from car seats to medicine bottle tops, have been childproofed, it's clear that society's general desire has been to eliminate as many potential dangers from children as possible, even when the number of those who might be harmed is relatively small. If one child's death is preventable, then the proper question isn't "Why should we do this" but rather "Why shouldn't we?" It would be strange for that principle to apple to everything but guns. — Gary Younge

Trying to catch their breath, they lay there for so long that Celyn lost track of time. That is, until Elina noted, "You are still hard inside me."
Celyn nodded, then realized she couldn't see that. "Aye," he finally answered.
"How is that possible?"
"I am dragon," he answered honestly. "Anything is possible. We're that amazing. — G.A. Aiken

It's downright undignified how many blazers I've bought over the years. And will continue to buy. They immediately give shape and add authority. With the perfect blazer, anything is possible. — Rashida Jones

If you can't fail then how can you possible develop as a communicator or as a creator of anything? We are locked into a deeply unhealthy notion that somehow you've got to succeed all the time. An appalling notion. Any painter or writer will tell you that that is no way to proceed. One of the things that will kill off a decent actor, especially a young actor early on and they will never recover from it, is too much success. It's disastrous. You stop being criticized, therefore you stop challenging yourself. You then can't afford to fail because there's too far to fall. — Emma Thompson

Nothing hurts me, Low Born. Absolutely nothing."
"How is that possible?" And for some reason he sounded as if he truly cared about her answer.
"When you stop feeling anything, you find it quite possible. — G.A. Aiken

Yet is it possible in terms of the motion of atoms to explain how men can invent an electric motor, or design and build a great cathedral? If such achievements represent anything more than the requirements of physical law, it means that science must investigate the additional controlling factors, whatever they may be, in order that the world of nature may be adequately understood. For a science which describes only the motions of inanimate things but fails to include the actions of living organisms cannot claim universality. — Arthur Compton

Once you make a journey to a near impossible destination, you get to realize how everything and anything is possible — Luthfy Es-Haq

When anything is possible, how do you choose? — Karen Marie Moning

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all? — Lauren Oliver

A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love. — Milan Kundera

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh. — Emil Cioran

If your boss asks you to do a task ... You'll stay late for work to make sure it's done. You'll be confident that your boss wouldn't have asked you if he/she didn't trust that you could do it. You wouldn't allow anyone or anything to distract you. No matter how hard it is, it's not an option, you'll find a way to make it happen. You'll not only find time, you'll try to get it done before the deadline. So, why when God gives you a task ... you allow fear to consume you, find excuses, allow distractions, care about what people think and assume it's impossible? If He gave it to you, He trusts you CAN get it done. Yes, they'll be distractions. And no it's not going to be easy, but know that it is POSSIBLE!!! Answer the call! — Yvonne Pierre

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ... But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ... Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world. — Michael Ondaatje

Never say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible — Mike Norton

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences. — Jonathan Lethem

I know this is like the worst possible time, but I really need to tell you that I love you. Okay? Because I do. And you don't have to say it back or anything, but that's how it is. — Tere Michaels

The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it. — George M. Whitesides

You have to make a bet one way or another. We believe that overall demand is going to continue to grow, and its absolutely being fueled by the Internet. If anything, we're just building a little bit ahead of the curve. There's clearly a curve toward growth, and the question is 'How do you intercept that?' We've decided to intercept it as aggressively as possible. — Paul Otellini

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. — Alan Watts

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work. — David Foster Wallace

There is a story concerning the Buddha, who is in the company of a fellow traveler who tests this great teacher with derogatory, insulting, disparaging, and bitter responses to anything the Buddha says. Every day, for three days when the Buddha spoke, the traveler responded by calling him a fool, and ridiculing the Buddha in some arrogant fashion. Finally, at the end of the third day, the traveler could stand it no more. He asked, "How is it that you are able to be so loving and kind when all I've done for the past three days is dishonor and offend you? Each time I am disobliging to you, you respond in a loving manner. How is this possible?" The Buddha responded with a question of his own for the traveler. "If someone offers you a gift, and you do not accept that gift, to whom does the gift belong? — Wayne W. Dyer

In the tumult of great events, solitude was what I hoped for. Now it is what I love. How is it possible to be contented with anything else when one has come face to face with history? — Charles De Gaulle

The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. — Julian Baggini

If an Englishman asks you 'how are you?', they only expect two possible answers: 'not bad' and 'not too bad'. The former means 'I am doing great', the latter that you are about to commit suicide or have some terminal disease. With anything else, you risk being tarred and feathered. Also, if your answer is 'excellent' they take it as sarcasm. — Angela Kiss

No doubt it is devastating. One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced." "How? By what?" "By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. This has been tested. It is certain. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You know how it is with drawers and labels in the music business. They don't want anything to be complicated. They just want it simple, as simple as possible. — Mark McGrath

We're living on the top of a pyramid,' he had said, 'supported by the massive base, rising above it, above everything that has made it possible. We're responsible for nothing, not the structure itself, not anything above us. We owe nothing to the pyramid, and are totally dependent on it. If the pyramid crumbles and returns to dust, there is nothing we can do to prevent it, or even to save ourselves. When the base goes, the top goes with it, no matter how elaborate the life is that developed there. The top will return to dust along with the base when the collapse comes. If a new structure is to rise, it must start at the ground, not on top of what has been built during the centuries past. — Kate Wilhelm

But I promise you, you guys can do it. In four days you'll be the happiest person Earth has ever seen. You'll stand by the ocean and feel the salty sea spray tingling in your nose. You'll be with people you know and love, and you'all appreciate how beautiful everything is. You'll se cars behind you in your rear view mirror, and maybe you'll laugh at the driver's faces. Because they'll look annoyed, bored, angry. And you'll realize what they're missing. You'll live a long and happy life, Mia. Because when you get home, you'll realize that anything is possible. You mustn't ever forget that. — Johan Harstad

All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything! — George Bernard Shaw

Why do you keep saying that " he asked in response "Apples and oranges aren't that different really. I mean they're both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They're both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine I can't think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple. If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and-while I was looking away-he replaced that apple with an orange I doubt I'd even notice. So how is this a metaphor for difference I could understand if you said 'That's like comparing apples and uranium ' or 'That's like comparing apples with baby wolverines ' or 'That's like comparing apples with the early work of Raymond Carver ' or 'That's like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.' Those would all be valid examples of profound disparity. — Chuck Klosterman

As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being. — Lynne Truss

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone? — Haruki Murakami

I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything,
that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts, to
have a model of the structure in one's mind. We can give other people
names, and lists, but we cannot give them our mental structures; they must
build their own. — John Holt

Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of particular religious and dogmatic religionlike ideologies into two groups, moderate versus extremist. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things. Nowhere do people tolerate attacks on their person, their family, their country - or their creation myth. In America, for example, it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality - including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth - the faith - of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else's sacred creation myth is "religious bigotry." It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat. — Edward O. Wilson

In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described. — Bertrand Russell