Quotes & Sayings About Impasse

In presenting a mathematical argument the great thing is to give the educated reader the chance to catch on at once to the momentary point and take details for granted: two trivialities omitted can add up to an impasse). The unpractised writer, even after the dawn of a conscience, gives him no such chance; before he can spot the point he has to tease his way through a maze of symbols of which not the tiniest suffix can be skipped. — John Edensor Littlewood

Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is two people because it is a statement of the impasse of dualistic universe which he has created, they have created. I think that any dualistic universe ends in Nova. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is a kind of God. A God of stupidity, cowardice, ugliness. — William S. Burroughs

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan. — Marcel Proust

Those who always have a sense of appreciation and gratitude never reach an impasse in life. — Daisaku Ikeda

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person's relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn't allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph. It is when psychology pretends to do this, when it offers itself as a full explanation of human unhappiness, that it becomes a fraud that makes the situation of modern man on impasse from which he cannot escape. — Ernest Becker

The leap of faith is a strategic impasse that confronts every Christian in search of converts; and, as he sees the matter, there is no wrong way to become a Christian. It is the end that is importnat, not the means; it does not matter why you believe, so long as you believe. For the philosopher, in contrast, the paramount issue is the justification of belief, not the fact of belief itself. — George H. Smith

We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the origin of values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision can be made at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedience. — Paul Ricoeur

Those who have come to an impasse should examine their original intentions; those who have succeeded should note where they are heading. — Zicheng Hong

We are at an impasse...There will come a time, when we can no longer safely approach any Muslim (or radicalised liberal), since we simply cannot trust that they won't lash out with the intent to kill. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

If I trace its breaking point I come across the eternity of the primitive impulse. The sea river is a cold impasse. Will I find secrets there? In my dream I am standing on a frozen lake, the second sex and I can hear female voices all around me. — Abigail George

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Patience is, in and of itself, a great challenge and it often holds the key to breaking through a seeming impasse. — Daisaku Ikeda

No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives. — Haruki Murakami

I gave a helpless laugh. "Damned if I know. I think ... we seem to have reached impasse.
I feel betrayed by your friendship with Verlane. I realize that's not logical. I realize that if I'd made the mistakes Verlane has made, I'd want my friends to stand by me, hope that someone would help me when the time came. I just ... "
"What?"
I met his eyes. "I just need to come first for someone, Guy. — Josh Lanyon

So where does that leave us?" I wondered. He chuckled humorlessly. "I believe it's called an impasse. — Stephenie Meyer

From Return of Swamp Thing
It's the old impasse:
I don't know what to wait for. — Kathleen Norris

When negotiations are at an impasse, when States dig their heels in, it is time to 'undig' them in a spirit of compromise. We all need to unlearn the predator in us, unlearn discrimination, unlearn privilege. — Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities required by the informational society. — Kenzo Tange

If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse. — J.M. Roberts

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. — Carl Jung

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist? — Barbara Ehrenreich

I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.
Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when the demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth - which is our fate - only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise - which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams. — Hermann Hesse

Why would i stay if things had reached such an impasse? — E.L. James

Humans are the same. Like polishing a jewel, difficulties polish a person's character. The trials we are given are proportional to our strength. Otherwise we wouldn't be using our true power. And then we wouldn't be able to grow stronger. If a trial is equal to your strength, then it's okay if you come to an impasse. If you do end up at an impasse, then it just means you're trying to move forward and you want to win. That's why you have to keep trying. — Kae Maruya

My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or bad. — Claudia Rankine

The main attraction of a generous NIT is that it could resolve an impasse. As matters stand, every element of limited government now faces a blanket objection: But what about poor people? An NIT could take poverty off the table by giving every adult an income above the poverty line. Doing so is probably the single most important step in getting the nation to think seriously about restoring limited government. The left has always claimed it wanted to end material poverty. A generous NIT would do that. Is the left willing to give up the apparatus of the welfare state in return? But — Charles Murray

...A legendary leader distinguishes himself as someone who gets ahead of his people from an impasse and futile general consensus, and then finds new grounds that constitute the base from which a unique course of his people's destiny is charted... — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The splendid wooden mosque - which you can find if you search - nobody would think of showing you, being less aware of what they have than what they lack. They lack technology: we want to get out of the impasse into which too much technology has led us, our sensibilities saturated to the nth degree with Information and a Culture of distractions. We're counting on their formulae to revive us; they're counting on ours to live. Our paths cross without mutual understanding, and sometimes the traveler gets impatient, but there is a great deal of self-centeredness in such impatience. — Nicolas Bouvier

If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher — Cameron Adams

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings - a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. — John Lanchester

It's strange, isn't it? No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. — Haruki Murakami

We are like a people under [a] sentence of death, waiting for the date to be set. We sense that something is about to happen.
We know that things cannot go on as they are. History has reached an impasse. We are now on a collision course. Something is about to give. — Billy Graham

The study of the cultures of antiquity in general, and of ancient Egypt in particular, can serve to guide us out of the secular and dualistic impasse that we now face. — Jeremy Nadler

There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction ... no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time. — Irvine Welsh

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. — Graham Greene

[I]t is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing that makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. [...] [G]etting caught up in the normal human tendencies of self-cherishing and arrogance, and ignoring the larger order of things, will ultimately lead to ans impasse in your life in which you are unable to go forward, unable to go back, and unable to turn around. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Consider the impasse of a one God universe.
He is all-knowing and all-powerful.
He can't go anywhere since He is already everywhere.
He can't do anything since the act of doing presupposes opposition.
His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death,
To keep his dying show on the road. — William S. Burroughs

Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

When the sun comes up, Justineau is silently amazed. It seemed entirely plausible that this ontological impasse would go on for ever. Through — M.R. Carey

They'll come for me if I help you, and no offense, no one has ever bled for me, so I'm not about to bleed for anyone else. You can all go to hell for what I care. I've done enough helping. You've already brought Zebulon down on my ass and now the Dolophoni. It took me centuries to reach an impasse with them and I like our cold war a little too much to jeopardize it for you. (Solin)
...
He's a fuzzy-little-bunny guy, isn't he? (Geary) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Each blockage is a blockage. Each impasse is an impasse. You have to find a solution; there is no recipe that fits each one of them. — Roberto Azevedo

But he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones that you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams? — Brian Doyle

Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day? — Henry Miller

If, in full conversation with the biblical and extrabiblical evidence, we can adjust our expectations about how the Bible should behave, we can begin to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conservative debates of the last several generations. — Peter Enns

Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience. — Rebecca Goldstein

Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse. — Heraclitus

An awkward impasse. No one knew exactly how to say good-bye. A wave? A handshake? A kiss? — Harlan Coben

But like the rest of the country, Maine has reached an impasse, for most of the mercury that fouls our skies, waters and land comes from outside our borders. — Tom Allen

History is filled with tragic examples of wars that result from diplomatic impasse. Whether in our local communities or in international relations, the skillful use of our communicative capacities to negotiate and resolve differences is the first evidence of human wisdom. — Daisaku Ikeda