Quotes & Sayings About Improbability

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability. — Milan Kundera

My face set to a grim and determined expression. I speak in all modesty as I say this, but I discovered at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. It's not something evident, in my experience. Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the every end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. It may be nothing more than life-hungry stupidity. — Yann Martel

To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability ... . [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles. — Francis Collins

I'm afraid you cannot leave,' said Zarniwoop, 'you are entwined in the Improbability Field. You cannot escape.' He smiled the smile that Zaphod had wanted to hit and this time Zaphod hit it. — Douglas Adams

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result
eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly
in you. — Bill Bryson

The improbability of a malicious story serves but to help forward the currency of it, because it increases the scandal. So that, in such instances, the world is like the pious St. Austin, who said he believed some things because they were absurd and impossible. — Laurence Sterne

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.
But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth — Max Frisch

Nothing holds back human progress as frequently as the misbelief that the words 'impossible' and 'improbable' are synonyms. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes. — Doris Lessing

When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy - if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this easily managed. — C.S. Lewis

Maximum improbability equals maximum possibility. — Mark Batterson

They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately. — Douglas Adams

Trumanites work for the President. Can't he simply "stand tall" and order them to do what he directs, even though they disagree? The answer is complex. It is not that the Trumanites would not obey;174 it is that such orders would rarely be given. Could not shades into would not, and improbability into near impossibility: President Obama could give an order wholly reversing U.S. national security policy, but he would not, because the likely adverse consequences would be prohibitive. — Michael J. Glennon

The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation. — Helen Nearing

It's the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance. — William Lane Craig

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. — Ronald A. Fisher

The vague yet menacing government agency would like to remind you that UFOs are totally not a thing. They remind you that UFOs are merely weather balloons, and further, that weather balloons are merely misplaced clouds, that clouds are merely dreams that have escaped our sleep, that sleep is merely a practice for death, that death is merely another facet of our world, no different from, say, sand or bicycles, and that the great glowing earth is merely the last thoughts of a dying man, laughing and shaking his head weakly at the improbability of it all. Remember, it's not just the law. It's an — Joseph Fink

Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You're an improbable person, and so am I. — Douglas Preston

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough. — Flea

I had a dream about you last night ... I was a brick and you were a blanket. Damn that improbability drive. — Nicole McKay

I don't hesitate to say that if we truly grasped the improbability and overwhelming power of God's love, we would be changed forever. We would think differently. Feel differently. Live differently. Nothing would be the same. — Francis Chan

There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals; between chemical combinations and simple mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and birds [ ... ]. The improbability may henceforth be taken for granted of finding in Nature a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is feminine on the other; or that any living being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly on one side, or wholly on the other, of the line. — Otto Weininger

Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others-and I am one of those-never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. — Yann Martel

The ship did. All by itself." "Huh?" "While we were in Improbability Drive." "But that's incredible." "No, Zaphod. Just very very improbable. — Douglas Adams

The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability. — Ernst Mayr

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. — Richard Dawkins

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature without promise. — Robert Ardrey

The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or "runs." What I found were "coincidences" which were connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure. — Carl Jung

In a 2011 TED Talk in San Francisco, author and speaker Mel Robbins talked about how the chances that you are you are about 1 in 400 trillion. (Yes, that's a four hundred followed by twelve zeros.) This takes into account the chance of your parents meeting out of all the people on the planet, the chance of them reproducing, the chance of you being born at the exact moment that you were, and every other wildly improbable factor that goes into each individual person. The whole point of her crazy calculation was that we should take the sheer improbability of our own existence as a kick in the butt to get out of bed in the morning. — Sophia Amoruso

I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. — Yann Martel

Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance. — Richard Dawkins

That's very good thinking, you know. Turn on the Improbability Drive for a second without first activating the proofing screens. Hey, kid, you just saved our lives, you know that?" "Oh," said Arthur, "well, it was nothing really ... ." "Was it?" said Zaphod. "Oh well, forget it then. Okay, computer, take us in to land." "But ... " "I said forget it. — Douglas Adams

Our culture sends some amazingly contradictory messages about what an ideal mother is like. Mothers try to live up to these ideals without recognizing the contradictions or the improbability of the task. As mothers, you are often expected to have a fulfilling career, time for personal interests, a rewarding marriage, involvement in your communities, a thorough grasp of current events - and be able to provide baked goods at a moment's notice. — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.
Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the "multiverse," in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

That our being should consist of two fundamental elements [physical and psychical] offers I suppose no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only. — Charles Scott Sherrington

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. — Lewis Thomas

I have always embraced this concept, and it paid off now, as Meza proved to be wonderfully creative in both Spanish and English. He ran through an impressive list of standards, and then his artistic side took full flower and he called me things that had never before existed, except possibly in a parallel universe designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The performance took on an added air of supernatural improbability because Meza's voice was so weak and husky, but he never allowed that to slow him. I was frankly awed, and Deborah seemed to be, too, because we both simply stood and listened until Meza finally wore down and tapered off with, Cocksucker. — Jeff Lindsay

For all this, man is embodied and trusting in his senses; he had sooner believe in a sensible improbability than in an insensible uncertainty, that is, sooner worship an idol than grapple with the philosophers. — Neel Burton

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. — Salman Rushdie

REVISITING THE LIST
1. Kiss Estelle
Okay, at least I've met her. She thinks I'm a creep. And that's withought her knowing I've read her diaries. Unless we somehow fall over, exactly aligned, lip to lip, and gravity causes the pressure, or we find ourselves in a darkened room and through a series of Shakespearian ID muddles she thinks she's kissing someone else, I can't say how this is ever going to happen. — Fiona Wood

But the child grows up, and reaches adolescence. He stands on the threshold of life, and the school-bench is left behind him. School has taught him but little - a few facts and some elementary information. But he has learnt to reason logically, and to examine the solid foundations on which the world rests. He begins to apply his logic to everything, and when he approaches religion, doubt trembles in his soul. The absurd improbability of the legends of the Middle Ages disgusts him, and at the same time he is obsessed by the fear of remaining without a relegion, a fear which has been inculcated into his mind by his entire upbringing. Calm and cold-blooded people think it all out, and become confirmed Atheists. Not so, however, those others with fervent, burning souls! — Aimee Dostoyevsky

Infinity minus one," chattered the computer. "Improbability sum now complete. — Douglas Adams

Dreams are what life is made of and although most things are improbable, nothing is impossible. Be the dreamer of the impossible and you can see probability. — Peace Gypsy

It is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in order to improve such an organ as the eye at all, it must be improved in ten different ways at once. And the improbability of any complex organ being produced and brought to perfection in any such way is an improbability of the same kind and degree as that of producing a poem or a mathematical demonstration by throwing letters at random on a table. — Joseph Murray

Whenever the strength of a belief strongly steps into the foreground, we must infer a certain weakness of demonstrability and the improbability of that belief. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability. — Jerry Pournelle

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

Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable. It systematically seizes the minority of random changes that have what it takes to survive, and accumulates them, step by tiny step over unimaginable timescales, until evolution eventually climbs mountains of improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called 'Mount Improbable'. — Richard Dawkins

We should take the sheer improbability of our own existence as a kick in the butt to get out of bed in the morning. If you hear this fact as discouraging - that you're only one in billions - then flip the script. You are one in billions! Someone has to succeed, so it might as well be you. — Sophia Amoruso

One moment I was sitting in your ship feeling very depressed, and the next moment I was standing here feeling utterly miserable. An Improbability Field I expect. — Douglas Adams

The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes. — Wendell Berry

A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it - indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it.
The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is 'religiosity', understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects. — Peter Sloterdijk

When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years. Which — Douglas Adams

The sheer improbability of your existence took my breath away. — Robin Hobb

All that matters is that artists keep reminding mortals about what really matters: the wonder, the glory, the madness, the importance and the improbability of love. — Hannah Mary Rothschild

Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky. — Emily St. John Mandel

I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence ... And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace. — Ursula Goodenough

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg.
Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter ... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold ... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle. — Alan Moore

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. — Graham Greene

In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. — G.K. Chesterton

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. — Richard Dawkins

Some of us give up[ ... ] with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. — Yann Martel

But there are times when men have serious thoughts, and it is at such times, when they begin to think, that they begin to doubt the truth of the Christian religion; and well they may, for it is too fanciful and too full of conjecture, inconsistency, improbability and irrationality, to afford consolation to the thoughtful man. His reason revolts against his creed. He sees that none of its articles are proved, or can be proved. — Thomas Paine

It seemed so improbable. But so did everything else that I really paid attention to. — Carrie Saxifrage

The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its improbability. — William Poundstone

For an instant Stile was daunted by the improbability of it all: a man, a cyborg, a robot, an animalhead, and a wooden golem, all riding unicorns through a battlefield strewn with goblins and dragons, pursuing an invaluable ball of power-rock that rolled along a channel cleared by plastic explosive. What a mishmash! — Piers Anthony

Charles Sherrington, the founder of modern neurophysiology, contended in 1947 that brain processes alone cannot account for the full range of subjective mental phenomena, including conscious free will. "That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only," he wrote. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

We very often express in a categorical form a judgment of which we do not feel assured, we even lay stress on its absolute validity. We want to see what opposition it will arouse, and this can be achieved only by stating our assumption not as a tentative suggestion, which no one will consider, but as an irrefutable, all-important truth. The greater the value of the assumption has for us, the more carefully do we conceal any suggestion of its improbability. — Lev Shestov

Wherever the strength of a faith steps decisively into the foreground, we infer a certain weakness in its ability to demonstrate its truth, even the improbability of what it believes. We, too, do not deny that the belief "makes blessed," but for that very reason we deny that the belief proves something - a strong belief which confers blessedness creates doubts about what it has faith in. It does not ground "truth." It grounds a certain probability - delusion. — Friedrich Nietzsche