Probability Vs Possibility Quotes & Sayings

May intelligent, bookish ladies sometimes be reformed?" he asked her.
She thought about it.
"I suppose it may be within the bounds of possibility," she said, "even if not of probability. — Mary Balogh

What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities? — Yoon Ha Lee

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words. — William Faulkner

Anything at all is possible. Some things are unlikely. Some things will never happen. But they always could, at any time. — Ashly Lorenzana

A reasonable scale of probability-what is likely-forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle. — Anthony Burgess

If you can't dream big, you will never see the vivid colors of probability over the darkness of possibility. — Shannon L. Alder

But was chance necessary? Hubbard, too, thought about the parallels between the Mandelbrot set and the biological encoding of information, but he bristled at any suggestion that such processes might depend on probability. "There is no randomness in the Mandelbrot set," Hubbard said. "There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. — James Gleick

If you missed your possibility do not lose your probability — Mohammed Sekouty

The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place.
The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible. — Simeon Denis Poisson

The reality, as I have come to understand it, is that the future is not fixed, and that therefore it cannot be reliably predicted. Consciousness interacts with vast archetypal fields of possibility and probability. What actually happens is the result of the collision of both forces. — Steven Forrest

Based on the law of probability Everything is possible because The sheer existence of possibility Confirms the existence Of impossibility. — Dejan Stojanovic

Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well. — Cornel West

Making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, — William Faulkner

In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right. — Antony Jay

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability. — Hugh Ross

Playing is more than the act of judging the possibility of defeat or victory, playing is the probability of hope we will have victory. — Pushpa Rana

Being nice is state of "Probability", not a state of "possibility". — Deyth Banger

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken. — Roland Barthes

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves - whether they know clearly what it is they act upon or not. — Flannery O'Connor

If nature has taught us anything it is that the impossible is probable — Ilyas Kassam

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it. — Aristotle.

When it looks like the sun isn't going to shine any more, God puts a rainbow in the clouds. Each one of us has the possibility, the responsibility, the probability to be the rainbow in the clouds. — Maya Angelou

Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence ... It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw. — Alfred Wegener

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant. — Daniel Kahneman