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?
"I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn't foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered.
All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.
To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being born there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us.
If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.
"1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.
I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.
"Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity." I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers. "Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees." --
But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.
In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.
Es perfectamente imaginable que el esplendor de la vida esta dispuesto, siempre en toda plenitud, alrededor de cada uno, pero cubierto de un velo, en las profundidades, invisible muy lejos. Sin embargo esta ahi, no hostil, no a disgusto, no sordo, viene si uno lo llama con la palabra correcta, por su nombre correcto, Es la esencia de la magia, que no crea, sino llama.
Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.
Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn't the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia, you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes...
"Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to "know" them, and know how to use them."
"At what point," he asked, "does one decide on rafters and a rope? Answer: no points to be had. There is merely what happened, what is now happening and what will one day happen. Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. Gravity has a hand. Bear in mind trapdoors. We fall in love, yes? Tumble, in fact. Is it choice? Enough said."
"A bird is like an instrument working according to mathematical law, and it is in the capacity of man to reproduce such an instrument," Leonardo da Vinci"
Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than their facts.