Possibility

Possibility is the condition or fact of being possible. Latin origins of the word hint at ability. Possibility also refers to something that "could happen", that is not precluded by the facts, but usually not probable.

Quotes

• Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.
  • Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. Psychology Press. 2004. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-415-96922-2. 

• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.
  • James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion : A Comedy of Redemption (1926), Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat

• A beautiful world we live in, when it IS possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done—done, see you!—under that sky there, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.
  • Ernest Defarge, in Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Book 1, Chapter 5: The Wine Shop, Page 6 (1859)

• Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety.
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 38. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8. 

• A difference of opinion exists only as to the question to which of the two classes anything belongs; whether to the class of the impossible, or to that of the possible. Note it.
  • Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190) Part III, Ch. 15, p 61, Tr. Michael Friedländer (1885) Vol. 3.

• Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future.
  • Peg O'Connor, "Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature", Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).

• What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future.
  • Peg O'Connor, "Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature", Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).

• There must be absolutely acceptance of the possibility that everything material in us should be destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear.
  • Simone Weil, "Concerning the Our Father" in Waiting on God (1972), Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, p. 153

• In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future; he must have a vision of something worth doing.
  • Colin Wilson in New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution, p 219-220 (1972)

• The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and the world didn't change.
  • Sun Ra, as quoted in The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose. BoD – Books on Demand. 2005. p. 33. ISBN 978-3-8334-2659-9.