These unthinkable quotes will inspire you. Unthinkable (of a situation or event) too unlikely or undesirable to be considered a possibility.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging unthinkable quotes, unthinkable sayings, and unthinkable proverbs.
Best Unthinkable Quotes
- “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.” ~ Tom Robbins
- “Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” ~ Douglas Adams
- “We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.” ~ J. William Fulbright
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“Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.” ~ Arthur Keith
- “We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.” ~ J. William Fulbright
- “At some time, often when we least expect it, we all have to face overwhelming challenges. When the unthinkable happens, the lighthouse is hope. Once we find it, we must cling to it with absolute determination. When we have hope, we discover powers within ourselves we may have never known- the power to make sacrifices, to endure, to heal, and to love. Once we choose hope, everything is possible.” ~ Christopher Reeve
- “Movement is life; without movement life is unthinkable.” ~ Moshe Feldenkrais
- “One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.” ~ Salman Rushdie
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“If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.” ~ Murray Bookchin
- “We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.” ~ J. William Fulbright
- “The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
- “There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again.” ~ Gary Zukav
- “If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.” ~ Josephine Tey
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“There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.” ~ Samuel Butler
- “It’s unthinkable not to love – you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.” ~ Lawrence Durrell , Unthinkable quotes love
- “Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is – among other things – continuity, and unthinkable without it.” ~ Clement Greenberg
- “I’m voting for Gore because the other is unthinkable. Which most of us will probably do. I hope all of us. I’ve always liked Ralph Nader and would like to see a real third party, but the thought of George Bush as president is unthinkable.” ~ Richard Gere
- “Dante can be understood only within the context of Italian thought, and Faust would be unthinkable if divorced from its German background; but both are part of our common cultural heritage.” ~ Gustav Stresemann
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“It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.” ~ Andre Gide
- “Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s further development.” ~ Lewis Mumford
- “Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “It is unthinkable that a national government which represents women should ignore the issue of the right of all women to political freedom.” ~ Lucy Burns
- “Exchanging blows generously, which is not uncommon in some other martial arts, is unthinkable in Shaolin philosophy, because a Shaolin disciple always assumes that an opponent is competent and able to inflict damage with just one blow.” ~ Wong Kiew Kit
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“The unthinkable is thinkable. No: likely.” ~ Tom Peters
- “To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible.” ~ Cullen Murphy
- “How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.” ~ Douglas Coupland
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“Infinite possibilities exist to create the previously un-creatable, think the unthinkable and do the undoable-it’s an extraordinary time to be alive.” ~ Mark Victor Hansen
- “Without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.” ~ Henry Miller
- “We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction ”If we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.” ~ Petra Kelly , Do the unthinkable quotes
- “Without a rope there is no fear beacuse to fall is unthinkable.” ~ Catherine Destivelle
- “We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.” ~ Salman Rushdie
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“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “As a Goodwill Ambassador for UNIFEM, I’ve learned that violence against women knows no boundaries. Join me in helping women worldwide who have suffered unthinkable violence.” ~ Nicole Kidman
- “Historically, I guess that’s how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.” ~ Samuel R. Delany
- “As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the “banality of evil” — that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.” ~ Philip Zimbardo
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“Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable… unimaginable… unspeakable.” ~ Paul Keating
- “Creativity requires the freedom to consider ‘unthinkable’ alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. Every organization, every society is under the spell of assumptions so familiar that they are never questioned, least of all by those most intimately involved.” ~ John W. Gardner
- “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.” ~ Jeffrey Rosen
- “Ultimately, what separates a winner from a loser at the grandmaster level is the willingness to do the unthinkable. A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough. Given the opportunity, I must have the guts to explode the game, to upend my opponent’s thinking and, in so doing, unnerve him. So it is in business: One does not succeed by sticking to convention. When your opponent can easily anticipate every move you make, your strategy deteriorates and becomes commoditized.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “They were so exhausted and seasick and all they could do was crawl up those beaches. And thousands of them lay dead in no time at all. It’s unthinkable.” ~ Barry Pepper
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“The unthinkable is not something we are thinking about at the moment.” ~ Peter Kenyon
- “The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” ~ C. Vann Woodward
- “That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.” ~ Iain Banks
- “Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.” ~ John Updike
- “Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as ‘art for art’s sake’ it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.” ~ Andre Simon
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“Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.” ~ Boris Pasternak
- “At the very core of RIM is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable. And that is fantastic.” ~ Thorsten Heins
- “We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.” ~ James Dyson
- “I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it’s as if they can’t get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate.” ~ Scarlett Thomas
- “According to the Buddha’s teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him ‘What is the beginning of God?’ he would answer without hesitation ‘God has no beginning’, and he is not astonished at his own reply.” ~ Walpola Rahula
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“Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.” ~ Helene Cixous
- “The grandiose plans of what Macintosh was gonna be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing. And the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible, it was salvageable. But the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something, and that somebody was John Sculley.” ~ Chris Espinosa
- “A general rule of etiquette is that one apologizes for the unfortunate occurrence, but the unthinkable is unmentionable.” ~ Judith Martin
- “If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable” ~ Wilfred Owen
- “One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.” ~ Andrea Dworkin
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“I am alarmed at the subtle invasion of professional football, which is gaining preeminence over baseball. It’s unthinkable.” ~ Branch Rickey
- “The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay. The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young.” ~ George Takei
- “If Israel falls to the terrorists, the entire free world will tremble. To forsake Israel now would be tantamount to forsaking Great Britain in 1940. It is unthinkable, and it is unthinkable because the world wants to know if we believe freedom is worth fighting for.” ~ Tom DeLay
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“We opened El Bulli; there were no secrets there. The recipes were not secret. Anybody who came, the recipes were there for them. This was unthinkable then.” ~ Ferran Adria
- “But sometimes it’s good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.” ~ Evan Davis
- “The idea of the Overton Window of using people on the political fringe to change the terms of acceptable debate, that`s an idea that`s been hugely influential in conservative politics since Joseph P. Overton thought it up, making radical ideas seem acceptable by advocating for the unthinkable.” ~ Rachel Maddow
