Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.
In my career as an actor, there is a catchphrase that Scofield always says often in regards to his brother, 'Have a little faith. ' In my own career as an actor, there were times when I was the only one who believed in myself in the face of the odds.
I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.
In my practice as a psychiatrist, I have found that helping people to develop personal goals has proven to be the most effective way to help them cope with problems. Observing that lives of people who have mastered adversity, I have noticed that they have established goals and sought with all their effort to achieve them. From the moment they decided to concentrate all their energies on a specific objective, they begun to surmount the most difficult odds.
The act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.
I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.
The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.
The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it "undermines the work ethic," but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.
Nothing reduces the odds against you like ignoring them.
Since 1978 the record pretty well shows that no start-up airline. . . has really been successful, so the odds of JetBlue having long-term success are remote. I'm not going to say it can't happen because stranger things have happened, but I personally believe P. T. Barnum was, in that respect, correct.
For the rest of your life you must check the box on employment applications asking the dreaded question: "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" And once you check that box, the odds are sky high that your application is going straight to the trash. Hundreds of professional licenses are off-limits to people convicted of felonies.
The citizens of Love Canal provided an example of how a blue-collar community with few resources can win against great odds (a multi-billion-dollar international corporation and an unresponsive government), using the power of the people in our democratic system.
In the Tarot deck, the Fool is depicted as a young man about to step off a cliff into empty air. Most people assume that the Fool will fall. But we don't see it happen, and a Fool doesn't know that he's subject to the laws of gravity. Against all odds, he just might float.
If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
There isn't a woman player in the world I can't give knights-odds to and still beat.
The more survival skills an individual has that have been practiced physically and otherwise, the better odds they have for those skills coming to the forefront during a stressful emergency.
Sincerity of conviction and purity of motive will surely gain the day; and even a small minority, armed with these, is surely destined to prevail against all odds.
You must ignore what everyone else is doing and trade only when you feel the odds are in your favor. In short, trade only when you and you alone are comfortable that the expected return of your trades will be positive. That might mean you'll have to sit out a few parties, but it will also mean that you'll have more profits over the course of your trading career.
The odds are six to five that the light in the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.