Impossible

“ Sensible people ridicule an absolute scepticism, and think it even impossible. A man, who doubted his own existence, or that of the sun, would appear ridiculous. Is this more extravagant than to doubt the non-existence of an evidently impossible being? Is it more absurd to doubt one's own existence, than to hesitate upon the impossibility of a being, whose qualities reciprocally destroy one another? ”

“ May not our taking things to be possible, in matters of higher moment, when we can show no good reason that they are so, lead us into unnecessary disputes and vain theories? Ought we to admit that as a just argument in reasoning, or even as a pressing difficulty, which is grounded on the supposition that such a thing is possible, when in reality we have no good evidence of its being possible, and for anything we can show to the contrary, it may be impossible?’ ”

“ You ask what is the use of drawing the Impossible? Your asking proves that you do not feel the charm of this vision of youth,—this dream of spring. I hold that the Impossible bears a [295] much closer relation to fact than does most of what we call the real and the commonplace. ”

“ And what’s impossible can’t be;
And never, never, comes to pass! ”

“ No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone. ”

“ So everywhere⁠—one hears this kind of question, as though the mind grew childish before an incomprehensible thing. Some shadowy magic pervades the faculties; their natural alertness fails; talk is in whispers, almost as if someone were listening; unreality broods over mood and speech and action. The Impossible, dressed in colours of strange, unfading brilliance, stoops down from some tremendous height, steals close past the windows of the mind, halts a moment, peers in⁠—and vanishes. ”

“ “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. ”

“ As to the reputed impossibilities which rest on no other grounds than our ignorance of any cause capable of producing the supposed effects; very few of them are certainly impossible, or permanently incredible. ”

“ Everything is impossible until some one does it, and then it becomes, on the contrary, astonishingly easy. If we take any other definition for this word, we must admit that there is only one thing that is impossible. ”

“ All is to them a dull round of probabilities and possibilities; but the history of all times and places is nothing else but improbabilities and impossibilities,—what we should say was impossible, if we did not see it always before our eyes. ”

“ It is impossible rationally to doubt where you have but one idea. You may doubt psychically, given two ideas which seem two but are one. And, even without this actual illusion, you may feel uneasy in mind and may hesitate. ”

“ It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. ”

“ We know universal, absolute nothing, only as a momentary condition which we imagine, but do not admit. In it we see that it is impossible that something should not exist; for, could any one instant be designated in which nothing existed, nothing could now exist. ”

“ "and to the timid and hesitating, everything is impossible, because it seems so." ”

“ So when we do read one of these to us "impossible" tales, in Amazing Stories, we may be almost certain that the "impossibility" will have become a fact perhaps before another generation—if not much sooner. It is most unwise in this age to declare anything impossible, because you may never be sure but that even while you are talking it has already become a reality. Many things in the past which were declared impossible, are of everyday occurrence now. ”

“ It is rigorously impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances only, without at the same time conceiving a Reality of which they are appearances; for appearance without reality is unthinkable. Strike out from the argument the terms Unconditioned, Infinite, Absolute, with their equivalents, and in place of them write, “negation of conceivability,” or “absence of the conditions under which consciousness is possible,” and you find that the argument becomes nonsense. ”

“ But we know that whatever is true, whether necessary or not, is possible. Our knowledge therefore of what is possible keeps pace with our knowledge of truth, whether contingent or necessary. Beyond this, I am afraid our knowledge of what is possible is conjectural. And although we are apt to think everything to be possible which we do not perceive to be impossible, yet in this we may be greatly deceived. ”

“ Therefore I am encouraged to ask your indulgence, in the name of your previous errors, for the following and any other instances in which I may appear to trifle with strict veracity. There is no such thing as the impossible in our universe! ”

“ that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. ”

“ For instance, if the world were so constituted that it would be impossible for it not to exist, that the necessity for its existence and the inconceivability of its non-existence were at once explicit and obvious, then there would be no sense in inquiring after a cause. ”

“ All metaphysical impossibilities can be reduced to the formula, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same moment, as this would be an absurdity—that is, an absurd or meaningless statement. ”

“ "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ”

“ In every case the conclusion arrived at is the same, viz. that the unconscious is nothing but this or that, which has already been adequately recognised and acknowledged as infantile, useless, meaningless, impossible, and out of date. ”

“ And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless. ”

“ A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities of the age in which they lived, which have afterward, and indeed within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true. ”

“ But, Madam, there may be infinite questions or exceptions, and infinite answers made upon one truth; but the wisest and most probable way is, to rely upon sense and reason, and not to trouble the mind, thoughts, and actions of life, with improbabilities, or rather impossibilities, which sense and reason knows not of, nor cannot conceive. You may say, A Man hath sometimes improbable, or impossible Fancies, Imaginations, or Chymæra's, in his mind, which are No-things. I answer, That those Fancies and Imaginations are not No-things, but as perfectly imbodied as any other Creatures ”

“ Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained—something bound to happen. ”

“ It cannot be, unless something which we hold for true is, as such, given up. The impossibility here will vary in degree, according to the strength of that knowledge with which it conflicts. And, once more here, it does not consist in our failure and impotence. The impossible is not rejected, in other words, because we cannot find it. It is rejected because we find it, and find it in collision with positive knowledge. But what is true on the other side is that our knowledge here is finite and fallible. It has to be conditional on account of our inability and impotence. ”

“ Complete Uniformity of Belief and Statement Impossible.—It is impossible, for, in the first place, it is difficult, in any case, to tell our real inner creed. Some of its most important articles are quite certain to be implicit and unconfessed, even to ourselves. ”

“ But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, that the impossible had been mysteriously achieved by man himself: this staggers the mind! ”

“ and, besides, nothing is worth doing except what the world says is impossible. ”

“ Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance with his nature. ”

“ There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est,—“I believe, because it is impossible,”—is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons. ”

“ We ought not to desire the impossible. ”

“ For all being impossible; they are none of them nearest the Truth, or nature of what they present. For impossibilities are all equal, and admit no degrees. And, then, if all those Poets that have so fervently laboured to give Rules as Maxims, would but be pleased to abbreviate; or endure to hear their Reasons reduced into one strict Definition; it must be, That there are degrees in impossibilities, and that many things, which are not possible, may yet be more or less impossible ”

“ “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; ”

“ Yet this usage has crept up on all peoples and into their languages and has grown strong by the general ambiguity, so that everything which actually exists, or has existed or will exist is called necessary, while everything which does not, has not and never will exist, are called impossible. ”

“ The working-world around must indeed give us an account of their actions, but lovers are not worth much in the way of rendering a reason; for half the charm of love-making lies in the defiance of everything that is reasonable, in asserting the incredible, and in believing the impossible. ”

“ He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled? Such things were impossible. ”

“ If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism, from out of whose toils we have just wound our way. ”

“ What was it, then, which determined Something to exist rather than Nothing, and bestowed being on a particular possibility, exclusive of the rest? External causes, there are supposed to be none. Chance is a word without a meaning. ”

“ Alike in ordinary life and in science, even in science where such a result was perhaps hardly to be expected, we found what at least seemed like illusion and what certainly was paradox, and almost against our will we had to conclude that a spirit of contradiction and duplicity and vacillation dwelt at the very centre and the very heart of our human experience. ”

“ But what form of Being shall this fact of the non-expression of the meaning of our ideas, this refusal of the universe concretely to fulfil our purposes, actually possess? Shall this brute fact that our ideas are not expressed possess the reality of an object independent of all ideas? But such a reality, as we now know, is a logical impossibility. Moreover, an object independent of all ideas, even if such an object were otherwise possible, could defeat, or could refuse real expression to no idea whatever. ”