“Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible." by Francis of Assisi?
Francis of Assisi photo
Francis of Assisi 49
Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order 1182–1226

Related quotes

Mikhail Bakunin photo

“By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

Attributed to Bakunin in The Explorers (1996) by Paolo Novaresio
Context: By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

Josemaría Escrivá photo

“With God's grace, you have to tackle and carry out the impossible, because anybody can do what is possible.”

Josemaría Escrivá (1902–1975) Spanish theologian

#216
The Forge (1987)

Marcus Aurelius photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo

“If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

C 54
Variant translation: If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook C (1772-1773)

Sri Aurobindo photo

“What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)
Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Ben Carson photo

“I started reading about people of great accomplishment … and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

As quoted in "World-Renowned Pediatric Neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson Attributes His Success to Confidence Gained Through Reading and Education" http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/world-renowned-pediatric-neurosurgeon-dr-benjamin-carson-attributes-his-success-to-confidence-gained-through-reading-and-education-132129383.html, PR Newswire (October 19, 2011)

Leonard Cohen photo

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love.”

Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Arthur Ashe photo
Harold W. Percival photo

“For you it is possible to do anything; the only thing impossible for you to do is to do wrong, inasmuch as you are knowledge and justice and love.”

Source: Thinking and Destiny (1946), Ch. 14, Thinking: The Way to Conscious Immortality, p. 943

Larry Niven photo

“Do you know what it's like to be suddenly poor and not know how to live poor?”

Source: Short fiction, Neutron Star (1968), A Relic of the Empire (p. 43)

Related topics