“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”

— Alan Turing

Last update July 30, 2025. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible." by Alan Turing?

Alan Turing 33

British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer… 1912–1954

Related quotes

“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”

Alan Turing (1912–1954) British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist

Variant: Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

“You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

From An Insight, An Idea with Tim Berners-Lee http://www.weforum.org/sessions/summary/insight-idea-tim-berners-lee at 27:27 (25 January 2013)
Context: When somebody has learned how to program a computer … You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

“It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

Source: Submission

“But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.

“In general, when the imagination is at all noble, it is irresistible, and therefore those who can at all resist it ought to resist it. Be a plain topographer if you possibly can; if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet.”

John Ruskin book Modern Painters

Volume III, part V, chapter II (1856).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)

“It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so, provided one takes the long view, for no one can see far ahead. Against a historical background, the layman can understand what is involved, for example, in the fascinating challenge of continuity and discontinuity expressed in the antithesis of field and particle.<!--p.4