“The impossible has no past.”

—  Ron English

Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 2, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The impossible has no past." by Ron English?
Ron English photo
Ron English 183
American artist 1959

Related quotes

Vladimir Nabokov photo

“I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Frank Herbert photo

“It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Variant: It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.
Source: Dune

George Orwell photo

“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

José Saramago photo

“Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Todo o romance é isso, desespero, intento frustrado de que o passado não seja coisa definitivamente perdida. Só não se acabou ainda de averiguar se é o romance que impede o homem de esquecer-se ou se é a impossibilidade do esquecimento que o leva a escrever romances.
Source: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 47

Anna Quindlen photo

“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”

Anna Quindlen book Black and Blue

Source: Black and Blue

Arthur C. Clarke photo

“Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962)
On Clarke's Laws

“Chaos cuts with two edges. We have seen how it is impossible to retrieve past history from current observations. We will now show that it is impossible to predict future states from the current observations.”

Ivar Ekeland (1944) French mathematician

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 6, Pandora's Box, p. 127.

Milan Kundera photo

“And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.”

Milan Kundera book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

J. Howard Moore photo

“How helpless human beings are—in fact, how helpless all beings are! How hopelessly dependent we are upon the past, and how impossible it is to be really original! What the future will be depends upon what the present is, for the future will grow out of, and inherit, the present. What the present is depends upon what the past was, for the present has grown out of, and inherited, the past. And what the past was depends upon a remoter past from which it evolved, and so on. There is no end anywhere of dependence, either forward or backward. Every fact, from an idea to a sun, is a contingent link in an eternal chain.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Genealogy of Animals", p. 85
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

James Harvey Robinson photo

“It is impossible to divide the past into distinct, clearly defined periods and prove that one age ended and another began in a particular year, such as 476, or 1453, or 1789.”

James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936) American historian

Source: An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (1902), Ch. 1 : The Historical Point of View, p. 3
Context: It is impossible to divide the past into distinct, clearly defined periods and prove that one age ended and another began in a particular year, such as 476, or 1453, or 1789. Men do not and cannot change their habits and ways of doing things all at once, no matter what happens. <!-- It is true that a single event, such as an important battle which results in the loss of a nation's independence, may produce an abrupt change in the government. This in turn may encourage or discourage commerce and industry and modify the language and the spirit of a people. Yet these deeper changes take place only very gradually. After a battle or a revolution the farmer will sow and reap in his old way, the artisan will take up his familiar tasks, and the merchant his baying and selling. The scholar will study and write and the household go on under the new government just as they did under the old. So a change in government affects the habits of a people but slowly in any case, and it may leave them quite unaltered.

Related topics