Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

“Impossible” lands in Wonderland like a complaint filed with the wrong department. Alice speaks in the tidy grammar of the real world, where facts are referees and the word itself is supposed to end the argument. The Mad Hatter’s comeback doesn’t refute her; it reroutes her. “Only if you believe it is” reframes impossibility as a psychological habit, not a property of the universe. Carroll’s trick is that it sounds like motivational wisdom, but it’s also a sly indictment of how “common sense” polices experience.

The line works because it weaponizes Alice’s own certainty. She thinks she’s naming an objective limit; the Hatter makes it a confession: you’re the one enforcing the boundary. That’s a classic Carroll move, turning language into a hall of mirrors where statements reveal the speaker’s assumptions more than they describe reality. It’s funny because it’s airy and blunt at once, as if the cosmos were a matter of attitude. It’s unsettling because Wonderland keeps proving him right: rules bend, time misbehaves, and logic is treated like a party guest who’s overstayed.

Context matters: Carroll is writing in a Victorian culture that prized order, propriety, and “reason” as a civic religion. The Hatter’s line punctures that piety with nonsense that’s too coherent to dismiss. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-complacent. He’s telling Alice (and the reader) that the world is partly built out of what we’re willing to imagine, and that certainty can be the most restrictive fantasy of all.