Faith & Spirit Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

La Fontaine’s line flatters the human animal, then quietly warns it. “Man is so made” sounds like a calm bit of natural history: not moral advice, not divine decree, just wiring. He frames transcendence as a built-in mechanism, which is sly coming from a poet famous for fables where self-justifying creatures talk themselves into trouble. The phrase “fires his soul” is doing double duty. Fire is illumination and ignition, but also combustion: something that consumes, something that spreads. What looks like inspiration can be obsession in a prettier coat.

“Impossibilities vanish” is the quote’s seductive magic trick. It doesn’t say obstacles are removed; it says they disappear. That’s not a description of the world changing so much as perception changing. La Fontaine is capturing the psychology of conviction: once desire, faith, ambition, or rage hits a certain temperature, the mind revises the limits of the plausible. That can birth art, discovery, courage. It can also birth catastrophes, because the same mental furnace that makes a person attempt the unthinkable makes them ignore the unthinkable costs.

Context matters: a 17th-century French writer working under monarchy, patronage, and tight social constraints knew how often “impossible” really meant “forbidden,” “impolite,” or “dangerous.” Passion becomes a workaround, a private authorization. The line is aspirational enough to be quoted on posters, but its sharper edge is La Fontaine’s: human beings don’t merely overcome limits; they are experts at burning past them, and calling the smoke a miracle.