“One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898), British writer, mathematician. Alice and the White Queen, in Through the Looking-Glass, “Wool and Water,” (1872).
In a letter to a child-friend in 1864, Carroll wrote, “If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things.” (A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to His Child-Friends, ed. Evelyn M. Hatch, 1933).