Literary notes about possible (AI summary)
The term "possible" is used with remarkable versatility in literature to convey different nuances of potentiality, feasibility, and degree. In narrative contexts, it often marks a limit of action or description, as when a character is urged to do something "as little as possible" or to act "as quickly as possible" to achieve a goal [1][2][3]. In philosophical and rhetorical passages, it emphasizes theoretical capacity or truth, suggesting that certain propositions, conditions, or experiences can exist or be realized [4][5]. Authors also employ it to underscore qualitative extremes—whether pointing to the "greatest possible" state of being [6] or the "smallest possible" figures in mathematical puzzles [7][8]. Thus, the word adapts its meaning in literature from expressing concrete temporal or spatial limitations to articulating abstract, evaluative potential.
- “As soon as possible—after I've made the necessary arrangements.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot - I shall be away as short a time as possible, it’s a fine stroke of business, do you look after the house.”
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - But she began to speak as soon as possible, to set them at ease.
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot - That is possible, which is capable of being true, since external circumstances are no hindrance to its being true; as for instance, “Diocles lives.”
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius - These concepts are therefore the a priori principles of possible experience.
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - Since he is superior to all other beings he must be in the highest possible mode of being.
— from Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation by Jesse Henry Jones - The puzzle is to find the dimensions for two pedestals having this peculiarity, in the smallest possible figures.
— from Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney - Now, can you put them all together so as to form a single square number—(I) the smallest possible, and (II) the largest possible?
— from Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney
