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Who really said it

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast

Written by Lewis Carroll 1832–1898 · English author & Oxford mathematician
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Word for word from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Macmillan, December 1871), Chapter V, “Wool and Water”. The White Queen says it, replying to Alice’s complaint that one can’t believe impossible things; Carroll wrote it.

Last verified 20 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” the White Queen, in Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), ch. 5

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Provenance

The passage

Work
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
Chapter
V — “Wool and Water”
First published
Macmillan, London, December 1871
Spoken by
The White Queen, to Alice — both fictional characters

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “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.”

Quoted alone, the line reads as a celebration of whimsy. In context it is a retort: the Queen is telling Alice that believing impossible things is a skill, and that Alice is simply out of practice.

Through the Looking-Glass, full text at Project Gutenberg

How we checked it

  • Checked against the full text. The exchange appears verbatim in the complete Project Gutenberg edition of Through the Looking-Glass ↗, in Chapter V, “Wool and Water” — the chapter in which the White Queen turns into a sheep.
  • Independently confirmed on Wikiquote. The Through the Looking-Glass page ↗ transcribes the same passage under its Chapter 5 heading, attributing it to the White Queen, with wording identical to the Gutenberg text.
  • The first edition text is on Wikisource. The Wikisource text of Chapter V ↗ carries the book as published, for checking against the original Macmillan printing rather than a modern transcription.
Public domain

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was first published by Macmillan in December 1871 (the title page is dated 1872) and Carroll died in 1898, so the text is long out of copyright in the United States and free to reproduce. Tenniel’s original illustrations are likewise public domain; a specific modern edition’s apparatus or new artwork may not be.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What usually goes wrong

The wording survives intact. The speaker rarely does.

The Red Queen

Swapped constantly, because Through the Looking-Glass has two queens and the Red Queen is the more famous. This is the White Queen, in Chapter V; the Red Queen is the chess-board drill-sergeant of Chapter II.

The Mad Hatter

A frequent caption, but the Hatter belongs to the other book — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and is not in this scene at all.

Alice

Also seen, and exactly backwards: in the book Alice is the one who says she can’t believe impossible things, and the boast is the Queen’s reply. The confusion has a clear source — in Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland it is Alice who counts off six impossible things ↗, steadying herself before she fights the Jabberwocky.

Carroll wrote it, the White Queen says it, and it sits in Chapter V of Through the Looking-Glass ↗.

Context

Believing as a discipline

The joke is mathematical, which is unsurprising from a man who lectured on logic at Christ Church. The White Queen treats belief the way a tutor treats scales: something you drill daily, half an hour at a time, until you can manage six impossibilities before breakfast.

It has since been adopted almost universally as a motto for imagination and optimism — which is a perfectly good use of it, and the opposite of what the scene is doing. Carroll’s Queen is faintly ridiculous, and her expertise is in believing things that are not true.

Her expertise is in believing things that are not true.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Through the Looking-Glass — full textwww.gutenberg.org

The complete book, free. Chapter V carries the passage.
Through the Looking-Glass — Chapter Ven.wikisource.org

The chapter carrying this passage, in the text as published.
Through the Looking-Glass on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Chapter-by-chapter transcription, with the speaker identified for each line.
Lewis Carroll on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

His sourced quotations and his misattributed list.
Lewis Carrollen.wikipedia.org

Biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, mathematician and author.

The author

About Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

1832–1898 · English author, mathematician & Oxford lecturer

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. Under the pseudonym he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871); under his own name he published on geometry and logic. He was also a prolific letter-writer, and a good deal of what circulates as “Carroll” online comes from that correspondence rather than the Alice books.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871), chap. 5, “Wool and Water”. Verified against the full Project Gutenberg text, 20 September 2026.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’?” Last verified 20 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/why-sometimes-ive-believed-as-many-as-six-impossible-things/

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