Where Did "It'S Always Seems Impossible Until It'S Done" Originate?

2025-08-26 01:45:25 981

3 Answers

Victoria
Victoria
2025-08-29 09:47:36
I’ve seen that line plastered on posters, graduation speeches, and motivational threads for years, and what people usually mean is the cleaner quote: "It always seems impossible until it’s done." Most of the time you’ll see it credited to Nelson Mandela, and that attribution is the solid one — Mandela used that phrasing in public remarks and it’s become strongly associated with him. I first ran into it while leafing through 'Long Walk to Freedom' years ago, and then it cropped up in articles and talks that quoted Mandela directly.

That said, quotes travel and mutate. People paraphrase it, weave it into speeches, and sometimes attribute similar maxims to others or to anonymous proverbs. If you want the primary source, the Nelson Mandela Foundation archives and reputable quote collections (like Wikiquote or published collections of Mandela’s speeches) are the places I’d check. I like to trace these things back to an original speech transcript if I can — it’s oddly satisfying to see the exact sentence in context.

For me, the charm of the line is how usable it is: activists, students, startup founders, and coaches all latch onto it because it’s short and true. Whenever I’m stalled on a project I whisper that line and it helps me break inertia, so even if the words are simple, their history and spread are pretty interesting — and Mandela’s authorship makes it feel weighty and earned.
Quinn
Quinn
2025-08-30 05:46:25
I’ve dug into this quote a few times and the trail consistently leads back to Nelson Mandela. The succinct form people use — "It always seems impossible until it’s done" — is widely attributed to him and appears in accounts of his speeches and writings. When I want to be thorough I look at the Nelson Mandela Foundation archives or the text of 'Long Walk to Freedom' to find the sentence in context; that helps distinguish Mandela’s exact phrasing from later paraphrases.

Quotes like this are slippery because they’re repeated so often that small shifts creep in, and sometimes other public figures repeat the line as if it’s a common saying. So for accuracy I prefer to reference Mandela directly and, when possible, point readers to primary sources. It’s one of those lines that feels both personal and communal, and it still gives me a quiet kick whenever I read it.
Sabrina
Sabrina
2025-08-30 10:39:03
I get why this quote gets tossed around so much — it’s punchy and universal. The commonly accepted source is Nelson Mandela; he famously said something along the lines of "It always seems impossible until it’s done," and the phrase shows up in discussions of his speeches and writings. I don’t think it was a random internet creation. Instead, it circulated from his speeches and later entered the public lexicon through books, news coverage, and speeches by other leaders who quoted him.

If you want to be picky about origins, it’s worth checking a few places: the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s website, the text of his autobiography 'Long Walk to Freedom', and reputable quotation databases. Sometimes people assume a phrase is an old proverb or attribute it to someone else when it’s actually Mandela’s line or a paraphrase of his sentiment. I usually cite him when I use it in a talk, but I also try to glance at the original passage to see the full context — it changes the flavor of the line when you hear what he was responding to. Try that and you might find a richer, more specific meaning than the tweetable version.
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