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If you wanted to say that anything is possible in Latin, how would you do it?

One possibility I thought of was something like:

Omne posse

I'm not sure that omne quite captures the nuance of anything versus everything. In other words, the original in English is saying any of these things is possible, but not all of them. It's splitting hairs, really, but is there a more idiomatic way to say this?

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  • Can you explain a bit how you ended up with the infinitive posse?
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    May 4, 2021 at 13:48
  • Poor life choices... No, in all seriousness, I was looking at the idiom example from the entry for possum in Whitaker's Words and he gave the example multum posse, so I modeled it after that.
    – Adam
    May 4, 2021 at 13:54
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    In that entry, posse is in the infinitive state for dictionary purposes. It is set apart from actual uses. So you would have something like, "Caesar multum potest" --> "Caesar has much influence/power."
    – cmw
    May 4, 2021 at 14:29

1 Answer 1

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One way to express that would be:

Omnia possibilia sunt.

All things are possible.

This actually comes from the Vulgate, where Jesus said:

Apud homines hoc inpossibile est,
apud Deum autem omnia possibilia sunt. (Mateus 19:26)

With men this is impossible; with God, however, all things are possible.

Everything vs. anything:

Concerning your comment about whether anything and everthing can be interchanged, I believe it's common for translators to do so. Technically, it doesn't express the idea in the exact same way. Rather, it's considering the same thing from different pespectives: everthing considers the subject collectively, whereas anything considers it from an individual point of view (i.e. each thing considered in turn). Even so, I believe it's often important for the translator to express thing in a way that seems natural.

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