Unendurable Quotes

• All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Revolution, Allegiance

  Henry David Thoreau (1942). “Civil Disobedience”, p.5, Hayes Barton Press

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• Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Regret, Men, World

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

  Djuna Barnes

  Curves, Joy

  Djuna Barnes, Thomas Stearns Eliot (2006). “Nightwood”, p.125, New Directions Publishing

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• Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

  Cyril Connolly

  Reality, History, Drug

  1944 The Unquiet Grave, pt.1.

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• There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Adversity, Men, Two

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• When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable).

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Moving, Years, Useless

  Elisabeth Elliot (2004). “A Lamp unto My Feet: The Bible's Light for Your Daily Walk”, p.92, Gospel Light Publications

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• Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.

  Brooks Atkinson

  Judging, Facts, Life Is

  Brooks Atkinson (1951). “Once around the sun”

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• When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Summer, Rain, Fall

  Bertolt Brecht, Ralph Manheim (1987). “Poems, 1913-1956”, p.247, Taylor & Francis

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• The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.

  Molly Haskell

  Adversity, Haskell, Endure

  Molly Haskell (2000). “Love and Other Infectious Diseases: A Memoir”, p.96, iUniverse

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• We have resolved to endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable.

  Hirohito

  Military, Suffering, Endure

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• To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

  Epictetus

  Irrational, Rational

  Epictetus (1926). “Discourses”

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• "But to be hanged - is that not unendurable?" Even so, when a man feels that it is reasonable, he goes off and hangs himself.

  Epictetus

  Men, Feels, Reasonable

  "Discourses" by Epictetus, Book I, (Ch. 2), 1535.

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• We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

  William James

  Life, Philosophical, Fate

  William James (1987). “Essays, Comments, and Reviews”, p.3, Harvard University Press

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• A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Society, Original Thought, Literature

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.20, Knopf

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• Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Jobs, Divorce

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.133, Pan Macmillan

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• The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Change, Country, Military

  Commencement address, 1946.

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• It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

  Carl Jung

  Thinking, Differences, People

  Carl Gustav Jung, Gerhard Adler (1976). “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung”, Bollingen

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• The grave is but the threshold of eternity. What a world were this, how unendurable its weight, If they whom death hath sundered, did not meet again!

  Robert Southey

  World, Weight, Headstone

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• Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Were Not Meant To Be, Has Beens

  Herman Melville (1970). “White-jacket: Or, The World in a Man-of-war”, p.280, Northwestern University Press

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• It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.

  Havelock Ellis

  Men, Atheism, Dignity

  HAVELOCK ELLIS (1930). “IMPRESSIONS & COMMENTS”

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• Manic depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Bipolar, Desire, Erode

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.11, Pan Macmillan

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• The grave Is but the threshold of eternity.

  Robert Southey

  Eternity, Graves, Threshold

  Robert Southey (1799). “Poems”, p.30

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• The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Summer, Rain, Fall

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• To most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable - else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?

  George Eliot

  Stupidity, Social, Acceptable

  George Eliot (2007). “Middlemarch”, p.579, Collector's Library

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• In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Summer, Fall, Winter

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2014). “Crime and Punishment”, p.560, Penguin UK

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