Impenetrable Quotes & Sayings

Ambition can form an impenetrable barrier for those who fail to acknowledge what they already are. — Bryant McGill

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary. — James Lee Burke

Of all the endless variety of phenomena which nature presents to our senses, there is none that fills our minds with greater wonder than that inconceivably complex movement which, in its entirety, we designate as human life; Its mysterious origin is veiled in the forever impenetrable mist of the past, its character is rendered incomprehensible by its infinite intricacy, and its destination is hidden in the unfathomable depths of the future ... — Nikola Tesla

It suddenly seems incredible to me that this was my best friend, that we could hang out for days and never run out of things to talk about, that I would come home from her house with my throat sore from laughing. It's like there's a glass wall between us now, invisible but impenetrable. I — Lauren Oliver

It looms before us, an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. — Anne Frank

If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines the basis of life developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach. — Michael Behe

The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. — Eckhart Tolle

He was sick of the noise and sight of so many people and determined to go quietly away, but it so happened that just at that moment the crowds about the door were particularly impenetrable; he was caught up in the current of people and carried away to quite another part of the room. Round and round he went like a dry leaf caught up in a drain; in one of these turns around the room he discovered a quiet corner near a window. A tall screen of carved ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl half-hid - ah! what bliss was this! - a bookcase. Mr Norrell slipped behind the screen, took down John Npier's A Plaine Discouverie of the Whole Revelation of St John and began to read. — Susanna Clarke

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of all true religiousness. — Karen Armstrong

The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in the impenetrable gloom of eternal oblivion. — Robert Fulton

[T]he tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting; of the indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelops, clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and, perhaps, beyond. — Joseph Conrad

I see the eight of us in the Annexe as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We're surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other. We look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty up above. In the meantime, we've been cut off by the dark mass of clouds, so that we can go neither up nor down. It looms before us like an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can only cry out and implore, 'Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out!' Yours, Anne — Anne Frank

Letter 17


Morning. The snow was falling outside. There was a white silence.
My mother and I sat facing my father at the dining room table.

There was something impenetrable about his gaze. It was like pack ice.

And the ice was thickening.

I could barely see into him.

I knew.
And they knew that I knew.

He was broken.

I did not even need to look at him.

I could feel his brokenness all thorough the room. — Gregory Colbert

When I meet young girls in Montreal or elsewhere who injure their bodies intentionally, deliberately, who want permanent scars to be drawn on their skin, I can't help secretly wishing they could meet other young girls whose permament scars are so deep they're invisible to the naked eye. I would like to seat them face to face and hear them make comparisons between a wanted scar and an inflicted scar, one that's paid for, the other that pays off, one visible, the other impenetrable, one inordinately sensitive, the other unfanthomable, one drawn, the other misshapen. — Kim Thuy

Even my pathological love of Japan and its beauties, glories and eccentricities is sorely tested by 'The Grudge 2,' from Takashi Shimizu, a movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points. — Stephen Hunter

ME LIKE THE MAGNET
Men I like, I repel
Like a magnet do
So if I'm nasty
Then you know
I probably fancy you.
"It's defence," the shrinks would say.
"It's protects against a fall."
It's impenetrable this fence of mine
It's like the Berlin Wall. — Rae Earl

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. — Sun Tzu

The sight of the wall of water outside reassured me, giving me the idea that it made very little difference whether I stayed with her, or set out alone on my journey that had neither visible starting point nor destination. It didn't matter: since, however closely I became involved with another existence, my own world would always remain secret, inaccessible and shut-off; nobody would ever see me, except as a dim, changeable, wavering shadow, through its impenetrable, semi-opaque walls. — Anna Kavan

She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest. — Alexandra Kleeman

She fell in love with freedom. In the Sommers' home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear. Fear had been her companion: fear of God and his unpredictable justice, of authority, of her adoptive parents, of illness and evil tongues, of anything unknown or different; fear of leaving the protection of her home and facing the dangers outside; fear of her own fragility as a woman, of dishonor and truth. Hers had been a sugar-coated reality built on the unspoken, on courteous silences, well-guarded secrets, order, and discipline. She had aspired to virtue but now she questioned the meaning of the word. — Isabel Allende

Life is too short to read books whose cleverness makes them impenetrable. A good book should keep you awake at night, flickering through pages as you promise yourself just one more chapter; they shouldn't put you to sleep as you tackle a paragraph for the fifth time. — Kate Morton

I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self. — Muriel Barbery

All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence — Khaled Hosseini

But he found him as he had seen him six weeks earlier, that is to say calm, firm and full of the distant good manners that make up the most impenetrable of barriers separating a well-bred man from one of the people. — Alexandre Dumas

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located - so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation - there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man. — Isaac Asimov

I always used to say to my wife, the thing that I loved most about us is that we are a team, we are impenetrable in that respect. — Seal

When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this."
"Looks like you're still there, Shura."
"No," he said. "I'm in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me. — Paullina Simons

Real philosophy is dense, impenetrable, so esoteric as to be unknown and so obscure as to be irrelevant... Maybe what I do is trivial, the philosophical equivalent of a Big Mac and fries — Jacob M. Held

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand. — William Golding

I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me. — Paul Auster

You can't turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you've created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can't see it anymore. — Katherine Allred

That left two possibilities, really.
Possibility one: Magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable, that even though wizards and witches had tried their best to understand, they'd made little or no progress and eventually given up; and Harry would do no better.
Or ...
Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound, rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagon Alley.
Possibility two: He'd be taking over the world.
Eventually. Perhaps not right away. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship. — Marcel Proust

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. — Vernor Vinge

Images flicker, each one bringing its own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst, an impenetrable and sightless black and at best, a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory if the sorrow it brings. — Pittacus Lore

That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable. — Lionel Shriver

I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine; the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever. — Slavoj Zizek

Maybe part of the reason I don't have any friends is because I refuse to let anyone in. My walls are always erect and impenetrable. — K. Webster

The Word, then, came into the world - came to what was his, but those who were his did not receive him. He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away. Thus had love's revelation to choose a struggle of life and death. God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. His grace began to trickle, but the world made itself supple and impenetrable, and the drops fell to the ground. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. — Lionel Trilling

I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We're surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other. We look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty up above. In the meantime, we've been cut off by the dark mass of clouds, so that we can go neither up nor down. It looms before us like an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can only cry out and implore, Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out! — Anne Frank

We were strong separately, but when we were together, we were impenetrable. — Tijan

Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium - indifference. — Leon Trotsky

If ever there was a sentence more quickly imprinted in my consciousness, more oft repeated, one that stood as more of an arbiter against which to judge all else, I do not know it. In the beginning, the repetition was the numb sort, the words impenetrable. Only occasionally did they have the power to stop me midstep as I walked upstairs. Or seize my stomach as I ate. Or clear my head as I attempted to speak. — Miriam Gershow

So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead — Wilkie Collins

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert. — Bruce Crown

So there were two worlds: the perceived world, a dimension of adjectives, equations and brush strokes, a surface dazzling with our efforts to render it, but ultimately bearing only our own reflections; and the impenetrable world, the plumbless dark full of latent particles, the primordial cauldron which, like a mother, gives us our being but is a lifelong riddle. — Bia Lowe

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom. — David Hume

His hair was shorter than I remembered, tawny in this half-light, the tousled edges casually framing the clean, commanding lines of his face. His mouth, normally so stern was relaxed now and as I stared a slight sweet smile touched his lips, its curve softening the straight strong lines of his nose and brow. Finally, inevitably, I met his eyes and felt a connection that seared straight through me, down through my soles and away. Those eyes, darker than mine, the darkest blue, dark and as impenetrable as glaciers. Tonight he was real, so very real that my heart thumped, my blood sang, my legs shook. — Hannah Blatchford

Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate. — Martin Luther King Jr.

America's belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one's philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you're a cabinet minister or a big time hockey player, you'll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it's up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns. — Mark Steyn

She was drowning, pulled under by a froth of limbs and bodies, swept along by currents of voices, music, and car engines. Dark shadows circled her like hungry sharks. She rose up, dragged to the surface by an impatient crowd. Hands and elbows pushed and shoved. Exhaust fumes and food smells clogged her nostrils. This was the old part of the city, where archaic buildings stood side by side, defences pitched against the onslaught of the modern. There were no smooth walls here, no towers made of steel and glass. This was all shadows and sculpture, buttresses and winding alleys; the impenetrable heart of a long ago city, beating to a circadian rhythm. The — Malcolm Richards

Until i die there will be these moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming
God grant me the grace to live them
in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the
light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head. — James Baldwin

Successful people are able to rise above crises by relaxing no matter what the external situation. Their belief in themselves, the strength of their self-image is impenetrable armor, which protects them against shattering events. — Maxwell Maltz

It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom. — Peter Watts

There is no unstoppable force but time, no impenetrable object except that which separates us from the past. — James Rozoff

About ten degrees upslope of Fiction, I could see our nearest neighbor: Artistic Criticism. It was an exceptionally beautiful island, yet deeply troubled, confused and suffused with a blanketing layer of almost impenetrable bullshit. — Jasper Fforde

If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there's no key - there's no door at all - then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? — Barack Obama

I shared with Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it--we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed. — Louise Erdrich

Seems like a lot of my generation as a whole is more concerned with being the cool kid; sarcastic, smug, or just all together impenetrable. So anyway, it's not always comfortable to be like, the dorky, happy girl at the party ... but that's me. — Hayley Williams

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. — Beryl Markham

The minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz. — Andre Maurois

i made myself be still - impenetrable, boring - which deprived them of their sport. — Harriet Showman

I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself
there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows. — Patrick DeWitt

I can't say enough about the two Marine divisions. If I use words like 'brilliant,' it would really be an under description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the so-called 'impenetrable barrier.' It was a classic- absolutely classic- military breaching of a very very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier. — Norman Schwarzkopf

As the ego becomes strong it starts surrounding intelligence like a thick layer of darkness. Intelligence is light, ego is darkness. Intelligence is very delicate, ego is very hard. Intelligence is like a roseflower, ego is like a rock. And if you want to survive, they say - the so-called knowers - then you have to become rock-like, you have to be strong, invulnerable. You have to become a citadel, a closed citadel, so you cannot be attacked from outside. You have to become impenetrable. — Rajneesh

I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes. — Trent Reznor

On a cloudy day, when the dim dance of the firelight and the warmth of the sconces are not enough, the books shed their own form of light. By the hundreds, they fill the shelves that stretch across every inch of exposed wall. They rise up to the ceiling, warriors of an impenetrable army, encircling my over-sized armchair and keeping me safe as they whisper their stories softly in my ear. — Kelseyleigh Reber

When an invincible weapon deals with an impenetrable defense,
war is useless. The wisest decision is to ceasefire and do synergy. — Toba Beta

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other ("I know you - I'm the only one who really knows you!"); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know. — Roland Barthes

The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows — Hope Mirrlees

It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it. — Paul McEuen

It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God had made one in the first creation. — Isaac Newton

Modesty is invisibility ... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be ... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable. — Margaret Atwood

She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving ... But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting. — Margaret Atwood

The chicken "understands" the dog, the dog can interpret the dove's cooing, the insect can fathom the lowing of the cow, and no matter how faraway the eagle may be, the cow can tell where it is. All audible animal messages are indifferently understood by all animals even though each one is monolingual at most. Could there be any more remarkable lesson in and example of understanding others without loss of personality? Most impenetrable to the thoughts of others are those who have no personal language. Most intolerant people hail from the land of self-ignorance. — Malcolm De Chazal

Jack Torrance looked back over his shoulder once into the impenetrable, musty-smelling darkness and thought that if there was ever a place that should have ghosts, this was it. — Stephen King

Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like me column that guided Israel in the deserts, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies. — Charles Caleb Colton

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned. — Gary Shteyngart

The older a wizard grows, the more silent he becomes, like a woody vine growing over time to choke a garden path, deep and full of moss and snakes, running everywhere, impenetrable. — F.T. McKinstry

God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them. — Isaac Newton

What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness? — Blaise Pascal

Ecuador has about 700 kilometers of border with Colombia, and a lot of it is impenetrable jungle. — Rafael Correa

But although she interacted with so many people during the day, no one could actually say that they were close to her. There is an aloofness to the permanently heartbroken, a secrecy. There was something impenetrable about her. There was a door that she had closed, which no one could get in. — Heather O'Neill

She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of silt that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which, taking root, would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within. — Leo Tolstoy

It started when we were little kids.
Free spirits, but already
tormented by our own hands
given to us by our parents.
We got together and wrote on desks
and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains
and slipped through whatever
cracks we could find,
minds altered, we didn't falter
in portraving hysterical and
tragic characters in a smog
filled universe.
we loved the dirty city
and the journeys away from it.
We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,
chase tails round and round in downward spirals,
leaving trail of irretrievable,
vital life juice behind.
Still, the
brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz
was impenetrable
and we lived inside it
laughing with no clothes, and
everything experimental 'till
death was upon us.
In our face, mortality. — Anthony Kiedis

The Lord will give [unyielding and impenetrable] strength to His people; the Lord will bless His people with peace. (PSALM 29:11) — Joyce Meyer

Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable. — Donella Meadows

I wanted to wear the most impenetrable suit of armour ever known to mankind. 'Hello, Mr. Rotten ... ' You can't say anything about me. You can't put me down in any way shape or form - I'm rotten to the core ... you know, what's left for you? Pleasantries? I suppose the worst insult you could sling my way is 'Oh, he's really nice, him.' — John Lydon

A Man's suicide is the ultimate violence he can fling against the granite circumstance he could not vanquish. Its a lonely and desperate act of supreme courage, not weakness. But it is also an admission of total failure, and the destruction of the self is the end of one person's struggle, an end where from there would be no rebirth or resurrection-nothing but the blackness, the impenetrable muck the hides everything, sometimes even the reason for death itself. — F. Sionil Jose

My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights). — Ray Kurzweil

I believe that the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension. — Vincent Bugliosi

Focus.
Such a little word for such a hard thing and yet it can make things so simple, unless you break it. Like glass.
Fragile on certain points with enough pressure ore carelessness, but if handled correctly, it's useful, clear, sharp, and perfect.
That's what I will try to think about, whenever the Beast in me is not in agreement with what I am doing, or how I am behaving, when it threatens to break free, through that very same glass that separates us.
I need to be exactly like this window: smooth, cool, strong, and impenetrable.
Focus. — D.S. Wrights

I knew, even at eight, that the confusion of values thrust upon me by parents, teachers, other children, nannies, camp counselors, and others would only worsen as I grew up. The years would add complications and steer me into more and more impenetrable tangles of rights and wrongs, desirables and undesirables. I had already seen enough to know that. — Jean Liedloff

All my life, I [Pari] have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath. — Khaled Hosseini

The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries and the cruelties which they had practised to make their last stand against the swarming hordes of the dead sea bottoms that had driven them step by step to the uttermost pinnacle of the world where they were now intrenched behind an impenetrable barrier of superstition. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question--how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told. — Hannah Arendt

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person - this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? — Joseph Conrad

Lack of Faith"

Yes,
even when I don't believe -
there is a place in me
inaccessible to unbelief,
a patch of wild grace,
a stubborn preserve,
impenetrable,
pain untouched by the sleeping body,
music that builds its nest in silence. — Anna Kamienska

They're an impenetrable fortress of unknowability, really. — John Green