Impervious Quotes & Sayings

I think I'm under control, that I've stripped away all weaknesses. That committing to my mission has made me impervious. I'm wrong. The thought of Barrons smiling brings other thoughts.
Barrons naked.
Dancing.
Dark head thrown back.
Laughing.
The image doesn't "gently swim up in my mind" in a dreamy sort of way, like I've seen in movies. No, this one slams into my head like a nuclear missile, exploding in my brain in graphic detail. I suffocate in a mushroom cloud of pain.
I can't breathe. I squeeze my eyes shut.
White teeth flashing in his dark face: I get knocked down but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down.
I stagger.
But he didn't get up, the bastard. He stayed down. — Karen Marie Moning

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education. — Barney Frank

A primary concern among Mac users, and a benefit to the hacking community, is the Mac owner mind-set that Macs aren't susceptible to viruses or attack. It is an interesting stance considering that the thing they are claiming to be naturally impervious from attack is, well, a computer! — Sean-Philip Oriyano

When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews. — Adam McKay

I hadn't known until now, but I saw it, felt it. I came here for her. Because it didn't matter whether I had lived in another realm for years that I thought were mere days. It didn't matter that I had tasted fairy fruit, fallen in love and broken a heart. Some bonds were impervious to all manner of experience. And the truth was that, no matter what happened, we were sisters. — Roshani Chokshi

no one was impervious to Little Foot losing his mom. Nobody. — Mariana Zapata

It's such a surprise for the Eastern eyes to see,
That though the English are effete
They're quite impervious to heat. — Noel Coward

I gloomily came to the ironic conclusion that if you take a highly intelligent person and give them the best possible, elite education, then you will most likely wind up with an academic who is completely impervious to reality. — Halton Arp

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity. — Dean Koontz

The silence in the giant redwood forest near my house draws me...At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in a silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. Some mornings I sleep through two alarms and awaken only after the first buses have arrived. I go anyway. There are hundreds of people in the woods before me. People speaking French, German, Spanish; people marveling to each other and calling to their children in Japanese, Swedish, Russian, and some languages I do not know. And children shrieking in the universal language of childhood. But the silence is always there, unchanged. It is as impervious to these passing sounds as the trees themselves. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Simplicity is an enduring habit within a soul that has grown impervious to evil thoughts. — John Climacus

I'm used to being the center of attention wherever I go. I've been told I could charm the shoes off a racehorse midstride, and yet you seem impervious. — Leigh Bardugo

No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly. — Diana Gabaldon

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished. — Charles Frazier

To try to give our infatuation a higher place than Truth is a sign of inherent slavishness. Where our minds are free we find ourselves lost. Our moribund vitality must have for its rider either some fantasy, or someone in authority, or a sanction from the pundits, in order to make it move. So long as we are
impervious to truth and have to be moved by some hypnotic stimulus, we must know that we lack the capacity for self- government. Whatever may be our condition, we shall either need some imaginary ghost or some actual medicine-man to terrorize over us. — Rabindranath Tagore

Her mother could sail impervious through reversals and snubs that would have sunk another woman. But she was defenseless against her own thoughts — Carey Wallace

However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at their scientific and philosophical points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had. It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for - of even against - evolution, march in the army of the night, their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason. — Isaac Asimov

Misconceptions are like cockroaches: you have no idea where they came from, but they're everywhere - often where you don't expect them - and they're impervious to nuclear weapons. — Alex Reinhart

But it is impossible to picture any of our interrogators, right up to Abakumov and Beria, wanting to slip into prisoner's skin even for one hour, or feeling compelled to sit and meditate in solitary confinement.
Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views - and they are not. Their branch of service does not require them to think logically - and they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering - and that is what they do and what they are. We who have passed through their hands feel suffocated when we think of the legion, which is stripped bare of universal human ideals. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm impervious to logic. — Stephen Colbert

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. — William Congreve

You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you
might even forget yourself. — Charles Yu

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear. — William Faulkner

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules. — Alain Finkielkraut

Funny how things change when you got a liquor in ya:
You're quicker with the tongue, givin' me rhythm now.
Block the music and the people out to admire the love,
The nerve of us ... impervious to the entire club.
And like marijuana shotguns, let's blow this joint,
It's pointless to stay here, so let me anoint. — Pharoahe Monch

Discipline strengthens the mind so that it becomes impervious to the corroding influence of fear. — Bernard Law Montgomery

Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats. — Connie Willis

Runners aren't impervious to pain, we're just better at choosing what kind of pain we have to feel.

And when I run, that's exactly what I'm doing.

I'm asserting control over the uncontrollable.

I'm housebreaking a tornado. — The Oatmeal

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. — James F. Cooper

I'm a five-seasons griller! Did you know I added a new season? Living in Cali, I'm cooking in the yard all the time. I don't care what the weather is like. My hair is impervious to any kind of dampness, so I don't have too much to worry about. — Guy Fieri

Marching thus at night, a battalion is doubly impressive. The silent monster is full of restrained power; resolute in its onward sweep, impervious to danger, it looks a menacing engine of destruction, steady to its goal, and certain of its mission. — Patrick MacGill

We've yet to comprehend the impervious reality that to gain 'life' we have to do the most scandalous thing imaginable, and that is to work 'against' the whole of our humanity and give everything away. And yet to give everything away is to work 'with' the whole of God's character. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I'd grown impervious to all three of his facial expressions. — Cookie O'Gorman

What's fascinating about the Australians is they have this quality that they are impervious to majesty. They're not awed. — Tom Hooper

Without another word, he lifted her into the carriage and drove her home.
He seemed impervious to the cold shoulder she gave him, which irritated her almost as much as the knowing way he had looked at her when he had kissed her senseless.
In fact, although his face was stern, he seemed downright cheerful, the cad! — Julia Keaton

A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction. — Carol Tavris

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy. — Maggie Nelson

It had taken Nikki years to rehabilitate herself from a mortal attraction to cowboys. After being burned about a dozen times, she thought herself finally impervious - until this one flashed his irritatingly irresistible grin. She reminded herself that she was immune to his kind of rustic charm - but crystal-blue eyes and a chin dimple. Holy crap!
Why did her would-be lawyer have to be a incredibly hot cowboy? — Victoria Vane

Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better. — Joseph Heller

And at points in the movie, John Cena is actually impervious to bullets! — John Cena

How impervious to things spiritual, my heart!" cries a St. Bernard. "No savor in pious reading, no pleasure in meditation nor in prayer! — Alfonso Maria De Liguori

Obama is clearly a narcissist in the non-scientific use of the word. He is so self-involved, you see it from his rise.There's not anyone of independent stature around him. There was in the first term, because he needed them to prop him up. But now that he entered a second term, he's the master of the universe, so there's nobody around him. He is impervious to outside advice, real advice that he takes. — Charles Krauthammer

They sat for several hours over a pot of tea and a plate of cake, and then they wandered the streets, impervious to time. By the end of the day, both realised that their lives had altered course. — Penelope Lively

Has modern society lost a measure of its spiritual awareness because we take so little time to walk? In not allowing ourselves time to slow down, to be close to the earth around us, have we become impervious to a God who chooses to reveal Himself through His creation? — Amy Litzelman

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. ... All history is taken in by stones. — Susan Griffin

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse. — Howard Zinn

The folly of humankind is that it believes it is impervious to decay — Tony DiTerlizzi

She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We're impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men's work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we're out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends. — Margaret Atwood

Sometimes it's better to show our vulnerability / pain / regrets so others don't think us impervious / unapproachable - be real / open — Jay Woodman

Concealed within the stones are frozen fires. Borne on vast waves of polychrome gas that attracted, discarded, formed, and reformed patterns of infinite complexity, the living sparks had taken their allotted places. They were burning before the beginning. They will burn after the end. Their fire is impervious to time. Time is a human concept. Creation is on a different scale. Every spark was a syllable spoken into silence, a miniscule portion of the great Word that became a roar of limitless power and exploded to create a universe. From chaos, cosmos. — Morgan Llywelyn

He was one of those old people who give the impression of having undergone a lifetime trial by fire which they somehow managed to turn to their own good in the end; using the fire to burn away everything in them that could possibly decay, everything mortal. So that what remains finally are only their cast-iron hearts, the few muscles and bones tempered to the consistency of steel needed to move them about, the black skin annealed long ago by the sun's blaze and thus impervious to all other fires; and hidden deep within, out of harm's way, the indestructible will: old people who have the essentials to go on forever. — Paule Marshall

Our modern microscopes, scanners, and sensors have disabused us of most of the old fanciful notions about the brain's function. But the brain's strangely remote quality - the way it seems both part of us and apart from us - still influences our perceptions in subtle ways. We have a sense that our brain exists in a state of splendid isolation, that its fundamental nature is impervious to the vagaries of our day-to-day lives. While we know that our brain is an exquisitely sensitive monitor of experience, we want to believe that it lies beyond the influence of experience. We want to believe that the impressions our brain records as sensations and stores as memories leave no physical imprint on its own structure. To believe otherwise would, we feel, call into question the integrity of the self. — Nicholas Carr

You can no longer just have a magazine that shows you this glossy impervious image of women - in the studio, artificial, wearing a push-up bra. — Natalie Massenet

She became a question mark. An unfinished puzzle. An intricate crossword. An impervious shooting star yet to determine her course. — Neetha Joseph

The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first. — Eckhart Tolle

There are ideologies of control lying behind the insistence on the need for instrumentally rational tools and techniques. In reflecting these ideologies, some believe that without the tools and techniques organizations would not be able to produce success; indeed, they would be ungovernable. Others believe that without the tools and techniques it would be impossible to improve the human condition or take action to sustain the planet. There is a very powerful belief that 'we' must be able to improve whole organizations intentionally. For some, these beliefs are impervious to reason, perhaps because it is too disappointing to accept the humbler realization that success and failure, sustainability and destruction, all emerge across populations through myriad local interactions and all anyone can do is participate as meaningfully and as influentially as possible, acting on practical judgment, in these local interactions. — Ralph D. Stacey

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] — Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature's killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that's not the word. — Ander Monson

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. — Henry David Thoreau

He had surrendered to it, on a few rare occasions through the years, with women he had thought he liked. He had been left feeling an angry emptiness - because he had sought an act of triumph, though he had not known of what nature, but the response he received was only a woman's acceptance of a casual pleasure, and he knew too clearly that what he had won had no meaning. He was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation. He grew to hate his desire. He fought it. He came to believe the doctrine that this desire was wholly physical, a desire, not of consciousness, but of matter, and he rebelled against the thought that his flesh could be free to choose and that its choice was impervious to the will of his mind. — Ayn Rand

Research at the subatomic quantum level reveals an invisible connection between all particles and all members of a given species. This oneness is being demonstrated in remarkable scientific discoveries. The findings show that physical distance, what we think of as empty space, does not preclude a connection by invisible forces. Obviously there exist invisible connections between our thoughts and our actions. We do not deny this, even though the connection is impervious to our senses. — Wayne Dyer

Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history. — Michael Rogin

I have been Europe's last hope. She proved incapable of refashioning herself by means of voluntary reform. She showed herself impervious to charm and persuasion. To take her I had to use violence. (26th February) — Adolf Hitler

Anorexia and bulimia seem to be getting much more common in boys, men, and women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds; they are also becoming more common in racial groups previously thought to be impervious to the problem. — Marya Hornbacher

Good thoughts are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort. And not only yourselves are safe, but all whom your thoughts rest upon are thereby benefited. — Mary Baker Eddy

We must, with God's help, eradicate the deadly poison of the demon of anger from the depths of our souls. So long as he dwells in our hearts and blinds the eyes of the heart with his somber disorders, we can neither discriminate what is for our good, nor achieve spiritual knowledge, nor fulfill our good intentions, nor participate in true life; and our intellect will remain impervious to the contemplation of the true, divine light; for it is written, 'Man's anger does not bring about the righteousness of God' (Jms. 1:20). — John Cassian

You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I'll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed. — H. Beam Piper

It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with. — Jonathan Dee

You're beautiful, lovely, wonderfully unique. Don't spend your energy on being upset, spend it on being a glowing star in happy wonders. Because you are a star, even in the darkest moments, your glow is impervious. — Kevin Jones

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked ... — H.L. Mencken

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay. — Janet Fitch

Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying, 'Whatever.' — Douglas Rushkoff

It is this kindness of his that unsettles me most. I can dodge a blow or block a knife. I am impervious to poison and know a dozen ways to escape a chokehold or garrote wire. But kindness? I do not know how to defend against that. — R.L. LaFevers

I danced on light boxer's feet over to Barrons. "Punch me."
"Don't be absurd."
"Come on, punch me, Barrons."
"I'm not punching you."
"I said, punch--Ow!" He'd decked me. Bones vibrating, my head snapped back. And forward again. I shook it. No pain. I laughed. "I'm amazing! Look at me! I hardly even felt it." I danced from foot to foot, feigning punches at him. "Come on. Punch me again." My blood felt electrified, my body impervious to all injury.
Barrons was shaking his head.
I punched him in the jaw and his head snapped back.
When it came back down his expression said I suffer you to live. "Happy now?"
"Did it hurt?"
"No."
"Can I try again?"
"Buy yourself a punching bag."
"Fight me, Barrons. I need to know how strong I am."
He rubbed his jaw. "You're strong," he said dryly. — Karen Marie Moning

Spirit is impervious to illness. — Marianne Williamson

The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly. — Niall Ferguson

Let's be honest: ignoring is acting, and nothing more - acting as though the words, or actions of your oppresors don't hurt. you hear the words, you feel the insults, and you bear the blows. you can act deaf and impervious to pain, but the stabs and the arrows pierce you anyway. — Frank E. Peretti

A stylish person, for me, is one who draws your eye without necessarily being showy; they wear clothes that are beautifully cut, flatter the wearer, and show that they are not impervious to fashion, but not a slave to it either. — Jojo Moyes

Once before, Jerott had seen him like that, in Algiers. He had seen him as he was now, with every skill of mind and body tuned to the ultimate pitch in pursuit of one object. Francis Crawford like that was uncontrollable and very close to invincible. But not invincible. And not impervious to the reckoning afterwards. — Dorothy Dunnett

However, Saudi Arabia quickly discovered what the rest of the world would soon learn. Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control. — Reza Aslan

That the machine of Heaven is not a hard and impervious body full of various real spheres, as up to now has been believed by most people. It will be proved that it extends everywhere, most fluid and simple, and nowhere presents obstacles as was formerly held, the circuits of the Planets being wholly free and without the labour and whirling round of any real spheres at all, being divinely governed under a given law. — Tycho Brahe

How many of us dig our own graves, thought William. We dig them with vigour and determination, unaware of the implications, but with all the conviction of those who do not really know what they are doing, who are impervious to the dangers that others can see so clearly. — Alexander McCall Smith

There aren't many white people around here, just us kids. Seventeen, eighteen years old and flushed with freedom, we don't care about fitting or blending in. We all speak loudly without saying a word. we are a tribe with our dyed hair and rags and big boots and we believe ourselves impervious to everything. The local folks must think we're crazy or lazy or both. — Jo Treggiari

Though impervious to the sacred, I loved magic. The cinema was a suspect appearance that I loved perversely for what it still lacked. That streaming was everything, it was nothing, it was everything reduced to nothing. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Morrigan "What are guilt ferrets:"
Atticus "They're bastards. They cling to your neck and tickle and bite and generally make you miserable, which is a pretty good trick for a metaphor."
They were also impervious to logic, perhaps their most diabolical power. — Kevin Hearne

If one could be enraged by the loss of a favorite sports team, shouldn't his anger rise at the entrenchment of a scheme whereby no innocent person was safe, where self-determination was a crime punished by the vagaries of an opaque & impervious justice system? — Ausma Zehanat Khan

It's happening everywhere; commercial and housing development, along with the road network needed to support it, is the single greatest pressure on natural landscapes in the United States, and by its very pervasiveness the hardest to control. Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres - meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those fifteen years. This isn't a trend, it's a juggernaut, and the worst may be yet to come. At this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming, and the total developed land in the United States will stand at a Texas-sized 174 million acres. Already, just the impervious covering we put on the land, the things like roads, sidewalks, and buildings we pave with asphalt or concrete, adds up to an area the size of Ohio.3 — Scott Weidensaul

It is not easy to explain how I felt while I read, but I will try. No doubt you, as a reader, will understand. It appeared I found myself in a place where no one could bother me, where no one could reach me. I grew impervious to all the noises around me. — Tatiana De Rosnay

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel. — Robert Burns

The life of faith can be called the life of the will since faith is impervious to how one feels but chooses through volition to obey God's mind. — Watchman Nee

Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.
'God Almighty,' he would groan, 'she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.'
So you see the man really loved her.
("The Tiger") — A.E. Coppard

I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with ... For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants ... but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being. — Leonid Borodin

It's funny, isn't it? While we were distracted by the silly scraps that make up human history, you and I became eternal, impervious to rot, infinity itself. — Daniel Kraus

A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger's or Whitehead's best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of "obligatory passage point" (Latour's term) in the discussions that follow.
Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made "fewer mistakes" than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress. — Graham Harman

It was a mystery to Roger how someone he knew so well could be such an impervious, impenetrable stranger. — John Lanchester

Many people, if they were to treat other people as they treat their spouses, would soon have not a friend in the world. Why it is assumed that marriage is more impervious to the effects of discourtesy than friendship, I do not know ... — Jo Coudert

... such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God - most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute. — Jon Krakauer

The problem with thick skin is that it leaves you impervious to the sharpest of pins. Everything becomes dull. But without that sense of pain, there cannot be that sense of relief. Ultimately, the thickened skin leaves you numb, incapable of feeling the highs and lows of life. It leaves you rough like a rock and just as inanimate. — Michael Soll

The activities of La Condamine, Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, and other such explorers touched on only the tiniest fraction of the vastness of a world so expansive as to be impervious to harm. But today, the Amazon River Basin, occupying more than 2.7 million square miles is at our fingertips and is considered one of the most ecologically threatened regions of the world. — Kurt Johnson

Another good image for the slight edge is Lady Justice, the blindfolded statue. The statue itself, of the woman holding the scales and sword to represent the idea of justice, has been around since the days of ancient Rome, but in those days it didn't wear a blindfold. That part wasn't added until the sixteenth century, during the renaissance in thinking that eventually gave birth to our modern ideas of representative democracy and universal human rights. The blindfold doesn't imply that justice is "blind," as people sometimes assume; its point is that true justice is impervious to external influence. — Jeff Olson