Intolerable Quotes & Sayings

And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life. Not because the law of the state requires him. Nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him. Nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty. — Plato

Be careful, dear friends, that you do not misrepresent God yourselves. You who murmur; you who say that God deals hardly with you, you give God an ill character; when you look so melancholy, worldlings say, "The religion of Jesus is intolerable;" and so you stain the honor of God. — Charles Spurgeon

That girl enjoyed everything that bored me and everything that I enjoyed bored her. We were the perfect mates: what kept us going was the tolerable and intolerable distance between us. We kept meeting each day - and each night - with nothing solved and no chance to solve it. Perfection. — Charles Bukowski

Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable. — Friedrich Hayek

If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, "I am truly sorry," would that mean as much to you as "the burden of it has been intolerable to me"? Remorse — Gail Godwin

The more amorous the President became, the more his fatuousness made him intolerable: there is nothing in the world as comical as a lawyer in love - he is the perfect picture of gaucheness, impertinence and ineptitude. — Marquis De Sade

Absolute freedom doesn't exist and never did. Just as we don't spit on the floor at work, swear at customers, or send out letters full of misspellings, so too we might have to 'watch our language.' It is odd that the request for unbiased language in schools and workplaces is considered intolerable when other limits on our freedom to do whatever we want are not. — Rosalie Maggio

The coldest most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

To see things as they really are renders life almost completely intolerable. Myself because I have, I believe, at least in part, seen things as they really are, I could never act. I have always remained on the fringe of actions. So, is it desirable that people come to see things as they really are? I don't know. I believe that, in general, people are incapable of it. So therefore it is true that only a monster can see things as they really are, because the monster lies outside of humanity. — Emil Cioran

There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life's richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us. — Marcel Proust

While American men are fighting to rid the old world of autocracy let American women set to and rid the new world of this intolerable old burden of sex ignorance. — Crystal Eastman

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little. — Ann Brashares

We make boundaries so that we can feel separate and move coherently through the world: it's part of our necessary natural growth to do that. In doing it, we forget the secret, which is that we are not separate ... Respect your limits. Love your limits; they protect you from an abundance so immense it can be intolerable. If, however, you stretch your limits also, you will move in the direction of receiving and becoming unconditional love. — Julie Henderson

The Truth must be told at all costs, no matter how unpopular it may be. The authentic spiritual leader, having freed himself of his own false need to be popular, tells the Truth whether it falls on fertile or stony ground. Such a teacher is the salt of the earth, though few know it. If you think the world is delirious as is, you would find it intolerable without his healing influence. — Vernon Howard

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous. — Alan Kinross

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. — Virginia Woolf

It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse. — Geneen Roth

Once you explore life outside of work, it becomes addictive. The less you work, the less you want to work. At first, the odd afternoon off seems like a fantastic luxury. Before long, you are opting for a four-day week. Then a four-day week becomes an intolerable demand on your time, so you find a way of moving to a three-day week. — Tom Hodgkinson

An existence devoted to reading would have been his ultimate fulfillment, but it had not been given to him. He would have had to choose that path much earlier, to have known what he wanted to do...To have had a life plan. At first it had been interested to be recognized as a promising young banker, to climb the hierarchy, to have responsibilities and to earn a lot of money. Up until the day he had started to feel, dimly at first, then more and more clearly, that the man he had become was the absolute opposite of what he really was. Although the dichotomy weighed heavily on him, for a while the money he was earning was compensation enough, but then it could no longer make up for it. The gap between his ideal and his reality was too great. The weight turned into an anguish that was succeeded by the intolerable idea that he was wasting his life --or even that he had already wasted it. — Antoine Laurain

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. — Ernest Hemingway,

You have to be an ally in a difficult time and not turn on yourself with self-shaming thoughts, which makes facing pain intolerable. — Jewel

Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves. — Guy De Maupassant

I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity ... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so. — Margo MacDonald

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime. — Romain Rolland

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. — Edward Bellamy

What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed - caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who — Richard Ford

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one. — Mel Brooks

The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once. — Quentin Crisp

For so many, death is a liberation from intolerable human conditions. — Robert Ludlum

Not as intolerable as being dead, in my opinion, but I'm very fond of me. I would miss me a lot. — Josh Lanyon

The enormous difference between fighting gender discrimination as opposed to race discrimination is good people immediately perceive race discrimination as evil and intolerable. But when I talked about sex-based discrimination, I got the response, 'What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men! — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

It is for people we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children we are exacting and would rather see. them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records that though He has often rebuded us, condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexcusable sense. — C.S. Lewis

We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness. — Guy De Maupassant

Mine is the sultry sunset when the skies
Tremble with strange, intolerable thunder:
And at the dead of an hushed night, these eyes
Draw down the soaring oracles winged with wonder — Lionel Pigot Johnson

It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows? — Stephen Fry

The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word and deed. It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made. — Thomas Carlyle

Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable. — George Bernard Shaw

Consciousness means that we have developed an acute awareness of both our suffering and our humanity: what happens to us and what we have a right to. We know we are human and so the suffering (inferior status, exploitation, sexual abuse) is an intolerable series of violations that must be stopped. Experiencing suffering as such - instead of becoming numb - forces us to act human: to resist oppression, to demand fairness, to create new social arrangements that include us as human. When humans rebel against suffering, the heroes of history, known and unknown, are born. — Andrea Dworkin

Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility? — Mary Lascelles

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. — William Styron

Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you're barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. — Patrick Rothfuss

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something - anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . .

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your "self" into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. . . — Emil M. Cioran

Being tolerant does not mean acquiescing to the intolerable; it does not mean covering up disrespect; it does not mean coddling the aggressor or disguising aggression. Tolerance is the virtue that teaches us to live with the different. It teaches us to learn from and respect the different. — Paulo Freire

There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women ... — Orson Welles

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility ... — Marcus Aurelius

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect. — Bertrand Russell

Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know — Simone De Beauvoir

It may be incredible that one creed is the truth and the others are relatively false. At the same time, it is not only incredible, but intolerable, to believe that there is no truth in or out of the creeds, and all are equally false. For then nobody can ever set anything right, if everybody is equally wrong. — G.K. Chesterton

Were uproariously demanding relief from their intolerable miseries - in this Potemkin sideshow there prevailed a preposterous and mendacious comfort. — Stefan Zweig

Nothing can preserve the integrity of contact between individuals, except a discretionary authority in the state to revise what has become intolerable. The powers of uninterrupted usury are too great. If the accretions of vested interests were to grow without mitigation for many generations, half the population would be no better than slaves to the other half. — John Maynard Keynes

I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners - whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter.
The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us - those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us. — Truman Capote

Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside. — Tom Hodgkinson

Ordinary society is, in this respect, very like the kind of music to be obtained from an orchestra composed of Russian horns. Each horn has only one note; and the music is produced by each note coming in just at the right moment. In the monotonous sound of a single horn, you have a precise illustration of the effect of most people's minds. How often there seems to be only one thought there! and no room for any other. It is easy to see why people are so bored; and also why they are sociable, why they like to go about in crowds - why mankind is so gregarious. It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable. Omnis stultitia laborat fastidio sui: folly is truly its own burden. Put a great many men together, and you may get some result - some music from your horns! A — Arthur Schopenhauer

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. — Muriel Rukeyser

Jesus does not impose intolerable restrictions on his disciples, he does not forbid them to look at anything, but bids them look on him. If they do that he knows that their gaze will always be pure, even when they look upon a woman. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. — Carson McCullers

I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR. — Edgar Allan Poe

Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable. — Cyril Connolly

For there is nothing more intolerable to mankind than suspense; when a thing is once decided, men can but endure whatever out of the catalogue of evils it is their misfortune to undergo. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Work - other people's work - is an intolerable idea to a cat. Can you picture cats herding sheep or agreeing to pull a cart? They will not inconvenience themselves to the slightest degree. — Louis J. Camuti

We shall succeed only so far as we continue that most distasteful of all activity, the intolerable labor of thought. — Learned Hand

There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect. — Flann O'Brien

Our losses ... have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses. — Karl Donitz

Without a little negligence, life would be intolerable. — Mason Cooley

In a world in which everything bears the indelible impress of Man, it is refreshing to escape from time to time from this wall-to-wall humanisation. Hence the American enthusiasm for national parks and outdoor activities. It is seductive to see the world as though we were not there to see it. We can always dream of perceiving things as they are in themselves, without the buzz and distortion of human meaning. We can take a vacation now and then from the intolerable burden of sense-making, rather as we do when we treat human flesh as something to be mindlessly indulged. We can shuck off language and confront reality in the raw, as we imagine an innocent child might do. — Terry Eagleton

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths. — Antonin Artaud

Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable. — Phyllis McGinley

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable. — Jess Row

Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging. — Arthur Schopenhauer

If God send thee a cross, take it up willingly and follow him. Use it wisely, lest it be unprofitable. Bear it patiently, lest it be intolerable. If it be light, slight it not. If it be heavy, murmur not. After the cross is the crown. — Francis Quarles

From my experience and observing a lot of other people that often times that only happens - a transformational experience or shedding of the skin - happens when we are at the end of our road and there is pain involved. We have to change or we continue to live in that almost intolerable pain. — Ray McKinnon

There is that in the Notre Dame fan which makes him intolerable to others, namely, his unassailable confidence that in a well-ordered universe Notre Dame is meant to win all of its games. — Ralph McInerny

Civilization is in no immediate danger of running out of energy or even just out of oil. But we are running out of environment-that is, out of the capacity of the environment to absorb energy's impacts without risk of intolerable disruption-and our heavy dependence on oil in particular entails not only environmental but also economic and political liabilities. — Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

As between the intolerable and the merely distasteful, I must choose the latter. — Rex Stout

And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it's God's Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, 'Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate a camel. The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed them you.' ... 'Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up'. What a downright weird story. What a peculiar psychology. — Yann Martel

It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy? — Koichiro Matsuura

We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. — C.S. Lewis

To some people return to religion is the answer, not as an act of faith but in order to escape an intolerable doubt; they make this decision not out of devotion but in search of security. — Erich Fromm

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure. — George Bernard Shaw

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first. — Jim Thompson

Dear Supreme Altruist-

I hope you are in a receptive mood.

Thanks very much for placing wihin me the bomb that never stops exploding. Though the benefits have been intangible and in fact I feel that this terrifying mechanism has generally made my life intolerable, I shall never ask you to reverse the situation. I feel I have done everything that may be reasonably expected of me in the way of self-abnegation. However, I now find to my dismay that my lifelong fear of death is beginning to desert me. I believe that this may mean that the bomb's continual explosions may be causing the growth of new slabs of man-bark instead of blasting the loathesome stuff away as it has been doing.

I therefore humbly request that the explosive power of the bomb be increased. Please do not make me weaker; make the bomb stronger.

Amen. — Jim Woodring

But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated. — Michael Eric Dyson

Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity. — Laurence J. Peter

This devotion, so great and so confident, to the august Queen of Heaven, has never forth with such brilliancy as when the militant Church of Go has seemed to be endangered by the violence of heresy spread abroad, or by an intolerable moral corruption, or by the attacks of powerful enemies. Ancient and modern history and the more sacred annals of the Church bears witness to public and private supplications addressed to the Mother of God, to help She has granted in return, and to the peace and tranquillity which She has obtained from God. — Pope Leo X

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. — Herman Melville

I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character. — William E. Gladstone

That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. — T. S. Eliot

They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we'd never become real people. That's how we're made. If we just work each day and eat well - that would be strange and intolerable! We — Svetlana Alexievich

You intolerable lunatic, he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me. — Naomi Novik

A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. — Gabrielle Zevin

I read recently in an article by G.K. Chesterton, that sex without gestation and parturition is like blowing the trumpets and waving the flags without doing any of the fighting. From a woman such words, though displaying inexperience, might come with dignity; from a man they are an unforgivable, intolerable insult. What is man's part in sex but a perpetual waving of flags and blowing of trumpets and avoidance of the fighting? — Dora Russell

The pride which is proud of want of pride is the most intolerable of all. — Marcus Aurelius

Who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel; who understands, which is beyond comprehension ... — Edward Albee

Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable. — Teju Cole

When children are hurt and in pain psychologically, they don't want to be in distress, so when the situation becomes intolerable, they cease to identify with themselves. When they feel the most threatened, they will choose to identify with the person who is the source of their suffering in an attempt to possess that person's strength. — Robert Firestone

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute. — Mark Twain

This focusing outward ... painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination. — M.L. Stedman

Let us educate the younger generation to be shy in and out of season: to edge behind the furniture: to say spasmodic and ill-digested things: to twist their feet round the protective feet of sofas and armchairs: to feel that their hands belong to someone else
that they are objects, which they long to put down on some table away from themselves.
For shyness is the protective fluid within which our personalities are able to develop into natural shapes. Without this fluid the character becomes merely standardized or imitative: it is within the tender velvet sheath of shyness that the full flower of idiosyncrasy is nurtured: it is from this sheath alone that it can eventually unfold itself, coloured and undamaged. Let the shy understand, therefore, that their disability is not only an inconvenience, but also a privilege. Let them regard their shyness as a gift rather than as an affliction. Let them consider how intolerable are those of their contemporaries who are not also shy. — Harold Nicolson