Inured Quotes & Sayings

The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water

A woman's shriek assaults the ear

While above, in the sky, inured to everything,

The moon looks on with a mindless leer

("The Unknown Lady") — Alexander Blok

A handful of men, inured to war, proceed to certain victory, while on the contrary, numerous armies of raw and undisciplined troops are but multitudes of men dragged to the slaughter. — Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

After thirty years of being 'the camel lady,' believe me: One becomes inured to the spotlight. — Robyn Davidson

I understand that it's incredibly difficult to watch what's happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I've fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away. — Kevin Powers

Character is inured habit. — Plutarch

Just what," answered the other, "would be the productive capacity of society if the present resources of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining; but we may be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to minds inured to the ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After — Upton Sinclair

That we can come here today and in the presence of thousands and tens of thousands of the survivors of the gallant army of Northern Virginia and their descendants, establish such an enduring monument by their hospitable welcome and acclaim, is conclusive proof of the uniting of the sections, and a universal confession that all that was done was well done, that the battle had to be fought, that the sections had to be tried, but that in the end, the result has inured to the common benefit of all. — William Howard Taft

But if we continue in sin, and rebel and harden our hearts, we shall become so inured and fixed in it, that it will be natural, and we shall choose it from time to time. — Elias Hicks

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years. — Roger Kimball

The bombing started up again, with explosions all around us, in broad daylight, but no one in the restaurant even flinched. Iraqis seemed numb after a quarter century under Saddam's whip-hand rule. It was heartbreaking to see what a harsh dictatorship can do to the human soul. In less than a week, I had grown almost inured to explosions and fires. — Richard Engel

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system ... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man's career with cool, cautious self-possession ... — R.M. Ballantyne

Internet trolling wasn't just a symptom, it was a canary. Trolls tested the boundaries of how far society would allow racism, misogyny, and transphobia to be normalized. Would anyone do anything? Would anyone take action? Would anyone powerful take this seriously? The answer turned out to be no. Those of us on the receiving end begged for help, and were told to grow a thicker skin, because the Internet "isn't real life." Until, surprise, the Internet became president, and we as a society were so inured to hate speech - our boundaries had been so thoroughly obliterated and "political correctness" so stigmatized - that we had no defense. There — Lindy West

For they were unseasoned, nor inured, not knowing this to be much less than the beginning of sorrow. — David Jones

Death will find me long before I tire of contemplating an evening spent in his company during which he enthralled a mixed audience consisting of a fur trader, a Cree Indian matron, and an Anglican missionary, with an hour-long monologue on sexual aberrations in female pygmy shrews. (The trader misconstrued the tenor of the discourse; but the missionary, inured by years of humorless dissertations, soon put him right.) — Farley Mowat

I remained Ryan's companion on the Hollywood party circuit, growing inured to sex and drugs before I was in my teens. — Tatum O'Neal

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors. — Arundhati Roy

So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. — William James

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. — Susan Sontag

Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort. — Terence McKenna

My heart should be breaking, too, but there comes a point when you're so inured to loss that you no longer feel the lash. — Ann Aguirre

Before you lie courage, perseverance, kindness, friendship, and love. Before you lie men and women who could have chosen otherwise, who could have inured themselves to the injustices of the world, rather than giving their lives to change it. Tonight we honor them. Tonight we also honor all who have gone before and paved the way, the ones we remember and the ones we have forgotten.
But nothing is lost in Eternity. A moment of grace resonates forever, as does an act of valor. So honor the dead- and live in grace and valor. — Sherry Thomas

America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War," he wrote. "We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction." The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. "The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest. — Erik Larson

For they who can come through this - and, as I say, there can only be a few, what can there be that they can not come through? And so I see in old Europe a new and commanding breed rising up, fearless and fabulous, unsparing of blood and sparing of pity, inured to suffering the worst and to inflicting it and ready to stake all to atain their ends - a race that builds machines, to whom machines are not soulless iron, but engines of might which it controls with cold reason and hot blood. This puts a new face on the world. — Ernst Junger

I am like a mariner born and bred on board a buccaneer brig whose soul has become so inured to storm and strife that if cast ashore he would weary and languish no matter how alluring the shady groves and how bright the gentle sun. — Mikhail Lermontov

I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times. — Lauren Groff

But in residency, something else was gradually unfolding. In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it. Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to float, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide. My — Paul Kalanithi

One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage. — David Simon

Kiyo, what would you do if all of a sudden I weren't here any more?' Satoko asked, her words coming in a rushed whisper.
This was a long-standing trick of Satoko's for disconcerting people. Perhaps she achieved her effects without conscious effort, but she never allowed the slightest hint of mischief into her tone to put her victim at ease. Her voice would be heavy with pathos at such times, as though confiding the gravest of secrets.
Although he should have been inured to this by now, Kiyoaki could not help asking: 'Not here any more? Why?'
Despite all his efforts to indicate a studied disinterest, Kiyoaki's reply betrayed his uneasiness. It was what Satoko wanted.
'I can't tell you why,' she answered, deftly dropping ink into the clear waters of Kiyoaki's heart ... — Yukio Mishima

I think when you get inured with the past, you get committed to the past, you stop growing. — Michael Eisner

An Olympic rowing career had left Porter Collins a bit inured to the pain of others, as he assumed they usually didn't know what pain was. No, — Michael Lewis

Equally inured by moderation either state to bear, prosperous or adverse. — John Milton

The brief answer is that I have become inured without becoming indifferent. — Christopher Hitchens

The continental troops have as much courage and real discipline as those that are opposed to them. They are more inured to privation, more patient than Europeans, who, on these two points, cannot be compared to them. — Marquis De Lafayette

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality ... But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it. — G.K. Chesterton

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions. — Terence McKenna

He was handsome and strong, but somehow that wasn't enough for him. He also felt the need to be tough and inured to hardship... But how was he to come by that quality in this luminous garden, where all manner of fruit was to be had for the picking? — Michael Ende

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. — Steven Pinker

I think people are getting more and more -unfortunately - inured to violence. People are less sensitive to things they should wake up about. — Tony Todd

Regular people are used to rudeness; we get it all the time, we're inured to it. The wealthy aren't; it hurts their feelings, or whatever they have in there. — Michael Cleverly

But to Ezail, gifted with acceptance, it was only another facet of the riotous marvel of the earth. For all was marvelous there, was and is still, but humanity becomes inured to repetitive amazements - that the sun may rise, that a tiny seed may become a tree or a man, that life, coming from nowhere, sets us to moving like clockwork, and going out again leaves us to sleep. Or else, as then, takes us away with it, who knows? But we are used to it all, dawn and growth, living and dying. It takes a dragon on houseroof to wake us up now - and then, too. But to Ezail, all was wonder and no single item more than another: Dawns and dragons were one. — Tanith Lee

And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more. — Homer

This is a generation of men accustomed to warfare, inured to danger and familiar with cruelty. — Philippa Gregory

This was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology - a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists - and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt as if I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation - vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

People write things in newspapers about me that aren't true - or that are true. They take pictures of my kids on the way to school. I get a little bit inured to it in a way that I think most people probably aren't. — Maggie Gyllenhaal

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

[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to. — Carl Safina

You need to understand plant chemistry, be inured to discomfort and awesomely flexible. When something breaks down-the plane, the boat, you just have to roll with it. — Chris Kilham