Invulnerability Quotes & Sayings

The earth is grounding while the mountains, curvaceous and sweeping, offer a blanket of refuge. Their woods are abounding in camouflage as their leaves sway about in continuous, florid dance. There is an air of invulnerability that is exclusive to the woods, which is why she's most happy among them. She doesn't mind beasts as they are preferable to humans and much less threatening; beasts, you see, although dangerous, are incapable of the enmity that permeates beyond the shade of the woods. — Donna Lynn Hope

In the story of Thetis and Achilles, it's clear this isn't really a safe environment. She's gone down to the River Styx - the dead are being ferried across in the background. There's something in this mythology that says that if you want invulnerability, if you want immortality, you pay a price. — Eula Biss

The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose. — Brenna Yovanoff

Who, on seeing a Parisian apartment house, has never thought of it as indestructible? A bomb, a fire, an earthquake could certainly bring it down, but what else? In the eyes of an individual, of a family, or even a dynasty, a town, street, or house seems unchangeable, untouchable by time, by the ups and downs of human life, to such an extent that we believe we can compare and contrast the fragility of our condition to the invulnerability of stone. — Georges Perec

I looked down at my clothes. They were slashed to pieces and full of bullet holes, but I was fine. Not a mark on me.
Nico's mouth hung open. "You just ... with a sword ... you just - "
"I think the river thing worked," I said.
"Oh gee," he said sarcastically. "You think? — Rick Riordan

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness. — Salman Rushdie

The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman - who is only a mere superhero. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Some Albanians who have worn a veil say it creates a kind of freedom by giving them anonymity and symbolic invulnerability when outside the home. — Antonia Young

Long periods of peace and quiet favor certain optical illusions. Among them is the assumption that the invulnerability of the home is founded upon the constitution and safeguarded by it. In reality, it rests upon the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the ax on the threshold of his dwelling. — Ernst Junger

When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision. — Bill McKibben

Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power. He kept near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and an imploring cry went from his mind. — Stephen Crane

You haven't yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior's way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability
to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I've shown you by example that a warrior's life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior's sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death. — Dan Millman

Watching either, one knew that the world would never again be the same; the risks everywhere, to which life was heir, had been changed on the morning of a new unclouded day. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the United States was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of 11 September announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period. Concerning — John Berger

A piece of simple goodness
a letter gushing from the heart; a beautiful unstudied vindication of the worth and untiring sweetness of human nature
a record of the invulnerability of man, armed with high purpose, sanctified by truth. — Douglas William Jerrold

It's difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide. — Dean Koontz

Even in the Belt, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different. The laws of physics would cut you a break, the missiles would never hit, the air would never hiss out into nothing. — James S.A. Corey

Immortality is a meaningless word unless invulnerability goes with it. — Barry Hughart

It seemed to k. as if all contact with him had been cut and he was more of a free agent than ever. He could wait here, in a place usually forbidden to him, as long as he liked, and he also felt as if he gad won that freedom with more effort than most people could manage to make, and no one could touch him or drive him away, why, they hardly had a right even to adress him. But at the same time - and this feeling was at least as strong - he felt as if there were nothing more meaningless and more desperate than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability. — Franz Kafka

Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates 'female' with 'victim', thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability. — Philip W. Cook

Standing there, I had the feeling of putting on armour, taking up secret weapons, becoming like a dreamer, invulnerable for the moment - safe in my dream. Now I could face the world, having no part in life; the presence of waiting phantoms could be forgotten. I was outside everything, surrendered unconditionally to my dream, giving no thought to my next move, prepared to obey whatever impulse next reaches me from the unseen. — Anna Kavan

In fact, Bill Clinton's an excellent example of what he should be doing when he realizes that he's not invulnerable. He realized two things: his invulnerability was contextualized in two things: junk food, and he had a problem with certain kinds of women. — Walter Mischel

Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability. — Patrick Lencioni

I always felt that you could see me, somehow. In a way no one else did. That with those fetching little spectacles, you could peer straight through me. And you made no secret of the fact that you despised what you saw, which marked you as far cleverer than most. I couldn't rid myself of this fascination with you. Your sharp gaze, your enticing mouth, your complete invulnerability to all my charms. If I treated you poorly - and I know I did, to my shame - it was because I always felt rather hopeless around you. — Tessa Dare

Achieving vulnerability-based trust (where team members have overcome their need for invulnerability) is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of the team, but that is exactly what is required. — Patrick Lencioni

There is nothing that I so greatly admire as purposefulness. I have an enormous respect for people who know exactly what they are doing and where they are going. Such people are compact and integrated. They have clear edges. They give an impression of invulnerability and balance, and I wish I were one of them. — Louise Dickinson Rich

As black people in a white-supremacist culture we have had a psychohistory of learning to utterly hide or repress our vulnerability in order to survive. When this survival strategy links with the overall cultural devaluation of vulnerability it makes sense that so many black folks have wrongly interpreted invulnerability as a sign of emotional strength. Maintaining this survival strategy when we no longer have to fear extreme violence at the hands of racist whites has damaged our emotional and intimate bonds. The inability to be vulnerable means that we are unable to feel. If we cannot feel we cannot truly emotionally connect with one another. We cannot know love. No wonder then that the lovelessness that abounds in our culture is even more intense among African-Americans. — Bell Hooks

No matter how much lip service those committed to power (psychopaths) may pay to the principle of equality (empaths), they can never approach their fellow human beings on an equal footing; their relationships with others are defined solely in terms of power and weakness. Therefore, they must accumulate as much power as possible, with the aim of becoming invulnerable and proving this invulnerability. — Arno Gruen

I should feel energized and powerful, invulnerable and potent, but all I feel is lost. — Kelly Thompson

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them — Frank Herbert

While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special. These self-serving protective shields allow us to believe that each of us is above average on any test of self-integrity. Too often we look to the stars through the thick lens of personal invulnerability when we should also look down to the slippery slope beneath our feet. — Philip Zimbardo

But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy. — Patrick O'Brian

A warrior is not about perfection or victory or invulnerability. He's about absolute vulnerability. — Nick Nolte

(Much of my callousness and invulnerability has come from my refusal to mourn the loss of a soft word and a tender embrace.) Blessed are those who weep and mourn. — Brennan Manning

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. "That's dangerous," says the ego. "You'll get hurt. You'll become vulnerable." What the ego doesn't know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you discover your true and essential invulnerability. — Eckhart Tolle