Rainer Maria Rilke
Poet, Novelist
"Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation."
Unbearable quotes
Unbearable
131 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Charles Bukowski
Poet, Novelist
"The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable."
Milan Kundera
Writer
"Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being."
Milan Kundera
Writer
"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
Ram Dass
Spiritual Teacher, Author
"The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain - to just be with it all."
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Unbearable quotes (page 1 of 7)
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"Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End."
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"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
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"loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
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"In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable."
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"she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
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"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."
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"And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?"
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"There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself - but you just can't help it."
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"The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia."
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"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
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"Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it."
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"Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another."
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"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo."
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"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
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"I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves."
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"The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable."
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"Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable."
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"Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short."
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"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."
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"With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable."
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