Ineffable Quotes - Page 4

• Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Marriage, Thinking, Mind

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1988). “Shelley's Prose: Or the Trumpet of a Prophecy”

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• I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination.

  Herman Melville

  Book, Rome, Feelings

  Herman Melville (2001). “Tales, Poems, and Other Writings”

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• I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing Burial Rites, I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.

  Hannah Kent

  Writing, Iceland, Trying

  "'Burial Rites' author Hannah Kent finds mystery in Iceland". Interview with Randy Dotinga, www.csmonitor.com. November 29, 2013.

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• There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Sadness, Thinking, Should

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Art, Two, Genuine

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• There are really three players: 'absolutists', for whom it is possible to describe reality as it anyway is; 'constructivists' or 'humanists', for whom there is nothing beyond a world that is relative to human interests and conceptual schemes; and 'ineffabilists', like myself, for whom any describable world indeed exists 'only in relation to man', as Heidegger put it, but for whom, as well, there is an ineffable realm 'beyond the human'.

  David E. Cooper

  Player, Reality, Men

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

  Pat Conroy

  Life Changing, Writing, Thinking

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• Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?

  Baron d'Holbach

  Men, Ideas, Giving

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• Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Love You, Parent

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States”, p.423

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• There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.

  Alan Watts

  Integrity, Light, Shining

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• Only when I saw the Earth from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind's most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.

  Sigmund Jahn

  Space, Tasks, Generations

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• Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the holy virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.

  Paul Levine

  Stars, Believe, Law

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• A house isn't a home without the ineffable contentment of a cat with its tail folded about its feet. A cat gives mystery, charm, suggestion.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Cat, Home, Feet

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2016). “EMILY STAR - Complete Trilogy: Emily of New Moon + Emily Climbs + Emily's Quest: Classic of Children's Literature”, p.587, e-artnow

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• You sit back in the darkness, nursing your beer, breathing in that ineffable aroma of the old-time saloon: dark wood, spilled beer, good cigars, and ancient whiskey - the sacred incense of the drinking man.

  Bruce Aidells

  Humorous, Drinking, Nursing

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• Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof. Take that Poppy seed, for instance: it lies in your palm, the merest atom of matter, hardly visible, a speck, a pin's point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge from the dark ground and blossom in a splendor so dazzling as to baffle all powers of description.

  Celia Thaxter

  Beauty, Lying, Dark

  Celia Thaxter (2008). “An Island Garden”, p.3, Applewood Books

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• We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Life, Dream, Greatness

  Rabindranath Tagore (2010). “My Life In My Words”, p.163, Penguin UK

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• Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points.

  Eckhart Tolle

  God, Reality, Important

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.14, New World Library

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• The 'peace' the gospel brings is never the absence of conflict, but an ineffable divine reassurance within the heart of conflict; a peace that surpasses understanding.

  Walter Wink

  Heart, Understanding, Conflict

  Walter Wink (2010). “The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium”, p.121, Harmony

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• The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

  Judith Butler

  Effort, Violence, Language

  Judith Butler (2013). “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative”, p.19, Routledge

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• As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).

  Fernando Pessoa

  Home, Perfect, Remember

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• The light of the Lord's transfiguration does not come into being or cease to be, nor is it circumscribed or perceptible to the senses, even though for a short time on the narrow mountain top it was seen by human eyes.

  Gregory Palamas

  Christian, Eye, Light

  "The homilies".

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• Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Passion, Order

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• The shepherds - simple souls - came to adore the Infant Savior. Mary rejoiced at seeing their homage and willing offerings they made to her Jesus... How happy is the loving soul when it has found Jesus with Mary, His Mother! They who know the Tabernacle where He dwells, they who receive Him into their souls, know that His conversation is full of divine sweetness, His consolation ravishing, His peace superabundant, and the familiarity of His love and His Heart ineffable

  Peter Julian Eymard

  Mother, Jesus, Heart

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• If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.

  Jo Walton

  Omnipotence, Damn, Omnipotent

  Jo Walton (2011). “Among Others”, p.111, Macmillan

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• Even the best computer in the world has no idea that it exists. You do. No one knows what creates that ineffable awareness that we're here.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Ideas, World, Computer

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