Indefinable Quotes

• There is an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Power, Mysterious

  Address at Kingsley Hall, delivered 17 October 1931, London

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• Art is expression; what is expressed is often the vision of a subtle and powerful soul, and also his experience with his vision; and however vivid and skilful he may be in the means of expression, yet it is frequently found that the master-spell in his work is something felt to be indefinable and inexpressible.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Art, Powerful, Mean

  George Edward Woodberry (1914). “Two Phases of Criticism, Historical and Aesthetic: Lectures Delivered on the Larwill Foundation of Kenyon College, May Seventh and Eighth, 1913”

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• She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

  Oscar Wilde

  Clever, Weakness, Charm

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.125, Wordsworth Editions

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• There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.

  Countee Cullen

  Hard Work, Secret, Break

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• Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

  Paul Gauguin

  Color, Matter, Vibrations

  Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

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• There is something in the Olympics, indefinable, springing from the soul, that must be preserved.

  Chris Brasher

  Athlete, Soul, Olympics

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• Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.

  Honore de Balzac

  Light, Shining, Clay

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• The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.

  Nick Lowe

  Attitude, Play, People

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• Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Art, Inspiration, Past

  Eric Temple Bell (1938). “The queen of the sciences”

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• Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Men, Scene, Turns

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.164, Open Road Media

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• Being a Christian is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.

  Donald Miller

  Christian, Falling In Love, Ideas

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• I'm a believer in belief. Faith is something that works - it causes people to do things, it has results. It's an intangible, indefinable, very real thing. And it moves people, sometimes to atrocity. And sometimes to survival.

  Tommy Lee Jones

  Real, Moving, People

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• Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

  Edward Abbey

  Art, Great Art, Art Is

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.36, RosettaBooks

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• Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.

  Mason Cooley

  Air, Rich, Behavior

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• Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.

  Rachel Carson

  Ocean, Swings, Sea

  Rachel Carson, Sue Hubbell (1998). “The Edge of the Sea”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Mid-summer ... when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Summer, Nature, Past

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_”, p.6, e-artnow

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• What time can be more beautiful when the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Beautiful, Longing, Virtue

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• Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you've never been there, you don't know what it's like until you're too far in to stop the process.

  Tim Sandlin

  Headache, Process, Knows

  Tim Sandlin (2010). “Skipped Parts: A Novel”, p.42, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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• Anyone who ever loves anyone truly loves them because of their indefinable essence, not because they conform to some checklist.

  Kim Wilkins

  Essence, Checklists, Conform

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• God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  God, Feels, Knows

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Ronald Duncan (2005). “Gandhi: Selected Writings”, p.238, Courier Corporation

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• The thing that you learn in directing is that when you're on the floor, no matter how complex the shooting is...you have to remain absolutely sensitive to every nuance of the behavior of the people around you. Because, ultimately, if you don't keep in mind the overall humanity, then the machine takes over and suddenly all you have are technically fine shots, technically good performances. The story's being told, but something's lacking, something mysterious, indefinable.

  Irvin Kershner

  People, Humanity, Mind

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• With the "civilized" person contentment is a myth. From the cradle to the grave they are forever longing and striving after something better, an indefinable something, some new object yet unattained.

  William Matthews

  Forever, Contentment, Longing

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• Christy Mathewson brought something to baseball no one else had ever given the game. He handed the game a certain touch of class, an indefinable lift in culture, brains, and personality.

  Grantland Rice

  Baseball, Games, Class

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• Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

  George Eliot

  Love, Dark, Blue

  George Eliot (2006). “Middlemarch: Easyread Edition”, p.35, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• What is courage? Let me tell you what I think it is. An indefinable quality that makes a man put out that extra something, when it seems there is nothing else to give. I dare you to be better than you are. I dare you to be a thoroughbred.

  Herb Brooks

  Inspirational, Hockey, Men

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