Ineffable Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues' gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release. Publicly humiliated? Yes please. Having all their crappy books remaindered? Definitely. Dragged away from their taxpayer funded troughs and their cushy sinecures, to be replaced by people who actually know what they're talking about? For sure. But hanging? Hell no. Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags.

  James Delingpole

  Book, Talking, People

  "Denier Delingpole Wishes For 'Climate Nuremberg,' Says 'Hanging Is Far Too Good' For Climate Scientists!". thinkprogress.org. April 7, 2013.

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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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• ...if we know God our knowledge of... everything will be brought to perfection, and, in so far as is possible, the infinite, divine and ineffable dwelling place (cf. Jn. 14:2) will be ours to enjoy. For this is what our sainted teacher said in his famous philosophical aphorism: 'Then we shall know as we are known' (I Cor. 13:12), when we mingle our god-formed mind and divine reason to what is properly its own and the image returns to the archetype for which it now longs.

  Pope Dionysius

  Christian, Teacher, Philosophical

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• All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.

  Victor Hugo

  Sleep, Color, Sky

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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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• In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.

  Ben Marcus

  Passion, Track, Profound

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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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• 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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• Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Art, Quality, Copying

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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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• 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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• 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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• Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Mean, Selfishness, And Love

  "A Woman's Thoughts About Women" by Dinah Maria Murlock Craik, (Ch. 10), 1858.

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