Ineffable Quotes - Page 5

• The mystics always say that the experience they're talking about is ineffable, that you can't say it. Rumi was asked one time why he talked so much about silence. He said, "The radiant one inside me has never said a word."

  Coleman Barks

  Talking, Silence, Said

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The magic of film isn't just because of the big screen, or the acoustics, but the ineffable shared experience of going to the movies.

  Fernando Perez

  Magic, Acoustics, Film

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Music is a language of emotion. I'm passionate about it because I think it's the most direct way to connect to the things that are ineffable. Words just aren't necessary a good enough opportunity to express. Words are maybe less than accessible at expressing.

  Adrian Grenier

  Opportunity, Thinking, Passionate

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The rapturuous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at somebody else's expense

  Leigh Hunt

  Drinking, Wine, Pleasure

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• [Bob] Dylan may, for whatever reasons of his own, do nothing of the sort with the Nobel committee. Up there on Parnassus, that is his unquestionable prerogative. But here on my anthill, it's mine to say: oh, do piss off, you ineffable snobs.

  David Bennun

  May, Bob, Reason

  Source: thequietus.com

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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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• You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs―the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate―the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Children, Artist, Flames

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.72, Vintage

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• Christ is already in that place of peace, which is all in all. He is on the right hand of God. He is hidden in the brightness of the radiance which issues from the everlasting throne. He is in the very abyss of peace, where there is no voice of tumult or distress, but a deep stillness--stillness, that greatest and most awful of all goods which we can fancy; that most perfect of joys, the utter profound, ineffable tranquillity of the Divine Essence. He has entered into His rest. That is our home; here we are on a pilgrimage, and Christ calls us to His many mansions which He has prepared.

  John Henry Newman

  Home, Voice, Issues

  Blessed John Henry Newman, Aeterna Press “Parochial and Plain Sermons”, Aeterna Press

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• Renunciation made for the sake of service is an ineffable joy of which none can deprive anyone, because that nectar springs from within and sustains life.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Spring, Joy, Sake

  Mahatma Gandhi (2011). “The Way to God: Selected Writings from Mahatma Gandhi”, North Atlantic Books

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• Among all life forms, there are creatures with charisma and creatures without. It's one of those ineffable qualities we can't quite define, but we all seem to respond similarly to.

  Susan Orlean

  Quality, Form, Charisma

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• For me, the existentialists are important critics of 'absolutist' claims, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are, at least in their later writings, also exponents of a doctrine of mystery: Being or the 'well-spring' of everything is, for Heidegger, ineffable, just as what Merleau-Ponty called 'Flesh' is for him.

  David E. Cooper

  Spring, Writing, Important

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Our Lord humbled without humiliation His lofty station which yet could not be humbled, and condescends to His servants, with a condescension ineffable and incomprehensible. God being perfect becomes perfect man, and brings to perfection the newest of all new things (cf. Eccles 1:10), the only new thing under the sun, through which the boundless might of God is manifested. For what greater thing is there than that God should become man?

  John of Damascus

  Christian, Men, Cfs

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• I am trying to counter the fixity of architectures, their stolidity, with elements that give an ineffable immaterial quality.

  Toyo Ito

  Giving, Trying, Quality

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• Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

  David Mitchell

  Fog, Wind, Clouds

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• Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Protect, Walkers

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.15, Penguin

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• When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

  Kingsley Amis

  Jobs, Hangover, Sadness

  "Distilled Kingsley: The late, great author - and prodigious drinker - gives his advice on beating a hangover" by Kingsley Amis, www.dailymail.co.uk. December 26, 2008.

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• Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.

  Mark Twain

  Sleep, Men, People

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• As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, Men, Clouds

  Henry David Thoreau, Barry Andrews (2005). “True Harvest: Readings from Henry David Thoreau for Every Day of the Year”, p.29, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

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• Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

  Umberto Eco

  Couple, Encounters, Damnation

  "Foucault's Pendulum". Book by Umberto Eco, 2007.

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• To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

  Stephen Fry

  Spiritual, Essence, Use

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• God would turn the world around to find suffering in order to give it to a soul upon whom He has set His Divine gaze with ineffable love.

  Therese of Lisieux

  Order, Giving, Soul

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