Ineffable Quotes

“Feel your emotions,
Live true your passions,
Keep still your mind.”
― Geoffrey M. Gluckman

“She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.

And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.”
― Lauren Oliver, Liesl & Po

“No one needed to say it, but the room overflowed with that sort of blessing. The combination of loss and abundance. The abundance that has no guilt. The loss that has no fix. The simple tiredness that is not weary. The hope not built on blindness.”
― Aimee Bender, Willful Creatures

“I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?”
― Kathleen Norris, The Psalms with Commentary

“Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“When observation fails to align with a truth, what do you trust--your senses or your truth? The Greeks didn't even have a word for blue. The color didn't exist to them. Couldn't see it without a word for it.

I think about her all the time. My stomach flips when I see her. But is it love, or just something we don't have a word for?”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“...imagine that you hold in one hand an oddly shaped stone. You keep this hand closed into a fist, but still you can feel the stone’s curvature and the pointed edges, the roughness—of course, you know the relative size and weight and might even have a mental image of the color of this stone, even if you have not yet laid eyes upon it. Imagine that stone in your hand. Imagine what it is like to know everything about the way it feels, but nothing of how it looks. Hold that in mind for a moment.

Now, imagine that there is a person standing next to you who tells you that she also holds a stone in her hand. You look down and see the clenched fist and she sees yours and you confess the same. Neither of you, it seems, has yet opened the hand and seen the stone. Still, you can only trust each other’s proclamations. Standing together with your stones in hand, the two of you theorize about whether or not your respective stones are similar to one another. You discuss mundane details about your stones (not the special ones—you hesitate to make mention of the sharp point in the northern hemisphere or the flat area on the bottom). Your neighbor finally notes similarities between her stone and yours and you nod with relief and acknowledge that your stones indeed share reasonable commonalities. Over the course of your discussion, you and your neighbor finally conclude, without bothering to open your hands, that the stones you hold must indeed be quite similar.

Are they? It is only suitable to say that they are.

At the same time, and in spite of your desire not to offend, there is no doubt in your mind that the stone you hold bespeaks a greater prominence than that of your neighbor. You are not sure how you know this to be true, but it must be so! And I do not mean that this stone simply holds a greater subjective prominence. It has something of the universal, for it is, indeed, an auspicious stone! Silently, you hypothesize in what ways it must be special. It is possibly different in shape, color, weight, size and texture from the other, but you cannot confirm this. Perhaps, it is special by substance? Still, you are unsure. The very fact of your uncertainty begins to bother you and unleashes within you a deep insecurity. What if you are wrong and your stone is actually inferior to the other…or inferior even to some third stone not yet encountered?

Meanwhile, your neighbor is silently suffering in the same agony. Both of you tacitly understand that, without comparing the two visually, it is absurd to proclaim the two stones similar. Yet, your fist remains clenched, as does your neighbor’s and so you find yourselves unable to hold out the stones before you and compare them side-by-side. Of course, this is possible, but the mutual curiosity is outstripped by an inveterate pride, and so you both become afraid of showing (and even seeing) what you have, for fear that your respective stones will be different in appearance from the model that you have each conceptualized in mind. Meekly your eyes meet and you smile to one another at your new comradeship, but, all the while, remain paralyzed by a simultaneous shame and vanity.”
― Ashim Shanker

“Rien ne m'explique : mes vices et mes vertus n'y suffisent absolument pas ; mon bonheur le fait davantage.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Within our awe we only know that all we own we owe.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thunder in the Soul: To Be Known By God

“What words are there to tell how long a night can be?”
― Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles

“To reach truth that one cannot be argued out of is to escape from the linguistically expressible to the ineffable. Only the ineffable—what is not describable at all—cannot be described differently.”
― Rorty Richard

“the thing that is between you and me,
there is something between you and me...
it is ineffable what is between you and me
it is incomprehensible what is between you and me
it is indefinable what is between you and me
it is indescribable what is between you and me
but there is something between you and me
the thing that is between you and me...”
― Avijeet Das

“Une pensée écrite est morte. Elle vivait. Elle ne vit plus. Elle était fleur. L’écriture l’a rendue artificielle, c’est-à-dire immuable.”
― Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

“No, no,” howled Shadow. “Do not keep me here!”
“Do you not love the boy?” said the voice of the sea.
“Love is terrible!” Shadow howled.
“I know,” replied the sea.
“It is full of hurt.”
“It is. But do you not love the boy?”
“I do love the boy!” the dog cried.
“You cannot leave the boy in this storm, not if you truly love him,” she said.”
― Steven James Taylor

“There’s something mystic and beautiful in the ineffable.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“There was a little hill behind the house. You climbed it, and there was the whole sky from horizon to horizon. A hundred and eighty degrees of brute inexplicable mystery. It was a good place for just sitting and saying nothing.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“Salma had read books where couples kissed, spoke in platitudes or come-ons; something about to happen, hinted at. Beyond that there was always only a white space on the page. A gap between paragraphs. She had thought often about what went on there. On the other side, when the letters appeared once more, couples smoke and drank tea or dressed one another or themselves. If there was a book to be written about Margot it should be blank; it would be those sex spaces between lines, sucked clean of words.”
― Daisy Johnson, Fen

“...photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ society...”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“In short, an argumentation sketch may be able to inspire and lead us in our reflections. We can take one step further by acknowledging that there may be other ways - for example, the aphoristic and even mystical style exemplified in the Lao Zi and to some extent Nietzsche's writing - to express (the author's) and inspire (the readers') reflections than argumentation (argumentation sketch included). This style has its benefits, especially if what is to be expressed has some form of internal tension, or if what is to be said is ineffable in a way. This is the issue underlying the problem of writing in Plato's Phaedrus, the problem of speaking about the inspeakable Dao in the Lao Zi, the problem of how to express oneself without being trapped in one's words in the Zhuang Zi, and the problem of how to assert nothingness in Buddhism.”
― Tongdong Bai, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case

“We could write a multitude of words, but some moments are ineffable!”
― Avijeet Das

“Standing face to face with the world, we often sense a spirit which surpasses our ability to comprehend. The world is too much for us. It is crammed with marvel. The glory is not an exception but an aura that lies about all being, a spiritual setting of reality.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thunder in the Soul: To Be Known By God

“Poetry Writes The Poet (The Sonnet)

The best poets are the ones,
Who don't know how to write poetry.
Just like the best scientists are those,
Who practice science as everyday curiosity.
The more you focus on the definition,
The more you lose touch with the essence.
That is why I never know what my work is about,
To explain love is to lose love's fragrance.
Painting of a landscape is not the landscape itself,
Depiction must never be confused with the depicted.
I don't know how to do small talk, hence the sonnets.
Poet doesn't write poetry, poetry writes the poet.
The moment I think I am in control, I lose all control.
Craving no control, the river just nourishes the soul.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“I felt as though what we shared went beyond the effable, beyond what could be written about. It was the infinite space between the unspoken I-love-yous that resounded so clearly all around us.”
― Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev, Vanishing Bodies: An Epic Science Fiction Thriller

“I once spent a weekend on Earth,
With two men (of Science and God)
One man convinced me I did not exist,
And the other that I was a fraud.
In both men I saw the same reason,
In both men I saw the same light.
So, I left for another dimension,
Assuming that both men were right."

- The Alien”
― C. Sean McGee, Ineffable

“we know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has theorized.”
― Catharine Mackinnon

“I think there was always a yearning in me for something else, something beyond myself, from which I felt excluded. Even in the most chaotic times, when I was struggling with addiction, I always felt desirous of those who had a religious dimension to their lives. I had a kind of spiritual envy, a longing for a belief in the face of the impossibility of belief that addressed a fundamental emptiness inside me. There was always a yearning.
As I’ve gotten older, I have come to see that maybe the search is the religious experience - the desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the moving towards the ineffable. Maybe that is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it. Or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it. 
When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself.”
― Kurt Vile

“This world is more ungraspable than the so-called hidden world, since it cannot even be called a world, but rather the One before all worlds, and it embraces all things in its perfectly unique simplicity.”
― Damascius, Damascius' Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles

“Music—good music, great music—is itself magical, its mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.”
― Dean Koontz, The City