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

“The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“...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 Romance

“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