Inarticulate Quotes - Page 2

• Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

  Alain de Botton

  Always Trying, Anxiety, Form

  Twitter post from Apr 22, 2013

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• just as violence is the last refuge of the inarticulate, so it is also the first resort of the incompetent, the easy out for the man who is capable of expressing himself only in the most primitive and vulgar of dramatic terms. He leaves us with only the obscenity of violence per se - and the pornographer thereof will always be with us, in film as in any other medium. And so will his audience.

  Judith Crist

  Men, Lasts, Violence

  Judith Crist (1968). “The private eye, the cowboy, and the very naked girl: movies from Cleo to Clyde”

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• The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential “you” which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your “feeling.”

  John Galt

  Dream, Self Esteem, Thinking

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• My intent was not to go after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. ... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.

  Michael Steele

  Voice, Littles, Enormous

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• Go out and speak for the inarticulate and the submerged.

  Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

  Speak, Submerged

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• The mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the inseparable garment of romance.

  Walther von der Vogelweide

  Romance, Soul, Half

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• It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

  Ralph Fiennes

  Nice, Clear Direction, Giving

  Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. February 10, 2014.

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• [T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Men, Voting, Principles

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• Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Inspiration, Speech, Kind

  Thomas Carlyle (1840). “Works”, p.78

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• I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.

  Eileen Myles

  Thinking, Childhood, Cameras

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Years, Sacred, Theater

  Kenneth Tynan (1964). “Tynan on theatre”

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• All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.

  Thomas Carlyle

  History

  Thomas Carlyle (1901). “Carlyle on Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History”

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• A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.

  Victor Hugo

  Children, Hymns, Profound

  Victor Hugo, Frank Lee Benedict (1874). “Ninety-three”, p.238, Dawson Bros.

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• Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Faith, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.10, Graphic Arts Books

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• When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Children, Men

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• Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

  Alice Walker

  Confused, Greed, Humanity

  Alice Walker (2013). “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness”, p.9, The New Press

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• What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dream, Character, Public Opinion

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• Art is the expression of a man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to the universe's unspoken message.

  Vernon Lee

  Art, Men, Expression

  Vernon Lee (1909). “Renaissance fancies & studies”

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• With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

  Alice Meynell

  Echoes, Bird, Musician

  Alice Meynell (2013). “The Essential Alice Meynell Collection”, p.225, eBookIt.com

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• it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  World, Ghost, Made

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• The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Strong, Too Much, Beast

  Quoted in Hedrick Smith The Power Game (1988).

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• Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.

  James Elkins

  Mood, Projection, Viewers

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.45, Routledge

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• As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.

  Graham Swift

  Thinking, Novelists, Levels

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• He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

  Edith Wharton

  Winter, Night, Light

  Edith Wharton (2015). “The Age of Innocence”, p.97, Booklassic

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• Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Speech, Way

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack (2005). “The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi”, p.27, Courier Corporation

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