Ineffable Quotes

• Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

  Douglas Adams

  Badass, Philosophy, Thinking

  "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". Book by Douglas Adams, 1987.

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• God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, ie., everybody, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

  Terry Pratchett

  Moving, Dark, Player

  "Good Omens". Book by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, 1990.

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• The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Music, Stars, Blue

  Rabindranath Tagore (2006). “Sadhana”, p.43, 1st World Publishing

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• To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Company

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion”, p.16, Macmillan

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• The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Happiness, Forgiveness, Spiritual

  Elbert Hubbard (1911). “A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard”

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• Go ahead. Weep for the rare, the never seen this way again, the excruciating, ineffable, unmitigated beauty of love.

  Mary Anne Radmacher

  Love, Way

  Mary Anne Radmacher (2008). “Live Boldly: Cultivate the Qualities That Can Change Your Life”, Conari Press

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• She saw the myriad gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our present life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendors of the spirit.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Sri Lanka, Mind, Saws

  "The Renaissance in India" by Sri Aurobindo in "Arya", intyoga.online.fr. August 1918 - November 1918.

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• Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Reality, Entity, Ultimate

  Paul Feyerabend (2001). “Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being”, p.214, University of Chicago Press

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• Beyond the beauty of external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow. It only reveals itself to you when you are present.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Inspirational, Essence, Shining

  Eckhart Tolle (2001). “Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now”, p.58, New World Library

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• Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Joy, Suffering, Cease

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack (2005). “The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi”, p.91, Courier Corporation

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• Although I may try to describe Love, When I experience it, I am speechless.

  Rumi

  Trying, May, Light And Shadow

  Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi, “The Meaning Of Love”

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• Both light and shadow are the dance of Love. Love has no cause, it is the astrolabe of God's secrets. Lover and loving are inseparable and timeless. Although I may try to describe love, when I experience it, I am speechless. Although I may try to write about love, I am rendered helpless. My pen breaks, and the paper slips away at the ineffable place where lover loving and loved are one. Every moment is made glorious by the light of Love.

  Rumi

  Love, Writing, Light

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• The name that no human research can discover-- But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

  T. S. Eliot

  Cat, Names, Profound

  Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats "The Naming of Cats" l. 25 (1939)

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• Religion brings to man an inner strength, spiritual light, and ineffable peace.

  Alexis Carrel

  Spiritual, Men, Light

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• It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.

  Vanna Bonta

  Beautiful, Interesting, Poetry

  "The Cosmos as a Poem". Book by Vanna Bonta., 2010.

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• Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

  Toni Morrison

  War, Arrogance, Slavery

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

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• At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Peace, Heart, Hands

  Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Poems”, p.11, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Eye, Heart, Fate

  "Shantaram". Book by Gregory David Roberts, 2003.

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• Both light and shadow are the dance of Love.

  Rumi

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Light

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• It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.

  Allen Newell

  Plato, Taught Us, Space

  "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search". Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (p. 125), March 1976.

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• War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.

  Thomas de Quincey

  War, Men, Relation

  Thomas De Quincey (1863). “De Quincey's Works ...: Miscellanies: chiefly narrative”, p.286

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• I believe in one secret and ineffable Lord; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name Chaos, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes. And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name Babalon.

  Aleister Crowley

  Mother, Stars, Father

  "Liber XV, The Gnostic Mass". Book by Aleister Crowley, www.scarletwoman.org. 1913.

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• Illumination in the outer world is to be happy no matter what is going on. In the inner world, it's more ineffable. It's harder to express.

  Frederick Lenz

  Illumination, World, Matter

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• 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

  Clouds, Giving, Atlas

  "Cloud Atlas". "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", p. 389. Book by David Mitchell, 2004.

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• For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Reality, Rocks, Wings

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “(The Great Gatsby)”, p.59, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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