Ineffability Quotes

The best things cannot be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood because they are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which cannot be thought about. The third best are what we talk about.

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

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.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something.

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can't be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.

Your trouble is, you keep trying to unscrew the unscrutable.

Nature! We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her. Variant: NATURE! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her.

There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

Love can never be fully explained.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.

Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

I know what I think but I don't know how to put it into words. Maybe I could get a little bit drunk and dance it for you.

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-Tzu's dictum: "Those who know, do not say; Those who say, do not know." When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the master, "Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?" All of them indicated that they knew. Then he said, "Put it into words." All of them were silent.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

Do I really have to find a word for it? Can't it just be what it is?