These unspeakable quotes will inspire you. Unspeakable, not speakable; that may not be spoken or not able to be expressed in words.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging unspeakable quotes, unspeakable sayings, and unspeakable proverbs.
Best Unspeakable Quotes
- “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” ~ Arundhati Roy
- “My sisters and I were fortunate to travel through Asia and Europe at very young ages. We confronted extraordinary beauty in Athens and unspeakable poverty in India.” ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter
- “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” ~ Washington Irving
- “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.” ~ Ida B. Wells
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“Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries.” ~ Richard Wagner
- “Every true prayer is a prayer of the Church; by means of that prayer the Church prays, since it is the Holy Spirit living in the Church, Who in every single soul ‘prays in us with unspeakable groanings’.” ~ Edith Stein
- “What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.” ~ George Eliot
- “Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.” ~ Luigi Pirandello
- “The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
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“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!” ~ Luigi Pirandello
- “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.” ~ Linda Chavez
- “Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.” ~ Ira Gershwin
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“Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.” ~ Leonard Baskin
- “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.” ~ Washington Irving
- “Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.” ~ Thomas Merton
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“Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” ~ Mae West
- “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.” ~ Walter Chrysler
- “The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“The third always speaks the unspeakable words.” ~ Tupac Shakur
- “Foxhunting… the unspeakable pursuing the inedible.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It’s so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn’t really like a drug. It’s more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.” ~ Brené Brown
- “Today’s unspeakable perversion is tomorrow’s kink, is next week’s good clean fun” ~ Dan Savage
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“The unspeakable visions of the individual.” ~ Jack Kerouac
- “This suffering, this unspeakable capacity to bleed and to know pain and to know annihilation, is what has to be overcome in this world if anyone is to reach God.” ~ Anne Rice
- “Explanation of the unspeakable cannot be finished.” ~ Gautama Buddha
- “New York has a tremendous number of people but the quality of its politics is unspeakable. By contrast, in a smaller township, I find there’s a great deal of social awareness, less of a sense of powerlessness, less of a polarization of economic life.” ~ Murray Bookchin
- “The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn’t know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.” ~ Meg Rosoff
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“There is unspeakable pleasure attending the life of a voluntary student.” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
- “Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that result to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize. Such natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize, there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “”All right then,” said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.” ~ Aldous Huxley - “But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “I like texting as much as the next kidult – and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.” ~ Will Self
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“Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.” ~ Ellen Goodman
- “A member of Parliament to Disraeli: ‘Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.’ That depends, Sir,’ said Disraeli, ‘whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.” ~ Anne Lamott
- “Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.” ~ James A. Baldwin
- “All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. … That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.” ~ Louise Erdrich
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“Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in all is the seal of unity.” ~ Aleister Crowley
- “What a blessing that God allows a life to come through your body, and then allows you to place that body in a body bag and take it out. I had to say that there’s a magnificent something that God has for me to do, to give me that level of completion. That level of experience. It’s unspeakable.” ~ Iyanla Vanzant
- “We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder.” ~ Anne Lamott
- “Free will appears unfettered, deliberate; it is boundlessly free, wandering, the spirit. But fate is a necessity; unless we believe that world history is a dream-error, the unspeakable sorrows of mankind fantasies, and that we ourselves are but the toys of our fantasies. Fate is the boundless force of opposition against free will. Free will without fate is just as unthinkable as spirit without reality, good without evil. Only antithesis creates the quality.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “…the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right-there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.” ~ Brian D. McLaren
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“Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable… unimaginable… unspeakable.” ~ Paul Keating
- “God works this unspeakable mystery of entire sanctification in your life and mine. People try to seek the experience of entire sanctification in ways other than God’s way; but the wonderful Spirit of God will remove confusion and enable us to see that the only means to obtain the experience of entire sanctification by faith is the grace of God.” ~ Oswald Chambers
- “These are thy glorious works Parent of Good, Almighty, thine this universal Frame, Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then! Unspeakable, who sitst above these Heavens To us invisible or dimly seen In these thy lowest works, yet these declare Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine: Speak ye who best can tell, ye Sons of light, Angels, for ye behold him, and with songs And choral symphonies, Day without Night, Circle his Throne rejoicing, ye in Heav’n, On Earth join all ye Creatures to extoll Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.” ~ John Milton
- “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings…. What I am condemning is that one power, with a president [George W. Bush] who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.” ~ Louis Auchincloss
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“A heavier task could not have been impos’d, Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Only a fool takes offense at the truth, Jessamine. They are awful, of that there is no question. But they are also very charming. Purveyors of unspeakable suffering and indescribable delights. Performers of murders and miracles! You might grow to like them, if you got to know them as I do. But why has your beloved Crabgrass ventured into this garden of horrors, I wonder?” ~ Maryrose Wood
- “You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.” ~ Joseph O’Neill
- “If menopause is the silent passage, ‘male menopause’ is the unspeakable passage. It is fraught with secrecy, shame, and denial. It is much more fundamental than the ending of the fertile period of a woman’s life, because it strikes at the core of what it is to be a man.” ~ Gail Sheehy
- “…the grace of the Spirit takes possession of the quiet soul, and gives it a taste of the unspeakable good things to come, which no passionate and negligent eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of such a man (cf. I Cor. 2:9). This taste is the earnest of these good things, and the heart which accepts these pledges becomes spiritual and receives assurance of its salvation.” ~ Gregory Palamas
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“Apparently, ‘conspiracy stuff’ is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.” ~ Gore Vidal
- “Perhaps the way to meet tomorrow’s challenges is not to use yesterday’s solutions, but to dare to think the previously unthinkable, to speak the previously unspeakable, and to try that which was previously out of the question.” ~ Neale Donald Walsch
- “Supposing you eliminated suffering, what a dreadful place the world would be! I would almost rather eliminate happiness. The world would be the most ghastly place because everything that corrects the tendency of this unspeakable little creature, man, to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He’s bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered.” ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
- “With a title like this-There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick-is there really a whole lot left to say? With cunning and quintessential stealth, with artful restraint, with whats fathering and foxy and filled with intelligence and wit, Michael Teig goes about making what seems to be invisible and unspeakable, the most palpable and important matter in the world.” ~ Dara Wier
- “An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that news flash, which in duty bound, we have to take.” ~ Howard Cosell
- “It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness.” ~ Glenn Close
