These ineffable quotes will inspire you. Ineffable, too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging ineffable quotes, ineffable sayings, and ineffable proverbs.
Best 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
- “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
- “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
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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
- “To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.” ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
- “Go ahead. Weep for the rare, the never seen this way again, the excruciating, ineffable, unmitigated beauty of love.” ~ Mary Anne Radmacher
- “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
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“Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.” ~ Paul Feyerabend
- “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
- “Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “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 , Ineffable quotes love
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“Although I may try to describe Love, When I experience it, I am speechless.” ~ Rumi
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“Religion brings to man an inner strength, spiritual light, and ineffable peace.” ~ Alexis Carrel
- “War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.” ~ Thomas de Quincey
- “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
- “Both light and shadow are the dance of Love.” ~ Rumi
- “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
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“I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn’t know what it meant myself.” ~ David Ogilvy
- “I could not help feeling that they were evil things– mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.” ~ Albert Schweitzer
- “Those who look at the surface of the sea must behold the birth and death of the waves, but those who seek the depths of the ocean behold one indivisible mass of water. Similarly, those who acknowledge “life” and “death” are tossed by sorrow, while those who live in the illimitable superconsciousness behold and feel the One Ineffable Bliss.” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda
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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
- “Poltinus the Platonist proves by means of the blossoms and leaves that from the Supreme God, whose beauty is invisible and ineffable, Providence reaches down to the things of earth here below. He points out that these frail and mortal objects could not be endowed with a beauty so immaculate and so exquisitely wrought, did they not issue from the Divinity which endlessly prevades with its invisible and unchanging beauty all things.” ~ Saint Augustine
- “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
- “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
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“Lovers have an ineffable instinct which detects the presence of rivals.” ~ Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling and Bulwer
- “But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.” ~ James Thurber
- “Every moment is made glorious by the light of love.” ~ Rumi
- “Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof.” ~ Julie Moir Messervy
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“Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon ‘the days that are no more’ with ineffable longing.” ~ Elizabeth Gaskell
- “The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “I feel like I am 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 me the rules, and who smiles all the time.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “God does not play dice [with the universe].
[Ger., Gott wurfelt nicht.]” ~ Albert Einstein - “Studying the universe engages us in something bigger than ourselves. Science tries to describe, in terms we can only grasp intuitively, things that are beyond our intuition. . . . all we can hope for is that our physical descriptions, like a song or a good painting, are a faithful evocation of some ineffable truth.” ~ Guy Consolmagno
- “The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.” ~ Laird Barron
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“It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.” ~ John Galsworthy
- “It’s one thing to assent to propositions like ‘The way of things is ineffable’, and quite another to internalise what it is being gestured at by such propositions, to get a sense or feel for mystery. For me, at least, it is in and through ways of engaging with nature that this sense is intimated. These ways include being in the garden.” ~ David E. Cooper
- “If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the images suggested by the words ‘O windy star blown sideways up the sky!’ True poetry is itself a magic spell which is a key to the ineffable.” ~ Aleister Crowley
- “From the first opening of our eyes, it is the light that attracts us. We clutch aimlessly with our baby fingers at the gossamer-motes in the sunbeam, and we die reaching out after an ineffable blending of earthly and heavenly beauty which we shall never fully comprehend.” ~ Lucy Larcom
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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
- “When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Prayer has a right to the word “ineffable.” It is an hour of outpourings which words cannot express,–of that interior speech which we do not articulate, even when we employ it.” ~ Sophie Swetchine
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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
- “prayer is whenever we consciously try to get in contact with the numinous, the ineffable, the marvelous.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle
- “I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.” ~ Pierre Bourdieu
- I saw the dance as a vision of ineffable power. A man could, with dignity and a towering majesty, dance. Not mince, cavort, do “fancy dancing” or “showoff” steps. No: Dance as Michelangelo’s visions dance and as the music of Bach dances.” ~ Jose Limon
- “O man, do you believe that Christ is God? If you believe, fear, and keep His commandments? there is no other God but He (cf. Dt. 4:35). To Him no one is equal, nor can become equal (cf. Is. 40:18). He is Ruler of all things, the Judge of all, the King of all, the Maker of light and the Lord of life. He is the Light that is ineffable, inaccessible (cf. I Tim. 6:16), and He is the Only One. By His appearing He causes all His enemies to vanish before His face (cf. Ps. 68:2 f.), as well as those who do not perform His commandments, just as the sun when it rises drives away the darkness of night.” ~ Symeon the New Theologian
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“Never f*!k with the ineffable.” ~ Terry Pratchett
- “All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.” ~ Pat Conroy
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“The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.” ~ Judith Butler
- “…if we know God our knowledge of… everything will be brought to perfection, and, in so far as is possible, the infinite, divine and ineffable dwelling place (cf. Jn. 14:2) will be ours to enjoy. For this is what our sainted teacher said in his famous philosophical aphorism: ‘Then we shall know as we are known’ (I Cor. 13:12), when we mingle our god-formed mind and divine reason to what is properly its own and the image returns to the archetype for which it now longs.” ~ Pope Dionysius
- “The light of the Lord’s transfiguration does not come into being or cease to be, nor is it circumscribed or perceptible to the senses, even though for a short time on the narrow mountain top it was seen by human eyes.” ~ Gregory Palamas
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“As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).” ~ Fernando Pessoa
- “As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).” ~ Fernando Pessoa
- “Like so many pilgrims before us, we kneel in wonder and adoration before the ineffable mystery which. was accomplished here… In This Child – the Son who is given to us – we find rest for our souls and the true bread that never fails – the Eucharistic Bread foreshadowed even in the name of this town: Bethlehem, the house of bread. God lies hidden in the Child; divinity lies hidden in the Bread of Life” ~ Pope John Paul II
- “The ‘peace’ the gospel brings is never the absence of conflict, but an ineffable divine reassurance within the heart of conflict; a peace that surpasses understanding.” ~ Walter Wink
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“Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
- “We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore
- “Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof. Take that Poppy seed, for instance: it lies in your palm, the merest atom of matter, hardly visible, a speck, a pin’s point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge from the dark ground and blossom in a splendor so dazzling as to baffle all powers of description.” ~ Celia Thaxter
- “You sit back in the darkness, nursing your beer, breathing in that ineffable aroma of the old-time saloon: dark wood, spilled beer, good cigars, and ancient whiskey – the sacred incense of the drinking man.” ~ Bruce Aidells
