Ineffable Experience Quotes

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.

I want to start where language ends.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

Music is a language of emotion. I'm passionate about it because I think it's the most direct way to connect to the things that are ineffable. Words just aren't necessary a good enough opportunity to express. Words are maybe less than accessible at expressing.

The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.

The Way is basically perfect. It doesn't require perfecting. The Way has no form or sound. It's subtle and hard to perceive. It's like when you drink water: you know how hot or cold it is, but you can't tell others.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

I kiss her mouth and I know... for everything there is a word... for everything but this.

I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

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.

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

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.

To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—

To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

As a professional climber, that's the question you always get: Why, why, why? It's an ineffable thing; you can't describe it.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

One listens to a piece of great music, say, and feels deeply moved by it, and wants to put this feeling into words, but it can't be put into words. That's what - the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous after that. But it's that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized that I try to get at in poetry.

An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.