Indefinable Quotes:

Happy! That is indefinable as far as states of being go.

- Sylvia Plath

source: Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.109, Faber & Faber

topic: States, Indefinable

There is an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything.

- Mahatma Gandhi

source: Address at Kingsley Hall, delivered 17 October 1931, London

topic: Power, Mysterious, Indefinable

Art is expression; what is expressed is often the vision of a subtle and powerful soul, and also his experience with his vision; and however vivid and skilful he may be in the means of expression, yet it is frequently found that the master-spell in his work is something felt to be indefinable and inexpressible.

- George Edward Woodberry

topic: Art, Powerful, Mean, Indefinable

She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

- Oscar Wilde

source: Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.125, Wordsworth Editions

topic: Clever, Weakness, Charm, Indefinable

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

- Paul Gauguin

source: Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

topic: Color, Matter, Vibrations, Indefinable, Inner Power

There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.

- Countee Cullen

topic: Hard Work, Secret, Break, Indefinable

The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.

- Nick Lowe

topic: Attitude, Play, People, Indefinable

There is something in the Olympics, indefinable, springing from the soul, that must be preserved.

- Chris Brasher

topic: Athlete, Soul, Olympics, Indefinable, Olympics Games

Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.

- Honore de Balzac

topic: Light, Shining, Clay, Indefinable

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

- Eric Temple Bell

source: Eric Temple Bell (1938). “The queen of the sciences”

topic: Art, Past, Simplicity, Indefinable, Generalities

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

topic: Mean, Men, Essence, Indefinable, Existentialist

Being a Christian is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.

- Donald Miller

topic: Christian, Falling In Love, Ideas, Indefinable

I'm a believer in belief. Faith is something that works - it causes people to do things, it has results. It's an intangible, indefinable, very real thing. And it moves people, sometimes to atrocity. And sometimes to survival.

- Tommy Lee Jones

topic: Real, Moving, People, Indefinable

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

- Edward Abbey

source: Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.36, RosettaBooks

topic: Art, Great Art, Art Is, Indefinable

Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.

- Mason Cooley

topic: Air, Rich, Behavior, Indefinable

Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.

- Rachel Carson

source: Rachel Carson, Sue Hubbell (1998). “The Edge of the Sea”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Ocean, Swings, Sea, Indefinable, Dual Nature

God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know.

- Mahatma Gandhi

source: Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Ronald Duncan (2005). “Gandhi: Selected Writings”, p.238, Courier Corporation

topic: God, Feels, Knows, Indefinable

Anyone who ever loves anyone truly loves them because of their indefinable essence, not because they conform to some checklist.

- Kim Wilkins

topic: Essence, Checklists, Conform, Indefinable

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry...As the poet Heine said, 'Where words leave off, music begins.'

- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

topic: Music, Writing, Soul, Indefinable

Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you've never been there, you don't know what it's like until you're too far in to stop the process.

- Tim Sandlin

topic: Headache, Process, Knows, Indefinable

With the "civilized" person contentment is a myth. From the cradle to the grave they are forever longing and striving after something better, an indefinable something, some new object yet unattained.

- William Matthews

topic: Forever, Contentment, Longing, Indefinable

There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail.

- Mark Twain

source: Mark Twain (2015). “A Tramp Abroad: Mark Twain's Collections”, p.214, 谷月社

topic: Beautiful, Matter, Faces, Indefinable

There is more or less of pathos in all true beauty. The delight it awakens has an indefinable, and, as it were, luxurious sadness, which is perhaps one element of its might.

- Henry Theodore Tuckerman

source: Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1846). “Thoughts on the Poets”, p.275

topic: Beauty, Sadness, Elements, Indefinable, Luxurious

Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.

- Lawren Harris

topic: Desire, Longing, Plastic, Indefinable

love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at its torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly.

- Mary Elizabeth Braddon

source: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (2015). “Lady Audley's Secret”, p.344, Sheba Blake Publishing

topic: Love Is, Essence, Looks, Indefinable, Sufferers

The thing that you learn in directing is that when you're on the floor, no matter how complex the shooting is...you have to remain absolutely sensitive to every nuance of the behavior of the people around you. Because, ultimately, if you don't keep in mind the overall humanity, then the machine takes over and suddenly all you have are technically fine shots, technically good performances. The story's being told, but something's lacking, something mysterious, indefinable.

- Irvin Kershner

topic: People, Humanity, Mind, Indefinable, Lacking Something

Mid-summer ... when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

- H. P. Lovecraft

source: H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_”, p.6, e-artnow

topic: Summer, Nature, Past, Indefinable, Intoxicated

What time can be more beautiful when the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life.

- Leo Tolstoy

topic: Beautiful, Longing, Virtue, Indefinable

What is courage? Let me tell you what I think it is. An indefinable quality that makes a man put out that extra something, when it seems there is nothing else to give. I dare you to be better than you are. I dare you to be a thoroughbred.

- Herb Brooks

topic: Inspirational, Hockey, Men, Indefinable, Thoroughbreds

An indefinable something is to be done, in a way nobody knows how, at a time nobody knows when, that will accomplish nobody knows what.

- Bill Vaughan

topic: Done, Way, Reform, Indefinable

Christy Mathewson brought something to baseball no one else had ever given the game. He handed the game a certain touch of class, an indefinable lift in culture, brains, and personality.

- Grantland Rice

topic: Baseball, Games, Class, Indefinable

Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

- George Eliot

topic: Love, Dark, Blue, Indefinable

Don't bother Me with promises. Vows are cheaply manufactured, come with no guarantees. Don't bother to say you love me. The word is indefinable. Joy to some, heartbreak to others, depending on circumstance. There is evidence that the emotion can make a person live longer, evidence it can kill you early. I think it's akin to a deadly disease. Or at least some exotic fever. Catch it, and you'd better, quick, swallow some medication to use as a weapon against the fire ravaging body and soul.

- Ellen Hopkins

topic: Thinking, Fire, Joy, Indefinable, Deadly Diseases

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

- W. S. Merwin

topic: Garden, Thinking, Design, Indefinable

In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that "liberty inheres in some sensible object," are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable "liberty" at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise.

- Russell Kirk

source: Russell Kirk (1996). “Redeeming the Time”, Isi Books

topic: Order, Knowing, Giving, Indefinable, Primacy

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

- Albert Camus

source: Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.19, Vintage

topic: Heart, Giving, Forever, Indefinable, Myth Of Sisyphus

He found himself looking into many faces for potentional love, and seeing many people as shining vessels of possibility. Perhaps this time there would be that indefinable something that sent hungry hearts roving, longing and searching for something, they knew not what, and yet could not give up the quest.

- Cassandra Clare

source: Cassandra Clare (2015). “Clockwork Angel”, p.57, Simon and Schuster

topic: Giving Up, Heart, People, Indefinable, Many Faces

His [Ben Okri's] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them: To what extent will we allow the indefinable dynamics of something called "destiny" to maintain grief and horror in the world? How hard are human beings willing to fight to achieve and sustain justice, equanimity, or joy? And should progress be called such when it devours what is best within the human spirit?

- Aberjhani

topic: Grief, Fighting, Destiny, Indefinable

When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole; it is to intuition that we must look for it.

- Henri Poincare

topic: Reality, Views, Giving, Indefinable

I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

- Bret Easton Ellis

topic: Thinking, Odds, People, Indefinable

Love, I would later conclude, was all things to all people. Love was the breaking and healing of hearts. Love was misunderstood, love was faith, love was the promise of now that became hope for the future. Love was a rhythm, a resonance, a reverberation. Love was awkward and foolish, it was aggressive and simple and possessed of so many indefinable qualities it could never be conveyed in language. Love was being. The same gravity that relentlessly pulled at me was defied as I rose into something that became everything.

- R.J. Ellory

source: R. J. Ellory (2010). “A Quiet Belief in Angels: A Novel”, p.221, The Overlook Press

topic: Heart, Healing, Simple, Indefinable, Faith In Love

Ahimsa in theory no one knows. It is as indefinable as God.

- Mahatma Gandhi

source: Mahatma Gandhi, Anand T. Hingorani, Ganga Anand Hingorani (1985). “The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts”

topic: Theory, Ahimsa, Knows, Indefinable

Chemistry is like an indefinable thing. When it comes to people playing your best friend or your parents or anything like that, there's always different kind of element to chemistry.

- Emma Stone

topic: People, Parent, Different, Indefinable

Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?

- Alfred de Vigny

topic: Indefinable, Sacred Things

History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream ...

- Lilian Whiting

topic: Dream, Art, Venice, Indefinable, Sorcery

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

- Paul Valery

topic: Art, Poetry, Harmony, Indefinable

The Vedas are as indefinable as God and Hinduism.

- Mahatma Gandhi

source: Mahatma Gandhi (1962). “All Religions are True”

topic: God, Vedas, Hinduism, Indefinable

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.

- Michel de Montaigne

source: Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.645, Stanford University Press

topic: Love, Beautiful, Poetry, Indefinable, Amorous

I think it is really helpful to see the beauty in every situation. I guess it's being able to see it in unexpected places. If you're fed too much of an image of what beauty is then you might define it as a certain specific thing, but when you have your own idea of what it is, or your own feelings of what beauty is, then it becomes so wide and so indefinable.

- Yukimi Nagano

source: Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

topic: Indefinable

Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality.

- Ernst Haas

topic: Keys, Personality, Secret, Indefinable, Knowledge And Experience