Top 100 Intelligible Quotes
#1. The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
Walter Bagehot
#2. ... there is an inherent rationality to life that makes it intelligible at a much deeper level than functional utility ...
Brian Goodwin
#3. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#4. A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.
Jules Cashford
#5. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
David Hume
#6. If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.
Bertrand Russell
#7. There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.
Frederick Douglass
#8. God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.
Joseph Campbell
#9. Notwithstanding my present incompetency, I am beginning to translate the New Testament, being extremely anxious to get some parts of Scripture, at least, into an intelligible shape, if for no other purpose than to read, as occasion offers, to the Burmans I meet with.
Adoniram Judson
#10. It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?".
Paul Banks
#11. All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#12. Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind is an arduous task ... In order to dive into those recesses and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, 'tis necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules.
Sarah Fielding
#13. Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.
Ian Leslie
#14. Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible will always be best able to persuade others of what they say, even if they speak in the thickest of dialects
Rene Descartes
#15. Now, in our opinion no author should be blamed for obscurity, nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.
Alice Meynell
#16. What's this all about?" Anne asked as I closed the door, pressing my ear up against it. "Can you hear anything?" I asked. They both put their ears to the door, too, waiting to see if something intelligible came through.
Kiera Cass
#17. Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.
Charles Caleb Colton
#18. There is the silence of age, too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it in words intelligible to those who have not lived the great range of life.
Edgar Lee Masters
#19. Complexity is acceptable as long as it is intelligible and necessary. We want to avoid needless complications.
Donald A. Norman
#20. It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#21. Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.
John Stuart Blackie
#22. Mr. Watson - Come here - I want to see you.
[First intelligible words spoken over the telephone]
Alexander Graham Bell
#23. We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.
David Elliott
#24. These ideas are, perhaps, too far stretched; but still it must be acknowledged, that, by representing the Deity as so intelligible and comprehensible, and so similar to a human mind, we are guilty of the grossest and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the whole universe.
David Hume
#25. The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.
William Barrett
#26. If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics. It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, as long as there is enough of them.
Lewis Carroll
#27. I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day.
Douglas Adams
#28. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
Annie Ernaux
#29. When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.
Stanley Hauerwas
#30. watch William's beloved sport, but to him televised football was no more interesting, or even narratively intelligible, than a flea circus, so he got up and went to the kitchenette to do the other stations of the Yuletide cross.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#31. Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole.
Ellen F. Davis
#32. We see things in this material world, wherein our bodies dwell, only because our mind through its attention lives in another world, only because it contemplates the beauties of the archetypal and intelligible world which Reason contains.
Nicolas Malebranche
#33. Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#34. If 'bounded by a surface' is the definition of body there cannot be an infinite body either intelligible or sensible.
Aristotle.
#35. Every one who understands the subject will agree that even the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests is intelligible only to those who have learned at least the elements of the differential and integral calculus, as well as analytical geometry.
Felix Klein
#36. I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.
Thomas Huxley
#37. The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
Walter Bagehot
#38. The fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage ...
Sylvia Pankhurst
#39. Philosophy and the arts are but a manifestation of the intelligible ideas that move the public mind; and thus they become visible images of the nations whence they emanate.
Lydia M. Child
#40. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
George Bernard Shaw
#41. It has been one of my difficulties, in arguing this question out of doors with friends or strangers, that I rarely find any intelligible agreement as to the object of the war.
Richard Cobden
#43. Keep it simple, make it general, and make it intelligible.
Douglas McIlroy
#44. Hearing God cannot be a reliable and intelligible fact of life except when we see his speaking as one aspect of his presence with us, of his life in us. Only our communion with God provides the appropriate context for communications between us and him.
Dallas Willard
#45. Try not to sound like those singer-songwriters that go on and on with ten-minute, barely intelligible stories that everyone endures until the next song starts.
Loren Weisman
#46. To believe that being is inexhaustibly intelligible is to believe also - whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not - that reality emanates from an inexhaustible intelligence: in the words of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, pure consciousness, omnipresent, omniscient, the creator of time.
David Bentley Hart
#47. The spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy; that without it there is no philosophy; and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.
Jacques Maritain
#48. Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.
Immanuel Kant
#49. The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.
William A. Dembski
#50. I find the selectivity of erotic love - the choice of this man or this woman - much more intelligible if liking the person is the origin of sexual interest, rather than the other way.
Mortimer Adler
#51. Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. A good civilization gives the greatest possible scope to the common passions and makes them intelligible among the great number of people.
Meridel Le Sueur
#54. I am strong and human with a mouth that works like a man's and a more intelligible brain, and I demand to be heard.
Caroline George
#55. Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe.
George H. Smith
#56. Great men simplify great principles and make them easily intelligible to ordinary men
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#57. Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
Thomas Nagel
#58. Also, a foreign accent if at least intelligible can sound quite sexy.
C.J. Cherryh
#59. School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
E. M. Forster
#60. There are intelligible principles inherent in the matter of every phenomenon; because matter is essentially the sum of all the seemings that it has for any and all persons.
Protagoras
#61. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.
Judith Butler
#64. A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony
and laughter, which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been the only intelligible language of madness and misery. Ecstasy only smiles
despair laughs.
Charles Robert Maturin
#65. Every scientist should, after all, regard it as his duty to tell the public, in a generally intelligible way, about what he is doing
Konrad Lorenz
#66. Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#67. But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.
Guy Deutscher
#68. I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible.
Charlotte Bronte
#69. Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.
Bertrand Russell
#70. Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
#71. The human mind inherently seeks intelligible order. Thus the conviction that such an order exists to be found is a crucial assumption.
Nancy Pearcey
#72. The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.
James Joseph Sylvester
#73. The process of writing is a process of learning; and much has become clearer to me in the attempt to transform my original rough notes into what I hope is an intelligible presentation.
Paul A. Baran
#74. The eye is the casement at which the heart generally looks out. Many a woman who will not show herself at the door, has tipt the sly, the intelligible wink from the window.
Samuel Richardson
#75. Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#76. The deity of Christ is the key doctrine of the scriptures. Reject it, and the Bible becomes a jumble of words without any unifying theme. Accept it, and the Bible becomes an intelligible and ordered revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
J. Oswald Sanders
#77. The attributes of God, though intelligible to us on their surface yet, for the very reason that they are infinite, transcend our comprehension, when they are dwelt upon, when they are followed out, and can only be received by faith.
John Henry Newman
#78. A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
Richard Dawkins
#79. We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us.
Natalia Ginzburg
#81. The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finally maintained...all existing things are, in an intelligible sense, imaginary.
John Stuart Mackenzie
#82. For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible
Arthur Schopenhauer
#83. Enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things; first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for a carrying that ideal into practice.
Norman Vincent Peale
#84. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be intelligible in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.
Alan W. Watts
#85. The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#86. Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.
Dieter Rams
#87. Personal experience, therefore, is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.
D.T. Suzuki
#88. There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#89. War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
H.L. Mencken
#90. No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.
Terry Teachout
#91. Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth. Titanic did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg. And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. These are simple historical facts intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals. But not ... to Bill O
Keith Olbermann
#92. I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and, therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living.
Mahatma Gandhi
#93. The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.
Kenneth L. Pike
#94. Translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
#95. There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.
Nancy Kress
#96. Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible
Roger Rosenblatt
#97. I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.
John Buchan
#98. The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
George Henry Lewes
#99. The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, god makes no more sense than unie; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd.
George H. Smith
#100. Most people have no idea why others do what they do..
The whole World from their own little mind decide 'what' it is..
Sad when reasonably intelligible people continue to judge & judge..
7.2 billion people under the Sun, how many can one please???
Therefore....
Abha Maryada Banerjee
