Unintelligible Quotes

#1. If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.

Leslie Stephen

#2. Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

Raymond Aron

#3. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

Thomas Jefferson

#4. This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter
Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter,
This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter
Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter,
matter, matter, matter, matter, matter,
matter, matter, matter, matter, matter!

W.S. Gilbert

#5. On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Milan Kundera

#6. Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together

Clyde Kluckhohn

#7. Tell me what this means," Dax said. "I'm a busy woman with a ship to run and a crisis to handle and I've surrounded myself with smart, dedicated people for the sole purpose of interpreting unintelligible squiggles for me.

Una McCormack

#8. Their conversation had gone like this: 'Something something, something something, something something something ... the White Dog of Afghanistan ... something something something, something, something, something else, something entirely unintelligible.

Mark Helprin

#9. For once the crofter was at a a rather loss for words, for to him nothing has ever been more completely unintelligible than the reasoning that is bred of tears.

Halldor Laxness

#10. Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

H.L. Mencken

#11. Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

Robert Smithson

#12. Palm Key he got itt," and some other snatches, mostly single words and unintelligible. I could not help wondering who it was that had "got itt," and what "itt" was

Robert Louis Stevenson

#13. The human mind defines things in relation to one another - without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible

Josh Waitzkin

#14. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#15. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit

Marcel Proust

#16. Don't feel bad; I regularly reduce people to unintelligible stammers.

Eoin Colfer

#17. The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over.

Louisa May Alcott

#18. The rules are simple and easily understood by anyone who has once seen the game, but to the totally uninitiated they appear to be hopelessly unintelligible.

John Adams Gilmer

#19. Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.

Wilkie Collins

#20. He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short.

Jocelyn Gibb

#21. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?

Steven Pinker

#22. I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

Jane Austen

#23. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.

Thomas Jefferson

#24. Now Thorndyke is going to enjoy himself. To him a perfectly unintelligible will is a thing of beauty and a joy forever; especially if associated with some kind of recondite knavery.

R. Austin Freeman

#25. Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful yet tolerate the world as it is.

Hans Jonas

#26. That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.

William Wordsworth

#27. Jody screamed at him: a high, explosive, unintelligible expulsion of pure inhuman frustration
a Hendrix high note sampled and sung by a billion suffering souls in Hell's own choir.

Christopher Moore

#28. You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

Doris Lessing

#29. What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word
the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

George Santayana

#30. I had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible.

Robert Walser

#31. Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the commonplace.

Aristotle.

#32. You're never "keeping it real" with your lack of punctuation and proofreading, you're keeping it unintelligible.

Austin Kleon

#33. The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.

Thomas Jefferson

#34. Of the many things hidden from the knowledge of man, nothing is more unintelligible than the human heart.

Homer

#35. He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.

Evelyn Waugh

#36. If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations.

George H. Smith

#37. Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer once we know them.

Alexander Pope

#38. I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.

Benjamin Franklin

#39. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Terry Eagleton

#40. Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal . . .

Anna Akhmatova

#41. Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

#42. I never rushed the fact that I wanted to be in the NBA or rushed the fact, you know, they asked me about the NBA. I always (unintelligible) back to the fact that I just love playing with my teammates.

LeBron James

#43. When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.

Franz Grillparzer

#44. The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

Tom Stoppard

#45. Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the other's words; both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what the unintelligible words meant.

Charles Dickens

#46. The true meaning of our philosophy will be unintelligible to the arrogant, the boastful and the mocking. Beware of those who exhibit such traits.

Joanne Owen

#47. The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

John Ruskin

#48. In the labyrinth of a difficult text, we find unmarked forks in the path, detours, blind alleys, loops that deliver us back to our point of entry, and finally the monster who whispers an unintelligible truth in our ears.

Mason Cooley

#49. She smiled then, an adorable, sweet smile that took his breath away. He forgot all about trying to maintain an air of civility. His inner caveman came barreling out, grunting and pounding his chest and muttering unintelligible words.

Maya Banks

#50. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.

Ambrose Bierce

#51. The supper was like most Parisian suppers: silence at first, then a burst of unintelligible chatter, then witticisms that were mostly vapid, false rumors, bad reasonings, a little politics and a great deal of slander; they even spoke about new books.

Voltaire

#52. Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

H.L. Mencken

#53. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.

Eric Hoffer

#54. I hope that the American public understands that we have three levels of government. We have the (unintelligible) the executive, but there's legislative and the judicial, and the legislative obviously need to be just doing their job.

Stockard Channing

#55. Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.

Will Durant

#56. If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Bertrand Russell

#57. You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.

This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.

Kristen Henderson

#58. Clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

Edith Hamilton

#59. All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#60. Unintelligible language is a lantern without a light.

Samuel Johnson

#61. I didn't realize I was crying until it was time to say the blinding words. 'I do,' I managed to choke out in a nearly unintelligible whisper... When it was his turn to speak, the words rang clear and victorious. 'I do,' he vowed.

Stephenie Meyer

#62. It was not certain what significance the ceremony held ... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible

Mervyn Peake

#63. Half the things I've done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn't have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat.

Timothy Leary

#64. But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.

Shirley Hazzard

#65. It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

Jean Baudrillard

#66. Philosophy ... consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Henry Adams

#67. Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.

Allan Watts

#68. When you're coming, you just make unintelligible sounds. But when you're close, you just whisper 'please' over and over, as if I'd ever deny you.

Christina Lauren

#69. More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

Eric Hoffer

#70. Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.

Victor Hugo

#71. It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

E. M. Forster

#72. I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

Samuel Beckett

#73. Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Lord Byron

#74. Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#75. What has been said of [God] is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man of common sense.

Baron D'Holbach

#76. I always choose to use the word often instead of (unintelligible). Just changing it up, changing it up.

Hayden Panettiere

#77. Each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind.

Edith Wharton

#78. What more He may be, we do not know; we know only that He must be more than we can conceive. It is to be expected that His creation should be, in the main, unintelligible to us.

C.S. Lewis

#79. The subconscious mind, like the Good Lord, can work in a mysterious way, and mine has been known to work in a way that is completely unintelligible, if not downright barmy.

John Dolan

#80. The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.

Thomas Jefferson

#81. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

Marianne Moore

#82. The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

Thomas Huxley