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Ineffable   Listen
adjective
Ineffable  adj.  Incapable of being expressed in words; unspeakable; unutterable; indescribable; as, the ineffable joys of heaven. "Contentment with our lot... will diffuse ineffable contentment over the soul."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ineffable" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Dost think any favour would make it tolerable to be wept over and pitied by the King—pitied by THE KING," he repeated in ineffable disgust; "or to be the show of the court, among all that knew me of old, when I WAS a man? Hob the cobbler, and Martin the bagster, are better company than Pembroke and Gloucester, and I meet with more humours ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in childhood you suffered an affliction that was ineffable,—if once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you were summoned to fight with the tiger that couches within the separations of the grave,—in that case, after the example of Judaea, [17] sitting under her palm tree to weep, but sitting with her head veiled, do you also veil your ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... fire-flushed. Messer Alessandro, who loved her like a maniac, went shivering out alone into the moonlit garden to expostulate with Nature. "Thou hast formed, most cruel Mother," cried he, "an image of thy fatal self, whose eyes are sharp swords, and her breath poison of ineffable sweetness; whose consummate shape killeth by mere splendour; to whose tint of bright fire every arm must stretch as moth to flame, and by it be blasted. All this thou hast done, and not yet content, hast set ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... the next, 185 and so on till they were all out of sight; and that they all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step though all were alike blind. Methought I borrowed courage from surprise, and asked him—Who then is at the head to guide them? He looked at me with ineffable contempt, not 190 unmixed with an angry suspicion, and then replied, 'No one.' The string of blind men went on for ever without any beginning; for although one blind man could not move without stumbling, yet infinite blindness supplied the want of sight. I burst into laughter, which instantly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... had dreamed a thousand times, by night and by day, of the ineffable bliss of rescuing Pet from a mad dog, from a runaway horse, from the assault of ruffians, from drowning, from a burning building. He had his plans all laid for doing every one of these things. He would have coveted the pleasure of whipping three ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... at him; there was an ineffable shimmer in her long-lashed eyes; she made a comical little grimace. "I've said the last word between me and him," she answered. "I got a humble letter from him yesterday begging my pardon for what he'd tried to do, ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben

... not done with the ineffable FUSSELL. By this time he was on the top of a step-ladder. Slowly he selected six tomes, and began his perilous descent. Our eyes were riveted upon him. Crash, bang! His arms were empty, and the unconscionable books fluttered and clattered to the floor. Slowly and ruefully did ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various

... companions as those around him. The sweet, kind face of Agatha disturbed him most. It almost unmanned him; he thought that it would be happiness enough for a life to be allowed to remain unseen where he might gaze on her. He felt that such beauty, such ineffable loveliness as hers could almost make him forget his country and his countrymen; and then he shuddered and turned his eyes away from her. But there she sat close to him: and she would speak to him, and ask him questions; she asked after his friends in St. Florent, after ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... the triumphant close, among the fragrant cherry blooms the birds were twittering their lullabies. She went in to say her own good night, the Poem, much erased and interlined, tucked in the front of her blouse together with ineffable sensations. But she was not, for all that, beyond a certain concern for material details. "Mother, may I do my hair ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... a Mountain Daisy," by Robert Burns (1759-96), are the ineffable touches of tenderness that illumine the sturdy plowman. The contrast between the strong man and the delicate flower or creature at his mercy makes tenderness in man ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... about my own age, and, oh! such a handsome youth, with features cut as in a cameo, and pale-brown smooth skin, and large deep eyes, that look upon me still sometimes in dreams with ineffable melancholy. He was somewhat beneath my stature, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... more than fire, all my members stream with sweat, I tremble, mine eye is not steady, no longer can I discern the sky, drops roll from my face as in the season of summer." Isis proposes her remedy, and cautiously asks him his ineffable name. But he divines her trick, and tries to evade it by an enumeration of his titles. He takes the universe to witness that he is called "Khopri in the morning, Ra at noon, Tumu in the evening." The poison did not ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... then!" he muttered to himself, and his face took on an expression of despair. "So that's the end of it! Now you, sir, will you answer me or not?" he went on suddenly, gazing at Gania with ineffable ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... on across the meadow, spied the big man and the little at the window and shouted a joyous good morning and Terry threw them a kiss apiece. And old man Packard, his hands on his hips, a look of absolute, ineffable content ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... Education should be confined to clerks, and it drives even them to drink. Will the world learn that we never learn anything that we did not know before? The artist, the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable instinct; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artistic instinct. Art flees before the art school... "correct drawing," "solid painting." Is it impossible to teach people, to force it into their heads that there is no such thing as correct drawing, and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... through her whole frame, through every nerve of her body, ran a hot flood of ecstatic happiness. His words were still ringing in her heart; mutely her lips were re-forming them: "I love you! I love you!" So great, so ineffable was the joy, that her eyes closed with the desire to shut out everything in the world but the one fact his dear ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice

... up and become another creature; performing the reasonable actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of divinity in us, but not in complement and perfection, till we have once more cast our secundine, that is, this slough of flesh, and are delivered into the last world, that is, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper ubi of spirits. The smattering I have of the philosopher's stone (which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great deal of divinity, and instructed my belief, how that immortal spirit ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... it. Now, my little girl had beautiful yellow curls and I can show you one, by the Lord's mercy I've got it." Mother paused and an ineffable gentleness came into her lovely old face. "I want to tell you about it, honey-heart, 'cause it have got a strange sweetness to it. She wasn't but five years old when she died, tooken sudden with pneumony cruel bad. Nobody thought to cut me one of her curls before ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... Yet it was almost well so transcendent a moment should have its pin prick of annoyance. With a "No" of ineffable scorn, Jim—or Christopher—the name was immaterial to him—clambered up into the high carriage and wedged himself between the elderly gentleman and the inquisitive driver, who had regained his seat and ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... few who do find their way into the Fijian Elysium are blest indeed. There the sky is always cloudless; the groves are perfumed with delicious scents; the open glades in the forest are pleasant; there is abundance of all that heart can desire. Language fails to describe the ineffable bliss of the happy land. There the souls of the truly good, who have murdered many of their fellows on earth and fed on their roasted bodies, are lapped in joy ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... woman remained all the longer unmarried because the world obstinately refused to credit her with gifts of mind. Yet there were men who were deeply stirred by the passionate ardor of that face and its tokens of ineffable tenderness, and who remained under a charm that was seemingly irreconcilable ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... done herself a violence in receiving me. Next day I found her armed with affected high spirits, and it took two months of habit before I saw her in her true character. But then it was like a delicious May, a springtime of love that gave me ineffable bliss; she was no longer afraid; she was studying me. Alas! when I proposed that she should go to England to return ostensibly to me, to our home, that she should resume her rank and live in our new residence, she ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac

... simple, but the manner with which they were uttered was ineffable: the scales fell from my eyes, and I felt that I had no right to try and induce her to infringe one of the most inviolable customs of her country, as she needs must do if she were to marry me. I sat for a long while thinking, and when I remembered ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... train of domestics in dark liveries, mounted on dark-coloured steeds. In the chariot there sat a tall stranger of a majestic aspect; his long black hair floated in the wind—fire flashed from his large black eyes, and a curl of ineffable scorn dwelt upon his lips. The look of the stranger was so sublime that he was awed, and trembled with fear when he gazed upon him. His complexion was much darker than that of any man he had ever seen, and the atmosphere around him was hot and suffocating. He perceived immediately that he was ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... The ineffable glory of the sun setting into the golden haze of the west filled the room, and enfolded the figures of the two boys, the one kneeling at the bedside, and the other with eyes lifted heavenward, and lips moving in earnest ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... native country against the foreigners. The Greek literati and physicians were in his view the most dangerous scum of the radically corrupt Greek people,(72) and the Roman "ballad- singers" are treated by him with ineffable contempt.(73) He and those who shared his sentiments have been often and harshly censured on this account, and certainly the expressions of his displeasure are not unfrequently characterized by the bluntness and narrowness peculiar to him; on a closer consideration, however, we must not only ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... life in full youthful vigour, as music from the soul of a young god should. It cannot and never will grow old; the everlasting life is in it that makes the green buds shoot. To realise the immortal youth of Purcell's music, let us make a comparison. Consider Mozart, divine Mozart. Mixed with the ineffable beauty of his music there is sadness, apart and different from the sadness that was of the man's own soul. It is the sadness that clings to forlorn things of an order that is dead and past: it tinkles in the harpsichord figurations ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman

... talk to me of heaven! I love To hear about my home above; For there doth many a loved one dwell In light and joy ineffable. ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... brown hair, with a white moustache; but he hardly looked more than fifty for all that, as Guy judged at once from his erect carriage and the singular youthfulness of both face and figure. That he was a born aristocrat one could see in every motion of his well-built limbs. His mien had that ineffable air of grace and breeding which sometimes marks the members of our old English families. Very much like Cyril, too, Guy thought to himself, in a flash of intuition; very much like Cyril, the way he raised his hat and then smiled urbanely on Mrs. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony as the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable confidence of a good child who has only good intentions. As she packed her books together, she said, "Well, I'm ready. I've done my grammar, indefinite pronouns, and I can say all those river-tributaries backwards. So now I can start. Good-bye, Mother dear." Marise bent to kiss the shining ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... which would have required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne solemnly pledged herself ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... ——— was very ill, and she ought not thus to torment her, and that I believed Jesus had granted her forgiveness. But I might as well have tried to stop the tempest in its career, as to calm the infuriated passions nurtured by the exercise of arbitrary power. She looked at me with ineffable scorn, and continued to pour forth a torrent of abuse and reproach. Her helpless victim listened in terrified silence, until nature could endure no more, when she uttered a wild shriek, and casting on her tormentor a look of unutterable agony, exclaimed, "Oh, mistress, I am dying." ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... features were beautiful; her eyes were dark as night; they also possessed the depth of the tenderest, sweetest summer night, subjugating all those who came in contact with her. Annabel Lee won Maggie's warmest affections at once; she determined to join her friend at St. Benet's. She spoke with ineffable scorn of her London season and resolved, with that enthusiasm which was the strongest part of her nature, to become a student in reality. Under Annabel's guidance she took up the course of study which ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade

... same remembrance Divide our happiness and our sorrow, And share the future. Let, let my flame Pour in thee the light, Let your soul but open To the rays of Love. Divine hearth! Sun whose ardor penetrates And comes to kiss us. Ineffable desire where one's whole being Melts in a single kiss. Let, let my ...
— The Tales of Hoffmann - Les contes d'Hoffmann • Book By Jules Barbier; Music By J. Offenbach

... in accents of ineffable contempt; "not much, there isn't. No, it is something infinitely better than that. It is this, my son, that when we leave this island we do so as a little bunch of bloated ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... conduct—a person admitted to this house as your brother's hanger-on—tolerated only on your brother's account; such a person, nameless, penniless, friendless (except for Maulevrier's too facile patronage), to dare to lift his eyes to my granddaughter! It is ineffable insolence!' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... can touch that? And even I am not unknown here," he added, with a little boyish pride. "Everybody who is of any importance knows that the Rector himself has always treated me quite as a friend. I don't think"—this with the ineffable simple self-assurance of youth, so happy in the discrimination of those who approve of it that the gratification scarcely feels like vanity—"that I ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... mortal object of his eulogy: 'Nec illi, quod est rarissimum aut facilitas auctoritatem, aut severitas amorem, deminuit.' Still more beautiful is the Apostles description of superiority to all Human failings, with ineffable pity for human sorrows: 'He can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, though without sin.' Was there ever in truth a man who could read the appeals of Paul to his converts, and doubt either that the letters were real or that the man was ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... forget that the sacred flower of the East—the lotus—is a lily, and that even to name it seems to carry ineffable consolation to the Buddhist. Thus, the universal prayer of the Buddhists—that prayer which is printed on slips and fastened on cylinders which are incessantly revolving in Thibet—'Om mani padme hum!' means simply, 'Oh, the jewel in (or of) the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... burning driftwood and dried sea-weed filled the low roof and was reflected back to a cot, on which a woman lay with a living child beside her. Something dread and ineffable was conveyed by that stiffened form. The Jew, familiar with misery and all its indications, caught the preacher in ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... it burn me up," replied Imbozwi with ineffable contempt, "and I will believe that these white men are magicians worthy to be kept alive, and not common slave-traders such as we ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... enjoy a larger share of it. Endowed with the Spirit as a Christian, and daily receiving grace more largely, as he became more and more ripe for glory; endowed with the Spirit's extraordinary gifts most eminently; favoured also with an abundance of revelations, disclosing to him things ineffable and inconceivable,—are not his writings to be most truly called inspired? Can we doubt that, in what he has told us of things not seen, or not seen as yet,—of Him who pre-existed in the form of God before he was manifested in the form of man,—of that great day, when we shall arise incorruptible, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... as this; it was a pearl of great price, for which a man might be prepared to part with all he possessed, if only to obtain it. There was an indefinable majesty, a moral glory, a tender grace, an ineffable attractiveness in this Man, which was immediately appreciated by the greatest of woman-born, because of his own intrinsic nobility and greatness of soul. It needed a Baptist to recognise the Christ. He who had never quailed before monarch or people, directly he came in contact with ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... heart-beats and see the glances of the languid, languorous eyes. The universe itself seems to stand still for these two lovers. Their heads are among the stars, their hearts in heaven. Their love is as pure as a sonnet of Keats, as ineffable as shimmering starlight. Day by day we trace its current, we cannot say growth because it sprang into life full-grown. Although Julie said that "her life was not worth a tear," she caused torrents of tears to flow. From the first, their love seemed centuries old, so entirely was it a part of ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... out her hand and obeyed. Into her eyes had come a crescent splendor, upon her lips the dawn of an ineffable smile; but yet troubled, yet without full understanding, she, trembling, held out the flower at arm's length. But when Ferne's hand closed upon hers, when she felt herself drawn into his arms and his kiss upon her lips, his whisper in her ears, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... experience of union with Him which comes through daily "taking up the cross," in His steps, for His sake, and in His strength; growing into conformity (summorthi-xomenos, a present participle) with His Death, drawn evermore into spiritual harmony with Him who wrought my salvation out by an ineffable surrender ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule

... by the organ of the august national representation, the great encomiums with which it favours me, putting me at the same time in possession of these precious gifts, my soul overflows with ineffable pleasure, and is overwhelmed with the deepest gratitude. My satisfaction and my glory are immense. What could I have done, that thus the generous hand of the representatives of the Mexican people should ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... is also wise, more than a little child or boy; yet the Divine is the same in the one as in the other. It is in like manner a fallacy arising from appearance, that the Divine is different with angels of heaven from what it is with men on the earth, because the angels of heaven are in wisdom ineffable, while men are not; but the seeming difference is not in the Lord but in the subjects, according to the quality of ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... write a song on the model of that, as Peter had recommended—something tawdry and sentimental, with a cheap accompaniment. He placed the ballad on the rest and started going through it to get himself in the vein. But to-night the air seemed to breathe an ineffable melancholy, the words—no longer ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... the bed, and her Paris frock, and the black scarf which she had not removed, touched its ruinous burden. Her right hand directed the sponge with ineffable tenderness, and then the long thin fingers tightened to a frenzied clutch to squeeze it over the basin. The whole of her being was absorbed in a deep passion of pity and an ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... studied by girls. It is not necessary for me to account for the discrepancies between those two systems, in the first place because I cannot, and in the second place, because there is in the mind of the age some ineffable way of harmonizing them which makes their conjunction common. Phoebe was restrained from carrying out either to its full extent. She was not allowed to go in for the Cambridge examinations because Mr. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... like without being rude, because everyone else in the carriage has their eyes fixed with a straight unwinking stare upon us. It is difficult to realise that we are more entertaining to them than the gentleman who is disrobing himself with ineffable dignity ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... enough, and sang out together—like this." . . . A wolfish howl searched the very recesses of my soul. "Oh! make 'im dry up," whined the accident case irritably. "You don't believe me, I suppose," went on the other, with an air of ineffable conceit. "I tell you there are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian Gulf. Look under ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... of all were turned upon their youthful deliverer, those of Mr. Smith being painfully prominent. It was a proud moment for Billy, and he sat silent for some time, with a look of ineffable wisdom and thought upon his face. ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... there is a little difference in these interests which you might not have found it very easy to reconcile, had the Congress been disposed to risk their heads by listening to terms which I have the honor to assure you are treated with ineffable contempt by every honest Whig in America. The difference I allude to is, that it is your interest to monopolize our commerce, and it is our interest to trade with all the world. There is, indeed, a method of cutting this Gordian knot which, perhaps, ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams

... He had the purest, noblest, most open countenance that Pilate had ever beheld; and the governor's attention was arrested. In the face of that poor, worn-out sufferer were expressed the meekness and gentleness of a lamb, the deepest tenderness and pity, the most ineffable sweetness and perfect calmness, the majesty of a king, the perfection of a god. Who could He be? Was He really only human? Or had the spirit of some of the Roman gods come down and taken up its abode in Him? Pilate could not tell; but he was amazed and confounded; and in his contemplation of ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... his wrath may well be imagined. He refused religious peace in his dominions with scorn ineffable. Not Gomarus in Leyden could have shrunk from Arminianism with more intense horror than that with which the archduke at Gratz recoiled from any form of Protestantism. He wrote to his brother-in-law the King of Spain and to other potentates—as if the very ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... been the ideal of his life. He owed everything—and by everything he meant chiefly his worship of beauty—to her. He asked her to accept his undying devotion, and to believe that, however far distance and time should part them, he was hers and hers only. He said he looked back with ineffable contempt upon the days when he had hoped to build a nest and see her beside him there. Now he had reached the true empyrean, and he could only ask to know that she, too, was winging her bright way into regions ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo

... the confusion worked, and which Diana was dimly conscious of all the while; one point of action. At the time she could not steady herself to look at it; but when the dawn came up in the sky, with its ineffable promise of victory by and by,—and when the rays of the sun broke over the hills with their golden performance of conquest begun, strength seemed to come into her heart. Certainly light has no fellowship with darkness; and the spiritual and the material are more closely allied, ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... ground, I combated his assertions, exposed his mistakes, and laid about me in the best manner I was able. He thought to silence me at once with St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the rest of the fathers, but found, to his ineffable surprise, that I could handle these almost as dexterously as himself; not that I had ever read them, or he either, perhaps, but I retained a number of passages taken from my Le Sueur, and when he bore hard on me with one citation, without standing to dispute, I parried it with ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... luxury of that Call, now lifting with an unbounded joy. Battleaxes fell to the ground; the warriors quieted even where they stood locked with their foes. The Tall Master now drew away from them, facing the north and west. That ineffable Call drew them after him with grave joy; and they brought their dead and wounded along. The women and children glided in among the men and followed also. Presently one girl ran away from the rest and came close ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... he'll fight!"—this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James

... The Church of the first three centuries rejected the use of images in worship, and no pictorial representations of the Saviour were to be found even in the dwellings of the Christians. They conceived that such visible memorials could convey no idea whatever of the ineffable glory of the Son of God; and they held that it is the duty of His servants to foster a spirit of devotion, not by the contemplation of His material form, but by meditating on His holy and divine attributes as they are exhibited in creation, providence, and ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... man walks two strides of one and a half feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and isn't there?—but the moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon, all his long misery vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting. He hurried, bare-headed, to clasp her little gloved hand. He had forgotten her unpunctuality, nor did ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various

... old towers of S. Marcellino and S. Antonio; if he looked west, the Cathedral, with its tall campanile, rose dark against the sky, and what a sky! full of clear sun in the morning, full of pure heat all day, and bathed with ineffable tints in the cool of the evening, when the light lay low upon vinery and hanging garden, or spangled with ruddy gold the eaves, the roofs, and frescoed walls ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands

... our gold shone out with a richer glow, As it mirrored a Form above, That bent o'er the fire, though unseen by us, With a look of ineffable love. ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole

... do,' she said, in her loving half-childish way, while Miss Rylance looked on with ineffable contempt. 'You are so clever and so beautiful; you ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... visitations granted to the loving soul in this life, distinguishing the feelings and sensations that are mere delusions, from those that truly proceed from the fire of love in the affection and the light of knowing in the reason, and are a very anticipation of that ineffable ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various

... was young. Lights and shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little plot. There was no inner order in my heart—on the contrary, chaos in and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... the translucent sea, over the glimmering deeps, the dawn above me, the scenes of the old life growing and shaping themselves and fading without any will of my own, nothing within or without me but ineffable peace and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... are they, like their betters in misfortune, cut off from hope, which is the wretch's last comfort. It is the man of sentiment and sensibility, who, in this situation, is overwhelmed with a complication of misery and ineffable distress: the mortification of his pride, his ambition blasted, his family undone, himself deprived of liberty, reduced from opulence to extreme want, from the elegancies of life to the most squalid and frightful scenes ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... of man, nor of the will of man, nor by carnal union, being conceived in the Virgin's undefiled womb, of the Holy Ghost; as also, before his conception, one of the Archangels was sent to announce to the Virgin that miraculous conception and ineffable birth. For without seed was the Son of God conceived of the Holy Ghost, and in the Virgin's womb he formed for himself a fleshy body, animate with a reasonable and intelligent soul, and thence came forth in one substance, but in two natures, perfect God and perfect man, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus

... Christ,'"—the Hebrew text with a Latin translation and explanatory notes, appeared at Leyden in 1705, under the title Historia Jeschuce Nazareni,—the many wonders admitted to have been performed by Christ are ascribed to his "having abstracted from the Temple the Ineffable Name and concealed it in his thigh,"—an idea thought to be of Indian origin. Clouston goes so far as to say: "Legends of the miracles of Isa, son of Maryam, found in the works of Muslim writers, seem to have been derived from the Kuran, and also ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... strength of vote which has never before been seen. Upon all trying questions, exclusive of the federalists, the minority of republicans voting with him, has been from four to six or eight, against from ninety to one hundred; and although he yet treats the federalists with ineffable contempt, yet having declared eternal opposition to this administration, and consequently associated with them in his votes, he will, like Mercer, end with them. The augury I draw from this is that there is a steady good sense in the legislature, and in the body of the nation, joined with ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... a branch of the theoretical, and treats of the practical use of the mysterious names of God and of angels. By uttering properly the Shem-ham-mephorash, i.e., the ineffable name of Jehovah, or the names or certain angels, or by the mere repetition of certain Scripture texts, miracles and wonders were and still are performed ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... had, to be plain, sat down before Jane's heart to besiege it with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of death. There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ages, on his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... he continued to pace the room in the utmost perturbation of spirits. His darkened countenance expressed all the rage of jealousy and revenge; and a person, who had seen his features under the smile of ineffable tenderness, which he so lately assumed, would now scarcely have believed them ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... the stranger expressed such ineffable horror, amounting to a fearful agony, that the old man was alarmed, and stretched out his hand to grasp a crucifix that hung over the chimney-piece; but his mysterious guest made a forbidding sign of so much earnestness mingled with such proud authority, that the aged shepherd sank back into his ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... loquacious voice, "although there is so much talk and dispute about evil, very few people know what evil essentially is. Now, there are some things, the mere doing of which by the most involuntary agent would at once stamp his soul with the conviction of ineffable sin. He would have touched the essence of evil. And if a wise man has done that, he has had in his ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... crushed in greater helplessness than when she had included God in the scheme of injustice. As long as God was, there was always chance for a miracle, for some supernatural intervention, some rewarding with ineffable bliss. With God missing, the world was a trap. Life was a trap. She was like a linnet, caught by small boys and imprisoned in a cage. That was because the linnet was stupid. But she rebelled. She fluttered ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... to say so, sir. But I do assure you that it is a satisfaction to me to receive you in my humble home. And that is what I would not say to everybody.' Ineffable loftiness on Mr. Sapsea's part accompanies these words, as leaving the sentence to be understood: 'You will not easily believe that your society can be a satisfaction to a man like myself; nevertheless, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... Adams, with a look full of ineffable contempt, told him, "He deserved scourging for his pronunciation." The witty fellow answered, "What do you deserve, doctor, for not being able to answer the first time? Why, I'll give one, you blockhead, ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... civilization, infant society enjoys pure and perpetual felicity. To this sentiment Tacitus owed a part of his success, when he sketched for the Romans, subjects of the Caesars, a picture of the manners of the inhabitants of Germany. The same sentiment gives an ineffable charm to the narrative of those travellers who, at the close of the last century, visited ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... been the case with William the Silent. And even now that the Spanish matrimonial alliance was almost a settled matter at the French court, while with the English king it was but a perpetual will-o'the-wisp conducting to quagmires ineffable, the government at Paris sustained the policy of the Advocate with tolerable fidelity, while it was constantly and most capriciously ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped—he could scarcely say which—to the sureness and pureness and ineffable softness of the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... into the air. There was the swift sense of lightning and incredible movement, of such incalculable speed as that with which a meteor blazes through the sky, and then a mighty surging, struggle; an interminable instant of ineffable and stupendous conflict. The bow dipped, split the foam; then the raging waters seized the craft again, and with one great impulse hurled it through the clouds of spray, down between ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... of April the 23d, from New York, and am sorry to find you have had a relapse. Time and temperance, however, will cure you; to which add exercise. I hope you have long ago had a happy meeting with your friends, with whom a few hours would be to me an ineffable feast. The face of Europe appears a little turbid, but all will subside. The Empress has endeavored to bully the Turk, who laughed at her, and she is going back. The Emperor's reformations have occasioned the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... populations in which religious feeling has retained most independence. The new devotions find no favour with it; the people are faithful to the old beliefs and the old saints; the psalms of religion have for them an ineffable harmony. In the same way, Ireland keeps, in her more remote districts, quite unique forms of worship from those of the rest of the world, to which nothing in other parts of Christendom can be compared. The influence of modern Catholicism, elsewhere so destructive ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... history puts before us many and serious defects; but there is much more to approve and admire: and while a feeling or sorrow lingers over the one, the other is so marked and prominent that it secures your sympathy, and you are drawn towards the man with an ineffable affection. There is a candour, and honesty, and generosity, and heroism, which gives to his character a most healthy tone. The qualities of his mind and heart, when sanctified by grace, become really noble; and if it were right, you would like to forget his failings ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King

... circumference, in which he can he made to march round his pole. They knead tough clay on his head to secure the cranium from the effects of the blaze, that it may not inflict immediate death. Under the excitement of ineffable and horrid joy, they whip him round the circle, that he may expose each part of his body to the flame, while the other part is fanned by the cool air, that he may thus undergo the literal operation of slow roasting. During this abhorrent process, the children fill the circle in convulsions ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint

... Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers' lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall the word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge,' so that they themselves came to surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the conflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere it disperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life. Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by some true study ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... finer hope Were gathered in; and thou hast lifted up The blind horizon for a larger faith! Moreover, walking in exalted woods Of naked glory, in the green and gold Of forest sunshine, I have paused like one With all the life transfigured: and a flood Of light ineffable has made me feel As felt the grand old prophets caught away By flames of inspiration; but the words Sufficient for the story of my Dream Are far too splendid for poor human lips! But thou, to whom I turn with reverent eyes — O stately Father, whose majestic face ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in the indignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Luebeck and Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reached that city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into the arms of its antique repose. "Here at last," he wrote to Bjoernson, "there is blessed peace," and he settled himself down to ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... becoming unendurable. She therefore profited by Peyton's present occupation to conduct pretended endeavors towards the closet west of the fireplace. She noiselessly opened one of the narrow doors, quickly tossed the hat inside, closed the door, and turned with ineffable relief ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... expressed Word.[15] Through {177} this eternal process of self-differentiation and outgoing activity, the inner spiritual universe comes into being—as an intermediate Nature or world, between the ineffable Abyss of God on the one hand, and our world of material, visible things on the other hand." "The process of the whole creation," he says, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the deep and unsearchable God, and yet creation is not God but rather like an apple which springs from ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... were spoken, or whether she read them as in a book, or whether it was only a remembrance of what she knew to be true, she could not tell, but it brought peace ineffable. ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson

... spiritual nature of him who has opened correspondence with God. Reaching out his eager and quickened faculties to the spiritual world around him, shall he not become spiritual? In vital contact with Holiness, shall he not become holy? Breathing now an atmosphere of ineffable Purity, shall he miss becoming pure? Walking with God from day to day, shall he fail to be taught ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... version, Elsner went, on the day of the Holy Trinity in the year 1789, for the first time to church, he was so deeply moved by the sounds of the organ that he fainted. On recovering he felt his whole being filled with such ineffable comfort and happiness that he thought he saw in this occurrence the hand of destiny. He, therefore, set out for Vienna, in order that he might draw as it were at the fountain-head the great principles of his art. Be this ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... Hayes, with his ineffable air of giving a cachet to any one he honoured with his favour. And Miss Arden hailed him, as if they had not met for ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... "The ineffable folly," he wrote, on receiving his son's letter, "of your fancied passion for Miss Allaby fills me with the gravest apprehensions. Making every allowance for a lover's blindness, I still have no doubt that the lady herself is a well-conducted ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... and, more than the words, their tone of ineffable disdain, aroused the passion that never slumbered deeply ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... will bear our Penates with us; their atrium, the heart. Our household gods are the memories of our childhood, the recollections of the hearth round which we gathered; of the fostering hands which caressed us, of the scene of all the joys, anxieties, and hopes, the ineffable yearnings of love, which made us first acquainted with the mystery and the sanctity of home.' Such a home, dear uncle, let us fashion, somewhere in sight of the blue Pacific; and into its sacred rest no lover ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... enthusiasm. He abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,' for both are the fruit ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... hand clasped in both of his own, and there was a yearning tenderness in his soft voice when he spoke, a pride and joy ineffable that glowed above the pain that was never to ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... thousand years older than that I was leaving behind. As the shores of California faded in the distance, and the summits of the Coast Range sank under the blue horizon, I bade farewell— yes, I do not doubt, forever— to those scenes which, however changed or unchanged, must always possess an ineffable interest ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... what is this that knows the road I came—the flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame—the lifted, shifted steeps, and all the way!" His dying thought clung to words long familiar, as that of other men might have clung to a prayer. There was a momentary sense of ecstasy, of something ineffable. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... bareheaded and barefooted, to whom the heat outside was insupportable, were in refuge there; some, seated upon the stones, revolved their rosaries; others walked slowly about. None spoke. The silence was a tribute to the ineffable sanctity of the place. The refreshing shade, the solemn hush, the whiteness of the garments were suggestive of sepulchres and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... Gascoyne here smiled with ineffable urbanity, and bowed slightly by way of finishing his sentence. Montague was saved the annoyance of having to reply by a sudden exclamation from his lieutenant, who was observing the schooner's boat through ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne

... kill a priest was a serious crime. Moreover, that priest had been his father's friend and favorite adviser, and Loris had much to fear from parental wrath. The mischief was done, however, and bestowing upon the dead body a parting glance of ineffable hatred, he set to work to reunite ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... pillow, then turned toward the door. It was still open, though his wife no longer stood there, and he heard the diminishing rustle of her skirts. He stood looking first at the door and then back again at the bed, irresolutely. Lena opened her eyes and smiled at him with ineffable sweetness, and the temptation was overpowering. He took one noiseless step and sank upon his ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... be painful, grotesque even: here it was wholly benign and beautiful. All discolorations had disappeared in an even pallor as of old ivory; all furrows of age and pain were smoothed away, and the rude peasant face was transfigured, glorified, by that smile of ineffable ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer

... second, the deep blue spark in her eyes glowed brighter—gentle arrows of turquoise shot him through and through—and then her glance withdrew from the ineffable collision. Her small, white-shod feet continued to bear her onward, away from him, while his own dimmed shoes peregrinated in the opposite direction—William necessarily, yet with excruciating reluctance, accompanying them. ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... uncreated, the tranquil, the home of peace, the calm, the end of suffering, the medicine for all evil, the unshaken, the ambrosia, the immaterial, the imperishable, the abiding, the farther shore, the unending, the bliss of effort, the supreme joy, the ineffable, the detachment, the holy city, and many others. Perhaps the most frequent in the Buddhist text is Arahatship, "the state of him who is worthy"; and the one exclusively used in Europe is Nirv[a]na, the "dying ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... interspersed knolls, Made greener by the pat of fairy feet And dancing moonbeams, fringe the rugged knees Of scarred and bronzed heights whose wind-notched crests Look grandly down. Fair scene and home of peace Ineffable; and yet not ever so, For I have seen these scars run full and white, And heard their trumpetings as they rush'd madly Adown the spray-sown steep, past wood and knoll, To mingle with the waters of the lake Vexed with the storm and sounding loud in sympathy. What have we here? What human trace of ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... you, were Croat property. But the Allied officers knew very well (and the C.N.I. knew that they knew) that more than thirty of the large buildings on the front belonged to Croats, whereas under half a dozen were the property of Italians or Italianists. The ineffable Mr. Edoardo Susmel, in one of his pro-Italian books, entreats certain French and British friends of the Yugoslavs to come for one hour to Rieka and judge for themselves. But twenty minutes would be ample for a man of average intelligence. In many ways the presence of ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... last Presbyterian joy: At the day of judgment the righteous shall be caught up to heaven and shall stand at the right hand of Christ and share with Him in judging the wicked. Then the Presbyterian husband may have the ineffable pleasure of judging his wife and condemning her to eternal hell, and the boy will say to his mother, echoing the command of God: "Depart, thou accursed, into everlasting torment!" Here will come a man who has not believed in God. He was a soldier who took up ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... flower of womanhood" grew radiant, and her lips parted in a smile of ineffable content. In bitter disappointment I saw that my artifice had succeeded, and that I had touched the key-note of her being. To my horror, she reminded me of a pleased, purring kitten that had been ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... calls it "the most ineffable thing that exists within the range of man," and later explains when he stands on the brink of it; "And where the Grand Canyon begins, words stop." Yet he goes on and uses about four more pages of words, and pictures after words ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... baby says," responded Cricket, with decision. "Think I'm going to waste this glorious day, knitting washrags?" with ineffable scorn. "You two old grandmothers can knit and read all you want to. I've too much ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow

... dinner that evening, a youth in blossom, like the shrubberies and garden beds in the dim yards up and down Julia's Street. All cooled and bathed and in new clothes of white, he took his thrilled walk through the deep summer twilight, on his way to that ineffable Front Porch where sat Julia, misty in the dusk. The girlish little new moon had perished naively out of the sky; the final pinkness of the west was gone; blue evening held the quiet world; and overhead, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... sprang towards him, stooped, picked up the tumbler, and handed it to him with a gesture full of ineffable charm. Then she blushed furiously, glanced round at the gallery, and, having assured herself that her mother apparently had not seen anything, immediately regained her composure. By the time Grushnitski had opened his mouth to thank her she was a long way off. A moment after, she came ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... the hearth, was beset by the desire to kick Master Kenneth, or Master Jocelyn, into the street. His lip curled into a sneer of ineffable contempt, for his shrewd eyes read to the bottom of the lad's mean soul and saw there clearly writ the confidence that emboldened him to voice that insult to the man he must know for his father. Standing there, he compared the two, marvelling deeply how they ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini

... glooming window, perched out of reach of mankind. And the thought that the window had burned there, patiently and unexpectantly, for hundreds of years, like an anchorite above the river and town, somehow disturbed him so that he could not continue to look at it. Ineffable sadness of a mere window! And his eye fell—fell on the coffin of Henry Leek with its white cross, and the representative of England's majesty standing beside it. And there was the end of Priam Farll's self-control. A pang like ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... With scorn ineffable the sun-god turned upon Midas, his peasant's face transfigured by his proud decision. For a little he gazed at him in silence, and his look might have turned a sunbeam ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... remarks, gave a smile of ineffable sweetness, sadly marred, however, by the grotesque effect of the flickering shadows that were cast on her face by the candle. After all, duty not right was the really important matter, and the lecturer thought that it would be better if one heard the former word rather oftener in connection ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... had not worn it since, and he was far distant when he caught the first flickering glimpse of her through the lower branches of the maples, but he remembered.... And again, as on that day, he heard a far-away, ineffable music, the Elf-land horns, sounding the mysterious reveille which had wakened his soul to ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his return, was ineffable. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... characteristic of these April odors is their uncloying freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are penetrating and lyrical. I know well the odors of May and June, of the world of meadows and orchards bursting into bloom, but they are not so ineffable and immaterial and so stimulating to the sense as the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs

... confusedly Enclosed within the furtive fervent gaze, Heating his arrows at their beauteous rays, For war with Pallas and with Dian cold. Fairer than mortal mould, She moved majestic with celestial gait; And with her hand her robe in royal state Raised, as she went with pride ineffable. Of me I cannot tell, Whether alive or dead I there was left. Nay, dead, methinks! since I of thee was reft, Light of my life! and yet, perchance, alive— Such virtue to revive My lingering soul possessed thy beauteous face, But if that ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... thumb. We live by rote. Every afternoon I have to take coffee at some house or other, when all those tiresome women are not at my own. And what do you suppose they talk about—but invariably? Love!" (With ineffable disdain.) "Nothing else, barring gossip and scandal; as if they got any good out of love! But they are stupid for the most part and gorged with love novels. They discuss the opera or the play for the love element only, or the sensual quality of the music. Let me tell you that although ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton

... Brigaut to old Madame Lorrain reached her in a moment of ineffable joy, which the perusal of them troubled. The poor old woman had grieved deeply in living without her Pierrette beside her, but she had consoled her loneliness with the thought that the sacrifice of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... the next to be lifted on board, merely whimpering now in ineffable agony. After him came the man in the velvet jacket, who was maundering, Doctor Wilhelm, Max Pander, and the other two sailors. Lastly the little corpse of Siegfried Liebling ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... till the heavy organ tones taught us that the service had begun. A hundred or more people had straggled in then, and the preacher, good soul, he took for his text, "Doth not God care for the ravens?" I cannot describe the ineffable feeling of home that came over me in that dark pew of that old church. I had never been in so large a church before. I had never heard so heavy an organ before. Perhaps I had heard better preaching, but never any that came to my occasions more. But it was none of these ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... it to them; and so beautifully that they were all but melted to tears—especially the monsieur, who was evidently very sentimental and very much in love. Besides, there was that ineffable charm of the pure French intonation, so caressing to the Belgian ear, so dear to the Belgian soul, so unattainable by Flemish lips. It was one of Barty's most successful ditties—and if I were a middle-aged ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... Of if an angel from the heavenly sphere In his ineffable goodness by the Lord, Dispatched, as to Tobias's aid whilere, A medicine for his blindness to afford. But good or evil angel — whatsoe'er He was that him to liberty restored — Him thanked and praised Rinaldo, for a heart Healed only by his ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... the perception of his rare fortune as he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to it new forces in his eyes—forces which dazzled and troubled his glance. The thought that this exquisite being—this ineffable compound of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness—belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... or two of his early dinner. His melody was burdened with no peculiar tune, but consisted of a few low, wailing, melancholy notes, such as may be extracted from the reed by a breath and the slow raising and falling of the little finger, much, we believe, to the comfort of the player, but to the ineffable disgust of, too often, ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... from the Pole, it seems as though she had entered a new region, "that region of Desolation and Silence," as Edgar Poe says; that magic person of splendour and glory in which the Eleanora's singer longed to be shut up to all eternity; that immense ocean of light ineffable. ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne



Words linked to "Ineffable" :   unexpressible, unnameable, untellable, unspeakable



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