Expressible Quotes & Sayings

Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions.' 'Because they are too terrible, Sir?' 'No. Because all answers deceive. — C.S. Lewis

I started on 'Neighbours' when I was 14. It's crazy to think now that I had such a bizarre adolescence. — Eliza Taylor

If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may. — Vincent Van Gogh

Whatever. I can't even imagine having a fiance."
"You probably have one, you know."
I stared at him. "Excuse me?"
"Your dad is a really important guy. I'm sure he made a match for you when you were thirteen."
I didn't even want to get into that. The thought that there was some warlock out there who was planning on making me his missus one day was too much to handle. What if he was here at Hecate? What if I knew the guy? Oh God, what if it was that kid with bad breath who sat right behind me in Magical Evolution?
I made a mental note to ask my mom about all of this as soon as I decided to speak to her again. — Rachel Hawkins

All results of the profoundest mathematical investigation must ultimately be expressible in the simple form of properties of the integers. — Leopold Kronecker

I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways." — G.H. Hardy

If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won't survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another? — Emily St. John Mandel

{Replying to G. H. Hardy's suggestion that the number of a taxi (1729) was 'dull', showing off his spontaneous mathematical genius}

No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways, the two ways being 13 + 123 and 93 + 103. — Srinivasa Ramanujan

We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible: it is contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech. — Roland Barthes

The finite interval 0-1 on the Number Line is thus even more inconceivably crowded. There's not only an infinite number of infinite sequences of fractions, but also an infinite number of surds, each of which is itself numerically inexpressible except as an infinite sequence of nonperiodic decimals. Let's pause to consider the vertiginous levels of abstraction involved here. If the human CPU cannot apprehend or even really conceive of (infinity)s, an infinite number of individual members of which are themselves not finitely expressible, all in an interval so finite- and innocent-looking we use it in little kids' classrooms. All of which is just resoundingly weird. — David Foster Wallace

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, "It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!" The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of nonelephant animals. — James Gleick

My beloved soul,
having awakened at last into My Peace,
you can return consciously and
completely to your own Original Source.
As this homecoming fills you
with in expressible joy
it pervades Allah Most High
with profound delight as well
(You will) experience the perfect union
with Love that is My highest Paradise. — Lex Hixon

In its own unique and indefinable manner, music indirectly communicates the joys of life along with the pains and terrors overwhelming humanity. The universal language of music quantities the human experience, its range of variation encapsulates the scale of humankind's exuberance for living as well as expresses our apprehension of suffering and death. Because music articulates the quintessence of life and yokes a myriad of human events into an expressible format, music is a critical act. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it's the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast-flowing) river of fate. The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. — Roberto Bolano

Not only in geometry, but to a still more astonishing degree in physics, has it become more and more evident that as soon as we have succeeded in unraveling fully the natural laws which govern reality, we find them to be expressible by mathematical relations of surprising simplicity and architectonic perfection. It seems to me to be one of the chief objects of mathematical instruction to develop the faculty of perceiving this simplicity and harmony. — Hermann Weyl

I do not hope somebody breaks in. However, if they did, I pity them. I pity the fool that breaks into my house. — Amber Heard

Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results. — John Maynard Keynes

God doesn't want to change the world without you. — Shane Claiborne

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

In brief, the whole world is the totality of mathematically expressible motions of objects in space and time, and the entire universe is a great, harmonious, and mathematically designed machine. — Morris Kline

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art. — Jacques Maritain

It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly! — Enrico Fermi

The pain between them made me as envious as their laughter, because it was real and expressible, blood-red with passion, and not the invisible pain of a ghost like me. Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the walls of the closet. My face still wearing its social smile fixed in place as if by a stroke. — Paul Monette

In whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded, by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state within the state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal. — Benjamin Franklin

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. — Rainer Maria Rilke

For poets, at least, experiencing something inexpressible does not mean silence. It's precisely the inexpressible something that poetry is meant to help us see or feel. If it were merely expressible - if there were nothing ineffable about it - there would be no need for a poem. But everywhere in the Bible we meet reality that exceeds our expectations. — John Piper

The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers. — Paul Dirac

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley — Nicholas Murray

Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world. — Jan Morris

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .... For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now. — Charles P. Enz

I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed. — Martin Buber

New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally - but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future? — Henry Kissinger

Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy. — Geoffrey Wood

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves-apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge-and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers-but not to us as psychologists-because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study. — Marvin Minsky