Uninitiated Quotes & Sayings

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs. — Anthony Hecht

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

Whoever among men who walk the Earth has seen these Mysteries is blessed, but whoever in uninitiated and has not received his share of the rite, he will not have the same lot as the others, once he is dead and dwells in the mould where the sun goes down. — Homer

The whys and wherefores didn't need to be said. If you are reading this have ever loved someone, you will understand. Putting it into words is useless. The uninitiated cannot understand the mysterious. — Jose Rizal

And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people they knew who lingered in the world of the uninitiated. "What was it like?" they asked each friend. The answers were vague. Sex was a private joke: you had to be there. — Audrey Niffenegger

The master initiate of any craft appears magical to the uninitiated. — Bryant McGill

Nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents. — Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is 'Libertarian.' People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable, and to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy. — George Carlin

Of course, owls on the loose seemed strange to the uninitiated. One day an electrician came to work on the building's power supply, when, seemingly out of nowhere, an owl flew around a corner right at him. The poor guy let out an unearthly scream and hit the floor, covering his head and yelling in Spanish. — Stacey O'Brien

For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination. — Anthony Marra

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits. — Neve Maslakovic

Academic training actively deprives you of the qualities that make for good teaching. A good teacher speaks plainly, in vivid, accessible language, because she is addressing what amounts to a general audience. But the kind of jargon academics learn to use is designed to repel the uninitiated. A good teacher ranges widely, making connections among subjects as well as from learning to life. But academics are constrained to specialize, and increasingly, to hyperspecialize, looking neither left nor right as they plow their little corner of the field. — William Deresiewicz

Perhaps you didn't say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots - dreadful things!'
'Yes,' said the Duchess, 'he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, dear, it does sound a little rude. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Homosexuality is an ugly sin, repugnant to those who find no temptation in it, as well as to many past offenders who are seeking a way out of its clutches. It is embarrassing and unpleasant as a subject for discussion but because of its prevalence, the need to warn the uninitiated, and the desire to help those who may already be involved in it, it is discussed in this chapter. — Spencer W. Kimball

It comes as a shock to most uninitiated folk that the constitution of the PRC does allow for freedom of religion. — Tom Muzzio

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Addressing a golf ball would seem to be a simple matter; that is, to the uninitiated who cannot appreciate that a golf ball can hold more terrors than a spacious auditorium packed with people. — Bobby Jones

A furry, for the uninitiated, is a person who identifies very deeply with, and dresses up as, an anthropomorphized animal. There have been quite a few evening news segments devoted to them, with lots of ominous music playing over shots of Care Bears walking down the street holding hands. YouTube it. — Isaac Oliver

So don't make a show of your philosophical learning to the uninitiated, show them by your actions what you have absorbed. — Epictetus

It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind. — Frank Herbert

Literary Teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiated gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink. — Mark Kurlansky

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City. — Therese Anne Fowler

I'm always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it's full of all these made-up words. — Alastair Reynolds

It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that 'Gangnam Style' is satire. — Evan Osnos

The mysteries of the faith are not to [be] explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted. — Pope Innocent III

There is a special mystique to Texas. Texans represent many things to the uninitiated: We are bigger than life in our boots and Stetsons, rugged individualists whose two-steppin' has achieved world-wide acclaim, and we were the first to define hospitality. — Ann Richards

Grey's chalky, flat, impassive face, dead eyes and squeaky monotone are now virtually emblematic of extreme mainstream pornography. For the uninitiated: her pornographic videos are something like plumbing tutorials by Eli Roth. Some women pride themselves on their quilting; Grey prides herself on choking on oversized genitals. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual. — David Hockney

To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself. — George Santayana

A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe. — Fritjof Capra

The approach to the offices of Girdlestone and Co. was not a very dignified one, nor would the uninitiated who traversed it form any conception of the commercial prosperity of the firm in question. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them. — Jerry B. Jenkins

Take a look around, then, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening. Now by the uninitiated I mean the people who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands, and who will not allow that action or generation or anything invisible can have real existence. — Plato

Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst? — Ken Kesey

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day. — Fred Rodell

The scrape of the skates on the ice. The smell of musty old equipment. The black puck stains on the boards. To the uninitiated they're nothing, but to a hockey player they're home. — Jeff Lemire

I've Got A Little Problem
And I'm not really sure how to fix it.
Not really sure I need to. Not really sure I could.
Life is pretty good. But once in a while, uninvited and uninitiated anger invades me.
It starts, a tiny gnaw at the back of my brain. Like a migraine except without pain. They say headaches blossom, but this isn't so much a blooming as a bleeding. Irritation bleeds into rage, seethes into fury. An ulcer, emptying hatred inside me. And I don't know why. Life is pretty good.
So, what the hell? — Ellen Hopkins

His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at them they might well consider him as a necromancer. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Evolutionists ... have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door — Richard Lewontin

(For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.) — Edward Feser

This is another world to the ones most Australians know. It was explained by my father once that it's like a blanket on the ground. We, the uninitiated, only see the blanket. Lift it up and that's what our elders ... see - the real thing - a world most of us will never know or understand. Through their paintings, artists ... offer us a glimpse of the world of dreams where the past, present and the future link. — Hetti Perkins

The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost. — Donalyn Miller

The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man - the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth. — Michael Leunig

Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society. Again, before healing may begin, men must acknowledge the reality of what lies within. Among those confusing emotions is a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as companion, model and support, and a deep hunger for the fathers as a source of wisdom, solace and inspiration. — James Hollis

The uninitiated are those who believe in nothing except what they can grasp in their hands, and who deny the existence of all that is invisible. — Socrates

Many women do not even have the basic teaching about predators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as: if it's threatening and bigger than you, flee; if it's weaker, see what you want to do; if it's sick, leave it alone; if it has quills, poison, fangs, or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; it it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I presume that to the uninitiated the formulae will appear cold and cheerless; but let it be remembered that, like other mathematical formulae, they find their origin in the divine source of all geometry. Whether I shall have the satisfaction of taking part in their exposition, or whether that will remain for some more profound expositor, will be seen in the future. — Benjamin Peirce

she said, when I wear these boots no one fucks with me
when I tie my past like a scarf around my throat
I can freeze the blood
of every naive and unabashed up-and-comer
when I slide on my desire like glowing black stockings
I can make the uninitiated beg
for the feel of raw and stinging wood
and when I slip my angry black leather belt
from its rusty hook
the ambitious and guileless cower
like a thousand condemned souls
when I close my fist, my rings golden
with a youth well spent
the warriors of Gilead surrender
with a breathless whimper
and when my shoulders
feel the rough comfort of my serape woven with the fibers
of a fierce and relentless vengeance
you will soon realize
these are not my clothes after all, she says,
they are warning signs — Daniel Ames

Never trust the occultist who tells you that he is the head of a tradition, because if he were, in the first place, he would not tell the fact to the uninitiated, and in the second place he would in all probability be living in great seclusion and inaccessible to all but his immediate subordinates. If a man is a great artist he does not need to inform us of the fact; we shall know him by his pictures that are hung in the galleries of the nation, and we shall, moreover, find that he guards himself from casual acquaintances because of the inroads on his time to which his fame renders him liable. The more eminent a person, the harder he is to approach, not out of any spirit of pride and exclusiveness, but because so many people want to see him that discrimination has to be used in admitting them. — Dion Fortune