Unintelligible Quotes & Sayings

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

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

For my part I think the Learned, and Unlearned Blockhead pretty equal; for 'tis all one to me, whether a Man talk Nonsense, or unintelligible Sense, I am diverted and edified alike by either; the one enjoys himself less, but suffers his Friends to do it more; the other enjoys himself and his own Humour enough, but will let no body else do it in his Company. — Mary Astell

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

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

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

Altho' I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.
[Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp on 30 July 1810 denouncing the Christian doctrine of the Trinity] — Thomas Jefferson

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was. — Don Cupitt

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

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

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

You're never "keeping it real" with your lack of punctuation and proofreading, you're keeping it unintelligible. — Austin Kleon

The book known by the name of the Apocalypse, has seemed to be until now unintelligible, merely because people persisted to see in it a real prediction of the future, which every one has explained after his own fashion, and in which they have always found what they wanted, namely anything but that, what the book contained. — Charles-Francois Dupuis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My vague confused dreams became a reality and the reality became an oppressive, difficult, joyless life. All remained the same.
Once it seemed so plain and right that to live for others was happiness; now it has become unintelligible. Why live for others, when life had no attraction even for oneself? — Leo Tolstoy

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

This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness. — Kristen Henderson

Yeah. She's still just observing though. She's too useless to even carry plates at the moment, so please just think of her as some Russian ornament."
Tom laughed at the owner's blunt response, and asked another question.
"Chief, how do I say something like, 'you're beautiful', in Russian?"
" ... 'Vi ocharovatelny'."
"Err ... Bee, acherabatennen."
However, hearing this, the Caucasian woman looked confused at Tom, and spoke to the owner behind the counter.
" ... What is this man saying? It is unintelligible. I question its relation to the Japanese language."
With a bitter smile, the owner turned his head towards the woman, and spoke to her.
"'Vi ocharovatelny'."
" ... Why do you suddenly speak these social compliments? Please concisely explain your reasoning."
"That's what that young man over there just tried to say to you."
"In which language, exactly?"
Listening to their conversation, — Ryohgo Narita

Tom laughed at the owner's blunt response, and asked another question.
"Chief, how do I say something like, 'you're beautiful', in Russian?"
" ... 'Vi ocharovatelny'."
"Err ... Bee, acherabatennen."
However, hearing this, the Caucasian woman looked confused at Tom, and spoke to the owner behind the counter.
" ... What is this man saying? It is unintelligible. I question its relation to the Japanese language."
With a bitter smile, the owner turned his head towards the woman, and spoke to her.
"'Vi ocharovatelny'."
" ... Why do you suddenly speak these social compliments? Please concisely explain your reasoning."
"That's what that young man over there just tried to say to you."
"In which language, exactly? — Ryohgo Narita

Yes, he knew that we was withdrawing from everything: not merely from human beings. A moment more and everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and the commonplace, will have become unintelligible, strange and heavy. So he sat there and waited until it should have happened. And defended himself no longer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be. — Stephen Batchelor

Unintelligible language is a lantern without a light. — Samuel Johnson

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

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

Don't feel bad; I regularly reduce people to unintelligible stammers. — Eoin Colfer

I always choose to use the word often instead of (unintelligible). Just changing it up, changing it up. — Hayden Panettiere

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not. — H.L. Mencken

Perhaps he just didn't have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap for something: for elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off- well, it didn't seem right. — Gregory Maguire

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

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

Faith is from within; it is the outbreaking of human spontaneity; it is force of soul, grandeur of sentiment, magnanimity, generosity, courage. Its formulas are naturally unintelligible in their literal tenor; for, otherwise, they would represent that which is scientifically known, and would not be the mere provisional clothing of that which is not objectively given, but subjectively projected from the inmost depth of the soul. — William Batchelder Greene

Only the never-ending work of mourning can help us from lapsing into the illusion that we have found the parent we once urgently needed - empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear, without unintelligible contradictions. Such a parent was never ours, for a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood; when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains. — Alice Miller

If I dismiss the ordinary - waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life ... To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories - to know that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing - is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, 'When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.' This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don't know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring. — Dani Shapiro

Summer on the farm was glorious. Peter spent as much time out of doors as possible, and he had many playmates, since all the children were free from their spring and autumn duties of tending crops or going to school. Peter had become the leader of a merry band of youngsters, aged six to fourteen, who followed the Wild Boy wherever he went and seemed to understand his unintelligible noises. If they did not understand, then they pretended to.
The life of a princess has many advantages, but I envied those children for their time with Peter and for what seemed to me to be a simple, carefree existence. — Christopher Daniel Mechling

To babble unintelligible prayers, to read masses, to recite rosaries, to practice ceremonies of religious worship empty of meaning, this is the conduct of the dead. Man tries to turn completely into an object, to subject himself entirely to the rule of what is alien. Such service is called devoutness. PHARISEES! — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

The words kept coming and he could not stop them, not while Callie was standing there so indecipherably, and so he was going to keep talking until he used up all the words there were and then no one would be able to talk to anyone else anymore and then all anyone would have left were one another's unintelligible faces, and maybe some weird gesturing, too, and it would be all Oscar's fault. — Anne Ursu

I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult. — Richard Dawkins

The human mind defines things in relation to one another - without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible — Josh Waitzkin

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

I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "nigger" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged. — John Howard Griffin

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour. — Judith Butler

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

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible. — Jane Austen

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

We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless. It is a cyberwar on many fronts, in which it is difficult to identify who is friend and who is foe. I will predict now, as unintelligible as it may seem, that Anonymous will turn out to be more friend than foe. — John McAfee

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

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

Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there is quite a racket going on. Choices have to be made with respect to every mark. Not every mistake should be erased. Nor shall the unintelligible be left out. Order is there to be wrenched from the tangles of words. Results are impossible to measure. A clearing is drawn around the perimeter as if by a stick with a nail on the end. — C.D. Wright

Wiggin really doesn't care as much about himself as he does about these other kids who aren't worth five minutes of his time.
And yet this may be the very trait that makes everyone focus on him. Maybe this is why all those stories Sister Carlotta told him, Jesus always had a crowd around him.Maybe this is why I'm so afraid of Wiggen. Because he's the alien, not me. He's the unintelligible one, the unpredictable one. He's the one who doesn't do things for sensible, predictable reasons. I'm going to survive, and once you know that, there's nothing more to know about me. Him, though, he could do anything. — Orson Scott Card

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

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. — Eric Hoffer

Creative ideas, in my opinion, show their value in that, like keys, they help to "unlock" hitherto unintelligible connections of facts and thus enable man to penetrate deeper into the mystery of life. I am convinced that Jung's ideas can serve in this way to find and interpret new facts in many fields of science (and also everyday life) simultaneously leading the individual to a more balanced, more ethical, and wider conscious outlook. If the reader should feel stimulated to work further on the investigation and assimilation of the unconscious-which always begins by working on oneself-the purpose of this introductory book would be fulfilled. — C. G. Jung

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

The world has no circumference. It would certainly have a circumference if it had a centre, in which case it would contain within itself its own beginning and end; and that would mean that there was some other thing which imposed a limit to the world - another being existing in space outside the world. All of these conclusions are false. Since, then, the world cannot be enclosed within a material circumference and centre, it is unintelligible without God as its centre and circumference. — Nicholas Of Cusa

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

I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.
[Letter to Mathew Carey, 11 November 1816] — Thomas Jefferson

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility. — Henry Adams

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. — H.L. Mencken

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

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

The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been addle! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off. — William James

A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death [the Stoics'] is quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to despise life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, loss, and a Hamlet-like dread of death. — Anton Chekhov

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. — F Scott Fitzgerald

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

An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny. — G.K. Chesterton

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

Well, almost everything is open - the political documents, the (unintelligible) of cabinet meetings. What has been opened now and what had been closed are things that many governments still close, and that is police files and trial records, trial records of the special courts set up by Vichy. And especially interesting are the trial records of the Purge Trials after the war. — Robert O. Paxton

The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. (The change-ringer's) passion - and it is a passion - finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed. — Dorothy L. Sayers

[The maid] went on and on about how you and three casks of wine and three women spent the week before our wedding trying to...you know"--Adrienne muttered an unintelligible word--"your brains out."
"To what my brains out?"
"You know." Adrienne rolled her eyes.
"I'm afraid I don't. What was that word again?"
"Adrienne looked at him sharply. Was he teasing her? Were his eyes alight with mischief? That half-smile curving his beautiful mouth could absolutely melt the sheet she was clutching, not to mention her will. "Apparently one of them succeeded, because if you had any brains left you'd get out of my sight now," she snapped.
"It wasn't three." Hawk swallowed a laugh.
"No?"
"It was five."
"Adrienne's jaw clenched. She held her fingers up again. "Fourth--this will be a marriage in name only. Period."
"Casks of wine, I meant."
"You are not funny. — Karen Marie Moning

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. — Tom Stoppard

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

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities ... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions
one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. — Oscar Wilde

While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ... — Andrew Elfenbein

I constantly meet people who are doubtful, generally without due reason, about their potential capacity [as mathematicians]. The first test is whether you got anything out of geometry. To have disliked or failed to get on with other [mathematical] subjects need mean nothing; much drill and drudgery is unavoidable before they can get started, and bad teaching can make them unintelligible even to a born mathematician. — John Edensor Littlewood

Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the commonplace. — Aristotle.

It has been jestingly said that the works of John Paul Richter are almost unintelligible to any but the Germans, and even to some of them. A worthy German, just before Richter's death, edited a complete edition of his works, in which one particular passage fairly puzzled him. Determined to have it explained at the source, he went to John Paul himself. The author's reply was very characteristic: "My good friend, when I wrote that passage, God and I knew what it meant; it is possible that God knows it still; but as for me, I have totally forgotten." — Jean Paul

People who are not historians sometimes think of history as the facts about the past. Historians are supposed to know otherwise. The facts are there, to be sure, but they are infinite in number and speak, if at all, in conflicting, often unintelligible, voices. It is the task of the historian to reach back into this incoherent babel of facts, choose the ones that are important, and figure out what it is they say. — Paul A. Cohen

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

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds. — Charles Caleb Colton

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

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

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies. — Benjamin Franklin

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President, author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat — George Washington

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

They also bring to mind what sometimes seems to be a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse dispirited or distastefully unintelligible. The award of a Nobel Prize in literature to Andre Gide who in his work fervently and openly insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of life for adolescent boys furnishes a memorable example of such judgments. Renowned critics and some professors in our best universities reverently acclaim as the superlative expression of genius James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake a 628page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital. — Hervey M. Cleckley

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

One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by "anyone". A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others". It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It's the Poverty.

I lack imagination you say

No. I lack language.
The language to clarify
my resistance to the literate.
Words are a war to me.
They threaten my family.

To gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
I may create a monster
the word's length and body
swelling up colorful and thrilling
looming over my mother, characterized.
Her voice in the distance
unintelligible illiterate.
These are the monster's words. — Cherrie L. Moraga

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. — Thomas Jefferson

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach