Words Being Inadequate Quotes & Sayings

If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. — Confucius

When she stopped kissing him his hand went to her waist to pull her back. the sun beat down on us. The day quivered. The sky was as deep as the ocean. We breathed underwater. — Karen Foxlee

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. — W. Somerset Maugham

And we need a full affront on an energy crisis that is real in California and looms for other parts of our country if we don't move quickly. — George W. Bush

The devil's most devilish when respectable. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela's name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night. Bela's yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its contents limited. Lacking chronology, randomly rearranged. — Jhumpa Lahiri

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent. — Patrick O'Brian

Nature teaches us everything,
Science, Religion and Scriptures
All are part of you and
All are from you
We all belong to you, on this Earth day ! — Santosh Kalwar

Education isn't everything, for a start it isn't an elephant — Spike Milligan

Every time I left for the battlefield I promised this to myself; I must live to see you again. In order to protect you, I promised myself that I must win. — Gwanghaegun Of Joseon

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking. — James Russell Lowell

You do bits and you fake anger and you write a bit and you have passion for it. Then you do it too many times and you have to work up the anger ... and I've never had to do that with Dr. Drew Pintsky. Dr. Drew is to medicine what David Blaine is to science. — Doug Stanhope

I don't really know how music and comedy are similar. I try never to dissect it theoretically or academically. — Eric Andre

I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When we say to people, 'I will pray for you,' we make a very important commitment. The sad thing is that this remark often remains nothing but a well-meant expression of concern. But when we learn to descend with our mind into our heart, then all those who have become part of our lives are led into the healing presence of God and touched by him in the center of our being. We are speaking here about a mystery for which words are inadequate. It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue. — William H Gass

I get invited to an awful lot of Jewish functions. — Tim Roth

We have become so quick and effective in building things today. It would be easy to build another Pyramid of Giza or another Great Wall. But these buildings haven't withstood the test of time because of their building quality. They stand tall because they have a symbolic value, they represent a culture. — Zhang Xin