words are too weak to describe him

The secret of that personality that so strongly affected us all is hard to define; words to describe him are too weak, or incomplete or too passive.

He was quiet, but the quiet was a smouldering fire that might suddenly flare up with a scorching flame that made us shrink away in startled silence. He was gentle, but when he wished us to learn a lesson that could not be taught by soft and comfortable methods, he was ruthless in his demands and scathing in his condemnation of our failures. He had studied much, and had learned at first hand about such things as the religious basis of the dances of the dervishes.

He was scornful of wordy analysis of philosophical ideas, and his own ideas were always expressed clearly, even crudely, with the earthiness of his peasant stoc ,and seemed to come out of his personal experience and contemplation. Verbosity he always condemned, and in the early days particularly that of Ouspensky, who was an effortless, brilliant but wordy talker.

Anna Butkowsky Hewitt - With Gurdjieff in St.Petersburg and Paris p.142