Defining Something Quotes

#1. Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.

Robert M. Pirsig

#2. Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

Jay McInerney

#3. Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it?

David Foster Wallace

#4. 'Transformers' was important and defining for me because it taught me about what kinds of movies I want to make and the kind of actor I want to be, and I have a long way to go before I become that actor.

Rachael Taylor

#5. One of the defining features of BPD is that sufferers have a difficult time in accepting emotions. This is in large part thanks to the intensity with which they experience them.

Emily Laven

#6. Humans crave knowledge. It's a defining element in our species. Something we don't see in animals in that same way, something we don't see in Scion, unless it's a craving that takes a very different form in execution.

Wildbow

#7. The defining moment when we finally admit, "I can't do this alone. Its too much for me. Take it."
That's the moment our heart cracks open, our will pours out and Christ stands ready with his arms stretched wide and his smile even wider.
That's the moment a miracle is born.

Toni Sorenson

#8. Self-esteem is the basis for feminism because self-esteem is based on defining yourself and believing in that definition. Self-esteem is regarding yourself as a grown-up.

Susan Faludi

#9. Grace is the catalyst that turns guilt into gratitude. One act of grace can turn the worst moment into the defining moment of someone's life. You can be that agent of grace.

Mark Batterson

#10. The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.

Peter Lindbergh

#11. The true defining situation for a person is what they do when they are alone and don't have to do anything else. What do they do? Do they do frivolous things? That's when you define what you are.

Jeff Benedict

#12. But the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.

Alexandra Fuller

#13. There were so many things I wasn't that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.

Mary Miller

#14. The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me.

Christy Hall

#15. Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.

Peter Agre

#16. You've no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it's taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it's the defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on.

Peter F. Hamilton

#17. It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

Alison Bechdel

#18. Character is what we do when no one else is watching"

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#19. From childhood forward, our hair is one of the most critical, defining aspects of our embodied selves as black women: how we get it done ... how we have to focus on it ... the questions we have to answer about it ... and so forth.

Melissa Harris-Perry

#20. Now, Emily didn't make a sound. There was something more defining about the soundless reality that condemned the paradigm of passion.

Allie Burke

#21. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.

Jennifer Egan

#22. I'm still the same artist; it's just different sides of me. I'm learning to be a little bit more confident in myself and I think that's something that all of us girls struggle with. It's really about defining your confidence.

Jamie Lynn Spears

#23. But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done - this was something else again.

Elliot Richardson

#24. Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.

Noah Baumbach

#25. Doing something later is not automatically the same as doing something better

Meg Jay

#26. In Re-framing, you interpret the event in a positive way. You change your language . Instead if defining it as a problem you re-frame it as a situation . A problem is something that is upsetting and stressful. A situation is something that you simply deal with .

Brian Tracy

#27. That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

Janet Fitch

#28. You are doing something very sacred here, something very daring, during your life upon the earth. You are defining yourself, and then creating yourself anew, in each golden moment of now.

Neale Donald Walsch

#29. He'd meant to pray, meant to fix his thoughts on something beautiful, like the future and the new world and the woman he would be sharing it with.
But like every important, defining moment in his life, it had all roared by too fast.

Blake Crouch

#30. The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

Richard Rohr

#31. The one thing I have learned is that you can't think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do - something.

Meg Jay

#32. What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

R.D. Laing

#33. If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.

Bret Easton Ellis

#34. I think the consensus among our generation and people younger than us is that we do have a defining challenge in the moment, so I do like being involved in something bigger than the finger-doodling I do in art. It stimulates your brain in certain ways.

Edward Norton

#35. Defining that special something isn't easy, but when you gazed into her eyes, you could always find it, reflected deep down inside.

Haruki Murakami

#36. I don't think the emotional quality is the defining quality of the music but it's definitely something that people have picked up on a lot

Win Butler

#37. What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

Stanislaw Ulam

#38. Reading something for the first time and getting this feeling like the material provokes you on some level, and doing the movie is really just sort of defining and figuring out why exactly you felt certain things when you read it.

Kristen Stewart

#39. The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

John Rawls

#40. If Microsoft is the new IBM, Google is the new Microsoft - the defining company of the industry.

Mitchell Kapor

#41. The experience of loss does not have to be the defining moment in our lives. Instead the defining moment can be our response to the loss. It is not what happens to us that matters so much as what happens in us.

Jerry Sittser

#42. We all have life-defining moments. They are like open-book tests, but we don't know we have been examined until it is over.

John Bevere

#43. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [ ... ] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.

Thomas Friedman

#44. The hardest thing was launching 'OK!' magazine; the easiest thing was Channel 5. 'The Express' was my defining moment because our turnover was less than £100m with 150 employees.

Richard Desmond

#45. He is defining the immediate future as follows: old people huddling in big cities, afraid of the sky.

Warren Ellis

#46. Becoming a mother was the single defining event of my life. It felt like the whole world shifted.

Debra Messing

#47. Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.

Kathleen Hanna

#48. The radical defining himself as a producer of actions and discourses has ended up fabricating a purely quantitative idea of revolution - as a kind of crisis of overproduction of acts of individual revolt

Anonymous

#49. What defines me? Skin? I hope I'm more than that. Than this. That I am what I think, what I believe. What I feel.

Lissa Price

#50. There is an inherent dissonancebetween the quasi-formal world of computer programs - defining the programmed machine in each system - and the non-formal problem world of the system requirements.

Michael Jackson

#51. We have laid the foundation for a better life. Things that were unimaginable a few years ago have become everyday reality. I belong to the generation of leaders for whom the achievement of democracy was the defining challenge.

Nelson Mandela

#52. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

Diane Wakoski

#53. Somewhere between what the lens depicts and what the caption interprets, a mental picture intervenes, a cultural ideology defining what and how to see, what to recognize as significant.

Alan Trachtenberg

#54. Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

Malcolm Bradbury

#55. Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.

Louis Untermeyer

#56. Since I have difficulty defining merit and what merit alone means - and in any context, whether it's judicial or otherwise - I accept that different experiences in and of itself, bring merit to the system.

Sonia Sotomayor

#57. Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don't make, in life-defining matters. That moment of 'angst' and its consequences can be such a cruel thing.

Per Petterson

#58. It's only when we are able to exceed our rigid interpretations, and we start defining love in it's totality, that we realize that love is everywhere

Julian Pencilliah

#59. If I may take the risk of defining what a spiritual experience is, it is one in which pure awareness reveals itself to you as the maker of reality - where you suddenly discover through insight or meditation or a freak accident that your essential nature is spiritual, non-material.

Deepak Chopra

#60. When you start defining yourself, you put yourself in boxes and I don't want to be trapped in anything because I will always evolve - I will always change. It's like water. I take on many shapes. Everyone should be that way and not define themselves. I am everything.

Karrine Steffans

#61. We are condemned to be free people, liberated people who must make life-defining decisions. Freedom requires choices and all choices entail value decisions.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#62. You have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community. If you don't succeed in this, then you will continue to pull that heavy wagon up the mountain, and despite the fact that you are pulling it, it will somehow run over your own foot.

Srikumar Rao

#63. That's how you're defining right and wrong? By what makes me happy?"
Pride lit his face as he nodded.
Oh Jesus. "Walker, you can't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because I shouldn't be the center of your life!"
His voice was gentle, a little confused. "But you are.

Rowan McBride

#64. When it comes to defining beauty, we need to embrace uniqueness. Remember: it's the imperfections that make the charm.

Rebecca Moses

#65. Every day when a man or woman gets dressed, they are in effect defining who they are. That daily clean slate is a time in our lives when we can determine who we want to be.

Kenneth Cole

#66. Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

Claire Cook

#67. Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

Jacques Ellul

#68. Everyone has their own insecurities, regardless of how you look or how people perceive you, but sometimes people give their insecurities too much power. Defining beauty is simply a matter of opinion. For me, real beauty has very little to do with the structure of someone's face or body.

Devon Aoki

#69. The defining qualities that will distinguish great leaders from the rest are stemmed from the mindset level.

Pearl Zhu

#70. He is the cornerstone of a defining life moment for me.

Kitty Thomas

#71. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.

Joyce Carol Oates

#72. We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.

Eugene Kennedy

#73. Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, "Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.

Thom Hartmann

#74. Again he thought of his own losses, and he wondered why it was that the things a person had lost - or might lose - defined him more than the things he yet possessed.

David Anthony Durham