Top 100 Distinguishes Quotes
#1. All things are poisons. It is simply the dose that distinguishes between a poison and a remedy.
Paracelsus
#2. The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
Martin Amis
#3. It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
Thomas Carlyle
#6. What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments
David Bentley Hart
#7. Quality rather than quantity distinguishes the master.
Sax Rohmer
#8. What distinguishes art from such undertaker's business is that life's closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.
W.G. Sebald
#9. They have something of which they are proud. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#10. Anyone can be a killer. There is no physical trait that distinguishes murderers from the rest of society.
Chrys Fey
#11. What distinguishes people with an extraordinary character from the rest of us is how they respond when life sends one of its inevitable curves.
Robin S. Sharma
#12. As a woman, I've learned that having a uniform of your staples or setting your look and saying what distinguishes you - like red lips or hair or whatever - leaves so much time for the rest of the day.
Natasha Lyonne
#13. ...A legendary leader distinguishes himself as someone who gets ahead of his people from an impasse and futile general consensus, and then finds new grounds that constitute the base from which a unique course of his people's destiny is charted...
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#14. And more than the quality of its institutions, what distinguishes a developed country from a developing one is the degree of consensus in its politics, and thus its ability to take actions to secure a better future despite short-term pain.
Raghuram G. Rajan
#15. Part of the human makeup which distinguishes man from other creatures is his ability to reason and make moral decisions. Man is a free moral agent.
Billy Graham
#16. That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose.
John Dewey
#17. Individuals of one species are the same in essence or substance. Two human beings differ from one another in matter, but are the same in essence, as being both rational animals. The essential human quality which distinguishes the species Man from all other species is identical in both.
Aldous Huxley
#18. The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.
Yuval Noah Harari
#19. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.
Brandon Boyd
#21. We are all equal. The unlike of choices is what distinguishes us from each other.
Amen Muffler
#22. The personal freedom to think & feel & speak authentically & to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.
Rollo May
#23. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Octavio Paz
#24. What distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#25. It's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.
John Fowles
#26. The War on Terror has been and continues to be, above all, a war on the most basic liberties and political safeguards that we're all taught are what distinguishes the US and keeps it free.
Glenn Greenwald
#27. I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
Joseph Heller
#28. But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.
Malcolm Gladwell
#29. A tolerance that no longer distinguishes between good and evil would become chaotic and self-destructive, just as a freedom that did not respect the freedom of others or find the common measure of our respective liberties would become anarchy and destroy authority.
Pope Benedict XVI
#30. What distinguishes - in both senses of that word - contemplation is rather this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. "Without love there would be no contemplation." Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object.
Josef Pieper
#31. The only quality that distinguishes the greats from the masses, is the unwillingness to give up.
Abhijit Naskar
#32. The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
William Osler
#33. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs
#34. There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.
Joshua Foer
#36. Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists.
Jurgen Habermas
#37. What distinguishes exemplary boards is that they are robust, effective social systems ... The highest performing companies have extremely contentious boards that regard dissent as an obligation and that treat no subject as undiscussable.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
#38. The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.
Paulo Freire
#39. Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.
Max Born
#40. All style is personal - that's what distinguishes it from fashion.
Fran Lebowitz
#41. There is a kind of elevation which does not depend on fortune; it is a certain air which distinguishes us, and seems to destine us for great things; it is a price which we imperceptibly set upon ourselves.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#42. Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they make themselves known, from their scars. - Chris Marker
Zeina Abirached
#43. To err is human; but contrition felt for the crime distinguishes the virtuous from the wicked.
Vittorio Alfieri
#44. The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
#45. This concept is central to understanding what distinguishes the Arrowsmith approach: cognitive exercises do not teach content or skill in, say, mathematics; the aim is to forge new neural pathways in the brain so that later, when math is taught, number concepts actually make sense.
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young
#46. What invariably distinguishes a good player from a poor one is their respective address positions or setups.
David Leadbetter
#47. That which distinguishes man from the brute is his power, in dealing with Nature, to milk her laws, and make them give forth their bounty.
Henry Ward Beecher
#49. Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, are bound to their actions, have their actions as their refuge. It is action that distinguishes beings as inferior and superior.
Gautama Buddha
#50. What distinguishes the campaign finance issue from just about every other one being debated these days is that the two sides do not divide along conventional liberal/ conservative lines.
James L. Buckley
#51. The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.
Ludwig Von Mises
#52. When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.
Sarah Vowell
#53. The ability to feel fear and keep moving forward distinguishes the living from the merely breathing.
Nicholas Lore
#54. Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.
Georges Braque
#55. What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Salman Rushdie
#56. Something distinguishes Christianity from all the religions of the world. Not only does it carry the truth of the redemption, by the death of our Savior for our sins on the cross, but it carries the fact that Christ rose again.
Billy Graham
#57. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
Karl Marx
#58. What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.
Jerry A. Coyne
#59. He makes a vast contrast between nature, which is this elemental, capricious, perhaps causal, perhaps chance-directed entity, and man, who has morality, who distinguishes between desire and will, duty and interest, the right and the wrong, and acts accordingly, if need be against nature.
Isaiah Berlin
#60. The more man distinguishes himself from the rest of creation, the more he becomes conscious of himself as the subject, as an "I" to whom the world is an object, the more does he tend to confuse himself with God, to confuse his spirit with the spirit of God, and to regard his reason as Divine Reason.
Emil Brunner
#61. Whether your characters journey daily to a distant moon or just down the street to the corner bar, what matters to the reader is the singular event that distinguishes one such voyage from all the others and makes for a story worth telling.
Peter Selgin
#62. That which distinguishes the new thought from the old is not a denial of this Divine Reality, but an affirmation of its immediate availability.
Ernest Holmes
#63. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.
Frank Herbert
#64. I was thinking that if what distinguishes us as humans is our stupidity, what may redeem us is our grace.
Earl Lovelace
#65. Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#66. Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples.
Samuel P. Huntington
#67. The real journey of the Indian aerospace programme, however, had begun with the Rohini Sounding Rocket (RSR) Programme. What is it that distinguishes a sounding rocket from a Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) and from a missile? In fact, they are three
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#68. truisms at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them from a good deal of political discourse. And
Noam Chomsky
#69. A politician who brings personal integrity into leadership helps us reclaim the popular trust that distinguishes true democracy from its cheap imitations.
Parker J. Palmer
#70. What distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.
Bruce Meyer
#71. It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination ... Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.
Louise J. Kaplan
#72. What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.
Odilon Redon
#73. What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
Rebecca Solnit
#74. If the proof starts from axioms, distinguishes several cases, and takes thirteen lines in the text book ... it may give the youngsters the impression that mathematics consists in proving the most obvious things in the least obvious way.
George Polya
#75. All papas and mammas have exactly that sort of sight which distinguishes objects at a distance clearly, while they need spectacles to see those under their very noses.
Giovanni Ruffini
#76. What distinguishes man from the brute is his conscious striving to realise the spirit within.
Mahatma Gandhi
#77. Profit maximization may be the 'end' but the means to achieve this end, is what matters, and that distinguishes a company in the corporate world and the market
Henrietta Newton Martin
#78. The ability to stay calm and focused in the midst of change is what distinguishes great leaders from those just collecting a paycheck.
Todd Stocker
#79. What distinguishes success from failures is that the successes constantly thirst for new ideas and knowledge.
Robin Sharma
#81. I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty.
Charles Richet
#83. Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another.
Geert Hofstede
#84. Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell
#85. Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the contrary.
Tony Judt
#86. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.
Peter Drucker
#87. The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.
Philip Schaff
#88. In business, what distinguishes leaders from laggards and greatness from mediocrity is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be.
Robert Fritz
#89. If there's one thing that distinguishes the human species, it is a pathological need to stay connected. The fact your people will interrupt sex to answer your communicators is a scandal across the entire Common Confederation.
John Scalzi
#90. What distinguishes a great player is his presence. When he goes on to the court, his presence dominates the atmosphere.
Bill Russell
#91. Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress, or color - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.
Marilyn French
#92. Friendship affords total certitude above all and that is what distinguishes it from love. It means respect as well and total acceptance of another being.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#93. Altizer distinguishes between melancholy as a condition marked principally by a sense of guilt, even a delirium of guilt, and the contemporary manifestation of depression or apathy, from which guilt is totally absent.
Alina Feld
#94. I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.
Howard Nemerov
#95. I am more proud of what distinguishes man from the animals than of what he has in common with them.
Louis MacNeice
#96. Confidence, ultimately, is the characteristic that distinguishes those who imagine from those who do.
Katty Kay
#97. As people grow up, they teach themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force themselves to down bitter beer until they are ready to join the group that actually likes it.
Margaret Visser
#98. We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America's friends from her enemies, and recognizes the true threats that we face.
Sarah Palin
#99. Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent,
Milan Kundera
#100. what distinguishes us from non-human organisms is that we do not simply react to biochemical impulses; we can transcend them by choosing to interpret them in particular ways.
Kevin Aho
