Quotes About Defining Ourselves

#1. Decisions are a way of defining ourselves. There comes a time in life when there is nothing else to do but go your own way. Where you are headed there are no trails, no paths, just your own instincts.

Sergio Bambaren

#2. We can be the very first generation which fails to see the logic or pride in defining ourselves by anything else but what is found within ourselves: our values

Akilnathan Logeswaran

#3. Right and wrong are concepts that only have meaning in this world, so by sorting existence on those characteristics, we are defining ourselves to exist only in this world.

Frederick Lenz

#4. If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are we can all be freer. And this is what HeforShe is about. It's about freedom.

Emma Watson

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

Claire Cook

#6. When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.' page 21

Jane McGonigal

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Rebecca Moses

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. But freedom starts with honesty. We aren't doing ourselves any favors by defining our- selves as good and others as bad. Let's just agree that we all need help, that we are all in this together.

Judah Smith

#18. 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

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

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

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

Alison Bechdel

#22. 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

#23. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

Charles Taylor

#24. To make a name in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves. We either get our name - our defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness - from what God has done for us and in us (Revelation 2:17), or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves.

Timothy Keller

#25. Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects.

Jonathan Sacks

#26. The most critical, defining battles we wage in life, we wage alone. Against ourselves. It

Karen Marie Moning

#27. There is a fine line deep within the mind that makes self-belief and confidence, the defining elements of success and failure in any circumstance. How we learn to activate them without running the risk of lying to ourselves is the key that unlocks the superhuman lying dormant within us.

David Amerland

#28. Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Ken Burns

#29. Encourage literally came from "in courage." The courage is put "into" you from outside. Our character and abilities grow through internalizing from others what we do not possess in ourselves.

Henry Cloud

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Louis Untermeyer

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

Malcolm Bradbury

#34. 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

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

Diane Wakoski

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#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. 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

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

Debra Messing

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

Warren Ellis

#43. 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

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

Thomas Friedman

#45. 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

#46. 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

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

Mitchell Kapor

#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. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Kitty Thomas

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

Pearl Zhu