Quotes About Defining Yourself

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Noah Baumbach

#4. 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

#5. Don't fear uniqueness. Fear similarities and acceptance. Create a new trend by defining yourself.

Debasish Mridha

#6. I think the difference between being miserable and finding happiness is just a matter of perspective. If you live your life defining yourself by what other people think of you, it's a form of self-torture.

Sarah Silverman

#7. Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.

Amy Hill Hearth

#8. 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

#9. I'm not a big fan of identity politics and sort of picking one thing and defining yourself with it.

Andrej Pejic

#10. 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

#11. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

Eckhart Tolle

#12. I would probably list myself as mostly straight. I've met guys all the time that I'm like, Damn, that's a good-looking guy, you know? I've never been, like, Oh, I want to kiss that guy. I really love women. But I think defining yourself as 100% anything is kind of near-sighted and close-minded.

Josh Hutcherson

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

David Foster Wallace

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Christy Hall

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

Peter Agre

#24. 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

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

Alison Bechdel

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

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

Claire Cook

#30. I think you can separate yourself from your fears. You know what you should do, and it's just scary to do it. But I'd hate to let the fact that I'm scared to do it make me not do it. It ends up defining you. Because the moves you make are then based on what you don't want to do.

Josh Homme

#31. 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

#32. '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

#33. I think that most of us can identify with the change that happens to Bruce Banner. We all have a little of both inside us. I think this is an important theme in defining the character.

Herb Trimpe

#34. The Bible does say, "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations." Preaching, music, the reading of the Word-these things are fine-but they must never override prayer as the defining mark of God's dwelling.

Jim Cymbala

#35. George Bush didn't campaign on, 'If you elect me, I'm going to be a great president to confront terrorism and launch a war in the Middle East' because nobody was thinking about it in the year 2000. But it became the defining issue of his presidency.

Mike Huckabee

#36. The next time you want to withhold your help, or your love, or your support for another for whatever the reason, ask yourself a simple question: do the reasons you want to withhold it reflect more on them or on you? And which reasons do you want defining you forevermore?

Dan Pearce

#37. We all have to escape from this thing called life sometimes. Maybe we use substances to do it. Maybe we use religion. Maybe we use exercise. Maybe we use anger. But we all have to do it. *How* we do it is what defines us.

Dan Pearce

#38. I grew up in a Christian home. The strictness comes with religion in general. Whether you grew up Jewish or Orthodox Jewish or Muslim, there are certain rules and regulations. But my parents instilled in me the importance of defining God for yourself.

Vera Farmiga

#39. All of us need a vision for our lives, and even as we work to achieve that vision, we must surrender to the power that is greater than we know. It's one of the defining principles of my life that I love to share: God can dream a bigger dream for you than you could ever dream for yourself.

Oprah Winfrey

#40. Be careful ... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#41. You can't market yourself as a brand without defining your core values and characteristics that are distinguishable and unique to you.

Daniela Bachelder

#42. We usually don't realize the thing that is defining our identity until that thing is taken away.

Tim Hiller

#43. The major purpose of defining and understanding yourself is to be able to come up with an objective strategy to map your success.

Archibald Marwizi

#44. We talk about defining moments, but I think nothing can define you. They're all refining moments. You're constantly refining yourself and refining your life.

Sheryl Crow

#45. It's a weird feeling when people are defining you, and you haven't even defined yourself.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#46. There are defining moments in one's life when you learn about yourself, and you deposit that knowledge in the experience account, so you can draw on it at some later date.

Jeffrey Archer

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

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

Thomas Friedman

#51. 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

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

Warren Ellis

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

Debra Messing

#54. 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

#55. 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

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

Mitchell Kapor

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Diane Wakoski

#60. 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

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

Malcolm Bradbury

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

Louis Untermeyer

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

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

Rebecca Moses

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

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

Pearl Zhu

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

Kitty Thomas

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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