Self Description Quotes

#1. The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description.

Dan Chiasson

#2. The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.

Jurgen Habermas

#3. Exceptionalism" is a shared self-description of imperial forms and . . . every empire imagines itself an exception.

Ann Laura Stoler

#4. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#5. To me, self-description is a calamity.

Jasper Johns

#6. I think Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child is one of the books read by nearly every therapist. Everyone's jaw drops when they read Miller's dead-on description of why we became therapists. (...) I wish more people were familiar with her work.

Ryan Howes

#7. It is incumbent upon every person of every description to contribute to his country's welfare.

George Washington

#8. Recently we've been hearing a lot about women "having it all." Myself, I think that is not really an accurate description of female lives today. It seems to me that what we have been up to is DOING it all.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

#9. The president is the cube of ice one places in the pot of a houseplant, providing a steady amount of nourishment over the course of a hot day. A good description of the job and also a fantastic bit of practical household advice.

Abraham Lincoln

#10. The ecclesiastical description of Hell is that of a horrible place of fire and torment; in Dante's Inferno, and in northern climes, it was thought to be an icy cold region, a giant refrigerator.

Anton Szandor LaVey

#11. Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

Duane Michals

#12. Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you're not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.

Glen Duncan

#13. In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.

Paul Gauguin

#14. Ending up in the right place in this debate requires starting in the right place. The right place to start is the proper discrimination of what judges are supposed to do, and the rest of the process should reflect this judicial job description.

Orrin Hatch

#15. In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

John B. S. Haldane

#16. In this book I do not intend to give a blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic. The circumstances that lead up to sex I find more interesting.

Charlie Chaplin

#17. Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid's confinement.

Marcel Proust

#18. The mandated description of fetal characteristics at two-week intervals, no matter how objective, is plainly overinclusive. [It is] not medical information that is always relevant to the woman's decision, and it may serve to confuse and punish her and to heighten her anxiety.

Harry A. Blackmun

#19. I feel that I'm solid at description.

Christopher Bollen

#20. I can't please everyone. That's not in my J.D., you know, not in my job description.

Maria Sharapova

#21. All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

Joseph Conrad

#22. I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

Anne Rice

#23. Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

Patrick Rothfuss

#24. Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

Truman Capote

#25. When we raise our vibration to the state of "Being Love," we change and our world shifts into something so delicious and intoxicating that words hardly do justice to its description.

Leeza Donatella

#26. To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#27. You can never appreciate the scent of a flower by another's description. Some things are left to experience. Journey of self.

Truth Devour

#28. Smart as a whip, kinky enough to own one.

R.G. Alexander

#29. I'm not asexual. I'm arelationshipal.

John Green

#30. The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.

Philip Dormer Stanhope

#31. Charm is that extra quality that defies description.

Alfred Lunt

#32. Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

Salman Rushdie

#33. The Tea Party is simply a loose description of local activism driven by Americans who want smaller government and more self-reliance. That sounds like what the Founding Fathers had in mind, does it not?

Bill O'Reilly

#34. Stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

Stephen King

#35. I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.

Elizabeth Bishop

#36. It's been said that alcoholics are egomaniacs with low self -esteem. It's the prefect description. Being larger than life and yet your pride is crushed with self- loathing.

Gary Oldman

#37. At every turn you have to find a new kind of self-sovereignty over your environment. Every kid I see is at the mercy of Periscope, Twitter, or an Angry Bird of some description. People are shackled to their mediocrity by companies and businesses who want to consume your life with theirs.

Daniel Gillies

#38. He was too many things at once - a boy, a man, and everything in between - and the differing parts of himself seldom came into balance. She found him attractive in that way. Yet the perception saddened her: she herself wasn't too many things, but too few.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#39. Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self
to the mediating intellect
as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.

William Styron

#40. Most people we observe who practice self-discovery just get caught up in a new description, a new "ism", a new religion, a new god. But nothing changes.

Frederick Lenz

#41. Grove Health Center, trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose job description might as well read: 'Ceaseless repetition'.

Will Self

#42. Ian stepped out to where he knew I could clearly see and identify his tall, dark, and dangerous self.

Lisa Shearin

#43. Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.

Dave Barry

#44. For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.

Rick Riordan

#45. Love is your job description - no matter what you do for a living. If you ever feel unsure of what you're supposed to do in a situation, here's a good rule of thumb: always do what leads to greater love.

Marci Shimoff

#46. Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

Alexander Stoddart

#47. I am not someone who throws around the word 'self-esteem.' It is a fictional description.

Nicolle Wallace

#48. When I see people talking on the internet about me or my work it's almost always more a description of themselves and so I never really think of myself as anything more than just who I always was.

Chuck Palahniuk

#49. ... although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom.

Jasper Fforde

#50. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.

Martha Grimes

#51. A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

William James

#52. Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'.

Christopher Lee

#53. he gave the first modern-day description of the condition in children in a lecture at a London hospital in 1887, noting, "If the patient can be cured at all, it must be by means of diet.

David Perlmutter

#54. However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

J.L. Austin

#55. The man is angry, the man
Is destructive, the man wants more.
The woman is more, the woman is all.

James Franco

#56. These truths may seem simple and self-apparent and the words easy to say, but the states of mind that you live in as you progress are beautiful beyond description.

Frederick Lenz

#57. My unworldliness, even at 21, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre, or gone to a race course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card.

Algernon Blackwood

#58. Sainthood emerges when you can listen to someone's tale of woe and not respond with a description of your own.

Andrew Mason

#59. I'm quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern - mankind.

Chico Hamilton

#60. I hope for an America where neither "fundamentalist" nor "humanist" will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls.

Edward Kennedy

#61. Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.

Emily Fridlund

#62. He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description.

Evelyn Waugh

#63. Women have been taught that they are not powerful; they've been given an opposite description, that they are weak. The word "effeminate" implies weakness.

Frederick Lenz

#64. Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone.

Madeline Miller

#65. Some people think of glasses as sexy. Those people haven't seen my glasses. Coke bottles would be a more apt description.

Alessandra Torre

#66. The sky was as blue and delicate as a porcelain teacup, and the hills rolled gently in all directions, intersected occasionally with the silver ribbon of a river.

Alyxandra Harvey

#67. Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

Marcel Proust

#68. A well-read fool is the most pestilent of blockheads; his learning is a flail which he knows not how to handle, and with which he breaks his neighbor's shins as well as his own. Keep a fellow of this description at arm's length, as you value the integrity of your bones.

Stanislaw Leszczynski

#69. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object.

C.S. Lewis

#70. What we need now is the description of the "describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.

Heinz Von Foerster

#71. One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.

Anne Lamott

#72. The truly enlightened are not necessarily very religious. Religon is a convienent description to take care of our fears, to passify us.

Frederick Lenz

#73. I'm sure you're wrong," Cat murmured. "Teachers have to like all kids. It's in the job description.

J.M. Madden

#74. There was something special about watching a manager and umpire both convinced they were totally right, but knowing that one had to be wrong. As an ump, those moments made my job fun, and getting 'nose-to-nose' was part of my job description.

Doug Harvey

#75. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

Benjamin Tucker

#76. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.

Haruki Murakami

#77. Now take all these qualities together: order, balance, evolution and intelligence. What you have is a description of love. It's not the popular ideal, it is the wizard's love - the force that upholds life and nurtures it.

Deepak Chopra

#78. Remember ... we don't see objects, we see light. [ ... ] Light can do anything water can do
flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do
paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always light in a room.

Janet Fitch

#79. My job description is that I'm a rock star. And I'm good at it.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#80. Damn description, it is always disgusting.

Lord Byron