Quotes on Definitions

Very high, very grand, and very wise is the ocean of God, the Water of Life. You went after the form and were lead astray. How can you see it? You abandoned the truth. Sometimes it is named "tree," sometimes "sun," sometimes "ocean," sometimes "cloud," one thing from which scores of discoveries arise, its slightest definition an everlasting life.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let’s think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow—that’s vulnerability.

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

I don't deserve you." "You're not allowed to say that." "Why not?" "It's a breakup line. Unless you're breaking up-" Jason leaned over and kissed her. The colors of the Roman afternoon suddenly seemed sharper, as it the world had switched to high definition. "No breakups," he promised. "I may have busted my head a few times, but I'm not that stupid.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Life is not a game of Solitaire; people depend on one another. When one does well, others are lifted. When one stumbles, others also are impacted. There are no one-man teams—either by definition or natural law. Success is a cooperative effort; it’s dependent upon those who stand beside you.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

Definition of a relationship - an enduring, mutually-agreed upon connection or union, which fulfills certain needs of the individuals involved and the society in which they live.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that's one definition of a lady.

Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?

I am not too happy with terms like “the left”, to be honest. And I don’t use it much….if by “the left” you mean people who are committed to peace and justice and freedom and so on, there can’t be elements of the left opposed to workers’ movement, at least under that definition.