Quotes on Definitions

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

My definition of success is doing what you love. I feel many people do things because they feel they have to, and are hesitant to risk following their passion.

Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?

For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. . . . We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

I wish people wouldn't think of me as a saint - unless they agree with the definition of a saint that a saint's a sinner who goes on trying.

The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.

Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.

The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

I will give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective 'Jewish.' A Nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then, if you add to that the word 'Jewish' you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation.

What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.

The errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.

... the socialization of boys regarding masculinity is often at the expense of women. I came to realize that we don't raise boys to be men, we raise them not be women (or gay men). We teach boys that girls and women are "less than" and that leads to violence by some and silence by many. It's important for men to stand up to not only stop men's violence against women but, to teach young men a broader definition of masculinity that includes being empathetic, loving and non-violent.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.