Quotes About Definition

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.

The character of our language defines us, and dictionaries say as much about us as about the way we speak.

It depends how lenient you are with your definition of artist. If you're going to include those who tap dance at the high school recital, then maybe I am.

If my cuisine were to be defined by just one taste, it would be that of subtle, aromatic, extra-virgin olive oil.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit.

How do you achieve success? Well, for one thing, you don't define it before you achieve it.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one's hands are fast enough.

To comply with these rules, the creation of volatile concrete objects requires special handling. This caution is warranted because, in virtually all languages, the creation of an object requires a source code dependency on the concrete definition of that object. In most object-oriented languages, such as Java, we would use an Abstract Factory to manage this undesirable dependency.

LSP: The Liskov Substitution Principle Barbara Liskov's famous definition of subtypes, from 1988. In short, this principle says that to build software systems from interchangeable parts, those parts must adhere to a contract that allows those parts to be substituted one for another.

God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed.

She was my—? I never knew what to call her. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd; no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend. Partner wasn't right either, as we didn't live under the same roof. Lover? How could one keep a straight face? Mistress? Do me a favor. Fiancée? Certainly not. I suppose I ought to have realized it was ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.

Groucho's definition of politics is Marxism in a nutshell: "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.

Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.

The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it's not, you've got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself.

Since the world obviously doesn't function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.

Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined

Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.

the thing is that it labels.