Quotes About Definition

By Thursday, in fact, Katrina had become one of the half-dozen moments in American television that not only revealed events but actually defined the community of millions responding to it on television. It joined the Army-McCarthy hearings (1954), the Kennedy assassination (1963), the Apollo 11 moon landing (1969), the Watergate hearings (1973–74), and the attacks on September 11, 2001.

We find no sense in talking about something unless we specify how we measure it; a definition by the method of measuring a quantity is the one sure way of avoiding talking nonsense. . . . —Sir Hermann Bondi, mathematician and cosmologist3

And so we should define a tool in this way: something that is not part of a man's body which makes something that the man wants to do possible or easier.

Talking about what "religion" does in the world is like defining "medicine" as "pills in bottles." I am not sure you should take that. My aunt took a pill from a bottle once and was sick for a week.

Perfectionists want static categories; they want things to be defined and to stay put. They want the kingdom of God to stay here, right where we put it, and they want the kingdom of man to stay right there, on the unbelieving shelf.

black swan event like the storming of the Bastille, in other words, the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life

The lesson here is: Taking either success or failure personally means, by definition, that your ego has become involved and you are in jeopardy of incurring losses due to psychological factors.

Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isn't.

Strategy explains how an organization, faced with competition, will achieve superior performance. The definition is deceptively simple.

by the time you've finished naming a thing, it has already changed and the name you gave it no longer defines it exactly...

It's not like we're a couple." "My dick was inside you three hours ago," he replied, eyes narrowing. "I don't know what that makes us, but it's fair to say we've moved past landlord and tenant.

it is the breadth, flexibility, and meaningfulness of our roles and behaviors that defines health. Good health does not mean ease.

And if I fight, then for what?" "For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity - a good strong self with which to begin to live.

A thing named is a thing tamed.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

had to look the word up. The definition had delighted her, and she'd hoped the girl was correct. The four Padavano sisters dressed up as witches for Halloween that year, and Charlie gleefully quoted Macbeth at them. Julia, in the height of her girlhood, with a pointed black hat on her head, knew that they were a coven of witches,

It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt.

If you're like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren't aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.

People didn't even agree on what the terms always and never meant! If you're like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren't aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.

The fact is, there's no single magic number that defines profitability for a game.

Well, when I was a kid, if my father was witnessing something that he thought was particularly outrageous or he was looking at some sort of a question that he thought lacked proper definition, he would say, Well, at least Jesse James had the honor to wear a mask.