Quotes About Definition

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

naming things can be helpful.

Una cosa es una cosa, y otra cosa es otra cosa.

originalmente, bárbaro no significa salvaje, sino extranjero)

Si fuéramos a reducir la definición de la democracia a la sublime sencillez que le dio Lincoln: «el gobierno del pueblo, por el pueblo y para el pueblo», no hay duda de que pocos regímenes podrían llenar todos los requisitos necesarios para merecer esa calificación.

Sam: So then what is art? Hally: You want a definition? Sam: Ja. Hally: [He realizes he has got to be careful. He gives the matter a lot of thought before answering.] Philosophers have been trying to do that for centuries. What is Art? What is Life? But basically I suppose it's... the giving of meaning to matter. Sam: Nothing to do with beautiful? Hally: It goes beyond that. It's the giving of form to the formless.

Jesus defines servant leaders as those who humbly serve others because they love them.

Traditional definitions of culture usually include such elements as people's thoughts, beliefs, values, speech, actions, and artifacts (man-made objects). These all fall under people's beliefs and actions. Therefore, I define culture as the sum total of what people believe and how they act on their beliefs.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

As the commission tartly noted, no two religious divines could agree on the definition of a Muslim. If the members of the commission tried imposing a definition of their own, the ulema would unanimously declare them to have gone outside the pale of Islam. Adopting the definition of any one religious scholar entailed becoming an infidel in the eyes of all the others.

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.

The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?

I feel like Europe is way more advanced. They're way more open to the definition of jazz. More cool. They're like, 'You want to do that? Awesome. You want to work with a rapper? Awesome.' They're not, 'Aah, it's not real jazz.'

People's faith, people's beliefs are such a personal thing, and it defies definition. I'm so rarely interested in discussing what I believe or what you believe. I think it's liquid, anyway.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.

Can life be defined? Well, how would you go about it? Well, of course, you'd go to Encyclopedia Britannica and open at L. No, of course you don't do that; you put it somewhere in Google. And then you might get something.

I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

To say someone is the greatest, I just don't want championships to define that greatness. Because under that theory, Robert Horry is one of the five or six best basketball players ever - he has seven championship rings. We know that not to be true.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

Politics, by definition, is risk averse. Perhaps that's why America was so awestruck when Barack Obama ended the Black vs White debate by painting his political canvas in shades of grey.

I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we're going to have to define differently what I'm going to be. We're going to have to define my growing up differently.

We got to figure out or define what is a legal guarding position because there are times where he can move his hands out of the way, but it's hard to tell a guy what to do when somebody is running into you, you know what I mean? I don't know what a legal guarding position is at times.