Quotes About Definition

Within that single fifteen-month period—perhaps the most creative in American literary history—Grant would not only write his Personal Memoirs, Twain would reach the peak of his career with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Those two books, perhaps the finest work of American nonfiction ever written and the greatest of all American novels, defined their legacy.

One finds oneself being defined by one's job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves.

What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray. The novelist is more serious—if that is the word.

Aggressive activities against crayfish might be, by definition, excluded from an afternoon's programme devoted to Harmony. Who could tell?

Short's power to define feminine beauty abandoned him at this point. He simply made a gesture with his hand.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning we give it.

Laying aside for the sake of clearness that indefinite term of girl — for girls are girls from the age of three up to forty-three, if not previously married

A thing named is a dead thing, and it's dead because it is set apart…

Ogni movimento rivoluzionario è romantico, per definizione.

The physician and the philosopher have different ways of defining the diseases of the soul. For instance anger for the philosopher is a sentiment born of the desire to return an offense, whereas for the physician it is a surging of blood around the heart.

That becomes clear if you try to define the objects and things which supervene in each class. Odd and even, straight and curved, number, line, and shape can be defined without change but flesh, bone, and man cannot. They are like sbub nose, not like curved.

Well-drawn laws should themselves define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as may be to the decision of the judges.

If, then, 'substance' is not attributed to anything, but other things are attributed to it, how does 'substance' mean what is rather than what is not?

Now there is a common division of goods into three classes; one being called external, the other two those of the soul and body respectively, and those belonging to the soul we call most properly and specially good. Well, in our definition we assume that the actions and workings of the soul constitute Happiness, and these of course belong to the soul.

In all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause ; inasmuch as even in bodies sometimes contact is the cause of their unity, and sometimes viscosity or some other such quality.But a definition is one account, not by connection, like the Iliad, but because it is a definition of one thing.

For to define the infinite you must use quantity in your formula, but not substance or quality. If then Being is both substance and quantity, it is two, not one: if only substance, it is not infinite and has no magnitude; for to have that it will have to be a quantity. Again, (5) 'one' itself, no less than 'being', is used in many senses, so we must consider in what sense the word is used when it is said that the All is one.

That conflict: Technology as it develops is a prayer… but prayer is by definition a subversion of reason. There is no Loophole there.

My definition of a liberal is a man who has his ass firmly stuck in clouds of cotton wool.

El cuerpo de la mujer es uno de los elementos esenciales de la situación que ella ocupa en este mundo, pero tampoco él basta para definirla, ese cuerpo no tiene realidad vivida, sino en la medida en que es asumido por la conciencia a través de sus acciones y el seno de una sociedad

But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is define only by her relationship to the world and to other individuals; she exists only by transcending herself, and her freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others.

The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.

It's hard to define somebody by one movie. I mean, unfortunately, my entire life was basically made by Billy Elliot. It was kind of created by that one catalytic moment.

If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing?

Defining consultancy is a bit like defining the upper class every possible candidate draws the line just below himself.