Quotes About Definition

Dictionary of Misunderstood Words

Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?

Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.

Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love.

love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

human lifetime is 80 years long on average. A person imagines and organizes his life with that span in mind. What I have just said everyone knows, but only rarely do we realize that the number of years granted us is not merely a quantitative fact, an external feature (like nose length or eye color), but is part of the very definition of the human.

Wenn Jan die Grenze für sich als ein Höchstmaß an zulässiger Wiederholbarkeit definiert hat, muss ich ihn jetzt korrigieren: die Grenze ist kein Resultat der Wiederholung. Die Wiederholung ist lediglich eine der Möglichkeiten, um die Grenze sichtbar zu machen. Die Grenzlinie ist staubbedeckt, und die Wiederholung ist wie die Geste einer Hand, die den Staub wegwischt.

The only place success comes before is in the dictionary

In separateness only does love learn definition.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

I was asking about lust, wasn't I? I was fairly certain of it. But isn't love supposed to come before lust? It does in the dictionary.

I heard once of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him, but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.

Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment. Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said? I bet you'll tell me. 'If you're reading this, you are one.' You're a riot.

We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.

though one can talk significantly about God one can only do so by saying what God is not.

The entropy of a system is related to the number of indistinguishable rearrangements of its constituents, but properly speaking is not equal to the number itself. The relationship is expressed by a mathematical operation called a logarithm; don't be put off if this brings back bad memories of high school math class. In our coin example, it simply means that you pick out the exponent in the number of rearrangements-that is, the entropy is defined as 1,000 rather than 2^1000.

The leaders of the Butlerian Jihad did not adequately define artificial intelligence, failing to foresee all possibilities of an imaginative society. Therefore, we have substantial gray areas in which to maneuver.

The more we spend time in defining things, the more unconscious we are of the present moment. This moment is the source of our present happiness and also the origin of the future we can create.

Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave).

The colonel could swear with vehemence and originality when he was angry, spilling his oaths in a pretty pepper and disproving Talleyrand's definition of swearing as the means by which the inarticulate gave themselves the impression of eloquence.

If, of course, to serial and redescription you add… how would I put it, punctual? …Or the key with which they maintain their subsistence. And in that sense serial redescription seems to be a very good definition for the social sciences as well as for philosophy. We accompany the task of the entities in their survival, so to speak, and their maintaining their subsistence in a very, very practical manner.

I had come to regard pride as the defining characteristic of a gentleman, when indeed I should think the word itself, gentleman, should impress upon me what aspect I ought to have settled on as the defining one.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable. I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God.