Anonymized Define Quotes

I'd rather be the creep in the night and the fire that burns your eyes than the way you use and define life. ~ Dominic Riccitello

Her full name is Eva Morelli Stein Hathaway. She retains her surnames not because they define her, but because she defines them; that is, except for the first--Morelli. Ironically it is the one she's least familiar with... ~ Maryann D'Agincourt

the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. ~ Jonathan Franzen

It's the choices that you make and the things that you're willing to accept and not accept that define who you are. ~ Loretta Lynch

Define your goals in terms of the activities necessary to achieve them, and concentrate on those activities. ~ Brian Tracy

Others will always seek to define you based on what they think you represent or who they think you are. But you have to be the one to control what you do and what you say and how you present yourself. ~ Loretta Lynch

When we talk about women's safety as being the top priority, what we are talking about is separating women out from society, not creating space for them within society. We are talking about creating methods of control and manipulation. We are saying that the world needs to be reorganized not around fairness and peace, but around our particular needs and desires. If we continue to define our group's identity by what has been done to us, we will continue to be object rather than subject. Once ~ Jessa Crispin

There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there. ~ N. Scott Momaday

I am against allowing the CIA to spend $25 million since 1947 for the express purpose, as stated before, to alter our behavior. Is the State supreme over individuals? Who owns or controls our minds? Why was CIA Director Allen Dulles allowed to order 100 million LSD tablets? Were half the U.S. population going to receive their doses? What gives the CIA and Pentagon the right to define normal, or to determine what is national security? Are we being drugged through food, water and supplied with chemicals so we become slaves and robots? Where is all the cancer coming from? Why the preoccupation with death? Why is the U.S. Government in the business of creating a "Psycho-civilized" world? Who is ordering the ultrasonic waves to lower brain waves of city populations to an alpha state, leaving citizens susceptible to mass propaganda and hypnotic suggestion? These facts have been confirmed by researcher Walter Bowart in 1977. I learned about the project years ago. ~ Mae Brussell

The most powerful force in the human psyche is people's need for their words and actions to stay consistent with their IDENTITY - how we define ourselves. ~ Tony Robbins

Obligatory is a bitch that's what is going to define life. ~ Deyth Banger

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us. ~ Simon Van Booy

In philosophy we must always resist the temptation of hitting on an answer to the question how we can define such-and-such a notion, an answer which supplies a smooth and elegant definition which entirely ignores the purpose which we originially wanted the notion for. ~ Michael Dummett

Yes that happened, but it doesn't define me. What does not kill me will only make me stronger. I made a mistake, but I am not a mistake. ~ John Hope Bryant

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. ~ Kenneth Tynan

We all have demons, Crash," she said quietly. "But you don't have to let them define you. ~ T.L. Shreffler

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

Where do you draw the line between actions carried out due to an internal need and actions that were nothing more than a slim version of one ceremony or another that help us define our emotions? ~ Yoav Blum

Do not give anyone the power to define your character. Let your character define and bring out the good in you as a person. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines. ~ Thomas Metzinger

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers). ~ Susan Sontag

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegia ~ John Barth

The world's theology is easy to define.
It is the view that human beings are basically good,
that no one is really lost,
that belief in Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation. ~ James Montgomery Boice

Words have the power to release pent-up emotions as well as to define them in rational and meaningful terms. ~ Jeff Cohen

I might define a 'journey' as something that life itself calls me to. And I might then define a 'trip' as something I create to avoid a journey by mimicking a journey. And while fear is most certainly part and parcel of both, the latter is emboldened by fear while the former surrenders to it. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Geography does not define you - love does. ~ Eve Ensler

What's the advantage to have hundreds of words to define stupidity, when the essence is always the same. ~ William C. Brown

In every science, after having analysed the ideas, expressing the more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further. These are the primitive ideas of the science; it is necessary to acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to explain them by deduction. ~ Giuseppe Peano

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. ~ Italo Calvino

beginners when it came to inner landscapes of beauty that would anchor and nourish them on the inside, beyond work, in the intimate spaces that in the end define us all. ~ Krista Tippett

The popular advice is we just need more confidence, more assurance, more chutzpah. But the issue with confidence is how we try to achieve it. Too often we try to win high self-regard in cheap ways. We undermine others, or we compare our achievements to those of the weakest around us. We conform to cultural norms, believing that what society values is what we value and that how society defines success is how we must define success. These cheap self-confidence tricks are unsustainable and can lead to narcissism during good times and depression during hard times. ~ Rich Karlgaard

She always stood so trim and erect, and you had the feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define. ~ Robert Penn Warren

While an increasing number of male academic, political, and cultural figures have felt comfortable enough in recent years to proclaim themselves feminists, absorbing aspects of feminist politics and theory into their thinking, their gestures are most often built on an essentialized and static dichotomy between men and women. But men must do more than admit their complicity in patriarchy; they must begin to rethink the very boundaries that shape and define what it means to be a man.

Conversely, women must play an important part in this reevaluation, an idea suggest by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwikc's admonition that "when something is about masculinity, it isn't always 'about men'." Far from being just about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone. ~ Maurice Berger

If we don't understand how metaphor works we will misunderstand most of what we read in the Bible. No matter how carefully we parse our Hebrew and Greek sentences, no matter how precisely we use our dictionaries and trace our etymologies, no matter how exactly we define the words on the page, if we do not appreciate the way a metaphor works we will never comprehend the meaning of the text. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Why should I choose to divide my ethics into four rather than six? Why should I define virtue as four, or two, or one? Why as desist and resist rather than 'follow nature' or 'discharge your private business without injustice', like Plato, or anything else?
'But,' you will say, 'there everything is summed up in a word. - 'Yes, but that is no good unless you explain it.' And when you come to explain it, as soon as you open up this precept which contains all the others, out they all come in the original confusion that you wanted to avoid. Thus when they are all enclosed in one they are concealed and useless, as if they were in a box, and they only come to light in their natural confusion. Nature has laid them down, without enclosing one inside another. ~ Blaise Pascal