Cavils Define Quotes

What makes the difference between "ideal" and an ordinary object of desire is that the former is impersonal; it is something having(at least ostensibly)no special reference to the ego of the man who feels the desire, and therefore capable, theoretically, of being desired by everybody.
Thus we might define an "ideal" as something desired, not egocentric, and such that the person
Desiring it wishes that everyone else also desired it. I may wish that everybody had enough to eat,
that everybody felt kindly towards everybody, and so on, and if I wish anything of this kind I shall
also wish others to wish it. In this way, I can build up what looks like an impersonal ethic,
although in fact it rests upon the personal basis of my own desires--for the desire remains mine
even when what is desired has no reference to myself. For example, one man may wish that
everybody understood science, and another that everybody appreciated art; it is a personal
difference between the two men that produces this difference in their desires.
The personal element becomes apparent as soon as controversy is involved. Suppose some man
says: "You are wrong to wish everybody to be happy; you ought to desire the happiness of
Germans and the unhappiness of everyone else. "Here "ought" maybe taken to mean that that is
what the speaker wishes me to desire. I might retort that, not being German, it is psychologically
impossible for me to desire th ~ Bertrand Russell

Prejudice and bigotry are brought down ... by the sheer force of determination of individuals to succeed and the refusal of a human being to let prejudice define the parameters of the possible. ~ Condoleezza Rice

I define sustainable history as a durable progressive trajectory in which the quality of life on this planet or other planets is premised on the guarantee of human dignity for all at all times and under all circumstances. ~ Nayef Al-Rodhan

The four words that will define this century: The Earth is full. ~ Paul Gilding

Countless people have attempted to define the absolute power of the world of nature. Some praise it as god, some call it the Buddha, others call it truth. Still others convert nature into a philosophy by which they attempt to sound its deepest truth. Such attempts to define the power of nature are no more than striving to escape its effects. ~ Koichi Tohei

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them. ~ May Sarton

Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent. ~ Richard Louv

If you don't look at yourself, you can't know yourself. If you don't know your flaws, lumps and bumps then someone else can use them against you to make you feel inferior. I think you're perfect just the way you are. I believe if you hide from who you are, you let everyone else define you instead of you. You are your power, embrace that and be beautiful. ~ Ella December

What kind of love was it that I felt when I was twenty? It is difficult to define - my physical passions were very weak then, perhaps because of a few years of great poverty and hard work. But my intellectual passions were strong, meaning that without asking anything in return, without wanting any pity, I wanted only to give, but not to receive. Foolish, wrong, exaggerated, proud, rash - for in love one must not only give, but also take; and, reversing it, one must not only take but also give. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

There is no room in research for morals. Morals cloud judgement. Morals taint conclusions. Morals define unwanted prejudices. They are not welcome in any lab of mine. ~ Edward Martin III

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain ... To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways. ~ Arundhati Roy

We're nothing but human.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity.
More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.
You are not machines.
You are not cattle.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts.
In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery.
We don't want to hate and despise one another.
We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.
You the people have the power.. the power to create machines.. the power to create happiness.
You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful..
To make this life a wonderful adventure.
We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices.
Some are on a grand scale.. Most of these choices are on lesser points.
But we define ourselves by the choices we have made.
We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.
Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly.
Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design ~ Anonymous

Guard your thoughts.
Your thoughts define the state of your wellness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Boring heroines are, in my opinion, the most common romance mistake. We loathe hanging out with women who define themselves purely through their relationships ... why would we want to read about them? ~ Sarah MacLean

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured.
I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience. ~ Jennifer Worth

If I had to define 'sexy' now, as Disney as it sounds, I would have to say it's about complete and utter confidence. ~ Solange Knowles

I didn't have a vocabulary for what he did to me, but then no one had been able to define the man himself. An enigma, an abomination, a wish on a star. He consumed me, and I drifted inside him, blissed out on the ride. ~ Skye Warren

I define God as ALL. All wisdom, All-wise,
All-loving and All-eternal. ~ Mitch Kynock

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

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people. ~ Jason Reitman

Our culture today confuses great attention with great success, assuming them to be the same thing, but they are not. You are great, already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it's not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to. ~ Mark Manson

To bring myself back to a perspective of all that I am in Christ - not according to the world. I need it to remind myself that the world doesn't define me. I am defined by my relationship with Jesus Christ. ~ Tony Dungy

In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a case. But who would accept such a definition? Writing is the production of meaning. Writing is thinking. ~ George Hillocks Jr.

There's nothing that says you have to succeed in the same way as someone else. In fact, there's nothing that says you must define success in the same way as someone else. ~ Ralph Marston

Failure to conform to social norms. I prefer to define my sociopathy as a set of traits that inform my personality but don't define me: I am generally free of entangling and irrational emotions, I am strategic and canny, I am intelligent and confident and charming, but I also struggle to react appropriately to other people's confusing and emotion-driven social cues. ~ M.E. Thomas

There is, I believe, no such thing as unconditional self-acceptance. Those who say so are promulgating a pernicious lie. One must first live a decent, honorable and productive life. Only then do you get to feel good about yourself.
Seeking to heedlessly gratify your desires or impulses of the moment to do things (or fail to do things) your conscience knows to be contrary to your standards of right, worthy and virtuous behavior is, in a mental, emotional and spiritual sense, akin to spending capital that you have not earned, and therefore will eventually cause you to feel very negatively ... about who and what you are. You cannot in the long run have your cake and eat it too. The longer ... you behave in certain ways, the more it comes to define you, not only to others, but also to yourself. ~ Laura C. Schlessinger

The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Classical liberalism . . . does not wholly define modern American conservatism. There is an added element: a concern with social and civic virtue. The term virtue has become a bad word in some quarters of American life. (It is especially unpopular with the chronically wicked and depraved.) Young people, especially, tend to associate it with finger-wagging and with people who tell you how to live your life. This is a very narrow view of virtue: It applies only to what it is good to do, rather than what it is good to be and what it is good to love. . . .

Conservatives recognize, of course, that people frequently fall short of these standards. In their personal conduct, conservatives do not claim to be better than anyone else. . . . But for conservatives, these lapses do not provide an excuse to get rid of the standards. Even hypocrisy--professing one thing but doing another--is in the conservative view preferable to a denial of standards because such denial leads to moral chaos or nihilism. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports. ~ Rusty Schweickart

When society does something wrong and extremely immoral, ironically it is not called 'madness'. For example, 'sati burning' and 'forced conversion into another religion' etc. Sometimes, an 'unreasonable' society tries to present itself as 'reasonable' by unfairly and selfishly defining 'madness' according to its own wish and for its own interest! ~ Md. Ziaul Haque

Laughter is the evidence that we're still here, the proof that our tragedies will not define us forever. Laughter is the language of the survivor. ~ Josh James Riebock

I don't feel the need to define nothin' to nobody, because I'm always changing. Why say that I'm this or that when I might not be tomorrow? I'm gonna follow my own feelings and my own heart. ~ Keke Palmer

Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years ~ FM-2030

The most powerful forces in the universe are infinite. Love, imagination, intuition, stillness. Then why should we define our soul? ~ Matthew Donnelly

One moment before, I knew nothing of it. And then, all of a sudden, I knew this was it. The most amazing thing. I could feel the whispers, I could feel all the dimensions possible. I could define it. I could call it Love ~ D.N. Joshi

If any human concious able to define the God then he exactly don't know about the God. If willing to describe then he is beliver of the God. Because The God is unable to describe, if described then not about God. Because God is unable to describe, thats why there is God. The supreme power. ~ Kunal Jajal

Mystery is a very deep and elusive concept to define. I honestly cannot tell you what it is, but I can only provide you with tools to help point you in the direction of discovering it for yourself. What I know about mystery for sure is this: it is what's responsible for creating adventure, novelty, surprise, edge, risk, rewards, passion, desire, depth, joy, excitement, seduction, faith, trust, conviction, aliveness, sensuality. Without mystery, life will be utterly boring, dull and depressing. ~ Lebo Grand

The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action. ~ Charles A. Murray

It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone. ~ Ha-Joon Chang