Constitutes Define Quotes

Part of Obama's persona is self-reliance. He's calm; he's cool; he's self-possessed. In many ways, he has tried to define himself in opposition to Clinton's sometimes needy, often undisciplined, emotionalism. ~ Dee Dee Myers

We all consist of both good and evil, both light and darkness. It is our choices Rhiannon, the day to day struggle, and how we choose to live, that define us. ~ Nikki Landis

How do I define who Usher is? I'm still doing it - every day, every new opportunity, every stage, every interview, every other thing that I've done, every time that I've invested in anything that is all the definition of who I am. ~ Usher

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not. ~ Jonathan Maberry

What are the two or three things that you and only you are responsible for? What, specifically, have you been hired to do? What is "success" for the person in your position? Now let's slice it even thinner. Of the two or three things that define success for you, which of those are in line with your giftedness? Of the tasks you have been assigned to do, which of them are you specifically gifted to do? ~ Andy Stanley

Friendship evangelism is great, but it does not enable the gospel to travel beyond our social networks, unless there are intentional attempts to build friendships with people who are not like us. John Mark Hobbins of London City Mission says, 'Many people live in networks which take precedence over their address, and many churches have grown because of this. But the reality for many people living in social housing or in cheaper housing is that their address is very likely to define their daily life. ~ Tim Chester

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

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. ~ Mark John Thompson

The freshness of a smile and the fragrance of a perfume often define the personality of a woman. ~ Debasish Mridha

I've grown accustomed to the stars above my head as I sleep, the ache in my muscles as we walk the land. The freedom that comes with defining your world instead of letting it define you. ~ Amy Engel

He couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I hate to lose but having the belt doesn't define who I am. It's how I live my life and what I put into things is what defines me. ~ Urijah Faber

All sizes of film sets have the same level of excitement and friction and tension and then vast sections of boredom that define the process, so I love it all. ~ David Hayter

Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are criss-crossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense a bit of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, "so far from everything?" (When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.) ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it's incredibly important to properly define the problem - or, better yet, redefine the problem. ~ Steven D. Levitt

The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

We're 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 be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more ~ Woody Allen

We need to encourage each other to do what we want and not let it totally define us. You know? The things that people think define them aren't valid either. You could see a girl who's completely covered head-to-toe and who looks like the sweetest little thing in the world, and she could be the most horrendous human being on the planet inside. ~ Ariana Grande

It struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next. ~ James Gleick

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.
Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything. ~ Ernst Junger

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation. ~ Robert Frost

You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing. ~ Robin Hobb

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life. ~ Michael Ignatieff

One of hardest for any historian or a biographer to do is to capture convincingly on paper something as ethereal as charisma. It's a relative term, and different generations define it differently. ~ Richard Norton Smith

We did what people do. We stood side by side and smoked our little passive aggressive wishes for death, and stared down at our glory days. And then we set the world on fire, for a dream that felt so real is nothing but a risk never taken. ~ Victor Giannini

In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust. Branch out. Not only do our beliefs define us, but so does the community of like-minded people who share those beliefs. Christian traditions, denominations, and congregations provide a group identity. We are social animals, so we should not judge our spiritual groups, or those of others, as necessarily a problem. Only when our communities become the defining element of our spiritual lives, packs that protect those boundaries at all costs, do problems begin. That leads to isolation, "us versus them" thinking, and the illusion that "we" are basically right about the Bible and God and "they" aren't - the kind of wall-building that Jesus and Paul criticized. So much can be learned from ~ Peter Enns

My definition of confidence is how you feel about yourself, and not letting the external world define you. ~ Bonnie St. John

Sometimes it's our secrets that define us. ~ Britney Spears

I don't even know how to define myself. I'm a person who writes. It's something I enjoy, and hopefully people enjoy it as well. ~ Macaulay Culkin

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages - which helps to explain why so many of modernity's avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel's God, represented the world's resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption - symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos - spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, "I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God," precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection. ~ Robert Barron

I am a stickler for good manners, and I believe that treating other people well is a lost art. In the workplace, at the dinner table, and walking down the street
we are confronted with choices on how to treat people nearly every waking moment. Over time these choices define who we are and whether we have a lot of friends and allies or none. ~ Tim Gunn

Thoughts not only manifest into reality,
they define it. ~ Jorge Gw

In this century, we are about to enter interplanetary civilization.
In order to survive, we need to go beyond neoclassical economics definition.
We define it as interplanomics. ~ Toba Beta

I am still stunned by my capacity to spin Scripture, see what I wanted, ignore what I didn't, and use the Word to defend my life rather than define it. ~ Jen Hatmaker