Defies Quotes

Mankind is a science that defies definitions. ~ Robert Burns

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it. ~ Glenn Gould

But I guess the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead. ~ David Levithan

The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't. ~ Christopher Paolini

Smoke defies the axiom that whatever goes up must come down. ~ Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.
(unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions) ~ William Gaddis

The Super Bowl now takes on a magnitude that almost defies the imagination. ~ Paul Tagliabue

Sometimes, impossibility isn't about defying reason,
but simply lack of willingness to believe in otherwise. ~ Toba Beta

And none can ever deny the
strangeness of the heart.
As it defies all logic and laws.
Feels light when it's occupied,
But gets heavy when rendered empty. ~ Drishti Bablani

Wit defies death
but death defines wit ~ David Giannini

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. ~ Jim Butcher

Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance. ~ Sharon Salzberg

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Darwin's Bestiary

PROLOGUE


Animals tame and animals feral
prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral:
the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile,
rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile.
Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride - every peril
was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural,
while Courage, Devotion, Thrift - every bright laurel
crowned a creature in some mythological mural.


Scientists think there is something immoral
in singular brutes having meat that is plural:
beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral.
Yet between the lines there's an implicit demurral;
the habit stays with us, albeit it's puerile:
when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel.



1. THE ANT


The ant, Darwin reminded us,
defies all simple-mindedness:
Take nothing (says the ant) on faith,
and never trust a simple truth.
The PR men of bestiaries
eulogized for centuries
this busy little paragon,
nature's proletarian -
but look here, Darwin said: some ants
make slaves of smaller ants, and end
exploiting in their peonages
the sweating brows of their tiny drudges.


Thus the ant speaks out of both
sides of its mealy little mouth:
its example is extolled
to the workers of the world,
but its habits also preach
the virtues of ~ Philip Appleman

The arrogance of race prejudice is an arrogance which defies what is scientifically known of human races. ~ Ruth Benedict

To better understand the Law of Attraction, see yourself as a magnet attracting unto you the essence of that which you are thinking and feeling. And so, if you are feeling fat, you cannot attract thin. If you feel poor, you cannot attract prosperity, and so on. It defies Law. ~ Esther Hicks

I come," replied he, "to thee, Manfred, usurper of the principality of Otranto, from the renowned and invincible Knight, the Knight of the Gigantic Sabre: in the name of his Lord, Frederic, Marquis of Vicenza, he demands the Lady Isabella, daughter of that Prince, whom thou hast basely and traitorously got into thy power, by bribing her false guardians during his absence; and he requires thee to resign the principality of Otranto, which thou hast usurped from the said Lord Frederic, the nearest of blood to the last rightful Lord, Alfonso the Good. If thou dost not instantly comply with these just demands, he defies thee to single combat to the last extremity. ~ Horace Walpole

This bill, by vesting the power to withhold or terminate Federal funds, creates a concentration of power of economic coercion unequaled in the history of governments-a power concentration which defies the experience of mankind with the temptation of power to corrupt. ~ Strom Thurmond

Wracked with a hangover I do my muttering over a Black Velvet, a union of champagne and stout. Don't be swindled into believing there's any cure for a hangover. I've tried them all: iced tomatoes, hot clam juice, brandy peaches. Like the common cold it defies solution. Time alone can stay it. The hair of the dog? That way lies folly. It's as logical as trying to put out a fire with applications of kerosene. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

We see not because everything is visible, but because something always defies the eye, persisting beyond the remit of mere representation. This something, which Pasolini endeavors to situate at the heart of filmmaking, is preceisely 'that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consicousness' (Lacan, 1998). ~ Fabio Vighi

China has consistently surprised us. When I returned from the United States many years ago, it was unimaginable that we would end up where we are now. What China has achieved defies all logic. I credit this to the hard work and enterprising spirit of the Chinese people. ~ Zhang Xin

Faith is one of only two things in mankind's consciousness that defies discussion. The other is one's marriage. ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal. ~ Banksy

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it. ~ Jean Baudrillard

There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just dont like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go and bleed It is more important to keep law and order in society than to be worried about weak-kneed people Society must take every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which defies the elected power. ~ Pierre Trudeau

They did not know; nor did they know that the negation of everything is in itself a form of servitude and
that real freedom is an inner submission to a value which defies history and its successes. ~ Albert Camus

Once I read a study about prisoners with a life sentence. The ones without the possibility of parole were happier than those who might get out. Defies logic, but then, not really. Sometimes it's the hope that kills you. ~ Julie Buxbaum

The things you see in Army barracks sometimes defies logic. After a while, you give up trying to rationalize and understand such things ... you just accept them as your new reality. ~ Scott Burkett

The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you'll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you'll discover that "adventure" is a decision after the fact - a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can't quite explain. ~ Rolf Potts

Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode
a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation. ~ Christos Yannaras

Universally, the better gold the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold mine country that is traversed by good roads, or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This meaning-argument is of a very different kind from the arguments I have been speaking about so far. The premise entails the conclusion all right, but it is so astoundingly false that it defies criticism, at first, by the simple method of taking the reader's breath away. This was a method which the neo-Hegelian idealists later perfected: reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism. Say or imply, for example, that in English "value" means the same as "individuality." You can be miles down the track of your argument before they get their breath back.
This method is not only physiologically but ethologically sound. Of course it should never be used first. You need first to earn the respect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, or the like: then apply the violent solecism. Tell them, for example, that when we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was born out of wedlock. You cannot go wrong this way. Decent philosophers will be so disconcerted by this, that they will never do the one thing they should do: simply say, "That is NOT what 'prime number' means!" Instead, they will always begin … [by] casting about for an excuse for someone's saying what you said, or a half-excuse, or a one-eighth excuse; nor is there any danger that they will search in vain. ~ David Stove

President Bush had an opportunity tonight to say, 'Look ... things aren't going very well in Iraq and we did make some miscalculations and misjudgments there,' but he is so stubbornly arrogant - he just sticks with that same formula that he has in talking about the war on Iraq that just defies the reality that we all see on the ground. ~ Mike McCurry

Now, every day I am offered the gift of living in such a way that I get a taste of what it means to need him. Resting fully dependent in the palm of his hand, I realize the safety of staying small. I get to embrace the full shock value of the kingdom of God, and that is a real blessing. I get to be knocked around by the fallout of belonging to a life where I am wildly ill equipped to meet its demands. I am honored to experience an existence marked by dependence, where I submit to God's will for my life, even and especially when it defies my put-on, middle-class values. ~ Shannan Martin

It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom. ~ Paul A. Lombardo

Dare to change the world
There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity. I can't think of a better life than one dedicated to passion, to dreams, to the stubborness that defies chaos and disillusionment. ~ Gioconda Belli

Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death. ~ D. A. Carson

A good story defies the reader's expectations, and in doing so, brings them satisfaction. ~ Thomas Maltman

The free man is not he who defies the rules ... but he who, recognizing the compulsions inherent in his being, seeks rather to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest each day's experience. ~ Bernard Iddings Bell

Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics. ~ Nelson Mandela

I know if I died tonight, I would die a happy man at peace with myself knowing Gloria's story would finally be told - a mysterious and astonishing story that defies the timeworn precepts of modern psychology and psychiatry - where insanity, genius, the metaphysical, and the mystery of life come together to beguile and confound our contemporary understanding of the mind and its limitless powers to heal.
Dr. Adam Jaxon ~ Linden Morningstar

One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon.com is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk. ~ Jeff Bezos

I do believe it is the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself. ~ Rosie O'Donnell

Lawful residents of San Francisco are being stripped of their freedom because of an illegal measure that defies common sense. I believe that we will prevail. ~ Wayne LaPierre

But, today, the idea of faith returns to me. Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Goodness, Time's rude hand defies,
And winter lives when beauty dies. ~ Henry Kirke White

A typical 'Larry King Live' is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he's strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject. ~ James Wolcott

Love supreme defies all sophistry. ~ George Eliot

One thing you need to realize about this lifestyle - the sensual lifestyle, that is - is that it defies all mediocrity. In fact, it was meant to be a container for you to live your most unlimited life; you actually become who you came here to be. ~ Lebo Grand

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. ~ Nadine Gordimer

A sensual lifestyle defies the productivist logic, it has time.

I love this illustration by Anthony DeMello:

A rich entrepreneur from the North was horrified to find the southern fisherman lying lazily besides his boat, smoking pipe.

"Why aren't you out fishing?" said the entrepreneur. "Because I have caught enough fish for the day," said the fisherman.

"Why don't you catch some more?"
"What would I do with them?"
"You could earn more money," was the entrepreneur's reply. "With that you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. Then you would make enough to buy nylon nets. These would bring you more fish and more money. Soon you would have more money to own two boats... maybe even a fleet of boats. Then you would be a rich man like me."

"What would I do then?" asked the fisherman.
"Then you could really enjoy life."
"What do you think I'm doing right now? ~ Lebo Grand

Love is such a thing. You have knowledge of what it is, but it defies careful explication."
"Love is a subtle concept," I admitted. "It's elusive, like justice, but it can be defined. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

It's always great to play a character that goes against the grain. Finn defies what people think when they think of stormtroopers. ~ John Boyega

God exists, though He defies reason. ~ Kedar Joshi

Your soul has a special mission. Your soul is supremely conscious of it.
Maya, illusion or forgetfulness, makes you feel that you are finite, weak and helpless. This is not true. You are not the body. You are not the senses. You are not the mind. These are all limited. You are the soul, which is unlimited. Your soul is infinitely powerful. Your soul defies all time and space. ~ Sri Chinmoy

You have this weird fear of squirrels that defies all reason."
"They have creepy eyes. ~ Karen Akins

You have to start with the notion that you pick the actor who's going to embody the role, the best person that you can find. If you don't start with that then it sort of defies the whole purpose of trying to make the best film that you can make. ~ Christopher Meledandri

We are not peddlers of the fashionable. We believe that good design defies fashion, is truly innovative, eminently sensible, yet a source of inspiration to those who have the pleasure of living with it. ~ Arthur Erickson

There is music in your soul. A wild and untamed sort
of music that speaks to me. It defies all the rules and laws you humans set upon it. It grows from inside you, and I have a wish to set that music free. ~ S. Jae-Jones

Charm is that extra quality that defies description. ~ Alfred Lunt

What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God's love, a love we don't even have to earn. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House. ~ Robert Taft

Grief is one illness that defies all remedies; it must ever run its course. ~ Brandy Purdy

The tree doesn't die, nor do I when you cut off a branch or a finger, we both heal so we don't lose all the sap or blood. That to me is total shock. Also that water defies the laws of physics by becoming less dense when frozen. Life really is a miracle and all the things that are been built into us through it. ~ Bernie Siegel

Whenever women hold men accountable, we invoke a reality that stands outside the artificial, though powerful, dominance-relation of men as a group to women as a group. Whenever a woman holds a man responsible for his behavior, she defies patriarchy's claim to define reality, she calls the universe to witness, she says, "Power is power, but it is not truth. You are as human as I--no less, and no more. You cannot escape the work of being human even if you punish me or kill me for reminding you of that work. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

Luck which so often defies anticipation in matrimonial affairs, giving attraction to what is moderate rather than to what is superior. ~ Jane Austen

He, who beats his wife defies his goddess ~ Akinwale Musa Oluseun

The human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are inconceivable to the mind and heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity. ~ Francoise Mauriac

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class. ~ Walter Lippmann

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about. ~ Barack Obama

Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction. ~ Walter J. Phillips

People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope. ~ Michael Robotham

Things are changed by a faith that defies obstacles and laughs at impossibilities. ~ Nicky Gumbel

First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of subtlety and intellect - and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-I-mean? outrage: look, they don't even buy our products! (Usually referred to as "quality art.") ~ Tom Wolfe

Why do I write? Because, I am able to create wonders with a click of my keyboard. I turn my computer on, and suddenly, I'm whisked into a world full of wonder and amazement. The universe bends to my will and defies physics. But when the afternoon arrives, I must return to my duties. I leave the comfort of my home and crawl through the elementary school carpool line. When I see the brightened faces of my children, my heart flutters, and I realize I can live with a few straggling toys ... as long as I can escape into the shower later. ~ Barbara Brooke

John Kerry's newfound interest in fiscal discipline is a political gimmick that defies his 20-year record in the Senate and stands in stark contrast to his reckless and expansive promises of new government spending on the campaign trail. ~ Steve Schmidt

The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with the ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government. The Supreme Court is not the supreme branch. And for God's sake, it isn't the Supreme Being. It is the Supreme Court. ~ Mike Huckabee

I'd call my work 'instinctual design.' I like to find the spirit of a piece that defies time, age, and occasion. My clothes give the wearer the chance to develop their own voice within a wardrobe, and I think of them as curators of their personal style. ~ Chris Benz

The power we call God defies description. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Internationally, there is one state that stands in defiance of practically every UN resolution that affects it: Israel. In the international community, Israel stands for the exercise of power with impunity. Israel defies the international community consistently - not because it is the world's sole superpower but because it is backed up by the world's sole superpower. ~ Mahmood Mamdani

Zen, like life, defies exact definition, but its essence is the experience, moment by moment, of our own existence
a natural, spontaneous encounter, unclouded by the suppositions and expectations that come between us and reality. It is, if you like, a paring down of life until we see it as it really is, free from our illusions; it is merely a divestment of ourselves until we recognize our own true nature. ~ David Fontana

The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress' ... The assumption is that the future will honour this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief. ~ Jacob Burckhardt

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death. ~ Ivan Klima

Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Busy in a bus or lacking luck you poke to pluck a pick-up truck.
Utterly shocked you choke in the lock and check if you chuck a buck or if you are stuck in the muck.
So you should lurk in a day like this in such a murky lucky way.
In a day when you don't know if you laugh or cry...
Errands wait for those who are late in the busiest day.
Such day that defies all your senses and makes you want to fly...
To fly away! ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry ... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart ... Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered. ~ John Berger

Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present. ~ Elie Wiesel

It's a cruel joke of the universe that the one person who makes me come alive is himself dead. And evil. His very existence defies all moral laws and all known laws of physics. ~ Kitty Thomas

I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out ... It's the best part of us probably ... ~ Nick Hornby

Everything you do.. defies any dream I've ever dreamed. You're so much more perfect to me than I ever knew how to wish for. ~Tara Mae~ ~ Lucian Bane

It's almost terrifying, how much it defies logic and reason. What else do we know about the world that isn't true? ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

Think of brilliant trickster Vik Muniz as the offspring of Man Ray and Jacques Henri Lartigue, combining the former's relentless experimentation, the latter's effortless wit, and their mutual inventiveness in work that defies category. ~ Vince Aletti

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned. ~ Wally Lamb

[H]e stooped down and wrote an answer to my question, Is love even real?

He wrote: Just because it defies logic and comprehension, that doesn't mean it's not real. ~ Preston Norton

Virtue runs before the muse,
and defies her skill;
she is rapt and doth refuse
to wait a painter's will. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There has to be some way this won't end in tragedy. Why can't Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after? It's as if the universe won't abide such a strong connection in such a disconnected world, as if our connection defies the natural order. ~ Kitty Thomas

Think about the comfortable feeling you have as you open your front door. That's but a hint of what we'll feel some day on arriving at the place our Father has lovingly and personally prepared for us in heaven. We will finally - and permanently - be 'at home' in a way that defies description. ~ Charles Stanley

I think 'Sightseers' was a bit of an epiphany, a massive learning curve, and it gave me loads of confidence to go out there, and also to create a female character which is completely unexpected and defies convention. ~ Alice Lowe

The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It's a brutal business, being a woman. Wendy sucks in her gut and crosses her legs, pointing her toes like a ballerina in a last-ditch effort to coax her calf muscle out of hiding. She has our mother's legs, sheathed in thick, smooth skin that defies definition. ~ Jonathan Tropper