Fantastically Define Quotes

Men used to marry men. And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly in was done by those without needs or troubles - done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people. ~ Seth Dickinson

The irony of what we define as a mistake can and will sometimes return to you as a redefined destiny that life sends your way without any of your own free will and choice in what happens. It just happens. Something in me changed in that one tell-tale moment. And for some strange reason, I knew there wasn't a way of going back. ~ Cyndi Goodgame

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be. ~ Bob Dylan

Know that the pain you have endured does not define you to me. What defines you to me is the way you talk about love, especially loving yourself. 'I have learned to love everything about me,' you wrote. You are powerful. ~ Ashley Asti

Your parents do not define who you are. If at any point, you think that maybe because she's turned out a certain way, that you might too, you need only remember that you, and you alone, are the master of your own destiny. That takes people far too long to realize, and even longer to do something about. ~ Steve McHugh

it's not the obstacles in our life that define us. It's the grace we display when overcoming them. ~ Tracy Brogan

Your attitude towards life will define your altitude of success. ~ Debasish Mridha

Define your life,
Define your world,
Define your passions,
Define your goals. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Every human being is capable of terrible transgressions, and exquisite goodness, and that neither has to define a person. ~ Angela Hoke

Man plan his course but the Maker define his path. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You've got to find forgiveness, Florence," said Elsie. "You find it so easily in other people, why do you struggle so much to find it in yourself?"
"I'm a bad person. I'm flawed. Damaged."
"Of course you are."
I looked at him.
"We all are. Every one of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines."
"We do?" I said.
'Of course we do. However else would all the light get in?"
I could see Elsie smiling at us.
"You can't define yourself by a single moment." Jack held my hand very tightly. I could feel him shaking. "That moment doesn't make you who you are."
"Then what does?" I said.
"Oh, Florence. Everything else," he said. "Everything else. ~ Joanna Cannon

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily. ~ Deborah Eisenberg

It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself. ~ Ansel Adams

Yet a period's character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and social behaviors. The scholar Andrew Delbanco goes so far as to define culture as a collective psychological notion. "Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days - pain, desire, pleasure, fear - into a story," Delbanco writes. "When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope. And if such a sustaining narrative establishes itself over time in the minds of a substantial number of people, we call it culture. ~ Joshua Wolf Shenk

It's not easy to define poetry. ~ Bob Dylan

But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power? ~ Dan Brown

It's not fair."
"No, it's not," I hear someone say, her footsteps barely more than a whisper against the floor. "But then again, a lot in life isn't fair." The woman is concealed in the shadows. "It's how you handle yourself in such situations and what you learn from them that will define you. ~ Jen Calonita

To follow your dream is to define your life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. ~ Adrienne Rich

Sometimes reality is a fantastically traumatic nightmare. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let's think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow - that's vulnerability. ~ Brene Brown

I think love is the most important thing in life. Whatever kind, however you define it, but I think of it generally as being greatly valued by another human being and greatly valuing another human being. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Never let others define who you are because most are still trying to figure out who they are. ~ Rodney Walker

Think of a single word. We'll use soul as our example. How do you define soul? Is it the same definition I use? Can it ever be it? My soul is not your soul. Our souls, our definitions, are shaped by the singular and cumulative experiences in our lives, the emotional weight we attach to a concept forever locked in the space behind our own eyes. ~ Chris Kluwe

What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters. ~ Matthea Harvey

People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be. It's almost heartening to think that the attachment you have can define your perception as much as any other influence. ~ David Levithan

But over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships. ~ Ann Patchett

I define personal power as a state of mind in which a person is confident he can handle whatever may come. This kind of power not only successfully deals with problems, challenges and adversity, it actually welcomes them, meets them head on, and is thankful for them. Personal power isn't the absence of fear. Even the most powerful people have fear. Personal power is the result of feeling fear, but not giving in to the fear. ~ Robert A. Glover

But a man's best friend is the one who not only wishes him well but wishes it for his own sake (even though nobody will ever know it): and this condition is best fulfilled by his attitude towards himself - and similarly with all the other attributes that go to define a friend. For we have said before that all friendly feelings for others are extensions of a man's feelings for himself. ~ Aristotle.

I am not my uncle. I am not my father, but I do subscribe to the twenty rules he taught me from the cradle. One, if you're afraid to fight, then you'll never win. Two, in times of tragedy and turmoil, you'll learn who your true friends are. Treasure them because they are few and far between. Three, know your enemies, and never become your own worst one. Four, be grateful for those enemies. They will keep you honest and ever striving to better yourself. Five, listen to all good advice, but never substitute someone else's judgment for your own. Six, all men and women lie. But never lie to yourself. Seven, many will flatter you. Befriend the ones who don't, for they will
remind you that you're human and not infallible. Eight, never fear the truth. It's the lies that will destroy you. Nine, your worst decisions will always be those that are made out of fear. Think all matters through with a clear head. Ten, your mistakes won't define you, but your memories, good and bad, will. Eleven, be grateful for your mistakes as they will tell you who and what you're not. Twelve, don't be afraid to examine the past, it's how you learn what you don't want to do again. Thirteen, there's a lot to be said for not knowing better. Fourteen, all men die. Not everyone lives. Fifteen, on your deathbed, your greatest regrets will be what you didn't do. Sixteen, don't be afraid to love. Yes, it's a weakness that can be used against you. But it's also a source of the greatest strength you will ever ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too? ~ Audre Lorde

We all fictionalize ourselves in the process of creating a story out of the raw materials of our life. For some it is a soap opera, for others an epic, but, for all of us, it's an ongoing narrative that we constantly manipulate and reshape, improving (like the best anecdotes) in the retelling. This is not just true of writers. The story is one of the key ways we define and order our experiences as human beings: how we tell ourselves and others who we are.
(from the Daily Telegraph) ~ Neil McCormick

I define a 'good person' as somebody who is fully conscious of their own limitations. They know their strengths, but they also know their 'shadow' - they know their weaknesses. In other words, they understand that there is no good without bad. Good and evil are really one, but we have broken them up in our consciousness. We polarize them. ~ John Bradshaw

A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life. ~ Michel Foucault

You're filled with passion and ambition and appetites, and I'm the man to match you. I want a woman who knows who she is, who doesn't need me to define her because she's already her own person. ~ Kate Meader

Don't allow people to define you based on reading the abstract of your story without even reading chapter 1. Continue to write the remaining chapters. ~ Assegid Habtewold

I am quite miserable because I'm never satisfied with what I've got. You're always looking for that next high, and that is what I would define as happiness. ~ Simon Cowell

My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life. ~ Michael Sandel