Quotes About Definition

A definition is death. A definition is the answer to which you must look up the question in the back of your book.

The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.

What is a positive attitude? The simple definition is the way you dedicate yourself to the way you think. Interestingly, it's also the definition of a negative attitude.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Truth cannot be defined, although it can certainly be experienced. But experience is not a definition. A definition is made by the mind, experience comes through participating. If somebody asks, "What is a dance?" how can you define it? But you can dance and you can know the inner feel of it. God is the ultimate dance.

Law is a process. If there is equality of process for everybody, then that's our definition of justice. Whether or not what is done is right or wrong, you follow the process. And so, the end result is just by definition within that alternative universe that is American law. Most people still operate within a moral universe where principles of good and bad and what is right and wrong in itself, and not just as a result of the process.

The definition of an asshole is someone who doesn't believe what he is seeing.

My definition of love is being full. Complete. It makes everything lighter. Beauty is something you see. Love is something you feel.

Allow me to offer a simple definition of wisdom. Wisdom is looking at life from God's point of view.

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

The definition of eternity is two people and a ham.

Lenten practices of giving up pleasures are good reminders that the purpose of life is not pleasure. The purpose of life is to attain to perfect life, all truth and undying ecstatic love - which is the definition of God. In pursuing that goal we find happiness. Pleasure is not the purpose of anything; pleasure is a by-product resulting from doing something that is good. One of the best ways to get happiness and pleasure out of life is to ask ourselves, 'How can I please God?' and, 'Why am I not better?' It is the pleasure-seeker who is bored, for all pleasures diminish with repetition.

A realistic definition of risk recognizes the potential loss of capital through inflation and taxes, and would include at least the following two factors: The probability that the investment you chose will preserve your capital over the time you intend to invest your funds. The probability the investments you select will outperform alternative investments for this period.

Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

The very definition of 'beauty' is outside.

For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'

Maybe the best definition of what a great partnership or great love is when people make each other grow in a better direction than they would have grown on their own.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

My definition of prosperity would be quite different than what most people probably imagine or think, because I think that a wholeness word that means nothing missing, nothing broken. It's not finances or materialism.

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

A skeptic is one who is willing to question any truth claim, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence.

My definition of secularism is very clear. The sole religion of the Government is Nation First, the holy book is the Constitution.

Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That's simply not true. You can improve control if you look at control as the control of events and not people. Then, the more people you have controlling events - the more people you have that care about controlling the events, the more people you have proactively working to create favorable events - the more control you have within the organization, by definition.

Immigrants who come to a country are going to lose something, for sure, but they hope to gain a great deal by making this journey, whereas refugees by definition have lost a tremendous amount - not just country and society, but also more personal things like careers, prestige, status, relatives, identities. This inevitably makes the longing to remember the past even more powerful among refugees, to the point of often debilitating them.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

He emphasised basic truths: you are not dying yet, you have to live your life until you are. Underpinning them was the belief that the grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. I didn’t believe that at the time, but now I do. By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.

There are, almost by definition, an unlimited number of Hells - potentially at least a personal one for every living sapient being.

The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead - and failing forward.

When the media defines something, you have to question: Is it the definition that you want applied to your culture? I'm trying to determine who's leaving the legacy, and if the legacy that is being left is a positive one.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

I want the definition of startup back. To be used by anybody who is willing to take the risk to quit their corporate job and go out and try and build an innovative, disruptive, tech-enabled business that tries to change the way things work in the world.

My definition of success is to be happy in what you like to do best. It's not a monetary value; it's an internal value in itself. If you're happy from the inside-out, thats what is important. Success comes as a day to day value or reaching a goal that you have, and you've got to prepare yourself for what's to come when success is there.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.

I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding.

I'm so passionately hopelessly in love with my job! I think the definition of workaholic is that you can't wait till the weekend is over so you can start working again.

I think it's offensive to equate evangelical Christians, Catholics, others that view marriage as between a man and a woman, as being racist. We're not racist. We love our fellow man, we think we're all equal under God's eyes, we don't believe we should change the definition of marriage simply because of opinion polls or because of a court that quite frankly isn't looking at the constitution.

Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

The definition of flexibility is being constantly open to the fact that you might be on the wrong track.

Sanity and enlightenment...I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option.

The definition of hell in the legal system is: endless due process and no justice; (in the corporate world) it would be: endless due diligence and no horse sense.

While an artist can choose whether or not to be responsive and responsible towards other human beings, by definition a designer must be.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

America is now a socialist economy. The definition of a socialist economy is when 50% or more of your economy is dependent on the federal government.

Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception.