Quotes & Sayings About Being Defined

Like most ancient names, YHWH had a meaning. It seems to have meant 'I am who I am' or 'I will be who I will be.' This God, the name suggests, can't be defined in terms of anything or anyone else. It isn't the case that there is such a thing as 'divinity' and that he's simply another example, even the supreme one, of this category. Nor is it the case that all things that exist, including God, share in something we might call 'being' or 'existence,' so that God would then be the supremely existing being. Rather, he is who he is. He is his own category, not part of a larger one. — N. T. Wright

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. By thy might, there return into us treasures that we had abandoned. By thy grace, there are released in us all the dried-up runnels of our heart. Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate - thou so pure within the bowels of the earth! A man may die of thirst lying beside a magnesian spring. He may die within reach of a salt lake. He may die though he hold in his hand a jug of dew, if it be inhabited by evil salts. For thou, water, art a proud divinity, allowing no alteration, no foreignness in thy being. And the joy that thou spreadest is an infinitely simple joy. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

We recognize that our progress as a species does not have to be defined in terms of wealth or material and physical growth any more than our progress as individuals has to be defined in terms of physical growth. Physical growth of the body reaches a limit, but the character and the soul of the individual continues to grow, or at least has a chance to continue, often to our last breath. It is simple minded to define our well being in material terms, when that well-being has an aesthetic dimension, and intellectual dimension, a moral dimension. — Wes Jackson

These days, information is a commodity being sold. And designers-including the newly defined subset of information designers and information architects-have a responsible role to play. We are interpreters, not merely translators, between sender and receiver. What we say and how we say it makes a difference. If we want to speak to people, we need to know their language. In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design. — Erik Spiekermann

If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are
the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. — Eckhart Tolle

Years ago she had discovered that she could control her relationships with heterosexual men far better by playing the sexy siren than the blushing ingenue. Being the sexual aggressor put her subtly in charge. She was the one who defined the rules of the game instead of the man, and when she sent her suitor on his way, he assumed it was because he didn't measure up to all the other men in her life. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

He defined the state as being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost. — Steven Kotler

What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent. — Meghan Daum

If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous and caring. We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive. — Tara Brach

R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being more than say five minutes late. It — Douglas Adams

The psychologist George Frankl atributes class structure and conflict and most of the ills of society to the sexual class war based on the Oedipul pattern; that is, murderous phallic conflict between males for the favour of the women, those favours being defined by the men themselves. This system is, as it were, only haunted by women, who cannot in it acheive expression or contribute to society anything of their true nature, and are regarded as a kind of castrated man. — Peter Redgrove

The entire notion of being defined by the crap you bring into your minds, bodies and souls, rather than what you produce with your mind, body and soul is a glaring offense to everything we are here to do on this beautiful blue ball of a planet. — Michael Tallon

The national interest cannot be defined as a common interest of the industrial, commercial, and financial companies of a country, because there is no such common interest; nor can it be defined as the life, liberty, and well-being of the citizens, because they are continually being adjured to sacrifice their well-being, their liberty, and their lives to the national interest. In the end a study of modern history leads to the conclusion that the national interest of every State consists in its capacity to make war. — Simone Weil

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. — Luke Rhinehart

That's what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."
"You don't even know why you need to be world-famous; you just think you do. — John Green

St. Thomas adopts a division of the nine choirs into three groups, according to their intellectual perfection and consequent nearness in being to God - Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Other writers suggest different arrangements; and there is a mass of magnificent theological speculation as to the difference of function between one choir and another. But the Church has defined nothing upon this matter. — Frank Sheed

There is no point in being a responsible member of society, nor is there any point in being an irresponsible member of society. Both are very defined descriptions of selfhood — Frederick Lenz

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation. — George Bernard Shaw

It was a loss of identity. I was a wizard. It was more than just a job, more than just a title. Wizardry was at the core of my being. It was my relationship with my magic, the way I used it, the things it let me do that defined me, shaped me, gave me purpose. I — Jim Butcher

When I read the documents relative to the Modernism, as it was defined by Saint Pius X, and when I compare them to the documents of the II Vatican Council, I cannot help being bewildered. For what was condemned as heresy in 1906 was proclaimed as what is and should be from now on the doctrine and method of the Church. In other words, the modernists of 1906 were, somewhat, precursors to me. My masters were part of them. My parents taught me Modernism. How could Saint Pius X reject those that now seem to be my precursors? — Jean Guitton

Everything that the Bible identifies as sin and our nature recognizes as such is something essentially good gone wrong. More precisely, it is something God has made that we have corrupted. Augustine defined the essence of sin as being curved in on ourselves — Michael S. Horton

Both could articulate the gospel well, but they don't view the essence of the gospel as the foundation for all of ministry. And that's a huge difference - the difference between knowing the gospel and being consumed by the gospel, being defined by the gospel, being driven by the gospel. It's one thing to see the gospel as an important facet of one's ministry. It's quite another to hold firmly to it as the centerpiece for all a church is and does, to completely orbit around it. — Matt Chandler

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. — Byung-Chul Han

I know we are raised to believe that our lives are defined by being chosen or not being chosen, but I'm starting to think there's another truth we're missing — Rachelle Dekker

I wouldn't want to even try to begin to describe our customer, as I think she likes a certain amount of anonymity. I try to offer clothes that allow that. I myself do not like being defined so readily, so I imagine that she is similar? — Phoebe Philo

What the fates have writ, men shall not erase . . . . How many times he [Lut] had uttered those words. But what exactly did they mean? That one's fate was inalterably fixed? A man's entire life? Was there no chance for redemption? Though he had never revealed this to anyone, especially not the elders, he'd long entertained the notion that perhaps not all of a man's life was preordained. For, if so, what was the point of living? Perhaps, just perhaps, he dared to imagine, impediments were placed in our paths by the gods, and a man was judged by how well he dealt with those obstacles . . . . Instead of a man being wholly defined by his fate, perhaps a man's very character was defined by his response to the fate that was spun for him. Couldn't it at least be possible? — James Jennewein

I always defined myself in terms of my talkativeness, and being without a voice hits me in a number of ways. — John Diamond

Courage is defined as: the ability to face danger, difficulty, uncertainty, or pain without being overcome by fear or being deflected from a chosen course of action. Many of today's world leaders have great courage: I wonder ... would we be better off with cowardice? — Joshua Fernandez

Depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Harry's status as orphan gives him a freedom other children can only dream about (guiltily, of course). No child wants to lose their parents, yet the idea of being removed from the expectations of parents is alluring. The orphan in literature is freed from the obligation to satisfy his/her parents, and from the inevitable realization that his/her parents are flawed human beings. There is something liberating, too, about being transported into the kind of surrogate family which boarding school represents, where the relationships are less intense and the boundaries perhaps more clearly defined. — J.K. Rowling

There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists* call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realize that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn't. — Terry Pratchett

What does it mean to be cultured? Who is the cultured person? The cultured individual is not defined nor determined by status in society nor by wealth; but the cultured individual is determined and defined by his or her sense for the art of life. And what is the art of life? The art of life is the reflection of the mind and the soul upon the world, upon other people, upon the respect and understanding of other people and upon the things that are in this world and beyond. There is a joy that is always sought in beautiful things. Being cultured is being conscious, reflective, understanding, feeling, aware. Knowing how to feel, to listen, to understand. A desire to find or to create joy in many things - that is the art of life. And these things define a cultured person. — C. JoyBell C.

As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil. — M. Scott Peck

Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem ... The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women. — Sandra Scarr

My message isn't perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure. — Kanye West

Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the past imperfect, the present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect. — Amrom Harry Katz

Poverty is a funny phenomenon. It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn. It is possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially categorised as poverty-stricken. You can also be really unhappy despite earning a high salary. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, regardless of how much they earn, while those who are content with what they have will always feel they have an abundance. Most poverty in the UK isn't material poverty, it's spiritual poverty, a state of mind in which fulfilment comes only from the pursuit of material gain. — Mark Boyle

People are making careful, comely, dignified work of the essential tasks defined by modern values as "drudgery." And because they have thought of the well-being of all the people, all are busy. There is a use for everyone. The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have "freed from drudgery." And — Wendell Berry

In my first leadership position, I mistakenly thought that being named the leader meant that I was the leader. Back then I defined leading as a noun - as the position I was appointed to - not a verb - as what I was doing. Though I had been hired as the senior pastor, I quickly discovered the real leader of the church was a down-to-earth farmer named Claude, who had been earning his leadership influence through many positive actions over many years. He later explained it to me, saying, "John, all the letters — John C. Maxwell

The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom - for both the patients and doctors - is defined by how one copes with it. — Atul Gawande

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things ... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. — Shelby Foote

Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret. — Benito Mussolini

Prior to the advent of the civilization of the Third Estate (mercantilism, capitalism), the social ethics that was religiously sanctioned in the West consisted in realizing one's being and in achieving one's own perfection within the fixed parameters that one's individual nature and the group to which one belonged clearly defined. Economic activity, work, and profit were justified only in the measure in which they were necessary for sustenance and to ensure the dignity of an existence conformed to one's own estate, without the lower instinct of self-interest or profit coming first. — Julius Evola

Herein lay the rub. The Americans, like all Western armies, defined "winning" as killing the enemy and securing control over the battlefield. Their opponents in previous conflicts had generally accepted the same definition. Not so the Moros. What was important to them was the struggle and how one conducted oneself, personally and as a people, not necessarily a measurable outcome. They knew from the beginning they were no match for American firepower. It was a one-sided contest, what today is termed "asymmetric warfare," but so what? Their measure was how well one did against the odds, the more overwhelmingly they were against one, the greater the glory. And being that life is transitory anyway, what mattered most was how much courage was shown and how well did one die. The Americans and the Moros were using different score cards for the same game. To the Moros, it was they who had "won. — Robert A. Fulton

In 2001 New York came under attack, and thousands of people simply evaporated, leaving behind only dust and bits of gold Rolex watches. We were told that we had nothing to worry about, that we should go shopping. I was eager to please my country, for shopping had long been an answer for me, but what I couldn't pay for, I stole. I started to accumulate stuff I felt would make me feel whole: I surrounded myself with symbols of status. I believed the TV commercials with all my heart. I felt that those material things I was being sold defined me. — Joe Pantoliano

I have already indicated to you the meaning of the word religion, as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a Church. It is a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism. — Muhammad Iqbal

I believe that there is an important part of every human being that is defined in terms of their significant other: how we choose our partner, and how we behave when we are with them. And that is the part that interests me. How that part of the personality is forged doesn't just interest me, it fascinates me. — Angeles Mastretta

Think of all the girls who could become top athletes but quit sports because they're afraid of having too many defined muscles and being made fun of or called unattractive. — Serena Williams

Time if the inner form of animal sense that animates events-the still frames-of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures-a series of spatial states-into an order, into the 'current' of life. Motion is created in our minds by running "film cells" together. Remember that everything you perceive-even this page-is actively, repeatedly, being constructed inside your head. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could stop its "motor" for a moment, you'd get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states. — Robert Lanza

Health can be defined negatively, as the absence of illness, functionally, as the ability to cope with everyday activities, or positively, as fitness and well-being. It has also been noted that in the modern world, health still has a moral dimension. — Mildred Blaxter

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one. — Eckhart Tolle

Being political is an integral part of being Iranian. Our lives are defined by politics. — Shirin Neshat

Available in HTML and CSS. In the absence of a font being found, the web browser will use its default font, which may be a user defined one. Depending on the web browser, a user can in fact override the font defined by the code writer. This may be for personal taste reasons, but may also — Anonymous

He got to know me, not with the minuteness with which I knew him, but with his spontaneous conclusions. He talked about everyone and defined them, but I had the privilege of being the only one in whom he discovered new facets, the only one to whom he addressed questions from the soul, the only one he examined and in whom he found what they never gave him, but he was frightened by the discovery. The two of us were filled with fear that night, the only night, when we again closed what we'd opened, as if we'd never seen it. — Jorge Franco

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it. — Jessa Crispin

People don't mind having the mystical aspect of a church being poorly defined as long as you make the rules of the church clear. — John Scalzi

You don't have a choice about being an alcoholic. But you do get to choose what kind of alcoholic you're going to be: the kind who lets his addiction define his life, or the kind whose life is too rich and purposeful to be defined by addiction. — Eric Greitens

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent
war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. — Susan Sontag

Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one's life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being. — Walter Brueggemann

This is the defining event of my life and you're treating it like it's normal. like it's nothing."
He leaned back, looking up at the sk. "Well, maybe it should stop being the defining event. There's a whole lot more to an average life than something that happened before you were a year old."
I knew that he was right, but it was scary. I looked away because I didn't want him to see how lonely I'd been. It was disorienting to think everything that had defined me for so long was only circumstantial. — Brenna Yovanoff

Being satisfied: this is the general model of being and living whose promoters and supporters do not appreciate the fact that it generates discontent. For the quest for satisfaction and the fact of being satisfied presuppose the fragmentation of 'being' into activities, intentions, needs, all of them well-defined, isolated, separable and separated from the Whole. Is this an art of living? A style? No. It is merely the result and the application to daily life of a management technique and a positive knowledge directed by market research. The economic prevails even in a domain that seemed to elude it: it governs lived experience. — Henri Lefebvre

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. — Simone De Beauvoir

Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books. — Simone De Beauvoir

Hurt people hurt people. We are not being judgmental by separating ourselves from such people. But we should do so with compassion. Compassion is defined as a "keen awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a desire to see it relieved." People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain. Avoid the reactive response of believeing they are bad; they already think so and are acting that way. They aren't bad; they are damaged and they deserve compassion. Note that compassion is an internal process, an understanding of the painful and troubled road trod by another. It is not trying to change or fix that person. — Will Bowen

There are more than 30 states, who either by statute or constitutional amendment, have defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. — John Thune

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes. — Peter F. Drucker

[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex
absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute
she is the Other. — Simone De Beauvoir

Remote Sensing is defined as the acquisition of information about an object without being in physical contact with it. — Charles Elachi

I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It's the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America. — Geoff Dyer

What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined. — Daniel Kraus

A mobile device adds rich contextual sensors and is aware of the world around it. Context is now much more than knowing where you are in an interface - it is where you are in a densely rich real-world environment. No longer is it enough to present a "map" of archived, published information. No longer is it enough to simulate a virtual world. The mobile device must be able to sense where a user is and facilitate actions situated in an immediate, living moment of experience defined by real places and times, by real states of being. — Frank Bentley

I'm a huge fan of a lot of different genres of music, and I really felt like somehow I had been pigeonholed a little bit - maybe of my own doing - and in a way where I felt like I was sort of falsely defined. What my music was being called wasn't really the music I was always listening to. — Kathleen Edwards

What is freedom?
Is it moving through a room unhindered, in any direction you want, fast or slow? Or is it being able to think any thought whatsoever, high or low, without shame or fear? Is freedom being able to openly express your convictions, and then trying to influence others to think the same thing? Or is freedom having the possibility to choose, being able to say no to what you don't want?
[...]
Freedom, thought Phillip Mouse, would be to outwit the limitations fate had once given him. To break out of the social, intellectual, and emotional framework that the factory [birthplace] and his youth had defined.
Freedom, thought Mouse, was to surprise life by placing yourself above your fate. — Tim Davys

I want to design for the working women. Okay well - it sounds like 90% of us are that. But really, we are more. We are working women who like to cook, to travel; we are a girlfriend, a writer. We are so much more than just being defined by the one job we have. — Sarah Lafleur

People aren't defined by their relationship. The whole point is being true to yourself and not losing yourself in relationships, whether romances or friendships. — Nina Dobrev

Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as "a place where the person you least want to live with always lives." His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?) — Philip Yancey

Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The child must have food, clothes, a bed, and some quality time.
In sharp contrast to such a weak view, God has called you to a more profound task than being only a care-provider. You shepherd your child in God's behalf. The task God has given you is not one that can be conveniently scheduled. It is a pervasive task. Training and shepherding are going on whenever you are with your children. Whether waking, walking, talking or resting, you must be involved in helping your child to understand life, himself, and his needs from a biblical perspective (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). — Tedd Tripp

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [ ... ]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. — Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child's well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975. — Sheryl Sandberg

To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but "affirm" other people's way of life or even "celebrate" diversity in general. Like other demands for "sensitivity," this demand offers no reason - unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason. — Thomas Sowell

The very concept of an Iranian university is an oxymoron. There are no free and open places of learning in that repressive theocracy. Dissenters are not given tenure; they are murdered, after first being tortured. Blasphemy, which is broadly defined, is punished. Gays are not only excluded from Iranian universities, but are imprisoned and killed. — Alan Dershowitz

Communication is defined not by what is being said but by what is being heard. For this reason, it is vital that you gain a good appreciation of how other people will listen - interpret, process, and assign meaning - to what you have to say before you can influence them effectively. — Margie Warrell

For what Luc was in fact proposing was just a game, an enticing game, but, even so, one that could destroy my undoubtedly quite genuine feelings for Bertrand; and it could destroy something else within me, something ill-defined but fiercely felt, which, whether I liked it or not, was opposed to transience. Or, at the very least, to the intentionally transient nature of what Luc what was offering. And then, even if I was able to conceive of any passion or liaison as being short-lived, I couldn't accept in advance that it had to be that way. Like any individual for whom life is a series of charades, I could bear the charades only if they were written by me, and by me alone. — Francoise Sagan

Not long ago, man grew a sense of conscience. He defined himself by what he is, what he thinks, and, more importantly, what he feels - failing to realize that all come from One single source. All of man's qualities come from One divine being. And that One being has bestowed nature's hand with the ability to balance itself. Where there is good, there is also evil. And where evil arises, so does good — Soroosh Shahrivar

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating. — A.S. Byatt

Man is merely a frequent effect, a monstrosity is a rare one, but both are equally natural, equally inevitable, equally part of the universal and general order. And what is strange about that? All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species ... all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal ... There is nothing clearly defined in nature. — John Dewey

Psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e., those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd and defined in terms of common and external goals — Gilles Deleuze

If you care so much about it," she asks him, "then why did you run?"
He takes a moment before answering, shifting his weight and grimacing again. "Their work is good," he says. "It just isn't mine."
This baffles her. His motives - his hazy integrity. It was easy to dismiss Lev as "part of the problem" when she did not know him, but now it's not so easy. He's a paradox. This is a boy who almost blew himself to bits in an attempt to kill others, and yet he offered himself to the parts pirate in order to save Miracolina's life. How could someone go from having no respect for one's own existence to being willing to give himself as a sacrifice for someone he barely knows? It flies in the face of the truths that have defined Miracolina's life. The bad are bad, the good are good, and being caught in between is just an illusion. There is no gray. — Neal Shusterman

I doubt most people could survive being defined by the least advisable sexual encounter they've engaged in. — Amanda Marcotte

We are able to speak for ourselves through our music rather than being defined and put into the spotlight in a very male kind of groomed way for an obviously predominantly male audience. — Shingai Shoniwa

young IT manager defined being the boss as developing people around him who would then rely upon him for his advice and expertise in correcting their weaknesses. — Fred Luthans

I've owned a lot of dogs in my life - Marcela, Rusty, Petey Pup, Precious, Rosy and Ava. Each were in love with life's simple pleasures, but being people in dog suits, as they seem to be, they each had a defined personality! — Bob Peterson

A period may be defined as a portion of speech that has in itself a beginning and an end, being at the same time not too big to be taken in at a glance — Aristotle.

We must never confuse the positive things that America does with the kingdom of God, for the kingdom of God is not centered on being morally, politically, or socially positive *relative* to other versions of the kingdom of the world. Rather, the kingdom of God is centered on being *beautiful*, as defined by Jesus Christ dying on a cross for those who crucified him. — Gregory A. Boyd

Many of us don't even know what it means to have a Christian perspective on our work. Oh, we know that being a Christian means being ethical on the job- as Saly put it, "no lying and cheating." But the work itself is typically defined in secular terms as bringing home a paycheck, climbing the career ladder, building a professional reputation. — Nancy Pearcey

Your identity should not be fully defined by what you do, by being a manager, a wife, a mother of children or a computer programmer — Sunday Adelaja

Although I claim to be a Christian, I live at a moment in time when the Christian faith is being defined by fundamentalists who have dishonored Christ and are in the process of destroying His church. I refuse to wear the 'Christian' label without redefining it. — Mel White

Whatever the variations by race, class, age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, being a man means "not being like women." This notion of antifemininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood, so that masculinity is defined more by what one is not rather than who one is. — Michael S. Kimmel

Effective thinking consists of being able to arrive at the truth; truth being defined as that which exists. — Calvin S. Hall

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. — Viktor E. Frankl