Only You Can Define Yourself Quotes & Sayings

Let me say that I consider myself a deep believer in the reality of God. I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience. — John Shelby Spong

Be a complex person. The more ways you define yourself, the less vulnerable you are to setbacks in any area. If you're only a writer, and your book doesn't sell, you're sunk. But if you're a writer and researcher and a teacher and a wife and mother and gardener and volunteer EMT and singer in the choir, it's easier to bounce back from disappointments. The more sources of joy and pleasure in your life, the better. — Anonymous

Lord Jesus, thank You that my identity and worth is firmly rooted in You. My job doesn't define me, my relationships don't define me, and my various roles don't define me. I praise You for declaring me holy and dearly loved. You paid the highest price for my soul. How I thank You that I have value and significance in You. I am Your masterpiece, and You have gifted me uniquely for the roles You desire for me to play in Your kingdom. Thank You that I don't need to compare my gifts to the gifts of others in order to feel special. In Your kingdom, I am a royal priest/priestess. I praise You that I am a coheir with Christ and have inherited every blessing through Him. (Col. 3:12; 1 Cor. 6:12; Eph. 2:10; Isa. 43:4; Rom. 8:17) — Becky Harling

I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define. — Ellsworth Kelly

It pisses me off that you allow something so trivial to define such a huge part of you. I can't make you pretty in this book, because that would be an insult. You're fucking beautiful. And you're funny. And the only times I'm not completely enamored by you are the moments you're feeling sorry for yourself. Because I don't know if you've realized this yet, but you're alive, Fallon. And every time you look in the mirror, you don't have the right to hate what you see. Because you survived when a lot of people don't get that lucky. So from now on when you think about your scars, you aren't allowed to resent them. You're going to embrace them, because you're lucky to be on this earth to see them. And any guy you allow to touch your scars better thank you for that privilege." My — Colleen Hoover

Define the limits of your vision: Having this, you will not be poorer Than a man who rules a dukedom. — Su Shi

When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Besides, what's in a name? Actually, a lot. Whether taken from a parent or grandparent, some saint, or even the late great Elvis, your name insists another person's dream of what you should have been. The portrait of some ancestral ideal lingers through heirloom names. Gender specific names imply all sorts of expectations. More than just a signifier used to summon, instruct, address, accuse, sometimes praise us, our names define and thereby limit us. They put us in a cage. — Brien Piechos

Lord Henry: to define is to limit. — Oscar Wilde

I don't know how to choose work that illuminates what my life is about. I don't know what my life is about and don't examine it. My life will define itself as I live it. The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at the moment, it's enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about. — Sidney Lumet

Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves- simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth Plantation or a wigwam. No way to keep out cold, or heat, for long. No way to preserve food, or to cook it. The things that define us, quiet as rock outcrops - the dumb screens and dials, the senseless clicks of on/off switches- without their purpose, they lose the measure of their beauty and we are left alone in the dark with countless useless things. — Jane Brox

We must not allow the conformity of our society to define us. — Debasish Mridha

Liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion — Thomas Hobbes

May the Venusian arts enrich your life, not define it. — Mystery

We declare, assert, define and pronounce to be subject to the Roman Pontiff is to every creature altogether necessary for salvation ... I have the authority of the King of Kings. I am all in all, and above all, so that God Himself and I, the Vicar of Christ, have but one consistory, and I am able to do almost all that God can do. What therefore, can you make of me but God? — Pope Boniface VIII

If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can. — Larry Wall

Everyone has scars. Remember that you are stronger than your broken parts. Don't let them define who you are. — Beth Michele

And if you look at all this academic work in the conferences and so on there's a constant theme that terrorism is extremely hard to define and we therefore have to have a deep thinking about it. And the reason it's hard to define is quite simple. It's hard to find a definition that includes what they do to us but excludes what we do to them. That's quite difficult. So it takes a global war on terrorism. — Noam Chomsky

Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. — Eckhart Tolle

A cell in our body may recognize that it is part of a greater whole, but it may never be able to define all that is beyond it simply because of its limited perceptive capacity. Likewise, all that makes up the universal consciousness will always lie just outside of our capacity to define it. — Rajeev Kurapati

One problem with people is that as soon as they fill a space it's them you see and not the space. Large, desolate landscapes stop being large, desolate landscapes once they have people in them. They define what the eye sees. And the human eye is almost always directed at other humans. In this way an illusion is created that humans are more important than those things on earth which are not human. It's a sick illusion. — Erlend Loe

The Stoics define wisdom to be conducted by reason, and folly nothing else but the being hurried by passion, lest our life should otherwise have been too dull and inactive, that creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason; and reason he confined within the narrow cells of the brain, whereas he left passions the whole body to
range in.
Farther, he set up two sturdy champions to stand
perpetually on guard, that reason might make no assault,
surprise, nor inroad ; anger, which keeps its station in
the fortress of the heart ; and lust, which like the signs
Virgo and Scorpio, rules the appetites and passions. — Desiderius Erasmus

If you define yourself by what you're running away from, then how do you know when you've arrived at where you're going to? — Julia Kent

Your ribcage never meant to hurt you.
Your windpipe doesn't know how to be pretty,
but she knows how to howl -
and here, I'd like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it. An apology
for a starvation that went deeper than my skin.
One for the strongest skeleton I will ever own
and how I kept using the word girl against it.
Or how I turned words like beautiful into shapes
I could contort myself into. I didn't mean
to compare myself to faces I can't have.
Or spend years trying to carve myself,
like Michelangelo's angels, from the marble -
forgetting what it is to be skin instead of stone.
I let myself be afraid. I was taught to be.
When you learn you are only as good
as your beauty routine, you forget
how to define yourself by anything else. — Ashe Vernon

When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics.
Losing on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among other things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck?
If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are. — Lance Armstrong

satisfying. You don't have to psychoanalyze yourself; you can stop obsessing about your body and dwelling in disappointment and frustration. There is only one principle that applies: Life is about fulfillment. If your life isn't fulfilled, your stomach can never supply what's missing. "What Am I Hungry For?" Everyone's life story is complicated, and the best intentions go astray because people find it hard to change. Bad habits, like bad memories, stick around stubbornly when we wish they'd go away. But you have a great motivation working for you, which is your desire for happiness. I define happiness as the state of fulfillment, and everyone wants to be fulfilled. If you keep your eye on this, your most basic motivation, then the choices you make come down to a single question: "What am I hungry for?" Your true desire will lead you in the right direction. False desires — Deepak Chopra

Positive belief leaves no room for excuses; it questions why the feats and quests cannot be attained. When your beliefs are strong enough, you will not define yourself on the basis of past and present limitations or life events. Your success can only be as big as the size of your beliefs, for it is the size of your beliefs that will either limit your dream or allow it to explode. — Archibald Marwizi

You're only responsible for yourself, Jess. And that's the only person you can control. Other people will either get it or they won't but you can't define yourself by their opinions. — Susan Mallery

How lucky are you that you are alive today? Don't forget to live. Choose to live beautifully; it will define your destiny. — Debasish Mridha

Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man's advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think
are there such cases? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can. — Michael A. Singer

I like to think of the word love as a door. If you only look at the door, all you get is an idea about what love is; but if you are willing to move closer to the door, to open it, and to walk on through, you get to have an experience of what love is. To be intimate with love, you have to move beyond words, leave behind self-concepts, empty your mind of learned ideas, stop being so religious, and let yourself dissolve into love. Now we are really getting somewhere. Now, at last, we can stop trying to define love, and we can let — Robert Holden

Define your priorities, know your values and believe in your purpose. Only then can you effectively share yourself with others. — Les Brown

You narrow hope when you define it ... — Barbara Hambly

Look at your life. Look at the ways in which you define who you are and what you're capable of achieving. Look at your goals. Look at the pressures applied by the people around you and the culture in which you were raised. Look again. And again. Keep looking until you realize, within your own experience, that you're so much more than who you believe you are. Keep looking until you discover the wondrous heart, the marvelous mind, that is the very basis of your being. — Tsoknyi Rinpoche

I have a needle being stuck into my spine, can anyone please define "a little pain"? — Pandora Poikilos

If you feel comfortable, and you feel happy, and successful at your job, then that's success. You define that as success, then that's success. Success is not a general thing. It's a personal thing. It's a personal attribute. — Lupe Fiasco

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. — Isaac Newton

The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be his life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone. — Ken Grimwood

Sexuality shouldn't define you. It should be part of who you are. — Jessie J.

The technology for a clothing printer exists but is not packaged in a form that would be suitable for consumer use. With the future potential of printing technology, an at-home clothing printer is a definite possibility. Our challenge was to define the experience. — Joshua Harris

Being bisexual, being bipolar, being biracial - it's been used to define me, but I am desperate to be indefinable. — Halsey

Time may be defined as " dimension governed by activity." Dimension diminishes with inactivity so does the value of time. — Moutasem Algharati

In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a case. But who would accept such a definition? Writing is the production of meaning. Writing is thinking. — George Hillocks Jr.

You must define success as making the complete effort to maximize your ability, skills, and potential in whatever circumstances - good or bad - may exist. — John Wooden

It helps omit uninteresting details, provides convenient building blocks (such as while and console.log), allows you to define your own building blocks (such as sum and range), and makes those blocks easy to compose. — Marijn Haverbeke

The things you rebel against are the things that define you — Charles Sheehan-Miles

BROWSED this far into the magazine, you've likely noticed something unusual about this issue: it has three consecutive covers. Why? Good question. The theme of The Atlantic 's annual Ideas Issue this year is creativity - which is a hard concept to define, let alone to illustrate. We could have gone with an illuminated lightbulb, or photographed Brad Pitt painting at an easel, but those options didn't seem very ... creative. — Anonymous

You need to change the questions you ask yourself and of your situations, in order to change the trajectory of your life. These are questions that will help you define and refine your purpose. — Archibald Marwizi

To define [Canada] or its literature seems like putting a finger on Zeno's arrow: no sooner do you think you have done it than it has moved on. — M.G. Vassanji

We cannot define. Nothing has ever been finally figured out, because there is nothing final to figure out — Charles Fort

You were many wonderful things to many people before you met him
don't let this one event define who you are. — Mary Esselman