This Does Not Define You 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

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

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

If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are. — Oprah Winfrey

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

Contrary to the romantic way in which our history is/has been portrayed, politicians are NOT 'men of good conscience.' In the real world, it takes a psychopath to want to rule over other human beings. Unless you want to define the word 'service' in the context of what a bull does to a cow, in no way are the efforts of politicians in this regard any kind of 'service'. — Edward Britton

Promise me that no matter what, you will never be ashamed of who you are, no matter how bad you want to be. And this might not make sense to you right now, but I want you to promise me that you will never let the things your daddy does to you define and separate you from who you are. Promise me that you will never lose Hope. — Colleen Hoover

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

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

Some would define a servant like this: 'A servant is one who finds out what his master wants him to do, and then he does it.' The human concept of a servant is that a servant goes to the master and says, 'Master, what do you want me to do?' The master tells him, and the servant goes off BY HIMSELF and does it. That is not the biblical concept of a servant of God. Being a servant of God is different from being a servant of a human master. A servant of a human master works FOR his master. God, however, works THROUGH His servants. — Henry T. Blackaby

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured.
I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience. — Jennifer Worth

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

Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as "Your Honor" or "Mi Lud," without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this. — Alan W. Watts

I see autism as having many different strands. All of these strands are beautiful. They are all the colours of the rainsbow intertwined intricately into the child. If you try and take away the autism by removing the strands you also take away parts of the child as they are attached to them. Thhey are what makes them who they are. However autism is only a part of them, not the whole. It does not define them.

This is for my Tom. — J.M. Worgan

WORKSHOP 1. Read your writing aloud to a friend. Ask, "Does this sound like me?" Discuss the response. 2. After rereading your work, make a list of adjectives that define your voice, such as heavy or aggressive, ludicrous or tentative. Now try to identify the evidence in your writing that led you to these conclusions. 3. Read a draft of a story aloud. Can you hear problems in the story that you could not see? 4. Save the work of writers whose voices appeal to you. Consider why you admire the voice of a particular writer. How is it like your voice? How is it different? In a piece of freewriting, imitate that voice. — Roy Peter Clark

I never put myself in that box of you're an Oscar winner so you can only do this or that. That's one award, one night, and it does not define my career or it does not define me as an artist. I never wanted to get put in that Oscar box because that's a lonely place to be. — Halle Berry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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