Defining Quotes

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal. (Anatole France)
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds. View quote
Jonathan Ive
The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function. View quote
Jonathan Ive
We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it. View quote
Jon Ronson
And when you really think about the 9-11 event, the horrific attack on our land here in America and the death of three thousand of out loved ones, it was a defining moment. View quote
Donald Evans
People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it's a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property. View quote
Michael Nesmith
I don't like defining myself. I just am. View quote
Britney Spears
No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament.”. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Elegance requires that the number of defining equations be small. Five is better than ten, and one is better than five. On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has found even a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any. View quote
Leonard Susskind
One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments. (Roger Ebert)
What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else. View quote
Stanislaw Ulam
The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. View quote
Dean Koontz
The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [...] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces. View quote
Thomas Friedman
There are defining moments in one's life when you learn about yourself, and you deposit that knowledge in the experience account, so you can draw on it at some later date. View quote
Jeffrey Archer
The great advantage of our system of government over all others, is, that we have a written constitution, defining its limits, and prescribing its authorities; and that, however, for a time, faction may convulse the nation, and passion and party prejudice sway its functionaries, the season of reflection will recur, when calmly retracing their deeds, all aberrations from fundamental principle will be corrected. View quote
Henry Clay
The terms ‘male' and ‘female' must be understood as representing no more primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live. View quote
Laura Riding
Tommy Hearns seemed like an indestructible machine, so to beat him, I think that was my defining moment, the pinnacle. View quote
Sugar Ray Leonard
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not. View quote
Ad Reinhardt
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. View quote
Gene Wolfe
Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself. (Robert M. Pirsig)
Futility is the defining characteristic of life. View quote
Stephen R. Donaldson
So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true. View quote
Wim Wenders
Anaximander used to assert that the primary cause of all things was the Infinite,-not defining exactly whether he meant air or water or anything else. View quote
Diogenes Laërtius
Defining the terms of the debate generally dictates who's gonna' win it. View quote
Paul Begala