Definitions Quotes - Page 31

• God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goal in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence, and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense , His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give, and nothing to receive.

  C. S. Lewis

  Plato, Children, Real

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• We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Heart, Exercise

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• I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

  Glen Duncan

  Lying, Unbearable, Killing Yourself

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• And then he pressed into her. First his thighs, then his middle, his chest, and finally his mouth. She made a whimpering sound, but its definition was unclear even to her, until she realized that her arms had gone around him instinctually, and that she was clutching his back, his shoulders, her hands restless and greedy for the feel of him. He kissed her openmouthed, using his tongue, and when she kissed back, she felt the hum that vibrated deep inside his chest. It was the kind of hungry sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. Masculine and carnal, it thrilled and aroused her.

  Sandra Brown

  Hands, Long, Sound

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• There were a number of definitions of courage, but now I was seeing it in its simplest form: you do what has to be done day after day, and you never quit.

  Eric Greitens

  Numbers, Done, Never Quit

  Eric Greitens (2011). “The Heart and the Fist: The education of a humanitarian, the making of a Navy SEAL”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

  Sam Harris

  Lying, Understanding, Trustworthiness

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• Someone has said, “A friend is a person who is willing to take me the way I am.” Accepting this as one definition of the word, may I quickly suggest that we are something less than a real friend if we leave a person the same way we find him.

  Marvin J. Ashton

  Real, May, Way

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• My nephew has HDADHD. High Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it's unbelievably clear.

  Steven Wright

  Nephew, Doe, Attention

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• Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

  Janette Rallison

  Lying, Believe, Fiction

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• By nature of definition only the coward is capable of the highest heroism

  David Gemmell

  Coward, Heroism, Highest

  David Gemmell (2011). “Legend”, p.33, Hachette UK

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• The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.

  Bernd Heinrich

  Ideas, Self, Ecosystems

  Bernd Heinrich (1997). “The Trees in My Forest”, Harpercollins

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• My definition of freedom is knowing who you are, and then being it. No matter what anyone else is doing. And naked parties of course.

  Pink

  Party, Knowing, Naked

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• I'm not body-shy -- it's hard to grow up in the Summerlands, where clothes are solidly optional, and stay body-shy -- but that doesn't mean I enjoy nudity. Naked people are, by definition, unarmed.​

  Mira Grant

  Growing Up, Mean, Clothes

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• There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

  John Fowles

  God

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

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• I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Pain, Believe, Struggle

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• To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

  N. Scott Momaday

  Space, Forever, Devil

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• I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Art, Struggle, Understanding

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• When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Pain, Book

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1937). “Essays, First and Second Series”, p.109, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Definition of a relationship - an enduring, mutually-agreed upon connection or union, which fulfills certain needs of the individuals involved and the society in which they live.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Connections, Needs, Unions

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• The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

  George Orwell

  Cutting, Years, Common Humanity

  George Orwell (2001). “Orwell's England: the Road to Wigan Pier in the context of essays, reviews, letters and poems selected from the Complete works of George Orwell”, ePenguin

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• ...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

  Robert Penn Warren

  Lying, Self, Justice

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• I don't believe there is any such definition, there is no such thing as evil, only moral judgments based on what society believes to be wrong behavior.

  Nikolas Schreck

  Believe, Evil, Moral

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• Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore

  Jodi Picoult

  Stories, Stones, Ends

  Jodi Picoult, Samantha van Leer (2013). “Between the Lines”, p.322, Simon and Schuster

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• If faith were rational , it wouldn't be -by definition- faith.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Rational, Eat Pray And Love, Eat Pray Love Book

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• Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.

  Justina Chen

  Beautiful, True Beauty

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