450 Quotes About Definitions

I'm going to use them to track him down and thwart him." "Thwart?" Sarissa asked."Thwart." I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person.""I'm pretty sure that isn't the definition," Sarissa said."It is today.

They spoke different languages--languages of homonyms. "Ignorance," "hate," "bigotry," "oppression"--they sounded the same when spoken, but connotations were the new definitions. She and Szofi could never understand each other. The very words they chose would force them apart.

Hypocrite: The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

Once she exclaimed, "But I always thought that sorceresses were evil!""What do you mean 'evil'?"Lynet has never considered the question. "You know," she said, after a moment, "unfriendly to people.""People!" repeated Morgana derisively. "As if humans were all that mattered. Just once I'd like to see people judged by how friendly they are to sorceresses.

If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.