Top 1200 Defining Moments Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

Explore popular Defining Moments quotes.
Last updated on April 17, 2025.
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.
I really do think inspiration comes from day-to-day life. I think there's things that pique our interest - not necessarily aha! moments - but things that just kinda make you raise your eyebrows. And those are often the moments that are the seeds of inspiration. Sometimes they're in a great conversation with friends, sometimes they're things you see live, something you read, a movie trailer you watch... I think inspiration is kind of laid out there. One thing we have to practice is recognizing when it happens, and recording that moment so we can come back to it.
A v-neck T-shirt is the manliest of all upper-body garments. The defining feature of the style is a plummeting neckline that we normally associate with women's fashion, but when worn by a guy, it basically says, 'Here is a pie slice of chest hair that forms an arrow to my gut.' The deeper the 'V,' the more masculine the shirt.
First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected.
What goes on in the world and who's defining what is right or wrong in anything? Is there a place in any of our existence where we need judgment any longer? But we should have empathy towards each other and break away from those categories that politics and religion keep throwing back at us.
Multiculturalism is a campaign to lower America's moral status by defining the American experience is terms of myriad repressionsand their victims. By rewriting history, and by using name calling ("Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!") to inhibit debate, multiculturalists cultivate grievances, self pity and claims to entitlements arising from victimization.
What modeling taught me at a young age was how to say "no," which is something girls - we're not always good at saying "no." We want to be nice, and then we forget to look out for ourselves. There have been moments when I was on a modeling job, and it was the most fantastic thing in the world. And there have been moments where I've realized, "Okay, I'm ten years old, and I've spent the past six hours outside in the rain." It taught me how to be specific about what kinds of projects I wanted to do, and what kind of work I wanted to do.
I think social networking is absolutely here to stay. Now, whether or not the label will Facebook forever, depends in part, I think, on whether Facebook wants to try to be less proprietary, be more central to the operation of defining and stewarding identity online.
A lot of directors on a base level are fearful of actors and maybe even distrustful. I love the craft of acting and I love actors so I think they can probably sense that. They also know that I understand what their process is, having done it myself. The thing I come back to over and over again is that for most people who are not analyzing it from a critical point of view, most iconic film moments are actor moments. We show up to commune with another human being and their experience. We don't show up necessarily to watch a really cool dolly shot.
We all have weak moments, moments where we lose faith, but it's our flaws, our weaknesses that make us human. Science now performs miracles like the gods of old, creating life from blood cells or bacteria, or a spark of metal. But they're perfect creatures and in that way they couldn't be less human. There are things machines will never do, they cannot possess faith, they cannot commune with God. They cannot appreciate beauty, they cannot create art. If they ever learn these things, they won't have to destroy us, they'll be us.
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.
If there is a defining aspect of UNC women's soccer, and its success, it is what we call the competitive cauldron. It is the pinnacle of our program. The great part about the cauldron is that it fosters a quality we can all possess. It isn't a talent we are born with. Competitive drive is not governed by innate ability, but by self-discipline and desire
As a person, I am totally obsessed with the choices and decisions we make in our lives and how they dictate the course of our lives. Seemingly random choices that we make end up defining everything.
We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.
You have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community. If you don't succeed in this, then you will continue to pull that heavy wagon up the mountain, and despite the fact that you are pulling it, it will somehow run over your own foot.
I thought the message of the artist was more important than the writing style. I tried to be clear; I wanted everyone to be welcome. I think some of the more serious writers wrote to a more elite audience than that. They're the ones who were defining the seriousness of rock n' roll.
So remember, if marriage arises out of intimacy then it is beautiful. That means that everybody should have lived together before they get married. The honeymoon should not happen after marriage, it should happen before marriage. One should have lived the dark nights, the beautiful days, the sad moments, the happy moments, together. One should have looked into each other's eyes deeply, into each other's being.
At moments we are all artists. — © Arnold Bennett
At moments we are all artists.
The word 'success' - who's defining it? It's about whether or not it makes me feel good. Four billion people don't have to see or hear it. If I've enjoyed the process of creation and I'm at peace, then what happens next is just entertainment. If mass appeal were actually something, Marilyn Monroe wouldn't be dead.
In the future, it will not be the one big message, the one big voice, but millions of us, in our own way, healing, unifying, and experiencing that one defining moment when we recognize that sustaining the democracy is the common bottom line - whoever we are, whatever we do, wherever we are, the call is to sustain the democracy.
One of the defining characteristics or difference between today's illegal immigration and the immigration of old is the immigrants of the late 1800s through the early 1920s came here desiring to become Americans. They wanted to become part of what was a unique and distinct American culture. They were all coming from tyranny of one kind or another.
The problems that you see startups tackling are dramatically different in different cities. Silicon Valley is unlikely to produce the same set of companies as New York or Cleveland because the region has a different set of strengths and defining institutions.
I must say, I always - from experience, when I watch TV shows and I see characters leave without a proper explanation or leave with not enough time, I get irritated. I like it when there's a clean-cut reason or a defining moment where they have to go. Whether that's death or not, I think that's subjective.
At Camellia Network, we believe if we can create a way of identifying every young person aging out of foster care, defining what they need, and giving a community of supporters a simple and clear way to fulfill those needs, we can produce radically improved outcomes for youth.
Jerry Robinson illustrated some of the defining images of pop culture's greatest icons. As an artist myself, it's impossible not to feel humbled by his body of work. Everyone who loves comics owes Jerry a debt of gratitude for the rich legacy that he leaves behind.
A revolution simply means great change, significant change, and that's how I'm defining it - great change for the better, brought about through non-violent means.
All political parties, organizations, and all people should abide by the constitution and laws without any exception. They must all act in accordance with the constitution and laws. I see that as a defining feature of modern political system development.
Great thinkers think inductively, that is, they create solution and then seek out the problems that solution might solve; most companies think deductively, that is, defining a problem and then investigating different solutions.
A defining moment in my life was my first actual VMA performance… That was the first time in my head I said I made it. Everybody knows who you are now. At that point everything in my life was flawless… I was just overwhelmed, I was happy, I was successful as an artist. I think I was in cruise control – like a little bit of bliss.
So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.
Our main source of psychic energy in the future will depend on our ability to understand this symbol of evolution in an acceptable context of interpretation. Only in the context of an emergent universe will the human project come to an integral understanding of itself. We must, however, come to experience the universe in its psychic as well as in its physical aspect. We need to experience the sequence of evolutionary transformations as moments of grace, and also as celebration moments in our new experience of the sacred.
People never hurt others in moments of personal strength and bravery, when they are feeling good about themselves, when they are strong and confident. If we spent all of our waking moments in that place, then fighting for social justice would be redundant; we would simply have social justice and be done with it, and we could all go swimming, or fishing, or bowling, or dancing, or whatever people do. But it is because we spend so much of our time in that other place, that place of diminished capacity, of flagging energy, or wavering and somewhat flaccid commitment, that we have to be careful.
You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
Every indication is that the Sudanese government will be defining it as an Arab, Muslim country. But there are also a lot of Christians and a lot of people, like the Nuba, who are not Arab. And that is why it is going to be problematic that Sudan will be defined in this way.
There are no ordinary moments. — © Dan Millman
There are no ordinary moments.
Once in a while, life gives you a chance to measure your worth. Sometimes you're called upon to make a split-second decision to do the right thing, defining which way your life will go. These are the decisions that make you who you are.
If I learned one thing, it is that self-doubt is one of the most destructive forces. It makes you defensive instead of open, reactive instead of active. Self-doubt is consuming and cruel. And my hope today is that we can all collectively agree to ban it. .?.?. Think to the moments of your life when you forgot to doubt yourself. When you were so inspired that you were just living and creating and working. Pay attention to those moments because they're trying to reach you through those lenses of doubt and trying to show you your potential.
What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else. Roughly speaking, people know that it deals with numbers, figures, with relations, operations, and that its formal procedures involving axioms, proofs, lemmas, theorems have not changed since the time of Archimedes.
It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.
When you start defining yourself, you put yourself in boxes and I don't want to be trapped in anything because I will always evolve - I will always change. It's like water. I take on many shapes. Everyone should be that way and not define themselves. I am everything.
The big, defining feature of Palmares Tres government is its system of summer kings. The idea is that women 'Aunties' rule, led by a queen with a term limit of 10 years. Men aren't entirely shut out from this system - in fact, they have one of the most important roles in the government - but it's strictly delimited.
One of the defining things about my career on camera is I like to play different characters. That gets difficult to do. People don't trust you to do something different. In animation, it's all about trust and how far can you go away from yourself. It's a really marvelous environment that's extremely creative.
The industrial world would be a more peaceful place if workers were called in as collaborators in the process of establishing standards and defining shop practices, matters which surely affect their interests and well-being fully as much as they affect those of employers and consumers.
At times you have to fight. No way around it. At some point, every one of us is confronted with danger or injustice. How we choose to combat that challenge is often life-defining. You can face difficulties head-on, or run from them, or ignore them until they consume you. But no one escapes conflict. No one.
What to do with a leading business that's challenged by a new technology wave without hurting an existing profit stream? The single greatest example of recent memory is Apple's willingness to decimate iPod sales by incorporating all the category-defining product's features into a new gizmo, the iPhone.
You have to take the responsibility totally, that it is you who decides either to be in misery or to be in blessing. If you want misery, have more desires. If you want a blissfulness, then learn the art - even for few moments - of being desireless, and you will be surprised. Even for a few moments, if you are desireless, all anguish, all anxiety disappears. And you are so contented, so fulfilled, that you cannot ask for more. Your blessing is so much that you can only say that you bless the whole existence. Still it will be there. It is so much; it is overflowing.
That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.
With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Why should we consider defining intelligence as something global and as something that hasn't actually yet appeared on Earth? It may be useful for envisioning the future of our own civilization and any others that may be out there among the stars. It might give us something to strive for.
It goes without saying that 'Buncha Losers' comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us 'Taxi,' 'Cheers' and the genre-defining 'Night Court,' a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.
I grew up in a Christian home. The strictness comes with religion in general. Whether you grew up Jewish or Orthodox Jewish or Muslim, there are certain rules and regulations. But my parents instilled in me the importance of defining God for yourself.
My favorite class as an undergraduate was a political theory class on justice. Now, 'justice' is hardly a self-defining term, and much smarter men than I have developed various definitions over the centuries. The class put Plato at one end and Nietzsche at the other, and off we went.
I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.
Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may
I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.
One thing I'm grateful for, and also surprised and excited about, is that I have a place in the community of comics now. In a real way. And I honor that. A lot of what I do is in support of the community and bringing new talent - talking to people that people don't know. And defining us as a community.
Marriage is also a social statement, preeminently describing and defining a person's relationship and place in society. Marital status, along with what we do for a living, is often one of the first pieces of information we give to others about ourselves. It's so important, in fact, that most married people wear a symbol of their marriage on their hand.
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