Albert Einstein
Physicist
"If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution."
Defining quotes
Defining
88 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Tony Robbins
Author, Life Coach
"The defining factor [for success] is never resources; it’s resourcefulness."
Wentworth Miller
Actor
"My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong."
Albert Einstein
Physicist
"When I have one week to solve a seemingly impossible problem, I spend six days defining the problem. Then, the solution becomes obvious."
Kenneth Cole
Fashion Designer
"Every day when a man or woman gets dressed, they are in effect defining who they are. That daily clean slate is a time in our lives when we can determine who we want to be."
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Defining quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"It's a weird feeling when people are defining you, and you haven't even defined yourself."
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"Other people and their opinions hold no power in defining our destiny."
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"Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself."
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"Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined."
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"Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life."
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"An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution."
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"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
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"In Re-framing, you interpret the event in a positive way. You change your language . Instead if defining it as a problem you re-frame it as a situation . A problem is something that is upsetting and stressful. A situation is something that you simply deal with ."
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"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."
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"[the virtues] cannot exist without Prudence. A proof of this is that everyone, even at the present day, in defining Virtue, after saying what disposition it is [i.e. moral virtue] and specifying the things with which it is concerned, adds that it is a disposition determined by the right principle; and the right principle is the principle determined by Prudence."
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"The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world."
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"If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are."
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"If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are we can all be freer. And this is what HeforShe is about. It’s about freedom."
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"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"."
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"When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic-what defines a human being-is to work with others."
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