#definitions

Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections [....] Reticulated: Made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#verbosity #equality

Duty is what one expects from others. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#duty #life #life

Before you can ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the preliminary question 'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very different question. One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is 'Man, that thing is just a mess. It's like looking into a room full of smoke.' Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology. ↗

— David Berlinski

#biology #clarity #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on. ↗

— Stephen King

#humor #anger

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#black #definitions #man #power #refuses

Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions. ↗

— Tryon Edwards

#adhere #controversies #define #definitions #ended

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#clever #definitions #homely #i #i wish

I don't like definitions, but if there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than. ↗

— Mark Knopfler

#change #control #definition #definitions #freedom

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are. ↗

— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#behind #body #comes #concern #conform

definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was ↗

— Richard Flanagan

#death