Definition Challenge Quotes

Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical?

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.

It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists' minds, when they speak of 'species'; in some, resemblance is everything and descent of little weight-in some, resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea-in some, descent is the key,-in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the undefinable.

A geek by definition is somebody who eats live animals. I?ve never eaten live animals.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!"

Everyone agrees to that; but when we come to define truth, dissension starts.

We still lack a global definition of terrorism.