"An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"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."
— John Dewey (How We Think)

"One's 'thing'--(1) A point of personal interest; a hobby, sport, or avocation that succinctly defines a person. (2) A brief coupling of words used to evoke someone's personality in a small-talk setting: Billy's thing used to be soccer; now it's masterbation. (3) A laconic summation of one's character and interests used for the purpose of categorization and judgement. See also 'What do you do?'"
— Joshua Braff (The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green: A Novel)

"A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing."
— Henry Hazlitt

"The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."
— Socrates

"Childhood is both a chronological stage and a mental construct, an existential fact and a locus of desire, a mythological country continuously mapped by grownups in search of their subjectivity in another time and space."
— Elizabeth Goodenough

"To define is to limit.

From, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

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— Oscar Wilde

""To define is to limit."

From, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
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— Oscar Wilde