Distinction Quotes

1. "Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity."
Author: Abdus Salam

2. "Towering genius disdains a beaten path... It sees no distinction in adding story to story... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it..."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

3. "At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled."
Author: Agatha Christie

4. "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Author: Albert Einstein

5. "We talk about our assholes. We talk about our cocks. We talk about who we fucked last night, or who we're gonna fuck tomorrow…Everyone tells one's friends about that, right? So the question is, what happens when you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse? The trick is to break down that distinction, to approach your muse as frankly as you would talk to yourself, or to your friends. It's the ability to commit to writing, to write the same way you are."
Author: Allen Ginsberg

6. "...if one civilized man were doomed to pass a dozen years amid a race of intractable savages, unless he had power to improve them, I greatly question whether, at close of that period, he would not have become, at least, a barbarian himself. And I, as I could not make my young companions better, feared exceedingly that they would make me worse- would gradually bring my feelings, habits, capacities, to the level of their own; without, however, imparting to me their light-heartedness and cheerful vivacity. Already, I seemed to feel my intellect deteriorating, my heart petrifying, my soul contracting; and I trembled lest my very moral perceptions should be come deadened, my distinctions of right and wrong confounded, and all my better faculties be sunk at last, beneath the baneful influence of such a mode of life."
Author: Anne Brontë

7. "So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice."
Author: Arundhati Roy

8. "There is an important distinction to be drawn between tolerance of homosexuality and tolerance of sex tourism."
Author: Brian Whitaker

9. "The shame and the downfall of a modern materialistic society is her inability to treasure, care for, admire, adore, cherish, value, revere, respect, uphold, uplift, protect, shield, defend, safeguard, treasure and love her children. I praise all the cultures of this world that naturally harbor and actively manifest these instincts. If a nation or if a population of people fails to recognize the excellent value and distinction of the lives of her children and is defective enough to have lost the capability of expressing and acting upon these instincts then there is nothing that can save that nation or those people. The prosperity of a people is not measured in banks, financial markets, economy and the death of its humanity is evident not through the loss of life but in the loss of love for its children."
Author: C. JoyBell C.

10. "All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial."
Author: C.S. Lewis

11. "The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appears pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings."
Author: C.S. Lewis

12. "Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim."
Author: Charles Dickens

13. "Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy. Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library."
Author: Edith Wharton

14. "Whats not to love is hardly a reason to love. And the catch of your life is not the same thing as the love of your life. Be careful of that subtle but rather crucial distinction."
Author: Emily Giffin

15. "In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true."
Author: Gautama Buddha

16. "We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension. All of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again–ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body's moral world."
Author: Glen Duncan

17. "Product distinctions, the historic centerpiece of product marketing, exist only briefly—and in the prospects' minds, often not at all."
Author: Harry Beckwith

18. "My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that 'achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success."
Author: Helen Hayes

19. "I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting."
Author: Henri Matisse

20. "Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well."
Author: Iris Chang

21. "Take me as godfather." The man asked, "Who art thou?" "I am Death, and I make all equal." Then said the man, "Thou art the right one, thou takest the rich as well as the poor, without distinction; thou shalt be godfather." Death answered, "I will make thy child rich and famous, for he who has me for a friend can lack nothing."
Author: Jacob Grimm

22. "The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood."
Author: John Boyle O'Reilly

23. "Most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal."
Author: John Dewey

24. "Jesus treats patriarchy the way he treats much else of the law and custom of his time: ambiguously, suggestively, and sometimes subversively, but never immediately revolutionarily outside the central matter of his own mission and person...The main scandal of Jesus' career is properly JESUS - not Jesus and feminism, or Jesus and the abolition of slavery, or Jesus and Jewish emancipation, or Jesus and anything else. Those other causes are good, and they are implicit in Jesus' ministry. But they are incipient at best, and Jesus' accommodation to these various social distinctions needs to be acknowledged and then accounted for in one's paradigm regarding gender."
Author: John G. Stackhouse Jr.

25. "If the Romans regarded crucifixion with horror, so did the Jews, though for a different reason. They made no distinction between a ‘tree' and a ‘cross', and so between a hanging and a crucifixion. They therefore automatically applied to crucified criminals the terrible statement of the law that ‘anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse' (Deut. 21:23). They could not bring themselves to believe that God's Messiah would die under his curse, strung up on a tree."
Author: John Stott

26. "Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces."
Author: Kate Morton

27. "I came not to your glorious shores to enjoy a happy rest - I came not to gather triumphs of personal distinction, but as a humble petitioner, in my country's name, as its freely chosen constitutional leader, to entreat your generous aid."
Author: Lajos Kossuth

28. "IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not."
Author: Lawrence Wright

29. "But for Soraya, words on a page were seductive, free, inviting everyone, without distinction. She could not help it when she found words written down, taking them in, following them as if they were moving and she was in a trance, tagging along. A book was something to hide, the thick enchantment of it, the shame, almost. When everyone was asleep, she would creep indoors, into stifling, badly lit rooms, with cockroaches clicking, to open a book at a page she had marked and step into its pulsating pool of words."
Author: Leila Aboulela

30. "So yes, black mages often can be evil. But black as a color is not inherently evil. Being influenced by black's philosophies does not necessarily mean that one will commit an evil act. That being the case, we cannot say that black represents evil. More closely aligned with evil than the other colors? Fine. More ripe with potential for evil? Sure. Evil? No. And that's a very important distinction"
Author: Mark Rosewater

31. "Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all. When some members of the dominant group, particularly those in power, are racist in attitude and practice, bitterness accuses the whole group."
Author: Martin Luther King Jr.

32. "Hé quoi ? vous ne ferez nulle distinctionEntre l'hypocrisie et la dévotion? Vous les voulez traiter d'un semblable langage,Et rendre même honneur au masque qu'au visage,Égaler l'artifice à la sincérité,Confondre l'apparence avec la vérité,Estimer le fantôme autant que la personne,Et la fausse monnaie à l'égal de la bonne ?Les hommes la plupart sont étrangement faits !Dans la juste nature on ne les voit jamais ;La raison a pour eux des bornes trop petites ;En chaque caractère ils passent ses limites ;Et la plus noble chose, ils la gâtent souventPour la vouloir outrer et pousser trop avant."
Author: Molière

33. "...the ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty."
Author: Nate Silver

34. "We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction"
Author: Orhan Pamuk

35. "Bat, pigeon, ravens - I don't care about distinctions right now. Any fluttery, flappy thing is not cool with me."
Author: P.C. Cast

36. "Did somebody whisper something? I look left then right. Uh oh. I think I'm hearing voices now. Not, I AM hearing voices I THINK I'm hearing voices. Okay not voices, just a voice. Is thinking you heard it better or worse than knowning you heard it? Does the distinction matter?"
Author: Penelope Fletcher

37. "Racial distinctions should not play a role in sport."
Author: Pierre De Coubertin

38. "Do you only think you love me? Are you pretty sure you love me? Or are you absolutely positive?" I asked. "Because it's kind of an important distinction.""I think I'm pretty positive I love you." He grinned down at me."
Author: Ripley Patton

39. "Consistently, [Yves] Congar emphasized the distinction between Tradition and traditionalism. The latter was an unyielding commitment to the past. The former was a living principle of commitment to the Beginning, a process that required creativity, inspiration, and a spirit of openness to the present as well as respect for the past. Two of Congar's works, on reform in the church and on the theology of the laity, proved especially controversial...Congar believed that reform was a vital and necessary dimension of the church. This was rooted in the distinction between the church and the kingdom of God and in the intermingling in the church of both divine and human elements. In light of the church's constant temptation to revert to institutionalism, it was always necessary to allow room for the prophetic voice, issuing from the margins, even though this might mean attending to uncomfortable truths."
Author: Robert Ellsberg

40. "We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can."
Author: Robert F. Kennedy

41. "As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away."
Author: Scott Donaldson

42. "This was now officially the most inane conversation in which Griff had ever been a participant—and that included a drunken debate with Del over ostrich racing."The color isn't too awful?" She twisted a fold of the skirt. "The draper called it ‘dewy petal,' but your mother said the shade was more of a ‘frosted berry.' What do you say?""I'm a man, Simms. Unless we're discussing nipples, I don't see the value in these distinctions."
Author: Tessa Dare

43. "We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time."
Author: Theodore Zeldin

44. "Aristotle drew a distinction between essential and accidental properties. The way he put it is that essential properties are those without which a thing wouldn't be what it is, and accidental properties are those that determine how a thing is, but not what it is. For example, Aristotle thought that rationality was essential to being a human being and, since Socrates was a human being, Socrates's rationality was essential to his being Socrates. Without the property of rationality, Socrates simply wouldn't be Socrates. He wouldn't even be a human being, so how could he be Socrates? On the other hand, Aristotle thought that Socrates's property of being snub-nosed was merely accidental; snub-nosed was part of how Socrates was, but it wasn't essential to what or who he was. To put it another way, take away Socrates's rationality, and he's no longer Socrates, but give him plastic surgery, and he's Socrates with a nose job."
Author: Thomas Cathcart

45. "An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men."
Author: Thomas Fuller

46. "A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy."
Author: Thomas Reid

47. "Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies."
Author: Tomas Transtromer

48. "Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, 'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys."
Author: Victor Hugo

49. "This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence."
Author: William Ernest Henley

50. "It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. Any existing distinction between the wise and the stupid, between the rich and the poor, comes down to a matter of education."
Author: Yukichi Fukuzawa

Distinction Quotes Pictures