The majority of a society is the true definition of the public. [ Johnson ]

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style. [ Jonathan Swift ]

Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Beauty is a hovering, shining, shadowy form, the outline of which no definition holds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Too many individuals are like Shakespeare's definition of echo, - babbling gossips of the air. [ H. W. Shaw ]

The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it: enthusiasm signifies God in us. [ Mme. de Stael ]

All men are married women's property; that is the only true definition of what married women's property really is. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim. [ Mazzini ]

Persuasion, Sect, or Denomination? Persuasion, the definition of which should be plain to every one who speaks English, is often ludicrously used in the sense of sect or denomination; as, He is of the Methodist persuasion. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

Without attempting a formal definition of the word, I am inclined to consider rhetoric, when reduced to a system in books, as a body of rules derived from experience and observation, extending to all communications by language, and designed to make it efficient. [ W. E. Channing ]

Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose - a power to accomplish all that we undertake; for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry. Pope in painting. Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men. [ Colton ]

You will get more profit from trying to find where beauty is, than in anxiously inquiring what it is. Once for all, it remains undemonstrable; it appears to us, as in a dream, when we behold the works of the great poets and painters; and in short, of all feeling artists; it is a hovering, shining, shadowy form, the outline of which no definition holds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]