These distinction quotes will inspire you. A distinction is a difference or contrast between similar things or people or excellence that sets someone or something apart from others.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging distinction quotes, distinction sayings, and distinction proverbs.
Best Distinction Quotes
- “Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America, it takes an automobile to produce this effect.” ~ Leon Trotsky
- “The name, Seventh-day Adventist, is a standing rebuke to the Protestant world. Here is the line of distinction between the worshipers of God, and those who worship the beast, and receive his mark. The great conflict is between the commandments of God and the requirements of the beast.” ~ Ellen G. White
- “Know thyself! This is the source of all wisdom, said the great thinkers of the past, and the sentence was written in golden letters on the temple of the gods. To know himself, Linnæus declared to be the essential indisputable distinction of man above all other creatures. I know, indeed, in study nothing more worthy of free and thoughtful man than the study of himself. For if we look for the purpose of our existence, we cannot possibly find it outside ourselves. We are here for our own sake.” ~ Karl Ernst von Baer
- “There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognizes a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. … It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organization; and it is in connection with organization that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time.” ~ Arthur Eddington
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“The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Every chemical substance, whether natural or artificial, falls into one of two major categories, according to the spatial characteristic of its form. The distinction is between those substances that have a plane of symmetry and those that do not. The former belong to the mineral, the latter to the living world.” ~ Louis Pasteur
- “We are … led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call “hard” data and “soft” data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed, but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by “hard” data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by “soft” data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “Physical science enjoys the distinction of being the most fundamental of the experimental sciences, and its laws are obeyed universally, so far as is known, not merely by inanimate things, but also by living organisms, in their minutest parts, as single individuals, and also as whole communities. It results from this that, however complicated a series of phenomena may be and however many other sciences may enter into its complete presentation, the purely physical aspect, or the application of the known laws of matter and energy, can always be legitimately separated from the other aspects.” ~ Frederick Soddy
- “Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.” ~ Lucretia Mott
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“Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye.” ~ Joseph Wood Krutch
- “Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “In America, the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.” ~ James F. Cooper
- “The most sensible people to be met within society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols — it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.” ~ William Hazlitt
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“This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature’s essence.” ~ William Ernest Henley
- “As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.” ~ Stephen Bayley
- “A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction.
You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte - “The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States.” ~ George W. Bush
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“No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him: it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.” ~ Charles Kendall Adams
- “The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.” ~ W. H. Auden
- “The attention of a traveler should be particularly turned, in the first place, to the various works of Nature, to mark the distinctions of the climates he may explore, and to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur.” ~ William Bartram
- “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” ~ George W. Bush
- “The author of McCarthyism was given the distinction of addressing the Republican National Convention. This strikes terror in the hearts of honest men.” ~ Emanuel Celler
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“I have worked with a great many comedians as opposed to comics, although I have worked with comics as well, I make the distinction.” ~ Bobby Darin
- “Art is anything people do with distinction.” ~ Louis Dudek
- “Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.” ~ Andrea Dworkin
- “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.” ~ Abba Eban
- “There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.” ~ Leslie Fiedler
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“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.” ~ Audrey Hepburn
- “I’m the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.” ~ Herbert Hoover
- “We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.” ~ Ivan Illich
- “The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.” ~ John Lennon
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“I don’t make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare – in fact, unless you’re a good comedian, you’re never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.” ~ Ian Mckellen
- “I feel as though we’re living in a time where there is very little distinction paid between the personal and the professional.” ~ Wentworth Miller
- “To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.” ~ Isaac Newton
- “In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.” ~ Richard M. Nixon
- “As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.” ~ Lester B. Pearson
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“We’re sad about some of the losses of members of great seniority and distinction in the Congress, and some very new members, who will no longer be serving with us.” ~ Nancy Pelosi
- “Texas has long been known as the nation’s largest energy producer, but we are equally proud of our distinction as the nation’s leading energy innovator.” ~ Rick Perry
- “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” ~ Harold Pinter
- “There’s a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.” ~ Michael Porter
- “No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
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“Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.” ~ Sydney Smith
- “Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Criminals are never very amusing. It’s because they’re failures. Those who make real money aren’t counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.” ~ Orson Welles
- “You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don’t necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.” ~ Bradley Whitford
- “I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.” ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
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“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” ~ James A. Baldwin
- “The ability to speak is a shortcut to distinction. It puts a man in the limelight, raises him head and shoulders above the crowd.” ~ Lowell Thomas
- “I didn’t finish college, which is really weird because they awarded me the Alumni of Distinction recently.” ~ Joely Fisher
- “The more we study the Indian’s character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.” ~ Nelson A. Miles
- “The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
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“Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.” ~ David Antin
- “When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions” ~ Robert Bork
- “I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade-or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.” ~ Belva Ann Lockwood
- “I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.” ~ David Antin
- “Racial distinctions should not play a role in sport.” ~ Pierre de Coubertin
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“A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere.” ~ Bill Brandt
- “Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.” ~ Benjamin Tucker
- “There are good books and there are bad books, period, that’s the distinction.” ~ Norton Juster
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“Death and the dice level all distinctions.” ~ Samuel Foote
- “But, when Scripture makes a clear distinction between the act of creation and the process of preservation, we cannot accept the idea of a progressive creation process.” ~ Walter Lang
- “There is no neat distinction between operating system software and the software that runs on top of it.” ~ Jim Allchin
