Example sentences of "to [be] [adj] is to be " in BNC.

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1 It is commonplace to be second best , but to be best is to be unique
2 It is a paradox too , that because Christianity has been able to drop any mention of the physical cycles of women 's lives , secular culture has ended up with an idea that true liberation means we can forget ‘ those difficult days ’ , and ‘ carry on as normal ’ ; assuming , perhaps , that to be normal is to be more like a man .
3 The only authentic way to be good is to be good ‘ for nothing ’ : that was to become the ringing insistence of her finest treatise , The Sovereignty of Good ( 1970 ) .
4 Here the difficulty I found in talking about psychoanalytic criticism is compounded , not because I am an unbeliever , but because anything that the middle-aged male commentator says about feminism is liable to be wrong : to be approving may be condemned as patronizing , and to be critical is to be sexist .
5 Both behaviourism and ‘ humanistic ’ views would have us believe that to be affective is to be effective in setting up conditions for learning .
6 But I would place a somewhat different emphasis , and suggest that in the Chewong case fear is a positive emotion and encouraged in children because to be fearful is to be human , while the arousal of other inner states is negatively valued and discouraged — as manifest in the various rules that forbid them ( see Howell 1981 ) .
7 To be old is to be , of necessity , unhealthy .
8 To be old is to be unhealthy .
9 Estes and Binney ( 1988 , p. 69 ) describe the image of older people in America as ‘ to be old is to be frail , sick , dependent and vulnerable ’ .
10 To be old is to be wrinkled and crabbit and heading for Parkinson 's or Alzheimer 's disease .
11 Talcott Parsons has proposed the very influential theory that of all other available institutions it is the classroom that above all converts an incomplete person into a member of the kind of society Parsons takes for granted as natural , that is , a kind of society where to be social is to be interested in achievement .
12 Not because we adhere to some outdated idea that to be commercial is to be tainted and somehow of no interest , but we felt we were redressing an imbalance .
13 To be slipshod is to be hounded , which is the last thing he wants .
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