“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”

— Charles Handy

The Empty Raincoat (1994); About the McNamara fallacy

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Charles Handy 1

Irish economist 1932

Tom DeMarco (1940) American software engineer, author, and consultant

Controlling Software Projects, Management Measurement & Estimation, (1982), p. 3.

“Success, in life, is most easily measured by the number of days you are truly happy.”

Eric Edmeades (1970) Canadian businessman

Article=Success Express Journal: Volume 3, Issue 1 – November 1995 http://sejarchives.wordpress.com/1995/11/01/sej-volume-3-issue-1/

“The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” p. 272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

“For although it is certainly true that quantitative measurements are of great importance, it is a grave error to suppose that the whole of experimental physics can be brought under this heading. We can start measuring only when we know what to measure: qualitative observation has to precede quantitative measurement, and by making experimental arrangements for quantitative measurements we may even eliminate the possibility of new phenomena appearing.”

Hendrik Casimir (1909–2000) Dutch physicist

in his memoirs, as quoted by [Jean Matricon, G. Waysand, Charles Glashausser, The cold wars: a history of superconductivity, Rutgers University Press, 2003, 0813532957, 18]

“Sometimes the fruit of your steps of faith is measured not so much by what God does through you as by what God does in you.”

Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest

It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

“You can't measure time the way you measure the distance between two points.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

“If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Walden

“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

The quote is widely misattributed to Galilei, but is actually from two French scholars, Antoine-Augustin Cournot and Thomas-Henri Martin. See "Der messende Luchs: Zwei verbreitete Fehler in der Galilei-Literatur" by Andreas Kleinert in "NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin" May 2009, Volume 17, Issue 2, pp 199–206.
Attributed

“It is very strange indeed that Poetry should be elder Brother to Prose… but it is very probable… precepts… were shap'd into measured lines, that they might be the more easily remembred”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment

The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Context: But why then did the Ancient Priestesses always answer in Verse?... To this Plutarch replies... That even the Ancient Priestesses did now and then speak in Prose. And besides this, in Old times all People were born Poets.... [T]hey had no sooner drank a little freely, but they made Verses; they had no sooner cast their eyes on a Handsom Woman, but they were all Poesy, and their very common discourse fell naturally into Feet and Rhime: So that their Feasts and their Courtships were the most delectable things in the World. But now this Poetick Genius has deserted Mankind: and tho' our passions be as ardent... yet Love at present creeps in humble prose.... Plutarch gives us another reason... that the Ancients wrote always in Verse, whether they treated of Religion, Morality, Natural Philosophy or Astrology. Orpheus and Hesiod, whom every body acknowledges for Poets, were Philosophers also: and Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, Eudoxus, and Thales... [the] Philosophers, were Poets too. It is very strange indeed that Poetry should be elder Brother to Prose... but it is very probable... precepts... were shap'd into measured lines, that they might be the more easily remembred: and therefore all their Laws and their rules of Morality were in Verse. By this we may see that Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is usually imagin'd, and that the Muses have of late days mightily deviated from their original Gravity.<!--pp. 207-209

“But we comforted ourselves with what we really meant to say, which was: "I don't normally feel this good about what I'm doing."
Measure the hope of that moment, that feeling.
Everything else will be measured against it.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

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Charles Handy 1

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