“Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.”
Source: Beowulf
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Seamus Heaney 29
Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer 1939–2013Related quotes
“What gets measured gets done.”
Attributed to organization theorist Mason Haire. p. 268.
In Search of Excellence (1982)

"BuSab [Bureau of Sabotage] Manual"; p. 87
The Bureau of Sabotage series, Whipping Star (1969)

[The Many Worlds Theory, 24 October 2018, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXRLDatmbgA] (12:16 of 56:11)

“What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men.”
"The Form of the Sword"
Ficciones (1944)
Context: What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.

On the killing of al-Queda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden by US military forces, as quoted in "Dalai Lama suggests Osama bin Laden's death was justified" by Mitchell Landsberg, in The Los Angeles Times (4 May 2011) http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0504-dalai-lama-20110504,0,7229481.story.

“Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it?”
Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 7 Pointer Readings <!-- p. 252 -->
Context: Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.