Quotes about measure
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“Stupid dreams. Even the good ones are bad, because they remind you how poorly reality measures up.”

Source: Unwind

“The only thing you have for measuring what's real is your mind… so what happens when your mind becomes a pathological liar?”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Challenger Deep

“A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Life

“A person's worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Personality

“Intelligence is a measure of how well you function within your level of awareness.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Source: God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

Intelligence

“We two make banquets of the plainest fare
In every cup we find the thrill of pleasure…
For us life always moves with lilting measure
We two, we two, we make our world, our pleasure”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Life, Pleasure, World

“Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Madness

“Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.”

Alan Brennert (1954) American writer

Source: Moloka'i

Fear, Fools

“These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

People

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Way, Madness

“when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Jealousy

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

People, Secret, Strong, Suffering

“The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.”

Deborah Moggach (1948) English writer

Source: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Disappointment, Failure, Success

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep 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 (1854)
Context: A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep 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.<!--pp.366-367

Music

“Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Source: The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857

Star, Tear, Water, Heart

“For me a house or an apartment becomes a home when you add one set of four legs, a happy tail, and that indescribable measure of love that we call a dog.”

Roger A. Caras (1928–2001) American photographer

Love, Happiness, Dogs, Home

“Why is the measure of love… loss? pg.9”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Written on the Body (1992)
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Love, Loss

“What's measured improves”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

“Love cannot be measured by its duration…”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau

Love

“Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Juan Muraña", in Brodie's Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

Money, Way, Time

“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Marriage, Happiness, Relationship

“A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.”

Chaim Potok book My Name Is Asher Lev

Source: My Name Is Asher Lev

Life

“Do certain events in our lives leave a permanent mark, freezing a piece of us in time, and that becomes a touchstone that we measure the rest of our lives against?”

Mary E. Pearson book The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Source: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Time

“No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: How to Save a Life

Life

“Everything man does today to be efficient, to fill the hour? It does not satisfy. It only makes him hungry to do more. Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time. When you are measuring life, you are not living it.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Life, Time

“These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”

Don DeLillo Falling Man

Source: Falling Man

“In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Life, Sense, Time

“She is more beautiful than I have words for. And last night, I was blessed beyond measure to serve her.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Awakened

Beauty, Night

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Feeling, Sense

“The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

Life

“To love God is to love His will. It is to wait quietly for life to be measured by One who knows us through and through. It is to be content with His timing and His wise appointment.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Love, Life, God, Time

“I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Love, Hate, Change

“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Way, Loss

“I measure the moment
in the heartbeats I skip”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

“We know it's all just daydreaming… But sometimes, it'd be nice just to hold something real in your hands that felt like a measure of your worth.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

“The worth of things can't be measured by what they cost but by what the cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high, and that there are some things that will never wear out.”

Bob Dylan book Chronicles: Volume One

Source: Chronicles: Volume One

Family, Faith

“The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Source: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Behavior

“Indeed, the more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.”

Lloyd Alexander book The Black Cauldron

Source: The Black Cauldron

Love, Heart

“Action is the real measure of intelligence.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

Intelligence

“What gets measured gets improved.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Source: The Greatness Guide: Powerful Secrets for Getting to World Class

“Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Courage, Courageous

“Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.”

George Monbiot (1963) English writer and political activist

Life, Speed

“Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.”

Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

Time

“The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.”

Darin Strauss (1970) writer

Friendship

“Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: A Circle of Quiet

Life

“Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.”

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Courage, Success, Success

“For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Waiting, Personality

“What are the three most important rules of the chemist?"

This I knew from Ben. "Label clearly. Measure twice. Eat elsewhere.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

“Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

“And you read your emily dickinson,
And I my robert frost.
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what weve lost.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Reading

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Life

“Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

Women

“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

Hope, Feeling

“Magic could not be measured and explained in scientific terms, for magic grew through destroying the very natural principles that made science as people knew it impossible.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

People, Nature, Science

“This is one of those times when explaining a feeling cannot measure up to actually having the feeling”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: Viola in Reel Life

Feeling, Time

“Like all Herondales, his ability to love without measure, without end, was both his great gift and his great curse.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Lost Herondale

Love

“You can’t look at someone with your eyes and take their measure.
You have to look with the heart.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Heart

“What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.”

Peter de Vries (1910–1993) American editor and novelist

Source: The Blood of the Lamb

People, Suffering

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others

Life, Coffee

“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, Christ

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Source: The World As I See It
Context: How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving....

Life, Men, Time, Dead

“I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Love, Jealousy

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

“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

Hope, Feeling

“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“A beggar’s mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king’s mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Judging Eye

TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
Source: The Judging Eye (2009)

Stupidity, Suffering

“The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All

Money

“Happiness simply cannot be relied upon as a measure of success.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Source: Your Road Map for Success: You Can Get There from Here

Happiness, Success

“… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”

Thomas Harris Hannibal Rising

Source: Hannibal Rising

Home, Help, Childhood

“As for courage and will - we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead.”

Andre Norton (1912–2005) American writer of science fiction and fantasy

Lie, Courage

“Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Tree, Silence

“You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

Tikkun (July-August 1989); also quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin, p. 51.

Democracy, Freedom

“I am just two and two. I am hot. I am cold. I'm the parent of numbers that cannot be told. I'm a gift beyond measure, a matter of course, and I'm yielded with pleasure- when taken by force.”

L.J. Smith The Forbidden Game

Source: The Forbidden Game

Pleasure, Parent

“There is no technique, there is just the way to do it.
Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?”

Frances Mayes book Under the Tuscan Sun

Source: Under the Tuscan Sun

Way, Cooking

“I have come here to thank personally each Member of the Congress who labored so long and so valiantly to make this occasion come true today, and to make this bill a reality. I cannot mention all their names, for it would take much too long, but my gratitude; and that of this Nation; belongs to the 89th Congress. We are indebted, too, to the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and to the support given to this measure by the then Attorney General and now Senator, Robert F. Kennedy. In the final days of consideration, this bill had no more able champion than the present Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, who, with New York's own "Manny" Celler, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Congressman Feighan of Ohio, and Senator Mansfield and Senator Dirksen constituting the leadership of the Senate, and Senator Javits, helped to guide this bill to passage, along with the help of the Members sitting in front of me today.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Remarks at the signing of the Immigration Bill (1965)

Support, Reality, Help, Personality

“To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book I, Chapter I, Of The Definitions of Wealth and of Productive Labour, Section II, p. 49
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Communication, Country

“The most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and Moral Truth. For all Beauty is Truth. True Features make the Beauty of a Face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true Measures that of Harmony and Musick.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 1, p. 77; "Sensus Communis".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

Truth, World, Beauty, Nature

“If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#16
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Problem, Universe

“That man was so much larger than life that there's no scale by which to measure him. Most of Wilson's dialogue, if put down on paper, seems either vulgar or obscene.”

Wilson Mizner (1876–1933) American writer

Gene Fowler, as quoted by Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, Viking Press, New York, 1974, ISBN 0-670-41374-7.
About

Life

“Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback […]—toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"Magnolias from Moscow", p. 403
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Angels, Mountain

“Yours is the guilt of all, who, judging wrong,
Mistake tuned nonsense for the poet's song!
Provoking dulness!—what a soul has he
Who fancies rhyme, and measure, poetry!—
He thinks, profanely, that this generous art
Stops at the ear—with power to shake the heart.”

Aaron Hill (writer) (1685–1750) British writer

Advice to the Poets (1731), p. 32

Art, Soul, Thinking, Heart

“The true measure of loving God is to love Him without measure.”

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) French abbot, theologian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 395

Love, God

“dreamtree, truthtree tree of jubilee:with aeons of (trivial merely)existence, all when may not measure a now of your treasure”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

90
95 poems (1958)

Tree

“Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
…
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.”

Robert Grudin (1938) American writer

Time and the Art of Living (1982)

God, Feeling, Knowledge, Science

“How can we measure the effects if we can't even count the dead to the nearest million?”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 5, Statistics Of Deadly Quarrels, p. 105

Dead

“The solution of (1), which represents a homogeneous manifold, may be written in the form:ds^2 = \frac{d\rho^2}{1 - \kappa^2\rho^2} - \rho^2 (d\theta^2 + sin^2 \theta \; d\phi^2) + (1 - \kappa^2 \rho^2)\; c^2 d\tau^2, \qquad (2)where \kappa = \sqrt \frac{\lambda}{3}. If we consider \rho as determining distance from the origin… and \tau as measuring the proper-time of a clock at the origin, we are led to the de Sitter spherical world…”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

"On Relativistic Cosmology" (1928)

World, Time

“It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

The Case for India (1931)

“A very bold political measure of Lycurgus is his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the state, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence, seeking preëminence through virtue alone, assured that there was no other difference or inequality between man and man than that which was established by blame for base actions and praise for good ones.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Lycurgus, sec. 8. The bolded phrase is often quoted in a paraphrase by Ugo Foscolo: "Wealth and poverty are the oldest and most deadly ailments of all republics" (Le ricchezze e la povertà sono le più antiche e mortali infermità delle repubbliche), Monitore Italiano, 5 February 1798.
Parallel Lives

People, Disease, Affliction, Envy

“The hypothesis that human emissions of CO2 can create global warming can be tested by measurement. … No warming has occured since 1998. … During that time atmospheric CO2 has increased. … The test of the hypothesis above shows that there is no relationship between measured temperature and CO2 emissions. The hypothesis fails.”

Ian Plimer book Heaven and Earth

Heaven and Earth (2009)

Time