Quotes about measurement (2196 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Why walk with half measures, animals know much more than people, above all because they feel more freely than most of these and, therefore, as Kafka says, they are possessors of all the knowledge about this life. They are just too humble to show it off.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Original: Para qué andar con medias tintas, los animales saben mucho más que las personas, ante todo porque sienten con más libertad que la mayoría de estas y, por ello, como dice Kafka, son poseedores de todo el conocimiento acerca de esta vida. Solo que son muy humildes para hacer gala de ello.
Source: Baroja, José. (2020). "Orfeo". En El lado oscuro de la sombra y otros ladridos. Lima: Ediquid, ISBN:978-980-7641-67-8; p. 40.

People , Knowledge , Animals , Life

“We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Context: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Life , Fate , World , Sense

“Measure a man by his actions fully, from the beginning to the end. Don't take a piece out of my life or a song out of my music and say this is what I'm about, because you know better than that.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, Prison interviews and interrogations (1995)

Life , Music

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

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

For Men , Intelligence , Change

“God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

God , Law , Nature

“There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tryant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness

Love , Women , Men , Friendship

“The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.”

Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) American psychologist

Source: On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

Personality

“The culture and civilization of the White man are essentially material; his measure of success is, "How much property have I acquired for myself?" The culture of the Red man is fundamentally spiritual; his measure of success is, "How much service have I rendered to my people?”

Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946) British/ American author, artist, and a founder of the scouting movement

People , Success

“The grandeur of man is measured according to what he seeks and according to the urgency by which he remains a seeker.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic" (Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte "Probleme" der "Logik" (1984), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0253004381, p. 7)

“Some people say I was a thug and a gangster; other people remember me as a poet and a born leader. But I'm saying to you, measure a man by his actions fully, through his whole life, from the beginning to the end.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Posthumous attributions, Tupac: Resurrection (2003)

Life , People

“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

“A mistake to a successful mind is not a dead end, it gives them the determination to bounce back harder, in fact their success can be measured by how high they bounce back when they fail.”

Hamis Kiggundu (1984) Ugandan business magnate, Internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author

Quoted from his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_and_Failure_Based_on_Reason_and_Reality, "Success and Failure Based on Reason and Reality" https://www.amazon.co.uk/SUCCESS-FAILURE-BASED-REASON-REALITY/dp/9970983903/ on Amazon, P.104 (July 2018)

Dead , Success

“Music is so important to us. We hear music from the moment we are born, often via lullabies, and through many of the most important occasions in our lives, from graduations to weddings to funerals. There is something about music that seems to bring us closer to each other and help us come together as a community.
Humans are wired for music. Researchers recently discovered that we have a dedicated part of our brain for processing music, supporting the theory that it has a special, important function in our lives.
Listening to music and singing together has been shown in several studies to directly impact neuro-chemicals in the brain, many of which play a role in closeness and connection. Now new research suggests that playing music or singing together may be particularly potent in bringing about social closeness through the release of endorphins.
Through singing, drumming, and dancing—all resulted in participants having higher pain thresholds (a proxy measure for increased endorphin release in the brain) in comparison to listening to music alone. In addition, the performance of music resulted in greater positive emotion, suggesting one pathway through which people feel closer to one another when playing music together is through endorphin release.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Pain , People , Music , Feeling

“Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

"What Makes Opera Grand?", Vogue (December 1958)

World , Art , Time , Success

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Wisdom , Justice , Law , Idea

“The only preventative measure one can take is to live irregularly.”

Adolf Hitler book Mein Kampf

Source: Mein Kampf

“The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens. As Americans, we are blessed with circumstances that protect our human rights and our religious freedom, but for many people around the world, deprivation and persecution have become a way of life.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Life , People , World , Way

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 "Debate on the Address" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/nov/12/debate-on-the-address#column_1117
Cited in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth
This speech is also commonly known by the name "The Locust Years" http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/Locusts.html.
The 1930s

“Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

As quoted in Al Arab Vol. 9 (1970) by the League of Arab States, p. 9

Feeling , Time

“As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe as measured from the beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, of a percent (10^-84). And that's why, for me, the most astonishing wonder of the universe isn't a star or a planet or a galaxy. It isn't a thing at all. It's an instant in time. And that time is now. Humans have walked the earth for just the shortest fraction of that briefest of moments in deep time. But in our 200,000 years on this planet we've made remarkable progress. It was only 2,500 years ago that we believed that the sun was a god and measured its orbit with stone towers built on the top of a hill. Today the language of curiosity is not sun gods, but science. And we have observatories that are almost infinitely more sophisticated than those towers, that can gaze out deep into the universe. And perhaps even more remarkably through theoretical physics and mathematics we can calculate what the universe will look like in the distant future. And we can even make concrete predictions about its end. And I believe that it's only by continuing our exploration of the cosmos and the laws of nature that govern it that we can truly understand ourselves and our place in this universe of wonders.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

Conclusion in Wonders of the Universe - Destiny

Life , God , Law , Star

“Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.”

Protagoras (-486–-411 BC) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

As quoted in Theaetetus by Plato section 152a

“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.”

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Italian physicist

As quoted in Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) by Tatjana Jevremovic, p. 397

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992), Ch. 7 : Work, §3 : Personal Power, p. 190 (p. 165 in some editions). This famous passage from her book is very often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela. About the mis-attribution Williamson said, "Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people."

Variant which appears in the film Coach Carter (2005): "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Variant which appears in the film Akeelah and the Bee (2006), displayed in a picture frame on the wall, attributing it to Mandela: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

God , Light , Children , People

“Oh, the comfort —
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person —
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Thiis was published without credit in The Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936) with the title "Friendship", and since that time has sometimes been misattributed http://www.geonius.com/eliot/quotes.html to Eliot; it is actually an adaptation of lines by Dinah Craik, in A Life for a Life (1859):
Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Misattributed

Personality , Faith , Feeling

“Music is so important to us. We hear music from the moment we are born, often via lullabies, and through many of the most important occasions in our lives, from graduations to weddings to funerals. There is something about music that seems to bring us closer to each other and help us come together as a community.
Humans are wired for music. Researchers recently discovered that we have a dedicated part of our brain for processing music, supporting the theory that it has a special, important function in our lives.
Listening to music and singing together has been shown in several studies to directly impact neuro-chemicals in the brain, many of which play a role in closeness and connection. Now new research suggests that playing music or singing together may be particularly potent in bringing about social closeness through the release of endorphins.
Through singing, drumming, and dancing—all resulted in participants having higher pain thresholds (a proxy measure for increased endorphin release in the brain) in comparison to listening to music alone. In addition, the performance of music resulted in greater positive emotion, suggesting one pathway through which people feel closer to one another when playing music together is through endorphin release.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Pain , People , Music , Feeling

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

"The Art of Living", interview with journalist Gordon Young first published in 1960
Variant: [T]here are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Happy , Sad , Life , Sadness

“I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

For Father , Love , God , Thinking

“I love you still, that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Love , Hate

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success”

Ian Fleming (1908–1964) English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer

Success , Motivational , Success

“I believe that anyone can be successful in life, regardless of natural talent or the environment within which we live. This is not based on measuring success by human competitiveness for wealth, possessions, influence, and fame, but adhering to God's standards of truth, justice, humility, service, compassion, forgiveness, and love.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Page 28
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)
Source: Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis

Love , Life , God , Truth

“I've found that the way a person feels about cats-and the way they feel about him or her in return-is usually an excellent gauge by which to measure a person's character”

P. C. Cast book Marked

Source: Marked

Way , Feeling , Cats , Gauge

“Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.”

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American women's rights activist

Life , Dogs , Birthday , Wedding

“You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?"

"It's a distance that can't be measured."

"Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Heart , Personality

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

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

"The Threatened", The Book of Sand [El Libro de arena] (1975)

For Him , For Boyfriend , Way , Time

“Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged.”

Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) German doctor, anthropologist, public health activist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician

1848 (quoted in Infections and Inequalities by Paul Farmer, page 1.

Life , Lie , Dead

“A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centred, competitive, goal-oriented lives. Overpreoccupied with their past and their future, they tend to have a limited awarenessof the present and thus a limited ability to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life. They concentrate on manipulating the external world and measure their living standard by the quantity of material possessions, while they become ever more alienated from their inner world and unable to appreciate the process of life. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Life , People , World , Past

“Every time I get injured I measure it's severity by asking myself 'Would this stop me from going to Disneyland?”

Chris Colfer (1990) actor, singer, book author

Personal Quotes 2009–2012

Time

“That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, I have unmistakably established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative. These have demonstrated that is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent, in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles — to the opposite end of the globe.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Loss

“There is no doubt a difference in the right hon. gentleman's demeanour as leader of the Opposition and as Minister of the Crown. But that's the old story; you must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. 'Tis very true that the right hon. gentleman's conduct is different. I remember him making his protection speeches. They were the best speeches I ever heard. It was a great thing to hear the right hon. gentleman say: "I would rather be the leader of the gentlemen of England than possess the confidence of Sovereigns". That was a grand thing. We don't hear much of "the gentlemen of England" now. But what of that? They have the pleasures of memory—the charms of reminiscence. They were his first love, and, though he may not kneel to them now as in the hour of passion, still they can recall the past; and nothing is more useless or unwise than these scenes of crimination and reproach, for we know that in all these cases, when the beloved object has ceased to charm, it is in vain to appeal to the feelings. You know that this is true. Every man almost has gone through it. My hon. gentleman does what he can to keep them quiet; he sometimes takes refuge in arrogant silence, and sometimes he treats them with haughty frigidity; and if they knew anything of human nature they would take the hint and shut their mouths. But they won't. And what then happens? What happens under all such circumstances? The right hon. gentleman, being compelled to interfere, sends down his valet, who says in the genteelest manner: "We can have no whining here". And that, sir, is exactly the case of the great agricultural interest—that beauty which everybody wooed and one deluded. There is a fatality in such charms, and we now seem to approach the catastrophe of her career. Protection appears to be in about the same condition that Protestantism was in 1828. The country will draw its moral. For my part, if we are to have free trade, I, who honour genius, prefer that such measures should be proposed by the hon. member for Stockport than by one who through skilful Parliamentary manoeuvres has tampered with the generous confidence of a great people and a great party. For myself, I care not what may be the result. Dissolve, if you please, the Parliament you have betrayed. For me there remains this at least—the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/mar/17/agricultural-interest in the House of Commons (17 March 1845).
1840s

Love , People , Pleasure , Beauty

“Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

Human Options (1981)

“The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts…everything we do, we do for the young.”

Isabel II do Reino Unido (1926–2022) queen of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and head of the Commonwealth of Nations

Speech during the commemorations of D-Day, 06/06/2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10883074/D-Day-anniversary-Queen-stirred-by-commemorations.html

“When it becomes necessary to do anything, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Soul , Heart

“"It is not a dirty word, "feminism." I just think that women belong in the human population with the same rights as everybody else. … The problem is, "A feminist looks like this, or is like that." We are taught not to like ourselves as women, we are taught what we're supposed to look like, what our measurements are supposed to be. I never hear what measurements men are supposed to be. Just women."”

Cyndi Lauper (1953) American singer, songwriter, actress and activist

Interview with Matthew Rettenmund in his book "Totally Awesome 80's" (1996), p. 149-150

Women , Men , Problem , Thinking

“We have more nuclear warheads than the Russians, and I consider this to be the most important measure of relative strength. In addition, as Dr. Kissinger stressed many years ago, at the present level of strategic armaments superiority in numbers or megatons has no meaning.”

Hans Bethe (1906–2005) German-American nuclear physicist

Bethe's testimony to the U. S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on 13 May 1982, as reported in the New York Review of Books: The Inferiority Complex, 10 June 1982 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/06/10/the-inferiority-complex/

“I am a completely carefree person. I don’t care a damn what people think. But the rumours affect the people I know. I remember a newspaper publishing something like that once when I was actually in hospital, suffering from a kidney stone. I was shooting with a drip in my arm, but nobody bothered about that. That’s another reason I am now putting the people who love me and really care for me first, instead of satisfying the media and the fans. Success is not just measured by what people think about you, but rather by what you feel. At the end of the day, if I am going to work really hard and feel empty inside, it doesn’t make sense to me.”

Sukirti Kandpal (1987) Indian actress

Sukirti on rumours and success http://www.bollywoodlife.com/news-gossip/sukirti-kandpal-i-dont-care-a-damn-what-people-think/

Love , People , Feeling , Thinking

“Azerbaijan became the Independent Republic […] A new epoch has begun in the life of Azerbaijan. And the history of our oil industry has got a new foundation, that’s to say, the third stage… During the new stage, expressing the will of the Azerbaijani people, we undertake necessary measures to use its natural resources.”

Heydar Aliyev (1923–2003) Soviet and Azerbaijani politician

The speech of President Heydar Aliyev at the signing ceremony of the Contract of the Century (20 September 1994) http://en.president.az/azerbaijan/contract

Life , People , History , Nature

“This mental activity, at first involuntary under the pressure of illness and suffering, gradually became second nature and led me finally to recognize that I was but an automaton devoid of free will in thought and action and merely responsible to the forces of the environment. Our bodies are of such complexity of structure, the motions we perform are so numerous and involved and the external impressions on our sense organs to such a degree delicate and elusive, that it is hard for the average person to grasp this fact. Yet nothing is more convincing to the trained investigator than the mechanistic theory of life which had been, in a measure, understood and propounded by Descartes three hundred years ago.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions (1919)

Life , Nature , Sense , Suffering

“In war, groping tactics, half-way measures, lose everything.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

War , Way

“Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 127

Health , Truth , Perfection

“To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

"On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/karl-marx.htm (1872)

Life , Nature , Animals

“Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of CHRIST as in a net, and preparing the way for a general apostasy from it. Whether this very apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, we cannot know; but at any rate this apostasy, and all its tokens, and instruments, are of the Evil One and savour of death. Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison! Do you think he is so unskilful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Tract 83 http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract83.html (29 June 1838).

Death , God , Truth , World

“I shall speak twice over. As upon a time One came to be alone out of many, so at another time it divided to be many out of One: fire and water and earth and the limitless vault of air, and wretched Strife apart from these, in equal measure to everything, and Love among them, equal in length and breadth.”

Empedocles book On Nature

from fr. 17
Variant translations:
But come! but hear my words! For knowledge gained/Makes strong thy soul. For as before I spake/Naming the utter goal of these my words/I will report a twofold truth. Now grows/The One from Many into being, now/Even from one disparting come the Many--/Fire, Water, Earth, and awful heights of Air;/And shut from them apart, the deadly Strife/In equipoise, and Love within their midst/In all her being in length and breadth the same/Behold her now with mind, and sit not there/With eyes astonished, for 'tis she inborn/Abides established in the limbs of men/Through her they cherish thoughts of love, through her/Perfect the works of concord, calling her/By name Delight, or Aphrodite clear.
tr. William E. Leonard
On Nature
Context: But come, hear my words, since indeed learning improves the spirit. Now as I said before, setting out the bounds of my words, I shall speak twice over. As upon a time One came to be alone out of many, so at another time it divided to be many out of One: fire and water and earth and the limitless vault of air, and wretched Strife apart from these, in equal measure to everything, and Love among them, equal in length and breadth. Consider [Love] in mind, you, and don't sit there with eyes glazing over. It is a thing considered inborn in mortals, to their very bones; through it they form affections and accomplish peaceful acts, calling it Joy or Aphrodite by name.

Love , Water , Time

“Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

A part of this passage appeared in The Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936) with the title "Friendship":
A Life for a Life (1859)
Context: Thus ended our little talk: yet it left a pleasant impression. True, the subject was strange enough; my sisters might have been shocked at it; and at my freedom in asking and giving opinions. But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Somebody must have done a good deal of the winnowing business this afternoon; for in the course of it I gave him as much nonsense as any reasonable man could stand...

Faith , Feeling , Personality

“God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.”

Origen (185–254) Christian scholar in Alexandria

On First Principles, Bk. 1, ch. 1; par. 5
On First Principles
Context: Having refuted, then, as well as we could, every notion which might suggest that we were to think of God as in any degree corporeal, we go on to say that, according to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured. For whatever be the knowledge which we are able to obtain of God, either by perception or reflection, we must of necessity believe that He is by many degrees far better than what we perceive Him to be.

God

“These atrocities and the blood-bath would have to some extent been checked if the Indian Government had lodged strong protests against the treatment meted out to the Minorities in Pakistan or even if a cold threat had been held out to the Muslims in Indian of being treated in the same manner as a measure of retaliation. But the Government which was under the thumb of Gandhiji resorted to absolutely different ways. If the grievances of the minorities in Pakistan were voiced in the Press, it was dubbed as an attempt to spread disaffection amongst the communities and made an offence and the Congress Governments in several Provinces started demanding securities under the press Emergency Powers Act, one after the other.”

Nathuram Godse (1910–1949) Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi

Nathuram Godse: Why I Assassinated Gandhi (1993)

Way , Strong , Communication

“I shall withhold my support from every Ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Address (1 October 1832), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 221
1830s

Support

“The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed. In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.”

Ivo Andrič book The Bridge on the Drina

Source: The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 22

Courage , Law , History , Business

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Henry Beston book The Outermost House

Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2

Time , Fate , Nature , Universe

“It is necessary to learn geometry only so far as might enable a man to measure land for the purposes of buying and selling.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Diogenes Laertius

Learning

“Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 9
Context: Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!

Time

“You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

“It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer book Truth and Method

Source: Truth and Method

Way , Nature , Sense , Universe

“Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: Macbeth: Playgoer's Edition

“It’s impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.”

Christopher Paolini book Inheritance

Variant: It's impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.
Source: Inheritance (2011)

Life , Feeling , Hurt

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Happy , Life , Sadness , Sad

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Source: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)
Context: Experimenters are the schocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics.

Question , Nature , Science

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, Rice University speech

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Tattoo , Parting

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Memory , Time , Personality

“Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

“Books are still the main yardstick by which I measure true wealth.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Books , Wealth

“Walking… is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948) Novelist, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Variant: nobody hαs ever meαsured, not even poets, how much the heαrt cαn hold.

For Wife , love , Wise , Relationship

“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain”, p. 133.
This is a paraphrase of Thoreau: see explanation by the Walden Woods project http://www.walden.org/Library/Quotations/The_Henry_D._Thoreau_Mis-Quotation_Page).
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"

Life , Men , World , Peace

“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Identity (1998), p. 78

“It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Source: The Archaic Revival

“A dry martini,' he said. 'One. In a deep champagne goblet.'…
Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?”

Ian Fleming book Casino Royale

Source: Casino Royale (1953), Ch. 7 : Rouge et Noir
Context: Bond insisted ordering Leiter's Haig-and-Haig "on the rocks" and then he looked carefully at the barman. "A Dry Martini", he said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet." "Oui, monsieur." "Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?" "Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

“… who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Heart

“Your time on this earth is a gift to be used wisely. Don't squander your words or your thoughts. Consider that even the simplest actions you take for your lives matter beyond measure… and they matter forever.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Source: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective

Time

“Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

People

“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

People , Thinking

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992), Ch. 7 : Work, §3 : Personal Power, p. 190 (p. 165 in some editions). This famous passage from her book is often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela. About the mis-attribution Williamson said, "Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people."
Variant which appears in the film Coach Carter (2005): "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Variant which appears in the film Akeelah and the Bee (2006), displayed in a picture frame on the wall, attributing it to Mandela: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."
Context: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Fear

“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

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.”

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

1940s, The World As I See It (1949)

Sense

“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”

John Dewey book Democracy and Education

Source: Democracy and Education

Education

“Through their deeds, the dead of battle have spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could. But we can only honor them by rededicating ourselves to the cause for which they gave a last full measure of devotion.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Dead

“I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Love , Way

“Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

“The greatness of the man's power is the measure of his surrender.”

William Booth (1829–1912) British Methodist preacher

“No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.”

Atul Gawande book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Source: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Perfection

“The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o book Wizard of the Crow

Source: Wizard of the Crow

Women

“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

La gente sólo se casa cuando no tiene más remedio, por pánico o porque anda desesperada o para no perder a alguien a quien no soporta perder. Siempre hay mucha chaladura en lo que parece más convencional.
Source: Corazón tan blanco [A Heart So White] (1992), p. 121

People , Madness

“I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 249

Success , Personality

“When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis (1897)

Soul , Sun

“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

Variant: Success is not measured by the position one has reached in life, rather by the obstacles one overcomes while trying to succeed
Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter II: Boyhood Days
Source: Up From Slavery: An Autobiography
Context: I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reached the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.

For Team , Life , Learning , Success

“The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1960s
Source: Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)
Context: The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Passion