Measuring Quotes

1. "Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

2. "So word by word, and line by line,The dead man touch'd me from the past,And all at once it seem'd at lastThe living soul was flash'd on mine,And mine in his was wound, and whirl'dAbout empyreal heights of thought,And came on that which is, and caughtThe deep pulsations of the world,Æonian music measuring outThe steps of Time—the shocks of Chance--The blows of Death. At length my tranceWas cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt."
Author: Alfred Tennyson

3. "Put the damn measuring tape away," Vee ordered. "I already know my size. I don't need reminding."
Author: Becca Fitzpatrick

4. "You can tell all that about me from your measuring tape?''Well, I use the metric system, It's the only way to get really exact numbers."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

5. "And when you write a poem within the accepted poem-form, making it sound like a poem because a poem is a poem is a poem, you are saying "good morning" in that poem, and well, your morals are straight and you have not said SHIT, but wouldn't it be wonderful if you could…instead of sweating out the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought…simply sit down and write the god damned thing, throwing on the color and sound, shaking us alive with the force, the blackbirds, the wheat fields, the ear in the hand of the whore, sun, sun, sun, SUN!; let's make poetry the way we make love; let's make poetry and leave the laws and the rules and the morals to the churches and the politicians; let's make poetry the way we tilt the head back for the good liquor; let a drunken bum make his flame, and some day, Robert, I'll think of you, pretty and difficult, measuring vowels and adverbs, making rules instead of poetry."
Author: Charles Bukowski

6. "Some artists claim praise is irrelevant in measuring the success of art, but I think it's quite relevant. Besides, it makes me feel great."
Author: Chris Van Allsburg

7. "Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems—general and specific statements—can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences."
Author: Christopher Zeeman

8. "When I have my interview with my God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage—a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics of that matter in measuring my life. This realization, which occurred nearly fifteen years ago, guided me every day to seek opportunities to help people in ways tailored to their individual circumstances. My happiness and my sense of worth has been immeasurably improved as a result."
Author: Clayton Christensen

9. "Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings."
Author: Dallas Willard

10. "Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt."
Author: David Graeber

11. "The kissing was supposed to take me away from all the problems. All the thoughts. All the doubts.But now when I kissed her, I was always measuring how much of her was there. And I was wondering how much of me was left."
Author: David Levithan

12. "The city is a device for measuring time."
Author: Don DeLillo

13. "I watched them tearing a building down,A gang of men in a busy town.With a ho-heave-ho and a lusty yell, They swung a beam, and the side wall fell.I asked the foreman: "Are these skilled--And the men you'd hire if you had to build?"He gave me a laugh and said: "No, indeed!Just common labor is all I need.I can wreck in a day or twoWhat builders have taken a year to do."And I thought to myself as I went my way,Which of these roles have I tried to play?Am I a builder who works with careMeasuring life by a rule and square?Am I shaping my deeds to a well made Plan,Patiently doing the best I can?Or am I a wrecker, who walks the townContent with the labor of tearing down?"
Author: Edgar A. Guest

14. "The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated."
Author: Elena Ferrante

15. "It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future—flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

16. "Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

17. "As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's. He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient."
Author: George MacDonald

18. "Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger."
Author: Gloria Naylor

19. "All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don't live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors."
Author: Haruki Murakami

20. "The prevailing quality of life in America -- by any accepted methods of measuring -- was unarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

21. "Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperatures they measure our fear."
Author: Jean Zimmerman

22. "The two men eyed each other. Assessing strengths. Looking for weaknesses. Measuring dicks once again"
Author: Jennifer Estep

23. "Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump."
Author: John Crowley

24. "Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value."
Author: John Ralston Saul

25. "Not everyone forgets to take measures and to do so frequently, but people still fail to create measures that generate the right kind of influence. They do so by measuring the wrong variable."
Author: Joseph Grenny

26. "I made a mistake in judgment about positioning myself with the mayor. Nobody had told me the old city hall idiom about being close to the mayor to 'get his ear.' The pundits use this as a measuring rod: who gets the office closest to the mayor's office, who gets in to see him without an appointment, and who gets to hold his hand, earliest and most often."
Author: Junius Williams

27. "I noticed again the bruised oaks nearby, and their gallant attempts to flourish as if their scars didn't exist. "Why did some of the oaks die and some survive?"Aimee gave me an elegant one-shoulder shrug. "Why do some people stay after a hurricane and why do some never come back?" She looked at me, her eyes measuring. "Why do some people continue to search for the missing, and others give up? I don't know. But I think sometimes a person has to be forced underwater to see if they're going to drown or swim."
Author: Karen White

28. "By the way'[Gabriel] said,' everyone else had better keep out of here. After you spend so much time in lockup, you get to like your space. You get kind of territorial. I wouldn't want anybody to get hurt.' ... Gabriel gave [Kaitlyn] a long, measuring look. Then he flashed a brilliant, unsettling smile. 'You can come in any time you like"
Author: L.J. Smith

29. "In a clock the complex action of countless different wheels works its way out in the even, leisurely movement of hands measuring time; in a similar way the complex action of humanity in those 160,000 Russians and Frenchmen – all their passions, longings, regrets, humiliation and suffering, their rushes of pride, fear and enthusiasm – only worked its way out in defeat at the battle of Austerlitz, known as the battle of the three Emperors, the slow tick-tock of the age-old hands on the clock face of human history."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

30. "They all watched in silence as the tall Southerner strode towards the doorway. George Peabody,a hot-headed boy who couldn't resist making one remark from the safety of the corner, muttered an insult under his breath.Heath stopped and turned around, giving him a measuring glance, but before he could make a reply, Lucy rounded fiercely on the boy. "George Peabody, you button your mouth!""He'd better see to his breeches first," Heath said, and touched the brim of his hat respectfully to Lucy before slipping out the door.Automatically they all looked at George's trousers, discovering that one of the buttons did indeed need to be fastened. The tension broke, and as the flushed boy spun around to restore his injured dignity, they all chuckled. Even Daniel had to smile. "Impudent Reb," he said ruefully, and no one disagreed."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

31. "If measuring by this earthly realm's time then it's been years but in the unseen realm above known as Vehaven, it has been but a moment."
Author: Madison Thorne Grey

32. "She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now."
Author: Marisha Pessl

33. "God forces us to quantify our religious tenants by measuring them against the family problems they solve. If your religious beliefs aren't solving family problems then something is broke--and it can be fixed.pg iv"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

34. "Are you wearing space pants?" Miranda asked him."What?"How did it end? oh, right. "Because your butt is fine."He gazed at her in that way he had like he was measuring her for straitjacket. "I think-" he started, then stopped and seemed to be having trouble talking. Cleared his throat three times before saying, "I think the line is 'because your butt is out of this world.""Oh. That makes a lot more sense. I can see that. See, I read this book about how to get guys to like you and they said it was a line that never failed but i got interrupted in the middle and the line before it was about china-not the country, the kind you eat off of-and that is where the fine part was but i must have gotten them confused. He just kept staring at her."
Author: Michele Jaffe

35. "When you are measuring life, you are not living it."
Author: Mitch Albom

36. "The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability."
Author: Nic Marks

37. "I'm doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and cataloging the myriad gradations of their forms."
Author: Niles Eldredge

38. "Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler', more ‘naturally' aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse' and ‘bestial' Hutus. On the ‘nasal index' for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose."
Author: Philip Gourevitch

39. "Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away."
Author: Philip Yancey

40. "We think that groups of between 30 and 40 early men would have settled in an area measuring a hundred square kilometers."
Author: Richard Leakey

41. "She kept the wish to herself, as she should have, and simply blew out the candle.I clapped and whistled and then dove into my own cupcake, dying to know how my creations tasted. And seeing as I'd done the hard work—frosting and decorating—I felt like I could take credit and call them my creations. All Cassie had done was get the ingredients, come up with the recipe, and do all the measuring and mixing."
Author: Richelle Mead

42. "...I fear that some of us understand just enough about the gospel to feel guilty--guilty that we are not measuring up to some undefinable standard--but not enough about the Atonement to feel the peace and strength, the power and mercy it affords us."
Author: Sheri Dew

43. "That's the big picture, your happiness. And health. You should never care what a man thinks of you -- until he demonstrates to you that he cares about making you happy. If he isn't trying to make you happy, then send him back from "whence" he came because winning him over will have no benefit. At the end of the day, happines, joy...and yes...your emotional stability...those comprise the only measuring stick you really need to have."
Author: Sherry Argov

44. "Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?"
Author: Stanisław Lem

45. "The little hand on time's clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here for years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it."
Author: Thomas Mann

46. "She'll have to get over it, then. Are you going to let her drop out of Dauntless for a stupid reason like not being able to walk?" Zeke is quiet for a few seconds. His eyes shift over my face, and he squints, as if weighing and measuring me. Then he turns and bends and wraps his arms around me. it's been so long since someone hugged me that I stiffen. Then I relax, and let the gesture force warmth over my body..."
Author: Veronica Roth

47. "Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

49. "He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?"
Author: William Gaddis

50. "I, measuring his affections by my own,Which then most sought where most might not be found,Being one too many by my weary self,Pursued my humor not pursuing his,And gladly shunned who gladly fled from me."
Author: William Shakespeare

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