Measurement Quotes - Page 6

• My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.

  Tino Sehgal

  Children, Father, Pakistan

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• Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something ? reality ? that may not be understood at all.

  Michael Crichton

  Reality, May, Kind

  "Travels". Book by Michael Crichton, Postscript, 1988.

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• Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it.

  Amber Naslund

  Motivational, Waiting, Marketing

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• Learning is the measurement of knowledge before and after.

  Eben Pagan

  Learning, Before And After

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• As I considered the matter carefully it gradually came to light that all those matters only were referred to mathematics in which order and measurements are investigated, and that it makes no difference whether it be in numbers, figures, stars, sounds or any other object that the question of measurement arises. I saw consequently that there must be some general science to explain that element as a whole which gives rise to problems about order and measurement, restricted as these are to no special subject matter. This, I perceived was called 'universal mathematics'.

  Rene Descartes

  Stars, Science, Light

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• British Israelites: The British Israelites believe the white Anglo-Saxons of Britain to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel deported by Sargon of Assyria on the fall of Sumeria in 721 B.C. ... They further believe that the future can be foretold by the measurements of the Great Pyramid, which probably means it will be big and yellow and in the hand of the Arabs. They also believe that if you sleep with your head under the pillow a fairy will come and take all your teeth.

  Mike Harding

  Humorous, Believe, Fall

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• To understand God's thoughts, one must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.

  Florence Nightingale

  God, Nursing, Science

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• That hemisphere of the moon which faces us is better known than the earth itself; its vast desert plains have been surveyed to within a few acres; its mountains and craters have been measured to within a few yards; while on the earth's surface there are 30,000,000 square kilometres (sixty times the extent of France), upon which the foot of man has never trod, which the eye of man has never seen.

  Camille Flammarion

  Knowledge, Eye, Science

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• If we are going to do anything significant with life, we sometimes have to move away from it- beyond the usual measurements. We must occasionally follow visions and dreams.

  Bede Jarrett

  Motivational, Dream, Moving

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• It can happen to but few philosophers, and but at distant intervals, to snatch a science, like Dalton, from the chaos of indefinite combination, and binding it in the chains of number, to exalt it to rank amongst the exact. Triumphs like these are necessarily 'few and far between.'

  Charles Babbage

  Science, Discovery, Numbers

  Charles Babbage (1970). “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England: And on Some of Its Causes”, Augustus m Kelley Pubs

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• The first steps in the path of discovery, and the first approximate measures, are those which add most to the existing knowledge of mankind.

  Charles Babbage

  Science, Discovery, Add

  Charles Babbage, Anthony Hyman (1989). “Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage”, p.119, Cambridge University Press

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• Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fall, Men, Work Out

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.180, Simon and Schuster

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• Measurement has too often been the leitmotif of many investigations rather than the experimental examination of hypotheses. Mounds of data are collected, which are statistically decorous and methodologically unimpeachable, but conclusions are often trivial and rarely useful in decision making. This results from an overly rigorous control of an insignificant variable and a widespread deficiency in the framing of pertinent questions. Investigators seem to have settled for what is measurable instead of measuring what they would really like to know.

  Edmund Pellegrino

  Knowledge, Science, Data

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• ...the geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough....You geometers can calculate the area of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating starts. Nothing's outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you're such an expert, measure a man's soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you've no idea what straightness means in life?

  Seneca the Younger

  Distance, Teaching, Mean

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• For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

  Wendell Berry

  Success, Mean, Law

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• Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.

  Frederick Seitz

  Religious, Technology, Land

  Frederick Seitz (2012). “The Science Matrix: The Journey, Travails, Triumphs”, p.8, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

  Jay Griffiths

  Opposites, Facts, Arguing

  "The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

  Jay Griffiths

  Space, Example, Needs

  " The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• If any of you would bring judgment the unfaithful wife, let him also weight the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.

  Khalil Gibran

  Husband, Heart, Wife

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

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• If it is possible to have a linear unit that depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements that in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such as the distance between two places or the area of some tract, for example. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle than to the length of a pendulum.

  Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

  Distance, Real, Taken

  "Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime". Book by Charles Coulston Gillispie, p. 240, January 10, 2009.

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• We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

  Neil Postman

  Children, Objectivity, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.61, Vintage

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• Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.

  Henry Beston

  Nature, House, Balance

  Henry Beston (1956). “The Outermost House”

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• While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the idealization obsession, the sexual afterglow, the profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

  David Buss

  Believe, Sacrifice, Love Is

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• Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesn't just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement.

  Dick Costolo

  Bars, Standards, Raises

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• She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Beautiful, Laughter, Fall

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