Measurement Quotes - Page 8

• In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

  Atul Gawande

  Meaningful, Pain, Sleep

  Atul Gawande (2014). “Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End”, p.162, Profile Books

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• I don't tell everyone my life history because if everyone knows your inside-leg measurement, how can you surprise them?

  Penelope Wilton

  Legs, Surprise, Knows

  "Unspoken worlds" by Gareth McLean, www.theguardian.com. October 25, 2007.

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• Profit isn't and shouldn't be the mission of business. The mission of business is to help people. To help your customers, your co-workers, your employees, and your partners. Success is not a number - it's not X dollars or Y customers - it's a measurement of VALUE.

  Fran Tarkenton

  Numbers, People, Dollars

  "3 Business Myths People Should Stop Believing" by Fran Tarkenton, www.businessinsider.com. January 14, 2015.

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• I appreciate a slight yield, lightness of weight, some motion if possible, because in moving about, the human body determines... the comfort and the measurements of its environment... the human measure is still the strongest factor. But coming back to the chair, there are certain motions we go through - we like to lean back, like to toss things - and if the chair's adaptable it responds and it's almost like wearing a comfortable coat; you really don't know you have it on.

  Harry Bertoia

  Moving, Yield, Appreciate

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• Modern science is predicated on "truths" verified through accurate observation and measurements of physical world phenomena.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  World, Modern, Observation

  "Has Modern Science Bankrupted Our Souls?" by Bruce H. Lipton, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 2, 2011.

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• Using SROI to explore the value of our online question and answer service, askTheSite, helped us develop new mechanisms for speaking to young people and gain a real insight into the impact of our work. The project enabled us to demonstrate YouthNets commitment to robust impact measurement as well as our commercial approach to project evaluation. Perhaps most importantly, being able to assign a monetary value to askTheSite has enabled YouthNet to convey to current and potential funders how valuable the service is for both young people and the wider society in a language that they understand

  Sarah McCoy

  Real, Commitment, Impact

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• The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Beauty, Beautiful, Party

  "Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence". Book by Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, Preface, 1931.

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• True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Giving, Judging

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• In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

  Steve Jobs

  Order, Ideas, Giving

  Interview with David Sheff, www.scribd.com. February 1, 1985.

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• In all the thrashing about that results from our dwindling gold reserves, it's about time that this country and other countries get some perspective on the situation. The day this country is out of the stuff, that day gold becomes what it's worth as a metal and no longer will have much significance as a monetary measurement. It isn't the gold we have that makes this nation rich. It's what we make, our knowhow, our productivity. So long as this country produces more and better, the world will continue to want what we make.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Country, Long, Perspective

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• That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.

  John Dos Passos

  Past, Events, High Standards

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• The heart of science is measurement.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Heart

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• The goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation. The goal is to reduce operational expenses AND reduce inventories and increase throughput simultaneously.

  Eliyahu M. Goldratt

  Goal, Inventory, Isolation

  Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox (2016). “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement”, p.84, Routledge

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• But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job.

  Val Logsdon Fitch

  Jobs, Mind, Way

  "Les Prix Nobel" ("The Nobel Prizes 1980") edited by Wilhelm Odelberg, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. 1981.

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• I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don't believe me go out and do the measurements yourself.

  James Lovelock

  Believe, Data, Mind

  "James Lovelock on the value of sceptics and why Copenhagen was doomed" by Leo Hickman, www.theguardian.com. March 29, 2010.

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• We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us.

  Robert Morrison MacIver

  Time, Pain, Knowledge

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• Such pretensions to nicety in experiments of this nature, are truly laughable! They will be telling us some day of the WEIGHT of the MOON, even to drams, scruples and grains-nay, to the very fraction of a grain!-I wish there were infallible experiments to ascertain the quantum of brains each man possesses, and every man's integrity and candour:-This is a desideratum in science which is most of all wanted.

  Robert Sutton Harrington

  Integrity, Science, Moon

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• Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.

  David H. Hubel

  Science, Thinking, Numbers

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• In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Zero, Errors, Average

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• I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.

  James A. Garfield

  Moving, Science, Men

  Garfield, James A. (1882). “The works of James Abram Garfield. Volume 2”, p.777, Best Books on

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• The experiment left no doubt that, as far as accuracy of measurement went, the resistance disappeared. At the same time, however, something unexpected occurred. The disappearance did not take place gradually but abruptly. From 1/500 the resistance at 4.2K, it could be established that the resistance had become less than a thousand-millionth part of that at normal temperature. Thus the mercury at 4.2K has entered a new state, which, owing to its particular electrical properties, can be called the state of superconductivity.

  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

  Science, Doubt, Owing

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• There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e. in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in our study of the material universe-before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification.

  Roy Crowson

  Lying, Purpose, Use

  Roy Albert Crowson (1970). “Classification and Biology”, p.2, Transaction Publishers

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• When you don't know what you're doing, fake it.

  Jill Shalvis

  Funny Inspirational, Funny Motivational, Top Management

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• When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Time, Ocean, Mean

  Hermann von Helmholtz, David Cahan (1995). “Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

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• For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer.

  Steven Chu

  Education, Science, Garden

  "Steven Chu - Biographical". www.nobelprize.org. 1997.

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