Yardsticks Quotes

Money has, as we know, no value in itself. It is a convenient yardstick for a large number of material values. But the health and life of an individual as well as the health of a nation cannot be measured by that yardstick. If we, entrusted with protecting and defending the health of the population, give in to a salesman's scale of values we are lost. ~ Karl Evang

As the twentieth century draws to a close it has become obvious that material yardsticks alone cannot serve as an adequate measure of human well-being. Even as basic an issue as poverty has to be re-examined to take into account the psychological sense of deprivation that makes people feel poor. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

I guess what I want to say to us artists and entrepreneurs is that conventional yardsticks of success don't apply to all enterprises. Labors of love count. ~ Steven Pressfield

What? You're thinking for yourself? You're deciding on your own? You're applying your own yardsticks, your own judgments, your own values? Who do you think you are, anyway? And, indeed, that is precisely the question you are answering. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can't play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can't enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But stories are just tools. They shouldn't become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars `to make a lot of money for the cooperation' or 'to protect the national interest'. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our life in their service. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Success should be measured by the yardstick of happiness; by your ability to remain in peaceful harmony with cosmic laws. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I don't want our success to be measured only by financial yardsticks, or by our distribution or number of shops. What I want to be celebrated for - and it's going to be tough in a business environment - is how good we are to our employees and how we benefit our community. It's a different bottom line. ~ Anita Roddick

Now, brethren, do not expect perfection in your choice of a mate. Do not be so particular that you overlook her most important qualities of having a strong testimony, living the principles of the gospel, loving home, wanting to be a mother in Zion, and supporting you in your priesthood responsibilities.
Of course, she should be attractive to you ...
And one good yardstick as to whether a person might be the right one for you is this: in her presence, do you think your noblest thoughts, do you aspire to your finest deeds, do you wish you were better than you are? ~ Ezra Taft Benson

How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick. ~ Geraldine Brooks

The giver measures his gift with one yardstick, and the receiver measures it with another. ~ Laura Huxley

Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality. ~ Hannah Arendt

Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks. ~ Kathryn Schulz

For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent. ~ Barbara Walters

We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth. ~ Kenneth Keniston

Without a yardstick sometimes the high points can be taken for granted. ~ Jasper Fforde

Life will never surrender its secrets to a yardstick. ~ Dee Hock

I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks. ~ Ron Suskind

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Change is a continuous process. You cannot assess it with the static yardstick of a limited time frame. When a seed is sown into the ground, you cannot immediately see the plant. You have to be patient. With time, it grows into a large tree. And then the flowers bloom, and only then can the fruits be plucked. ~ Mamata Banerjee

Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul. ~ Ann Voskamp

Personal dignity is to be measured with the yardstick of one's conscience, not with that of other people's judgement. ~ Fausto Cercignani

The more successful you become, the longer the yardstick people use to measure you by. ~ Tom Landry

We cannot measure Divine Providence by the yardstick of human mentality. ~ A.J. Cronin

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it's god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature's simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
'Goodness = what comes next.'
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

Oh then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be). ~ C.S. Lewis

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the "developed" and the latter as the "developing" world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of "development" are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of "development"? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more "developed" than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter? ~ Vinoth Ramachandra

If you are poor, shun association with him who measures men with the yardstick of riches. ~ Khalil Gibran

The great majority of men use their own short-sighted ideas as a yardstick for measuring the divine omnipotence. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

You can measure opportunity with the same yardstick that measures the risk involved. They go together. ~ Earl Nightingale

The remarkable thing," said Doc, "isn't that they put their tails up in the air - the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we'd probably be praying - so maybe they're praying. ~ John Steinbeck

Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks. ~ Charles Lindbergh

Success is not rightly measured by wealth, prestige and power. Success is measured by the yardstick of happiness. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

If we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us. ~ Pope Francis

The minister of the Gospel is really the yardstick by which the nation measures its morals. ~ Jimmy Swaggart

The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement. ~ Peter Drucker