Quantify Quotes & Sayings

What I really, hugely, and antagonistically dislike is the attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. And if you are a branding consultant, you have to accept that there are a lot of things you just cannot quantify. — Wally Olins

The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. They took highly novel securities, subject to an enormous amount of systemic uncertainty, and claimed the ability to quantify just how risky they were. Not only that, but of all possible conclusions, they came to the astounding one that these investments were almost risk-free. — Nate Silver

No really. What exactly did you do today, Jenny? Quantify it for me."
"It's not quantifiable. There aren't even metrics for the shit I do. — Jenny Lawson

From a mathematical point of view, however, trust is hard to quantify. That's a challenge for people building models. Sadly, it's far easier to keep counting arrests, to build models that assume we're birds of a feather and treat us as such. Innocent people surrounded by criminals get treated badly, and criminals surrounded by law-abiding public get a pass. And because of the strong correlation between poverty and reported crime, the poor continue to get caught up in the digital dragnets. The rest of us barely have to think about them. — Cathy O'Neil

She looked at ways to quantify life. Analytic in nature, her head almost always overruled her heart. Love it? Hate it? She wanted to KNOW it. — Gregg Olsen

Make adjustments and improvements to enhance the effectiveness of meetings or surpassing of your target. Learn to define, quantify and be specific about what, how and when you want to succeed in each area of your life. — Archibald Marwizi

The easier it is to quantify, the less it's worth. — Seth Godin

Yoga is somewhat hard to quantify in terms of benefits because you see them in all the injuries you don't get. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

There are things about growing up in a small town that you can't necessarily quantify. — Brandon Routh

There exists a mountain of circumstantial evidence that consciousness survives bodily death. This is the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Some people believe that science needs better tools to quantify what consciousness is. Perhaps when we discover what consciousness is we will be on the road to providing absolute scientific evidence that there is life after death. — Jean Ritchie

Wow. You really know how to make a woman happy..."
"I have a night-eight percent success rate with always knowing what will make a woman happy," he said.
Lindsey chuckled softly. "And how do you quantify that?"
"Would you like to know," he said.
Nat wanted to know. — Jamie Farrell

The reality is, like any band, you can never quite quantify who does what. — Nick Mason

Less than 1 percent of ancient Egypt has been discovered and excavated. With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past? — Sarah Parcak

The solution to the problem of poor performance scores had been a new system of grading that would encourage students to stay in school as well as improve their self-esteem. Beyond these important, admirable goals, it also had a more immediate purpose: it would undoubtedly reduce the school's notoriously high failure rate, which had become an embarrassment to the school and to the school board. Under the plan, equal weight was given to class participation (which to some teachers meant simply showing up, because how on earth were you supposed to quantify participation?), homework, weekly tests, and a final exam at the end of every six-week period. A student could flunk every weekly test as well as the final exam and still pass a course for that period. — H. G. Bissinger

He that expects to quantify in dollars the gains that will accrue to a company year by year for a program for improvement of quality expounded in [Out of the Crisis] will suffer delusion. He should know before he starts that he will be able to quantify only a trivial part of the gain. — W. Edwards Deming

Prejudice, mostly,' Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk. 'They can't quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it's will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don't push your luck, anyway. — Salman Rushdie

You can't quantify love, and if you try, you can end up focusing on misleading factors. Stuff that really has more to do with personality-the fact that some people are simply more expressive or emotional or needy in a relationship. But beyond such smokescreens, the answer is there. Love is seldom-almost never-an even proposition. — Emily Giffin

We should not forget, no matter how we quantify it: 'Freedom is not free.' It is a painful lesson, but one from which we have learned in the past and one we should never forget. — Paul Gillmor

How do you quantify love? Can you weigh it, measure it, pin it down with equations? If the sum of all experiences is really just the interaction of a finite soup of chemicals copulating in nerve endings, how did this even dare articulate the infinite?
Mathematicians will tell you there are different types of infinities. Some are countable, some are not. We can love someone more and more; we can stop loving. But we can never guess how much all this is. Love has no units. — Sean J Halford

Can we quantify failure in degrees and say, 'on a 10 point scale this failure causes this much pain?' Extremely difficult. — Anup Kochhar

We all know what the moon does to the ocean in the form of tides. Well, we are about 85% salt water; don't you think it is also affecting you? Maybe you cannot quantify that effect along with zillions of other effects, but certainly you are being affected. — Bryan Kest

Friendship is a strange idea, difficult to quantify and, at times, even more difficult to maintain. Clearly a friend is someone you enjoy spending time with. However, a friend is also someone you continue to support even during periods when they are considerably less pleasurable to be around. The loyalty of friendship often contains a kind of tautology or feedback loop: the longer you are friends the more loyal you become, and the more loyal you become the longer you remain friends. — Jacob Wren

Software never was perfect and won't get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality. — Boris Beizer

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156 — Chuck Klosterman

If we can't quantify and communicate our value with confidence, the achievements of the tremendous women before us will have all been for nothing. — Mika Brzezinski

In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantify of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. — Howard Zinn

Reducing risk, which is the primary mission of testing, clearly creates economic value for product developers. In fact, reducing risk is so centrally important to product development that it is indispensable for us to quantify its economic impact. — Donald G. Reinertsen

You can't quantify everything a player does to win games. — Derek Jeter

A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling. — Thomas Harris

All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous. — Noreena Hertz

A person seeks to quantify their existence. Do we measure a person's life by its longevity or by assessing the warmth of its blaze? Do we measure a person by their brainpower or by the heartiness of his or her spine? Do earthy deeds count for more than intellectual opinions? What is more important, the work that a person produces or the quality of life that effuses from their being? Does it matter how we live and how we die, if we love or hate, are kind or mean, generous or stingy? Does it matter that we struggle to express personal doubts and toil in an effort to obtain redemption for our personal lapses? — Kilroy J. Oldster

Stupid Ape: I had to quantify this with the word "stupid" so as not to offend the ape community. Large of limb, impotent of intellect, he was the kind of guy who lettered in leg-breaking at thug school but flunked the written exam because he didn't know which end of the e-pencil to use. — John Zakour

I still think I love him more. It's one of those things you never know for certain because there's no way to enter all the relationship data in a computer and have it spit out a definitive answer. You can't quantify love, and if you try, you wind up focusing on misleading factors. — Emily Giffin

Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So — Donella H. Meadows

There is redemption in sadness. It tells me that for nearly five months in 2003, I lived life with the open, raw, refreshing outlook of the young. The payoff, though difficult to quantify, is much greater than I expected. I have no regrets about having gone -- it was the right thing to do. I think about it every day. Sometimes I can hardly believe it happened. I just quit -- and I was on a monumental trip. I didn't suffer financial ruin, my wife didn't leave me, the world didn't stop spinning. I do think of how regrettable it would have been had I ignored the pull that I felt to hike the trail. A wealth of memories could have been lost before they had even occurred if I had dismissed as a whim my inkling to hike. It is disturbing how tenuous our potential is due to our fervent defense of the comfortable norm. — David Miller

No scoring system is perfect, but a system that provides for flexibility in scores, if applied by the same taster without prejudice, can quantify different levels of wine quality and provide the reader with one professional's judgment. — Robert M. Parker Jr.

The revelation that there was nothing "special" about humanity didn't shock her. Not specifically. She'd always been cynical about that sort of thing. The idea that reality was all too big to even quantify in any meaningful way didn't disturb her much either. Except, deep down, she'd assumed there was some inherent logic at work. Like ricocheting molecules congealing into planets and stars, dogs and cats. At least the made sense, even if it wasn't very comforting. At least it put things in neat little boxes with neat little labels that she didn't always understand but could rely on in terms of familiarity. — A. Lee Martinez

He kissed me again, farther up my neck, and I pushed him back against the wall.
My mind searched for the logical thought, a rational life raft before I drowned in wanting to hiss him. I managed, "We've only met a few days ago. We don't know each other."
Luke released me. "How long does it take to know someone?"
I didn't know. "A month? A few months?" It sounded stupid to quantify it, especially when I didn't want to believe my own reasoning. But I couldn't just go kissing someone I knew nothing about
it went against everything I'd ever been told. So why was it so hard to say no?
He took my fingers, playing with them in between his own. "I'll wait." He looked so good in the half-light under the trees, his light eyes nearly glowing against his shadowed skin. It was useless.
"I don't want you to." I whispered the words, and before I'd even finished saying them, his mouth was on mine and I was melting under his lips. — Maggie Stiefvater

Our campaigns have not grown more humanistic because our candidates are more benevolent or their policy concerns more salient. In fact, over the last decade, public confidence in institutions-- big business, the church, media, government-- has declined dramatically. The political conversation has privileged the nasty and trivial. Yet during that period, election seasons have awakened with a new culture of volunteer activity. This cannot be credited to a politics inspiring people to hand over their time but rather to campaign, newly alert to the irreplaceable value of a human touch, seeking it out. Finally campaigns are learning to quantify the ineffable - the value of a neighbor's knock, of a stranger's call, the delicate condition of being undecided-- and isolate the moment where a behavior can be changed, or a heart won. Campaigns have started treating voters like people again. — Sasha Issenberg

It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics ... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify. — Cassiodorus

In this culture of participation awards, this society where everyone is special and legitimate skill is the mark of a bygone era, we have ceased to quantify accomplishment. I look around and see a generation of useless, over privileged men who have all been taught to express their opinions rather than get things done. — J.A. Rock

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy. — Polly Toynbee

We must each ascertain our own way to quantify the world. We can choose to peer at life harshly or benevolently. The prism that we select to view the world ultimately is the same standard that we employ to judge ourselves. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud. — Dustin Yellin

This is another lesson from the transformative movements of the past: all of them understood that the process of shifting cultural values - though somewhat ephemeral and difficult to quantify - was central to their work. And so they dreamed in public, showed humanity a better version of itself, modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible. — Naomi Klein

For someone to promise a percentage type cure for this issue, for instance I had someone who said they had experienced a 90 percent permanent - in all caps PERMANENT - reduction of their same-sex attraction. How can we quantify that? How can you even know that that's what you have experienced? And what if at some point you fall to 85 percent or 70 percent? That, I think, sets people up for unrealistic expectations and is something that I'm not willing to offer when we're sharing these types of messages or presenting what was presented to me. — Alan Chambers

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify. — Karen Russell

There are just some things that are outside of comprehension, even if we can quantify them. At some point, science becomes magic. — Jay Hosking

I'm a romantic, but I'm not a romantic in the traditional sense. I like to romanticize what happens to me. Whatever happens to me - you could quantify it as good or bad - I romanticize it. I think along the lines of 'When that thing happened, it made me who I am.' That kind of thing. It's a different way of being romantic. — Zooey Deschanel

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each. — Darin Strauss

Nobody can quantify for you what's the impact of eating fiber every day, for instance. We can say we think it's good. But some people might say 'Oh, it reduces your risk of colon cancer by 20%, some people might say it reduces your risk by 25%.' — Anne Wojcicki

Every situation has qualities. Essentially, we quantify them and that's the practical side of our lives, so the involvement with perception and in acquiring the perception is our ability to understand qualities. They exist only as long as a human being keeps them in play. They're - Therefore they are akin to energy. — Robert Irwin

The greatest friends and companions in times of horrible sadness are the ones who don't attempt to fix or quantify your experience, but rather are simply present and willing to share only as little or as much of your life as you invite them into." Well — September Vaudrey

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person's personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person's sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author's own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person. — Kilroy J. Oldster

All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment. — Tadao Ando

I feel like I'm an explorer, a frontiersman if you will, and I've been able to satisfy that desire in me through music. I've continued to meet people who challenge me and inspire me as friends. I don't even know how to even quantify it in words. I've been very fortunate. — Ishmael Butler

In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust. — Lauren Oliver

Wage concessions are difficult to quantify, since their magnitude depends on many operating variables. — Carol Loomis

Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.
Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.
But for me it does-I walk down the street
and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry
eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math. — Jeffrey McDaniel

Put in the starkest terms, there is no measure by which we can adequately quantify the devastation a mass nuclear attack would have on our civilization. My — William Perry

Or that other bullshit, 'I need more space.' People never quantify exactly how much space they need, but strangely enough it always seems to be the exact same height, depth, and breadth as you. — Dylan Moran

He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear. — Dave Eggers

Life has taught me to be very cautious of a man with a dream, especially a man who has teetered on the edge of life. It gives a fire and recklessness inside that is hard to quantify. It can also make them fun to be around. — Bear Grylls

There's no question that the mind-body connection is real, even if we can't quantify it. Hope is one of the greatest weapons we have to fight disease. — David Agus

Suffering is always hard to quantify - especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as Alzheimer's. Most illnesses attack the body; Alzheimer's destroys the mind - and in the process, annihilates the very self. — Jeffrey Kluger

As children, we have a tenuous idea of love; we often try to quantify it with how much we feel seen and heard. — Adora Svitak

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time. — Yann Martel

Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who've been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage. — Peter Lynch

Such arguments remind me of a scene from Woody Allen's movie Manhattan, where a group of people is talking about sex at a cocktail party and one woman says that her doctor told her she had been having the wrong kind of orgasm. Woody Allen's character responds by saying, "Did you have the wrong kind? Really? I've never had the wrong kind. Never, ever. My worst one was right on the money."
Grace works the same way. It is what it is and it's always right on the money. You can call it what you like, categorize it, vivisect it, qualify, quantify, or dismiss it, and none of it will make grace anything other than precisely what grace is: audacious, unwarranted, and unlimited. — Cathleen Falsani

Measuring success in cultural diplomacy - the use of education, creative expression in any form, or people-to-people exchange to increase understanding across regions, cultures, or peoples - is challenging. How does one quantify changes in attitude, abandoning stereotypes, or feeling empathy as a result of a performance, a film, a book? — Cynthia P. Schneider

The lesson here, and my advice for other developers, is to find a way that you can quantify for people what your product is worth. We were leery to do it ourselves, but being near Vetro when they did, the auction was a good technique for that. No one wants to be first, and the auction proved to people that others were buying and gave them that boost of confidence they needed. — Bob Horner

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen. — Harrison Ford

I love seeing women looking great in my clothes. I don't care who they are. I don't quantify people by celebrity. — L'Wren Scott

The copyright industry has managed to kill civil liberties for their own children, ushering in a dystopian surveillance machine, merely to avoid taking responsibility for their own business failures. I lack words to quantify my contempt for these utter parasites. — Rick Falkvinge

I just let people believe what they please. I don't feel like it's my responsibility to quantify myself for them. — Jenny Han

Anything you try to quantify can be divided into any number of "anythings," or become the thing - the unit - itself. And what is any number, itself, but just another unit of measurement? What is a 'six' but two 'threes', or three 'twos' ... half a 'twelve', or just six 'ones' - which are what?
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson) — Mort W. Lumsden

I've turned myself inside out to try and avoid what happened today. You affect me in ways I can't quantify or contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control. — Jeanette Winterson

Spare time is like spare change. It's hard to quantify, the definition of that phrase. What do I do when I'm not onstage singing, or sleeping, with or without someone else? I watch movies. — Marilyn Manson

I've never really understood the desire people have to quantify a baby. "He's X big and Y long," As if the baby is a fish you're not sure you're going to keep. Or some prize potato you're hoping will win a prize at the county fair. — Patrick Rothfuss

Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics. — Paul Samuelson

Do not measure the number of tragedies you sustain, but to quantify the success you derive from them. — Jacqueline Susann

But people are not butterflies, right.
People are, well, more important than butterflies.
We have opposable thumbs, hello.
You can't possibly compare the sanctity of a human's life with that of a butterfly. In our culture you can and, indeed, must quantify sanctity, and butterflies have less than people. — Inga Muscio

I can't give you a specific number today, in large part because the analysis upon which we would make that determination has not been completed ... I think it is fair to say there may be additional costs associated with a farming operation, but it is very difficult to quantify. — Tom Vilsack

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 — Michael Ben Zehabe

Knowing, glorifying and loving God are difficult to quantify, so we seldom include them in the evaluation process. We are tempted to evaluate goals that are easy to measure but that are much less significant. The final evaluation of leadership and of organizations is to ask, Did our efforts, programs, finances, structures and leadership style bring glory to God? Did these help people to know and love God? Too often we merely ask, Did the organization grow under my leadership? Did the budget increase? Did we plant more churches? Instead we must ask, Did the budget make God glad? Do people in the churches we planted truly love God more deeply? The fact that we will never be able to precisely quantify and evaluate the ultimate purpose must not dissuade us from being passionate about God's glory. The Lord will likely give us glimpses or indications of leadership effectiveness, but most of the critical outcomes will only be known in eternity. — James E. Plueddemann