Yardstick Quotes & Sayings

I love that perhaps we don't see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them. — Nicolas Roeg

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

Having taught economics courses at private vocational schools and universities, I have always had a problem with GNP as a yardstick of prosperity. GNP is improved by increases in questionable activities such as consumption of cigarettes and the production of weapons. Moreover, a substantial increase in car accidents will favorably affect GNP because more funerals, hospital visits, car repairs, and new car purchases will result. — Ernie J Zelinski

It is now 14 years since I first suggested that organic farming might have some benefits and ought to be taken seriously. I shall never forget the vehemence of the reaction.. much of it coming from the sort of people who regard agriculture as an industrial process, with production as the sole yardstick of success. — Prince Charles

We select such investments on a long-term basis, weighing the same factors as would be involved in the purchase of 100% of an operating business: (1) favorable long-term economic characteristics; (2) competent and honest management; (3) purchase price attractive when measured against the yardstick of value to a private owner; and (4) an industry with which we are familiar and whose long-term business characteristics we feel competent to judge. — Warren Buffett

Love is a Yardstick [10w]
Love is a yardstick by which we can measure our heartbreak. — Beryl Dov

In retrospect, 'Pulp Fiction' isn't just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another. — Steve Erickson

In my opinion, the entire field of investment management, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, would be more satisfactorily conducted if everyone had a good yardstick for measurement of ability and sensibly applied it. — Warren Buffett

The trouble with institutional investors is that their performance is usually measured relative to their peer group and not by an absolute yardstick. This makes them trend followers by definition. — George Soros

I think I need to spend some time with safari but what arrests my attention are salient, sadomasochism, saccadic, and salad days. I think I will go learn more about coral only to learn a lot more about corollary and counterturn and coffin nail. I go from magnificence to means to marquee to maniac to distyle, ductile, hindsight, shell game, veronica, yardstick, ball field, magpie, variegated, and close shave. — Dara Wier

What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility. Difficulty of reproduction is the yardstick of the degree of beauty. — Kobo Abe

The only yardstick for success our society has is being a champion. No one remembers anything else. — John Madden

There is one Christian commandment that can be used as a yardstick ... 'Thou shalt not kill.' That is clear enough ... 'Thou shalt not kill' says you shall not kill your neighbor no matter how you feel about him. — Seth

A gaping chasm separates what we try to be aware of and what we actually are aware of. And I don't care how long your yardstick is, there's no measuring that drop. What I can set down here in writing only amounts to a catalog. Not a novel, not literature, not even art. Just a notebook with a line ruled down the center. And maybe a lesson or two in it somewhere. — Haruki Murakami

I think as a filmmaker one should make all kinds of films. It is not that one should make only one kind of film. I love to see romantic films; I loved watching 'Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge,' 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.' If I make such films, I will make it with my yardstick, according to my parameters. — Madhur Bhandarkar

The main yardstick for measuring life and its essence is quality of life. — Sunday Adelaja

When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature - those of his own nature as well as those of so-called "nature"? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution - i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick - an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? — Karl Marx

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

That picture has become a sort of yardstick for everything else I've done. — Robert Hamer

It's not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed. Why I love that line, that concept, is that it reminds me that we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness.
And what does that mean? How is that measured? You can't use a yardstick. It's like I was saying just before: it's not like measuring how much you've grown in a year. It's not exactly quantifiable, is it? — R.J. Palacio

Here Mr. Tushman looked up at the audience. "Kinder than is necessary," he repeated. "What a marvelous line, isn't it? Kinder than is necessary. Because it's not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed. Why I love that line, that concept, is that it reminds me that we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness. And what does that mean? How is that measured? You can't use a yardstick. It's like I was saying just before: it's not like measuring how much you've grown in a year. It's not exactly quantifiable, is it? How do we know we've been kind? What is being kind, anyway? — R.J. Palacio

Money is not a part of the visible sector of the economy; people do not consume money. Money is not a physical factor of production, but rather a yardstick for measuring economic input, economic outtake and the relative values of the real goods and services of the economic world. Money provides a method of measuring obligations, rights, powers and privileges. It provides a means whereby certain individuals can accumulate claims against others, or against the economy as a whole, or against many economies. — Louis O. Kelso

The inevitable consequence is that the wealthy become dominant. The wealthy set their own pay or the company boards pay very generously. Each company board, in hiring a new CEO, feels it must pay as much or more than the competitive companies pay their CEO, rather than using the firm's earnings or share price or some other yardstick. In many sectors, especially in the financial sector, there is more collusion than real competition. The wealthy see their pay as describing their worth, and they rely on their wealth and political influence to defeat democratic measures to contain or tax them sufficiently. Democracy is therefore in danger of being destroyed by capitalism. Unless there is higher taxation on wealth and more regulation to promote real competition, democracy is subverted.8 — Philip Kotler

Now that the generation that grew up on '80s indie-rock has attained influential positions in the culture, that music is the new yardstick. And that will shift yet again some day. — Michael Azerrad

For children, parents are a yardstick for normalcy. — Upasana Saraf

Originality is what distinguishes art from craft. It is the yardstick of artistic greatness. — H. W. Janson

Critics and fans use the music of their youth as reference points. For years, people seriously wondered who "the next Beatles" were going to be, and classic rock bands were the de facto yardstick for rock quality. — Michael Azerrad

Self-correction makes me check the ruler of my life against the yardstick of my inner voice. I acknowledge when I don't measure up. Self-correction is an ongoing process. If done often enough, I can stop myself from straying off the path. — Stella Payton

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

she'd wager that they weren't single moms who'd had to poke the radiator vents with a yardstick at 3:00 a.m. to prove that there weren't any snakes hiding in the dark tunnels. — Jodi Picoult

Don't allow money to become the yardstick by which you measure the worth of the world around you! — Andrew James Pritchard

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

The yardstick that we frequently use to determine if something can be restored is based on the handful of inches that we bring to the process, when God shows up with an infinite amount of miles. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

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

Even the healthiest of people struggle to measure the world and themselves with an accurate yardstick, as the power of sin infects everyone's mind as well as his or her actions. — Adam S. McHugh

I see the cultural messaging everywhere that says an ordinary life is a meaningless life ... I know the yearning to believe that what I'm doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate. — Brene Brown

We shall always meet teachers but we shall seldom meet good teachers. We shall seldom meet a good teacher who is good enough to direct the body, mind and soul towards the path of true purposefulness. We shall hardly meet good teachers who are good enough to leave indelible and distinctive footprints in our minds; good teachers whose words, thoughts, actions and wonderful deeds would continue to reecho themselves in our minds and become the yardstick, guiding principles and reasons for the steps we take each moment of time. We shall always meet teachers but, we shall seldom and hardly meet great teachers! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

History uses a unit of measure for time that is different from that of the lifespan of the individual, whereas man is only too ready to measure the evolution of history by his own yardstick. — Gustav Stresemann

I've certainly stayed a marginal figure, though I became a member of the "surveillance committee" fairly early on. I can actually live pretty well with this, because I'm allowed to work in peace - except when I have to give strings of interviews ... And also, I've never sought a position of power in the music business. I became a teacher not so as to found a Kagel School, but to transmit knowledge. My work as a composer should be the only yardstick by which my contribution can be measured. — Mauricio Kagel

There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed. — Duke Ellington

To get the most from agricultural resources, poor farmers' needs must come first, guiding investment strategies and forming the yardstick for gauging results. — Sylvia Mathews Burwell

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

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people. — Barbara Bush

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

A good column is one that sells paper. It doesn't matter how beautifully it is written and how much you admire the author ... if it doesn't sell any papers, it's not a good column. It's a terrible yardstick to use, but in the newspaper business, that's the whole thing. — Herb Caen

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

No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart. In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes. — Jill Kargman

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

It's hazardous, though, being that much to someone. When you're the yardstick that everything else is measure against, eventually, you just fail. — Brenna Yovanoff

My yardstick is how somebody treats me. — Truman Capote

In childhood, it's our parents who give us our standards for experience: "Here's an inch," they say. "And this is a foot." And a child says, "Thanks! I can make my own yardstick now." In my family, there wasn't any kind of calibration demonstration. In the chaos, I struggled to figure out anything at all. — Heather Sellers

The ability to analyze others' arguments can also serve as a yardstick for when to withdraw from discussions that will most likely be futile. — Ali Almossawi

From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it. — Todd Rose

The best yardstick for our progress is not other people, but ourselves. Am I better than I was yesterday? This is the only question worth asking. As long as you go to bed at night a better practitioner than the one who woke up that morning, you have succeeded. Your worth should have nothing to do with how your progress stacks up relative to another. — Chris Matakas

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

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. — Steve Jobs

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

What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being. — Soren Kierkegaard

I'm not particularly needy, and I'm not particularly anxious. I don't look for a director to tell me I'm doing a good job or that I'm great. I don't need to be stroked. It's more my own yardstick. — Cate Blanchett

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

Hope, ... which whispered from Pandora's box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion ... It's a law of motion, a fact of physics ... , no different from the stages of white dwarves and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years. — Ian Caldwell

Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration. — Wendell Phillips

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

In any organization of which I have played a leadership role, our trump card has never been great numbers but the way we worked with neighborhood people in conjunction with professionals in suits and ties. I want the Obama generation to try to understand this concept, and use it as a real yardstick for their ability to make change. My life personifies the straddling of two cultures: the world of Amherst and Yale and the world of Newark, New Jersey. As you will see, it is the power of the streets combined with the power of the suites that is the most effective mix for making things happen. Anybody who comes to you and says "we want change," without addressing the intersection of these two powerful forces in combination, is just whistling status quo. — Junius Williams

I was guided by Allah (God) to give a yardstick to the voting public, particularly Black people as to what will set that candidate apart from others. — Louis Farrakhan

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger. — Fulton J. Sheen

I have my own peculiar yardstick for measuring a man: Does he have the courage to cry in a moment of grief? Does he have the compassion not to hunt an animal? In his relationship with a woman, is he gentle? Real manliness is nurtured in kindness and gentleness, which I associate with intelligence, comprehension, tolerance, justice, education, and high morality. If only men realized how easy it is to open a woman's heart with kindness, and how many women close their hearts to the assaults of the Don Juans. — Sophia Loren

For us there still exists a serene, unfathomable abyss in which God and the spirits dwell. The soul, in moments of ecstasy, often soars across it; poetry unveils it at times with childlike naivete; but science with its hammer and yardstick is often perched at the rim and may, in many cases, contribute nothing at all. — Adalbert Stifter

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem - and that yardstick is: Is it good for America? — Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

Even terror needs a yardstick, and surely the yardstick for the unknown is the known? — Carsten Jensen

I didn't want to be the yardstick of righteousness; I was too lacking. — Amy Harmon

There is much reading material that is available which is either time-wasting or corrupting. The best yardstick to use in discerning the worth of true knowledge and learning is to go first and foremost to the words of the Lord's prophets. — Ezra Taft Benson

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it. — James Branch Cabell

Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. "He applied charm or public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective," Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn't. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first ten months at NeXT. He quit when "Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was with what we were doing." When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. "Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field trips, visits by akido masters, and off-site retreats. — Walter Isaacson

The task of writing consists primarily in recognizing the distance between oneself and the things around one. It is not sensitivity one needs, but a yardstick. — Haruki Murakami

The Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ... nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love ... ' — Muhammad Asad

Why shouldn't we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word "obscenity." If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick. — Billy Graham

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

There is no yardstick for measuring love; nevermind that the heart doesn't follow rules — Franklin Veaux

Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party. — J.G. Ballard

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language. — Joseph Brodsky

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

Up to now in the West none of the apostles of stabilization and petrification has succeeded in wiping out the individuais innate disposition to think and to apply to ali problems the yardstick of reason. This alone, and no more, history and philosophy can assert in dealing with doctrines that claim to know exactly what the future has in store for mankind. — Ludwig Von Mises

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

But our minds are bound to the yardstick of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and with that yardstick we try to inquire into the unknown, to measure that which is not measurable. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation. — Carson McCullers

Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn't reflect your, or your child's, or your students', or your employees' abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously. — Todd Rose

Not the absorption capacity of the land, but the creative ability of a people, is the true yardstick with which we can measure the immigration potentialities of the land. — David Ben-Gurion

The point of the spiritual life is to realize Truth. But you will never understand the spiritual life, or realize Truth, if you measure it by your own yardstick. — Dainin Katagiri

The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen King. These are honorable writers; but no one doubts it was the size of their contracts that won them covers. The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority, and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it. — Jonathan Franzen

There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility. — Karl Lehmann

We humans can spend our whole lives pondering the meaning of 'good' and 'evil,' but we will never be able to figure it out. The only thing that human beings can do is come up with a yardstick by which to measure good and evil. — Soko Morinaga

The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one's hand and ask: "Does this spark joy?" If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge. — Marie Kondo

I won't tell," he said, his arms holding my waist with amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he'd become and all the things he'd try with me for the very first time. I'd be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he'd have afterwards would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naivety would be subtracted from my experience to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible. — Alissa Nutting

I have observed a phenomena about women in this community and is how quick they are able to form opinions and "ideas" about other women without any knowledge of their character and just by virtue of some preconceived notion often fueled by envy, bias and downright bad mind which in many cases have no basis or truth to it.i hate when biotches try to use their lackluster lives as a yardstick for mine ... — Crystal Evans

The clearest short-term yardstick may be the PSA nadir (discussed above). One study of 743 patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York confirmed that higher-intensity radiation does a better job of achieving a rock-bottom PSA level. Of the men who received higher doses - 76 to 81 Gy - 90 percent achieved a PSA nadir of 1.0 ng/ml or less; 76 percent of men who received 70 Gy and 56 percent of men who received 64.8 Gy achieved those low PSA levels. But there was a trade-off - the men who received higher doses of radiation also had a significantly higher rate of gastrointestinal side effects, urinary tract complications, and impotence. To overcome these side effects at high doses, intensity-modulated radiation therapy — Patrick C. Walsh

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

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