Quotes & Sayings About Yardsticks

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

A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people . — Peter Drucker

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

Your mother has been using the old yardsticks all her life, and she can't change now. — Stephen King

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

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

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

Honesty and integrity are the yardsticks by which we measure our intrinsic value. — Orly Wahba

Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father's curse, mother's moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks. — Emma Goldman

Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us a maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. — Mary Oliver

Morse found it nerve-wracking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn't smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was. Sometimes he wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn't a pervert. Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought, arranging his face into what he thought would pass for the expression of a man thinking fondly of his own youth, a face devoid of wackiness or perversion, humility was the thing. — George Saunders

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

How our governments need standards of integrity! How our communities need yardsticks to measure decency! How our neighborhoods need models of beauty and cleanliness! How our schools need continued encouragement and assistance to maintain high educational standards! Rather than spend time complaining about the direction in which these institutions are going, we need to exert our influence in shaping the right direction. A small effort by a few can result in so much good for all of mankind. — L. Tom Perry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together. — Mary Oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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