A Quote by Seneca the Younger

There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won't make the crooked straight.

Seneca the Younger

Quote Topics

Against Characters Crooked Make Measure Need Our Ruler Someone Straight Themselves Which Without

Quote Author

Seneca the Younger
Roman - Philosopher
4 BC - 65

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. And they grew next to each other. And every day the straight tree would look at the crooked tree and he would say, "You're crooked. You've always been crooked and you'll continue to be crooked. But look at me! Look at me!" said the straight tree. He said, "I'm tall and I'm straight." And then one day the lumberjacks came into the forest and looked around, and the manager in charge said, "Cut all the straight trees." And that crooked tree is still there to this day, growing strong and growing strange.

Tom Waits

If a crooked stick is before you, you need not explain how crooked it is. Lay a straight one down by the side of it, and the work is well done. Preach the truth, and error will stand abashed in its presence.

Charles Spurgeon

Reincarnation is, indeed, the key which unlocks all doors, the universal "combination," before which our manacles fall from our limbs -- the life-line by which the crooked way is made straight.

Shaw Desmond

The hundred parts of the body are all complete in their places. Which should one prefer? Do you like them all equally? Are they all servants? Are they unable to control one another and need a ruler? Or do they become rulers and servants in turn? Is there any true ruler other than themselves?

Zhuangzi

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

James Hillman

It is better to have crooked legs than a crooked spirit. We can only do the best we can with what we have. That, after all, is the measure of success: what we do with what we have.

Marguerite de Angeli

Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.

Fulton J. Sheen

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

Walter Lippmann

It's a muscle that everybody needs to develop: the ability to see themselves in someone else's circumstances without having to paint that person white, make that person straight, or a man.

Arthur Jafa

Try not to make a straight line crooked.

Matthew McConaughey

Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.

Wilfrid Sheed

I don't measure myself against my coaches, I don't measure myself against my teammates. If I'm doing jiu-jitsu for sport, I don't measure myself against the guy I'm rolling with or whatever belt he is or how many stripes he has on his belt. I measure myself every day against the guy I was yesterday.