Quotes about Testing

After you have made your commitment to say no to what no longer serves you, you will probably be invited to demonstrate that you really mean it.

Imaginary testing is unreliable, and in many cases, it’s a huge waste of time and energy.  In truth you just don’t know what will happen until you try.  You may start a business, and it could take off in ways no one could predict.  Or it could be a complete failure.  You could ask for a date and end up with the partner of your dreams.  Or you could be rejected cold.  It’s great to visualize what you want, but you never really know what’s going to happen until you act.

As soon as you concern yourself with the 'good' and 'bad' of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weaken and defeat you.

This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away.

I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life's greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret.

Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. . . . These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. . . . I always rested on the following argument. . . We look up to the sky and see the sun. Our eyes are dazzled and our senses record the fact. So here is this great sun standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical senses. But happily there is a method, apart altogether from our physical senses, of testing the reality of the sun. It is by mathematics. By means of prolonged processes of mathematics, entirely separate from the senses, astronomers are able to calculate when an eclipse will occur. They predict by pure reason that a black spot will pass across the sun on a certain day. You go and look, and your sense of sight immediately tells you that their calculations are vindicated. So here you have the evidence of the senses reinforced by the entirely separate evidence of a vast independent process of mathematical reasoning. We have taken what is called in military map-making "a cross bearing." . . . When my metaphysical friends tell me that the data on which the astronomers made their calculations, were necessarily obtained originally through the evidence of the senses, I say, "no." They might, in theory at any rate, be obtained by automatic calculating-machines set in motion by the light falling upon them without admixture of the human senses at any stage. When it is persisted that we should have to be told about the calculations and use our ears for that purpose, I reply that the mathematical process has a reality and virtue in itself, and that once discovered it constitutes a new and independent factor. I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot - in fact hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see.

What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.

I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers.

Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves.

[Scientific enterprise] is usually conceived as being made up of four main kinds of interrelated activities: gathering data, finding parsimonious descriptions of the data, formulating explanatory theories, and testing the theories. Sometimes the second category (description) and third (explanation) are merged. (note that they do not consider new data measuring devices among other things)

Guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing.

Let's just say I was testing the bounds of society. I was just curious.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.

Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far nobly so advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.