Quotes on Tests

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

If you want to keep a friend, never test him.

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

I love things that age well - things that don't date, that stand the test of time and that become living examples of the absolute best.

Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.

You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

The thing about witchcraft," said Mistress Weatherwax, "is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect

We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Adversity tests the sincerity of friends

The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.

This, then, is the test we must set for ourselves; not to march alone but to march in such a way that others will wish to join us.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.