proportion quotes

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

- Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
  Essays, no.43,'Of Beauty'.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

- Ernest Millar Hemingway
Quoted in  A E Hotchner Papa Hemingway (1966), pt.1, ch.3.

To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.

- Arthur Honegger
I Am a Composer.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.

- Philip Arthur Larkin
  'Toads'.

L'a"  me se raffine a'   mesure qu'elle se ga"  te. The soul refines itself in proportion to how it spoils itself.

- Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
  Le paysan parvenu, ch.4.

Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

- C(yril) Northcote Parkinson
  Parkinson's Law: the Pursuit of Progress, ch.3.

It is that cricket field that, in all the sharp and bitter moments of life as they come to me now, gives me a sense of wholesome proportion: 'At least I am not playing cricket!'

-John Cowper Powys
Quoted in Helen Exley Cricket Quotations (1992).