Given this data set:
  Name Height Weight
1 Mary     65    110
2 John     70    200
3 Jane     64    115
I\'d like to sum every qualifier c
You can use function colSums() to calculate sum of all values.  [,-1] ensures that first column with names of people is excluded.
 colSums(people[,-1])
Height Weight 
   199    425
Assuming there could be multiple columns that are not numeric, or that your column order is not fixed, a more general approach would be:
colSums(Filter(is.numeric, people))
mapply(sum,people[,-1])
Height Weight 
   199    425 
We can use dplyr to select only numeric columns and purr to get sum for all columns. (can be used to get what ever value for all columns, such as mean, min, max, etc. )
library("dplyr")
library("purrr")
people %>%
    select_if(is.numeric) %>%
    map_dbl(sum)
Or another easy way by only using dplyr
library("dplyr")
people %>%
    summarize_if(is.numeric, sum, na.rm=TRUE)
For the sake of completion:
 apply(people[,-1], 2, function(x) sum(x))
#Height Weight 
#   199    425