Mere Quotes

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.

At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.

Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect.

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history.

For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the ape-regarding Christians, a well known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment.

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.

And let a scholar all earth's volumes carry, he will be but a walking dictionary: a mere articulate clock.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.

Poetry's a mere drug, Sir.

Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Sometimes I feel a strange exhilaration up here which seems to come from something beyond the mere stimulus of flying.

It is by acts (actions) and not by ideas (mere thoughts) that people [really] live.

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.

It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.

The mere wit is only a human bauble. He is to life what bells are to horses-not expected to draw the load, but only to jingle while the horses draw.

Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.

Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.

Without their money, the Jews will shrink into mere shadows of themselves, and the nightmare will be over.

The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a comtempt for mere external show

Mere pleasure is at best but fleeting; happiness is abiding, for in the recollection thereof is renewed.

We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.

Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.

It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable. The pain unendurable.

The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.

The only impregnable citadel of virtue is religion; for there is no bulwark of mere morality, which some temptation may not overtop or undermine, and destroy.

People who are so dreadfully "devoted" to their wives are so apt, from mere habit, to get devoted to other people's wives as well.

Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something.

Honor, without money, is a mere malady.

Without moving beyond a mere copy, there is no artistry, no originality or artistic advancement; only mechanics.

Avoid him who from mere curiosity asks three questions running about a thing that cannot interest Him.

It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.

The Lord didn't make Lehi a mere spectator, watching and learning from afar. Instead, the Lord taught his prophet by taking him out of the bleachers and placing him right in the middle of the action.

Worship is a way of gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of his worth. This cannot be done by mere acts of duty. It can be done only when spontaneous affections arise in the heart.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government.

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

Just as drowning cannot be equated with swimming, mere existence is not the same as abundant life. We have been offered a new way to live – a new way to be human.

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.

Sabbath rest is more than mere abstention from physical work; and, therefore, must include worship and Scripture-reading.

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.

Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.

The vortex theory [of the atom] is only a dream. Itself unproven, it can prove nothing, and any speculations founded upon it are mere dreams about dreams.

Nonviolence in the sense of mere non-killing does not appear to me, therefore, to be of any improvement on the technique of violence.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

Don't go empty handed when going to a temple or to see a spiritual master. Offer something as a symbol of surrender, even if it be a mere flower.

Knowledge for its own sake was meaningless, its mere accumulation a waste of time. Knowledge must lead to understanding.

My religion recognizes no obligation to resolve doubt other than through rational means; and it commands no mere faith in eternal truths