Merely Quotes

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre.

Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use.

I am not making spiteful assertions now but merely stating the facts-that, for instance, among Hungarian generals there is such a considerable percentage of men of German origin, who of course had, in most cases, to alter their names if they wanted to get anywhere.

We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

I submit, on the other hand, most respectfully, that the Constitution not merely does not affirm that principle, but, on the contrary, altogether excludes it.

Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation.

Likewise today, some Christians are content to merely exist until they die. They don't want to risk anything, to believe God, to grow or mature. They refuse to believe his Word, and have become hardened in their unbelief. Now they're living just to die.

It is better to have a meaningful life and make a difference than to merely have a long life.

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

In view of our public pledges, we public officials can never again go before the public merely promising election reform. The time for promises is past.

A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.

You can mark in desire the rising of the tide, as the appetite more and more invades the personality, appealing, as it does, not merely to the sensory side of the self, but to its ideal components as well.

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.