Mere Quotes

#1. To have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and her self respect - well, that's a trophy enough for a guy's ego, huh?

Jerry Spinelli

#2. What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself.

Anna Jameson

#3. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

Virginia Woolf

#4. You're right. So right. My heart is a god among mere mortals. A queen among peons. A rock star among the masses. There's nothing to worry about. Everything will be okay.

Nicole Williams

#5. The secret of attraction is to love yourself. Attractive people judge neither themselves nor others. They are open to gestures of love. They think about love, and express their love in every action. They know that love is not a mere sentiment, but the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe.

Deepak Chopra

#6. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Sara Sheridan

#7. No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#8. The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
To dwell is to garden.

Martin Heidegger

#9. If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.

William Kingdon Clifford

#10. Mere mental assimilation of these truths cannot withstand temptation, however. The revelation of God is positively essential. The Spirit of God must reveal how we are in Christ and how we are united with Him in one.

Watchman Nee

#11. I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amidst the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.

Charles A. Beard

#12. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When

Yuval Noah Harari

#13. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

H.P. Lovecraft

#14. Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.

Johannes Tauler

#15. But the kings of modern times, restrained by the limits of mere probability, have neither courage nor desire. They fear the eat that hears their orders, and the eye that scrutinizes their actions.

Alexandre Dumas

#16. Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.

Helen Keller

#17. Unholy delight lit Giles's dark face to flashing brilliance. She realized that while he mightn't be handsome, he was breathtakingly attractive and brimming with potent masculinity more powerful than mere good looks.

Anna Campbell

#18. I'd much rather you assumed for yourself a higher rank than mere menial labourer for the duration of this great adventure.'
He paused. 'You wish me to strike heroic poses against the sunset, Lady Envy?'
'Indeed!

Steven Erikson

#19. One can never rack up his goals mere through hard-work, there is a thing in this world which is known as self-confidence.

M.H. Rakib

#20. Laws ... proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Honore De Balzac

#22. Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass.

Fernando Pessoa

#23. When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.

George MacDonald

#24. It is sometimes but the mere hope for enjoyment that allows one to enjoy something, even when he is not really enjoying it at the moment.

Criss Jami

#25. There is not a single true chess-player in the world whose heart does not beat faster at the mere sound of such long beloved and familiar words as 'gambit games'.

David Bronstein

#26. World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.

Dalai Lama XIV

#27. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

William James

#28. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.

Yoshida Kenko

#29. ... The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

Brian Greene

#30. Without execution, thinking is mere idleness.

Winston Churchill

#31. Monuments make momentous men immortal, but more memorable are mortal men making mere moments monumental.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#32. Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?

Carol P. Christ

#33. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau

#34. To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.

Jean Francois Revel

#35. The dummies and slackers, by their mere existence, are imposing a negative externality on the skilled and dedicated,

Avinash K. Dixit

#36. When inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learned without experiencing it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#37. Mere elegance of language can produce at best but an empty renown.

Petrarch

#38. Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Ammianus Marcellinus

#39. People who hate you because of a mere jealousy over your success hurt themselves in disguise. This is because you carry an image of who they wish they had become. Don't hate them back because they may also become like you one day and it will mean hurting that image you carry!

Israelmore Ayivor

#40. I could bend you with my finger and my thumb. A mere reed you feel in my hands. But whatever I do with this cage, I cannot get at you, and it is your soul that I want.

Charlotte Bronte

#41. Count this as a mere taste, sweetheart, of all the pleasure I can give you. Marry me and let me show you more. Be mine, and I'll take you on a journey the likes of which you've ever only imagined. ~~ Adam to Mallory

Tracy Anne Warren

#42. Life in its essence is a mere manifestation of an unwritten perpetual contract with eternity.

Moutasem Algharati

#43. And when did mere preaching do any good? Put something in the place of these things. Fill the vacuum of the mind.

Frances Wright

#44. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ...
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.

Henry David Thoreau

#45. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them ( ... ) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

Aldous Huxley

#46. Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story and judge it by its ability to make sense of things and "chime in" with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty, and goodness. If

Alister E. McGrath

#47. The union with Christ which produces no effect on heart and life is a mere formal union, which is worthless before God. The faith which has not a sanctifying influence on the character is no better than the faith of devils.

J.C. Ryle

#48. Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

Robert Kennedy

#49. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

Duke Ellington

#50. There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.
Bomar

Kurt Vonnegut

#51. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Irving Howe

#52. They knew that mere appearance and disappearance are on the surface like waves on the sea, but life which is permanent knows no decay or diminution.

Rabindranath Tagore

#53. It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.

David Hume

#54. One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn't have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.

Georges Courteline

#55. I am a mere breath of air; a formless thought that thinks of you.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#56. In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory
horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene
and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#57. The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.

C.S. Lewis

#58. There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.

Ayn Rand

#59. [I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone ... Well, that fact alone is staggering.

Joyce Carol Oates

#60. Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.

Thomas Carlyle

#61. Mere philosophy will not satisfy us. We cannot reach the goal by mere words alone. Without practice, nothing can be achieved. (3)

Swami Satchidananda

#62. Apparently, what differentiates the mere rich from the filthy rich is a servant who treats you like dirt.

Paula Wall

#63. We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

G.K. Chesterton

#64. The mere assemblage of peace loving people to interchange convincing reasons for their common faith, mere exhortation and argument to the public in favor of peace in general fall short of the mark.

Elihu Root

#65. Today's Politically Correct "historical Jesuses" are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them.

Robert M. Price

#66. Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.

C. G. Jung

#67. My hope and prayer is that the body of Christ in America will awake with holy boldness, a boldness content neither with silence nor mere words but that backs up those words with action and results.

Frank R. Wolf

#68. A man in cahoots with a woman's sexual instinct was the devil himself, for he had the united power over her - himself and her own longing - greater than a mere man

Judith Ivory

#69. Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.

Richard Rohr

#70. Nothing disturbs me more than superficiality and mere sloganizing on matters of public policy, and the suspicion that what the speaker is saying represents the full extent of his knowledge on the subject.

Preston Manning

#71. Nothing is unattainable, my Lord, to him who enjoys Your grace. Through Your might, a mere shred of cotton can surely burn a submarine fire (the impossible can be made possible).

Tulsidas

#72. How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

C.S. Lewis

#73. Upset The Established Order Of Your Life And Everything Becomes Chaos ... To A Degree That You Wont Be Able To Differentiate Between Mere Illusions And Solid Reality

Sherif A. El-Mawardy

#74. All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.

Andrew Jackson

#75. Yes, please leave us, the mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us.

Gene L. Coon

#76. As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.

Joseph Butler

#77. You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

David Hockney

#78. I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

Louis MacNeice

#79. We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say 'I.

Simone Weil

#80. To me art means power to sway people not with my words but with a mere picture. Art means expression, not my own but of the subjects. Art means truth; because when you see a picture you see all that is real. Art is exposure, showing things in a way they haven't been seen before.

CV

#81. Our sex bears the disgrace not only of a great deal of genuine poltroonery, but also of much which is mere affectation.

Frances Power Cobbe

#82. The mere stuffing of the mind with a knowledge of facts is not education. The mind must not only possess a knowledge of the truth, but the soul must revere it, cherish it, love it as a priceless gem; and this human life must be guided and shaped by it in order to fulfill its destiny.

Joseph Fielding Smith

#83. Living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.

Vladimir Nabokov

#84. Sice Karate exists for cultivating the spirit and training the body, it must be a moral way surpassing mere techniques ...

Mas Oyama

#85. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.

Hilaire Belloc

#86. I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

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

Israel Shamir

#88. Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#89. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races.

Emperor Hirohito

#90. Whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.

Ferdinand Kurnberger

#91. Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,
Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.

Alexander Pope

#92. His smile became downright wicked. I can make you beg for the mere whisper of my breath on your skin. I can do things with my tongue that will make you scream with the exquisite intensity of it. And I can make you come so hard, for so long, that you'll pass out from pleasure.

Larissa Ione

#93. Ill-Success failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued.

Charlotte Bronte

#94. Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. Amos's

Michael Lewis

#95. Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas.

John Forbes Nash

#96. Whatever the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty's Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism.

Neville Chamberlain

#97. I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.

Lech Walesa

#98. The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#99. What used to be called 'good manners' is now regarded as mere affectation. Open a door for a young woman, and she's likely to call security.

Terry Wogan

#100. There was an aura about him that was staggering to her, making it difficult to think. It wasn't mere male heat and sensuality. It was raw sexuality, animalistic in its intensity - and she was starving for it.

Kresley Cole