Top 100 Mere Quotes
#1. Mere poets are sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet.
John Dryden
#3. The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#4. 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.
John Bytheway
#5. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching but ... precede it.
John Stuart Mill
#6. The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Felix Frankfurter
#7. All that you ever need to know about genitals is that they are made up of flesh, blood, and millions of tiny, restless nerve endings - anything else that you read into them is mere hallucination, a product of your own overactive imagination.
Julia Serano
#8. 7 These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold - though your faith is far more precious than mere gold.
Anonymous
#9. I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.
George Henry Borrow
#10. The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#11. Instead of an unhinged lunatic you may glimpse a punctured soul-a mere human being like you.
Shannon Love
#12. What will happen in the future is mere guesswork - essentially, make-believe. If you are going to spend a lot of time and energy in a make-believe world, I suggest spending time considering the great possibilities rather than worrying about the bad ones.
Charles F. Glassman
#13. Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.
Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.
Vera Nazarian
#14. To say she is only a woman is to say a violin is a piece of wood with strings, and Dante is mere ink printed on paper.
Bruce Crown
#15. Cupid had struck his heart to the core but had forgotten to put even a mere scratch on his beloved's.
Jettie Necole
#16. Don't fuss about trifles. Don't permit little things-the mere termites of life-to ruin your happiness.
Dale Carnegie
#17. 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.
Karina Longworth
#18. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being ...
Edith Wharton
#19. After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.
Mark Twain
#20. And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.
Donna George Storey
#21. Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
George Santayana
#22. Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke
#23. I don't have to write jokes. I don't have to write insults. If you ask the man of the hour in the hot seat, my mere existence is clearly insult enough.
Rachael Ray
#24. I've never really played everyday people. I've played realist roles, but not mere daily life. There was always something incredible happening to my characters.
Sandrine Bonnaire
#25. Ages are mere reminders of the hours logged on this earth and the precious time remaining.
Casper Smart
#26. A soul-winner can do nothing without God. He must cast himself
on the Invisible, or be a laughing-stock to the devil, who regards
with utter disdain all who think to subdue human nature with mere words and arguments.
Charles Spurgeon
#27. We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.
Jonathan Sacks
#28. Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting ... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.
Marilynne Robinson
#29. You cannot change the course of events, but you can change your
attitude, and what really matters is the attitude and not the mere event.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#30. A servile race Who, in mere want of fault, all merit place; Who blind obedience pay to ancient schools, Bigots to Greece, and slaves to musty rules.
Charles Churchill
#31. However strong, however imposing a ship may appear, it is not 'disgraced' because it flies before the tempest. A commander ought always to remember that a man's life is worth more than the mere satisfaction of his own pride. In any case, to be obstinate is blameable, and to be wilful is dangerous.
Jules Verne
#32. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.
Pope Francis
#33. Until 1986, developing games was a mere hobby for me. Back then, I didn't know that game designers existed, because the designers' names didn't appear on the boxes.
Klaus Teuber
#34. My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?
Jean-Paul Sartre
#35. Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.
Theodore Roosevelt
#36. To a dog, motoring isn't just a way of getting from here to there, it's also a thrill and an adventure. The mere jingle of car keys is enough to send most any dog into a whimpering, tail-wagging frenzy.
Jon Winokur
#37. Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
Gautama Buddha
#38. Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.
E. M. Forster
#39. It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, ... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.
George McGovern
#40. Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not being or end: they mere change form.
Robyn Davidson
#41. The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer's personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.
Emily Post
#42. Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough." "True - true," I replied;
Edgar Allan Poe
#43. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid.
Michael Lewis
#44. I repeat that the distance between the earth and her satellite is a mere trifle, and undeserving of serious consideration. I am convinced that before twenty years are over, one-half of our earth will have paid a visit to the moon.
Jules Verne
#45. Life does not mean mere karma or mere bhakti or mere jnana.
Vinoba Bhave
#46. Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
Rollo May
#47. About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".
Herbert Butterfield
#48. A purely materialistic art would be like a tree which is expected to bear fruit without flowering and to sacrifice grace and beauty for mere utility
Haile Selassie
#49. NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget.
Bill Nye
#50. A good deal of philanthropy arises in general from mere vanity and love of distinction gilded over to others and to themselves with some show of benevolent sentiment.
Walter Scott
#51. Sadness- just a mere disease,
which keeps your soul,
placed in your own haven,
until you're in pieces!
Verses from her poem titled as 'Sadness- an ethereal aura
Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
#52. People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.
Jose Saramago
#53. Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny.
Henry David Thoreau
#54. The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.
Philip Zaleski
#55. The time is gone when mere accidents could still happen to me; and what could still come to me now that was not mine already? What returns, what finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#56. The mere apprehension of a coming evil has put many into a situation of the utmost danger.
Lucan
#57. Nothing touches our lives but it is God Himself speaking. Do we discern His hand or only mere occurrence?
Oswald Chambers
#58. We are uttering a mere tautology if we mean by 'in the mind' the same as by 'before the mind', i.e. if we mean merely being apprehended by the mind.
Bertrand Russell
#59. For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
Joyce Carol Oates
#60. This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right-thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right-thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.
Douglas Adams
#61. Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else's view or a mere book.
Bruce Lee
#62. She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.
Margaret Atwood
#63. Chinese immigrant: Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.
H.W. Brands
#64. I was for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#65. Religious fundamentalism, even before it eliminates human beings by perpetrating horrendous killings, eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext.
Pope Francis
#66. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.
N. T. Wright
#67. I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
Sam Harris
#68. If I were given a change of life, I'd like to see how it would be to live as a mere six-footer.
Wilt Chamberlain
#69. The mere change of custom, even though it may be of advantage in some respects, unsettles men by reason of the novelty: therefore, if it brings no advantage, it does much harm by unprofitably disturbing the Church.
Saint Augustine
#71. There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter
if not a paragraph or proper noun
in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#72. It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.
Walter De La Mare
#73. -believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.
Anne Fadiman
#74. I know by experience that Jesus Christ is a very powerful spirit - I know by experience that he is probably the most powerful spirit in the universe. I know by experience he is not a mere human being. He is something beyond that.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
#75. White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
G.K. Chesterton
#76. The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.
Baron De Montesquieu
#77. The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death.
Herbert Gold
#78. When the Soul that is sprung from God's Word and Will is entered into its own desire to will of itself, it will run in mere uncertainty till it return to its Original again.
Jakob Bohme
#79. Education, in its highest sense, is conscious training of mind or body to act unconsciously. It is conscious formation of mental habits, not mere acquisition of information.
William George Jordan
#80. What is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.
Joshua Reynolds
#82. Twitter was a mere prototype in 2006; now, many of us have become adept at saying all we have to say in 140 characters.
David Horsey
#83. The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.
Julian Barnes
#84. 'Band on the Run' is a carefully composed, intricately designed personal statement that will make it impossible for anyone to classify Paul McCartney as a mere stylist again.
Jon Landau
#85. At the end of the day, I think everybody takes for granted that they get up, get out of bed every morning - just the mere fact that they can stand in front of the mirror and brush their teeth and get in their car and take off? A lot of people take their health for granted.
Brock Lesnar
#86. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of
Charles Dickens
#87. It is a matter of mere coincidence that there is often a real individual who corresponds with a celebrity, signifies them.
Johnny Rich
#88. It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.
John B. S. Haldane
#89. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being
H.G.Wells
#91. 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.
John Piper
#92. An understanding of Jesus is not a mere matter of intelligence. He has to be accepted by faith.
Lloyd C. Douglas
#93. It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.
Charles Darwin
#94. Want to lose weight? Kick a bad habit? Well you might want to try hypnosis! ... no longer regarded as mere hocus-pocus, it's been shown as an effective means of helping people quit smoking, shed pounds, reduce stress, and end phobias.
Jane Pauley
#95. Religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development
begun now and ending never.
Anna Julia Cooper
#96. Democracy is just a false idol - a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations.
H.P. Lovecraft
#97. Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.
John Robert Seeley
#98. My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.
Frances Hardinge
#99. Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.
Terry Pratchett
#100. The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color.
Robert H. Jackson
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