Top 100 Merely Quotes
#1. We aim for the practice of Christianity in their everyday life and dealings, and not merely the profession of its theology on Sundays.
Robert Baden-Powell
#2. If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
Lionel Trilling
#3. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.
Patrick Swift
#4. Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, "There is a fire over there," certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror.
Marcel Proust
#5. Her gloves, as Razumihin noticed, were not merely shabby but had holes in them, and yet this evident poverty gave the two ladies an air of special dignity, which is always found in people who know how to wear poor clothes.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#6. Money & success don't change people; they merely amplify what is already there.
Will Smith
#7. Why does merely attempting to understand Reality so often seem to lead to going insane?
Ashleigh Brilliant
#8. The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body; what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#9. A harem is not a brothel, as so many Westerners erroneously believe. It is merely the women's living quarters. Male relatives can join them
but no male nonrelatives may do so. It is hardly a den of eroticism.
Phyllis Chesler
#10. No one has any license to brag because he is honest. That should be natural instinct and, besides, if you are not, they put you in jail. Honesty is merely a form of insurance.
Charles Comiskey
#11. All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.
Theodore Roosevelt
#12. When the words come, they are merely empty shells without the music. They live as they are sung, for the words are the body and the music the spirit.
Hildegard Of Bingen
#13. The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
Paul Auster
#15. To become successful you must be a person of action. Merely to "know" is not sufficient. It is necessary both to know and do.
Napoleon Hill
#16. I always have the feeling we are merely fearfully trying to save room for God; I would rather speak of God at the center than at the limits, in strength rather than weakness, and thus in human life and goodness rather than in death and guilt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#17. Our external results are merely a reflection of our internal reality.
Joan Posivy
#18. I wondered if all creatures were drawn to what was dangerous or if we merely wanted light at any cost and were willing to burn for our desires.
Alice Hoffman
#19. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#20. The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.
Larry Wall
#21. Religion of any form is a sacred matter. It involves the relation of the individual to some Being believed to be infinitely supreme. It involves not merely character and life here, but destiny hereafter, and as such is not to be spoken of lightly or flippantly.
David Josiah Brewer
#22. The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
Brian Ferneyhough
#23. Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.
Herman E. Daly
#24. I wondered whether trusting him was merely unwise or if it crossed the line into recklessness, like lying down for a nap in the middle of a road.
Ransom Riggs
#25. They are commiting murder who merely live.
May Sarton
#26. Do not flatter yourselves: if you go to places of worship merely to look about you or to hear music, you are not worshipping God.
Charles Spurgeon
#27. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde
#28. For him, death is merely the ultimate frailty. Humans whimper when they die. They claw for life even if there is no hope. He will not. Death is not grander than his pride.
Pierce Brown
#29. When a leader in the Church inspires council members with vision, he helps them focus on their real mission so that they are ministering to people rather than merely administering programs.
M. Russell Ballard
#30. If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.
Mao Zedong
#31. He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera
#32. Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a profound connection between human beings.
Elizabeth Janeway
#33. One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.
Mohsin Hamid
#34. But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it.
Anthony Horowitz
#35. The biggest secret of self-esteem is this: Begin to appreciate other people more; show respect for any human being merely because he is a child of God and therefore a thing of value.
Maxwell Maltz
#36. These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.
Pessoa, Fernando
#37. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.
Samuel Johnson
#38. Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
Niels Bohr
#39. If I'm going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself.
Haruki Murakami
#40. The fashion industry isn't merely content to encase my meaty flanks in skintight denim. Oh, no! That denim also has to be white, a color that attracts ketchup, wine, garlic aioli, and any other foodstuffs I might otherwise be able to enjoy if I wasn't wearing ridiculously tight pants.
Diablo Cody
#41. In ancient times people mistook us for gods, but we peculiars are no less mortal than common folk. Time loops merely delay the inevitable, and the price we pay for using them is hefty - an irrevocable divorce from the ongoing present.
Ransom Riggs
#42. To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.
Marina Abramovic
#43. The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.
Amity Shlaes
#44. Necessity is not merely the father of invention; it is the father of courage.
Michael Josephson
#45. The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.
Paul Virilio
#46. When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes
many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy.
It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money.
War is our century's prostitution.
T. S. Eliot
#47. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
George Orwell
#48. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
Plato
#49. In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.
Yukio Mishima
#50. Until a vegan or vegetarian enters the room, people don't see themselves as meat-eaters. They are merely 'eaters', and it is we vegans who have made them aware of what they are doing. Often this is discomforting.
Carol J. Adams
#51. In brief, without being mindful of death, whatever Dharma practices you take up will be merely superficial.
Milarepa
#52. Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more ... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance
Wei Wu Wei
#53. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
#54. Life is a choice. Choose to live and not merely survive.
Debasish Mridha
#55. When he comes, he makes a noise deep in his throat that is so raw and animal and sexual that I think if he merely looked at me and made that noise, I might explode in an orgasm.
Karen Marie Moning
#56. I've made a lot of choices, some good, some not so good; how sad for those who merely hitchhike along, never daring to choose at all.
C.J. Heck
#57. When we lavish our money we rob our heir; when we merely save it we rob ourselves.
Jean De La Bruyere
#58. Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.
Henry Miller
#60. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart
and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#62. Every Christian must be fully Christian by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some spiritual realm.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#63. One person's mess is merely another person's filing system.
Margo Kaufman
#64. Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#65. So now that we don't have different clothes," I say, "you merely have different women," This is irony, but he doesn't acknowledge it.
Margaret Atwood
#66. Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.
Neil Postman
#67. Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
Alexander Hamilton
#68. We can't remember things from our future; remembering is merely the privilege and the beauty of the past!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#69. There was a much smaller room on the other side. It was merely the size of, say, a cathedral. And it was lined floor to ceiling with more hourglasses that Susan could just see dimly in the light from the big room. She stepped inside and snapped her fingers.
Terry Pratchett
#70. The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.
Michael Korda
#71. That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal.
Sigmund Freud
#72. Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.
Susie Orbach
#73. We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.
Shaun David Hutchinson
#74. I have a merely ethical and moral relationship to collecting. Whereby I never collect things that I necessarily like. I collect things by young artists who don't have any money because I need to give them some money! Because I think that they should carry on whether I like it or not.
Ryan Gander
#75. I wondered if that wasn't the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn't that eating was so great-it wasn't-but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay.
Lionel Shriver
#76. I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel - everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.
Mary MacLane
#77. History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
Andrew Marr
#78. The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
Oscar Wilde
#79. I don't really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
Anais Nin
#80. If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#81. Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.
John F. Kennedy
#82. There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy's entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.
Edmund Phelps
#83. Was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.
Dean Koontz
#84. People talk about the '60s, but they were merely a mass production of what the '50s had begun.
Peter O'Toole
#85. Time is merely the spread-out and piecemeal view that an individual being has of the Ideas.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#86. Accept the challenges of life and you'll continue to find that winning is the spirit of living ... it's merely a state of mind.
Mychal Wynn
#87. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration.
Og Mandino
#88. the game required the ball to be hit out of the ground altogether, not merely over the boundary as is the case today.43
Peter Oborne
#89. Being polite to a person is not a sign of respect for them. It is merely a sign of a good upbringing and a balanced nature.
Brandon Sanderson
#90. Merely stating a truth isn't enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship.
Dale Carnegie
#91. The aim of education. - Education: to discover but not merely to imitate. Learning techniques without inward experiencing can only lead to superficiality.
Bruce Lee
#92. The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
Thomas Carlyle
#93. Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice
Bertrand Russell
#94. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased
the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
Raymond Chandler
#95. As Luke would have it, what ends with crucifixion does not merely reappear restored. Resurrection declares and presents the unrecognizably new, even as traces of the familiar remain.
Jay Emerson Johnson
#96. I think it's important to view the issues on the broadest possible reference plane. In fact, if you firmly believe in any issue, I urge you to read the opposite of it. Most of the time, it'll merely reinforce your original beliefs, but on the rare occasion, it might change your mind.
Michael Ramirez
#97. Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers. (James 1:22 NRSV)
John Ortberg
#98. If you define evolution as merely meaning change over time, then I don't see any problem with a person being a Christian and believing in evolution. But that's not how textbooks define evolution. They define evolution as being random and undirected without plan or purpose.
Lee Strobel
#99. We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we will not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace
Martin Luther King Jr.
#100. A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.
Frank Moore Colby
