Top 100 Merely Quotes
#1. She knew she could drink up to a certain point, but after that she never did anything interesting like dancing on the bar with her top off or snogging random strangers. She would merely fall over and then probably be sick.
Harriet Evans
#2. I love you, Hermione," said Ron, sinking back, rubbing his eyes wearily.
Hermione turned faintly pink, but merely said, "Don't let Lavender hear you saying that."
"I won't," said Ron into his hands. "Or maybe I will ... then she'll ditch me ...
J.K. Rowling
#3. Creativity. Inspiration. We worship them here, Donald. They are our guidance, and we revere them. Do you understand? Revere them. So many people think that writers merely sit down and string together words and poof! a piece of writing. Not so!
David Bischoff
#4. But to "bring something to light" is not to question its existence, but merely to decide whether or not something should be permitted within the realm of the real, the realm of the ruler (of that which is measurable), or to leave it outside the realm, in the "outer darkness.
Simon
#5. God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race
to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections.
Mary Howitt
#6. True art takes note not merely of form but also of what lies behind.
Mahatma Gandhi
#7. It's not fundamentally different to any other genre, that action is a particular thing. Being able to do action sounds like it should be straightforward, but it really isn't. I always want the action to be witty. I don't want it to be merely routine.
Adrian Hodges
#8. Morgan was looking at the food in front of her suspiciously, as if it intended to merely reside for a bit inside her, then liberate itself at a most inconvenient time.
Lynn Kurland
#9. According to this doctrine, however, the Buddha was never merely an individual human being but, like St. John's Word or Logos, an eternal principle temporarily made flesh.
Anonymous
#10. I know it's not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig!"
"My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow ... "
"Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!
Terry Pratchett
#11. Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.
H.L. Mencken
#12. If you don't work on yourself, then much of your politics is merely projections. We have to walk our talk and do the inner work that allows the outer work to be authentic and also effective.
Matthew Fox
#13. Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit ...
C.S. Lewis
#14. What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.
Thomas Mann
#15. It is impossible to fight bullies merely by saying they're going too far.
Robert Reich
#16. I have spent 11 horrific years in solitary confinement in a 6-square-meter dungeon three floors underground without sunlight or fresh air. But I endured my hardships because I was merely living my convictions.
Samir Geagea
#17. We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
Henry David Thoreau
#18. I believe this country has already been painted by the hand of God. We can cover it over with our own creations, but it will merely mar what is already perfect
Lisa Tawn Bergren
#19. The professor is not merely an information dispensing machine, but a skilled navigator of a complex landscape.
William Badke
#20. Time and again human consciousness fixates, and slams the door on its greatest gift, the open-endedness of infinite possibility. As a result we do not experience reality but merely our concept of it.
Jose Arguelles
#21. the thing separating them was only a door and not a wall. He said nothing, merely nodded and thought to himself that worse than any wall is a door to which one has never had the key, a key he didn't know where to find, or even if it existed.
Jose Saramago
#23. We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
#24. I love this country very much, and I'm proud to live here, but I think our current administration is extreme. These are not merely conservative people, these are extreme right-wing people.
Ed Harris
#25. or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion." He did not mean, of course, that religion turns all good people bad, but merely some of them,
Jerry A. Coyne
#26. Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
D.T. Suzuki
#27. Within each of us dwells a higher order of consciousness created with a possibility far greater than to merely appear and disappear as some form in the river of passing time.
Guy Finley
#28. The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.
Harry S. Truman
#29. Men don't have it. Our resolve is born out of fear. It's merely bravado." His glance
Deborah Harkness
#30. Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#31. He had put so much space behind him that he had finally reached that place at which the past was indeed another country, the future was unimportant, only today existed, and even today merely unfolded, minute by minute.
Judith Krantz
#32. If I dream by myself, it's merely a dream. But if we all dream together, that's the start of a new future.
Lee Soo Man
#33. Hesse's Journey to the East (1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of Rosemary's Baby and 2001? I am merely asking the question.
Mircea Eliade
#34. Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like?
Sam Harris
#35. Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
Henry Miller
#36. But we all must be true to our own nature. Acting as anyone other than yourself merely brings you pain and makes you appear ashamed of who and what you are. Others will feed off that shame, and soon it will be all that you are.
Gena Showalter
#37. Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us.
Eric Maisel
#39. Sometimes I suspected Ryan was merely visiting the real world, on vacation from his permanent residence in la-la land.
Rachel Vincent
#40. Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.
Leo Strauss
#41. Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely
Erich Maria Remarque
#42. My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.
Santosh Kalwar
#43. This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.
Italo Calvino
#44. Do nothing to merely interest, assume or attract. This is not your province. Do only that wins the people you are after in the cheapest possible way
Claude C. Hopkins
#45. Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
Joyce Carol Oates
#46. My young friend supposes his ingenuousness is merely a ruse.
Mason Cooley
#47. Despite what they say, the clothes do not make the man. They merely determine the set of assumptions others make about the man.
Anthony Miller
#48. It has been universally recognized, in all authentic teachings of mankind, that every being born into this world has to work, not merely to keep himself alive, but to strive towards perfection.
E.F. Schumacher
#49. Learning a technique is not an end in itself, it merely indicates where you need to start.
Masaaki Hatsumi
#50. Wherever Mathematics is mixed up with anything, which is outside its field, you will find attempts to demonstrate these merely conventional propositions a priori, and it will be your task to find out the false deduction in each case.
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
#51. As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep.
William Winwood Reade
#52. Women are foils to men in South Korea. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance. Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.
Kim Hyesoon
#53. I do not want merely to possess a faith, I want a faith that possesses me.
Charles Kingsley
#54. Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).
Sam Harris
#55. Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake.
Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end.
Max Jacob
#56. Devolving APD to Scotland is merely tinkering with it. We have to get shot of this hated tax right across the country to ensure all of our airports are competing on level terms.
Brian Donohoe
#57. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
G.K. Chesterton
#58. Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human
civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall,
rebuilding what had been merely superhuman.
Vernor Vinge
#59. Followers of Christ are not called to be merely tolerant of others. We are called to love those who disagree with us. Abnormal communication - blessing those who curse us - establishes the relational level of our communication and demonstrates our concern for others.
Tim Muehlhoff
#60. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.
John Taylor Gatto
#61. Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive
Bell Hooks
#62. We cannot see what is "out there" merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible.
Parker J. Palmer
#63. What do we mean by the public interest? Some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree.
Newton N. Minow
#64. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.
Italo Calvino
#65. A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.
Erica Jong
#66. History will not judge our endeavors
and a government cannot be selected
merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these.
John F. Kennedy
#67. No movie becomes a hit without good reviews and word-of-mouth. No agency ever became a great brand by merely saying it was great - in advertising or by any other medium.
Rochelle B Lazarus
#68. Jesus is God drawn close to our wounded humanity, so close that he takes it upon himself - not merely in some general way but in a way that encompasses each one of us.
John Janaro
#69. When we merely follow another, we take a potentially creative mind out of service-our own.
William Coperthwaite
#70. Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker.
Mary Gaitskill
#71. I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.
Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.
Claire North
#72. And there still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of Love and Art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love.
Arthur C. Clarke
#73. People credit me for making the universe interesting when in fact the universe is inherently interesting, and I'm merely revealing that fact. I don't think I'm anything special for this to happen.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#74. The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.
John D. Rockefeller
#75. Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#76. The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
Mark Twain
#77. Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. If I might suggest, sir - it is, of course, merely a palliative - but it has often been found in times of despondency that the assumption of formal evening dress has a stimulating effect on the morale.
P.G. Wodehouse
#79. At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.
Lord Chesterfield
#80. The key point about a demonstration is that it must be seen. Hence the term "demonstration." If a person demonstrates privately in his own home, this is not technically a demonstration but merely "acting silly" or "behaving like an ass.
Woody Allen
#81. Translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation
John Felstiner
#82. Though bonobos tend to be a lot hairier than us - and they don't build houses or churches or Pentagons like we do - these primates look and act remarkably human. They often even go beyond the merely "human," and enter the realm of the truly "humane.
Susan Block
#83. The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
Terence McKenna
#84. In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change.
Emma Donoghue
#85. It's funny how you can become something merely by forgetting who you once were.
Chrissy Moon
#87. What do you mean Taurus? he frowns. I'm not a Taurus.
You were born on the cusp, I remind him. Jason merely shrugs.
Shows what you know, Scotty, I was born in Ohio.
I can take him anywhere but out.
Steve Kluger
#88. As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.
William Eldridge Odom
#89. She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.
Jerry Spinelli
#90. Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.
John Ruskin
#91. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
Oscar Wilde
#93. A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind
Robert Oxton Bolton
#94. Celyn merely snarled and stalked away.
"You best go to him, sister, and soothe his hurt feelings."
"Why should I?"
"You know how men are. If you treat them nice and buy them gifts, they will suck your pussy like champion.
G.A. Aiken
#95. ...[W]e must admit that... law must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity...
Immanuel Kant
#96. Concerning the loved ones who have passed on ... do not try to make me believe that they are doing nothing, merely resting, careless ever. That would imply the condition of Hell, not of Heaven.
G. Campbell Morgan
#97. When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.
Francine Prose
#98. You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
Harold Bloom
#99. All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#100. The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.
A.W. Tozer
