Merest Quotes

#1. However, he didn't have a high opinion of the average man's ability as a fighter. The majority of men couldn't fight at all and even most outlaws were the merest amateurs when it came to battle. Few could shoot well, and even fewer had any mind for strategy.

Larry McMurtry

#2. Little bits of things make me do it; - perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; - the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

Anthony Trollope

#3. On the contrary, what is hidden from the learned and clever is often revealed to the merest children.

John D. Mueller

#4. What a mouse he is made by conversation,' " Ezri recited. " 'Scorns gods, dares battle, and flinches from a maid's rebuke! Merest laugh from merest girl is like a dagger felt, and like a dagger, makes a lodging of his breast. Turns blood to milkwater and courage to faint memory.'

Scott Lynch

#5. Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.

Honore De Balzac

#6. It is, of course, the merest truism to say a party is of use only so far as it serves the nation.

Theodore Roosevelt

#7. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

Annie Dillard

#8. How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

Richard Burton

#9. Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet - a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness.

Thomas Hardy

#10. Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

James Thurber

#11. It seems that the merest breeze causes me to bleed. Each breath feels like I'm swallowing glass.

Kaori Ozaki

#12. Upright simplicity is the deepest wisdom, and perverse craft the merest shallowness.

Isaac Barrow

#13. Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#14. Scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.

H.P. Lovecraft

#15. I have seen that women are shut out from every means of earning a living that is really remunerative, crowded into certain narrow walks, which, in consequence, are so thronged that the poor creatures are forced to work for the merest pittance.

Lillie Devereux Blake

#16. You'll understand, I'm sure that I'm chasing the merest sliver of color. It's my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It's terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most ...

Claude Monet

#17. There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

Friedrich Schiller

#18. Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.

Emil Cioran

#19. It takes little or nothing to undo reputations, the merest trifle makes and remakes them, it is simply a question of finding the best means of engaging the confidence or interest of those who are to become one's unsuspecting echoes or accomplices.

Jose Saramago

#20. In every life there is a turning point. A moment so tremendous, so sharp and clear that one feels as if one's been hit in the chest, all the breath knocked out, and one knows, absolutely knows without the merest hint of a shadow of a doubt that one's life will never be the same.

Julia Quinn

#21. Arthur Conan Doyle was entranced by the notion of a brilliant detective who can deduce everything a stranger has been up to from the merest clue, and yet can't have a trusting relationship with his closest friend.

Rafael Yglesias

#22. In merest prudence men should teach ...
That science ranks as monstrous things
Two pairs of upper limbs; so wings
E'en Angel's wings!
are fictions.

Henry Austin Dobson

#23. Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.

Salman Rushdie

#24. Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

Bryce Courtenay

#25. A little praise is not only merest justice but is beyond the purse of no one.

Emily Post

#26. The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

Philip K. Dick

#27. The number who actually consented to the Constitution of the United States, at the first, was very small. Considered as the act of the whole people, the adoption of the Constitution was the merest farce and imposture, binding upon nobody.

Lysander Spooner

#28. The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

Honore De Balzac

#29. Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.

Rafael Sabatini

#30. Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#31. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if it all depended on this particular up or down.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

#33. Coincidence is a recognized element in 'real life.' All of us have anecdotes about those times when, by the merest coincidence, we avoided some disaster or stumbled onto some wonderful experience.

Jane Lindskold

#34. Falling stars are high examples sent To warn, not lure. Gross fancy says they are Substantial meteors; but that is not so. They are the merest phantasies of Night, When she's asleep, and, dimly visited By past effects, she dreams of Lucifer Hurled out of Heaven.

Alfred Austin

#35. I have never been able to use that soap since. Scents are too evocative and the merest whiff jerks me back to that first night away from my wife, and to the feeling I had then.

James Herriot

#36. Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

Franz Kafka

#37. It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#38. There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.

Ramana Maharshi

#39. What has been done is little - scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.

Agnes Mary Clerke

#40. The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

Douglas Adams

#41. God requires a faithful fulfillment of the merest trifle given us to do, rather than the most ardent aspiration to things to which we are not called.

Saint Francis De Sales

#42. It will be a nuisance if he even suspects I spare the merest moment to ponder the Intruder, and he would willfully misinterpret it. I think of her only because I am concerned with their security. The thought was so lame and uncertain in his own mind, it made him growl.

K.M. Shea

#43. Oh - oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

Fannie Hurst

#44. The fear of man, the trust in man, the deference to the opinion of man, is the merest worship of a rag-stuffed idol.

George MacDonald

#45. The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.

Honore De Balzac

#46. The present is the merest flicker between the long long time past and the things that haven't yet happened but most assuredly will.

Estela Portillo Trambley

#47. It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Richard Dawkins

#48. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears;

Emily Bronte

#49. The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.

Lewis Carroll

#50. As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.

Joseph Campbell

#51. Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.

Patrick Kavanagh

#52. Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call "Silence" - which is the merest word of all. All

Edgar Allan Poe

#53. Will still support my weight, but it drags beneath me uselessly; and when I prick it with my stylus, there is the merest ghost of a pain. I still have not informed

John Edward Williams

#54. Bravery is fearlessness-the absence of fear. The merest dolt may be brave because he lacks the mentality to appreciate his danger.

Napoleon Hill