Top 100 Not 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. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
Niels Bohr
#19. Necessity is not merely the father of invention; it is the father of courage.
Michael Josephson
#20. The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.
Paul Virilio
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
#27. Life is a choice. Choose to live and not merely survive.
Debasish Mridha
#28. 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
#29. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. Every Christian must be fully Christian by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some spiritual realm.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
Oscar Wilde
#37. Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.
John F. Kennedy
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The aim of education. - Education: to discover but not merely to imitate. Learning techniques without inward experiencing can only lead to superficiality.
Bruce Lee
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers. (James 1:22 NRSV)
John Ortberg
#45. 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
#46. 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.
#47. A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.
Frank Moore Colby
#49. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
#50. There are very few intellectual elites and those who think they are, are merely not and those who are not shows us the intellectual power of human mind.
Santosh Kalwar
#51. I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.
Robertson Davies
#52. I've come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.
Nick Flynn
#53. And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.
Jess Walter
#54. People who make decisions based merely on what seems most advisable to them will inevitably choose something inferior to God's best. Jesus, the ultimate model for the Christian life, did not rely on His own best thinking, but depended completely on His heavenly Father for wisdom in everything.
Henry Blackaby
#55. The essential thought must ever be that a man does not, except in his spiritual infancy, accept a statement merely because the Church or someone in authority declares it correct, but because, under mature examination, it is found to be true and right and worthwhile.
John Andreas Widtsoe
#56. Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
Audre Lorde
#57. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Robert A. Heinlein
#58. Enduring great companies don't exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.
James C. Collins
#59. Commercialism and the mad desire to make money have blotted out everything else, and as a result we are not living, but merely existing.
Joseph Knowles
#60. In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture - it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.
Jamaica Kincaid
#61. It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.
Derek Thompson
#62. Whether people were great or not, there was not much variety in their inner life experience. Any difference lay merely in how they dealt with common human weaknesses.
Eiji Yoshikawa
#63. My point is, if you want to achieve anything in life, it is not enough to merely wish for it. You must develop that kind of 4:30 AM discipline that distinguishes you from others.
Armstrong Williams
#64. In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#65. Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.
Jessica Livingston
#66. The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana
#67. The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#68. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
Ayn Rand
#69. God is not dead-He is merely unemployed ...
Walt Kelly
#70. We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out.
Adolf Hitler
#71. Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.
Immanuel Kant
#72. In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
Florence King
#73. Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
Milan Kundera
#74. To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.
Edmund Burke
#75. It is a small part of life we really live.' Indeed, all the rest is not life but merely time.
Seneca.
#76. My principles, and those always received by the republicans, do not admit to removing any person from office merely for a difference of political opinion. Malversations in office, and the exerting of official influence to control the freedom of election are good causes for removal.
Thomas Jefferson
#77. proverb attributed to Seneca that says, "A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer.
Anonymous
#78. Wise men are not pacifists; they are merely less likely to jump up and retaliate against their antagonizers. They know that needless antagonizers are virtually already insecure enough.
Criss Jami
#79. It is not more than you can handle. It is merely more than you thought you could do.
Laura Breckenridge
#80. [A]rt is not art until it's sold. Until then it's merely a storage problem.
Frank Wynne
#81. Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.
Theodore Roosevelt
#82. More and more, the Democrats are not merely inconsistent, wrong and/or misguided - they are the worst of all possible things you can be in Washington: irrelevant.
Dick Morris
#83. The moment of confession is not merely when one hears another pronounce the words: God forgives you, or 'in God's name I absolve you.' Rather it is that point at which the sinner unfeignedly experiences himself as truly judged and pardoned by God.
Thomas C. Oden
#84. The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that overcomes evil with good.
Pope Benedict XVI
#85. All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
John Stuart Mill
#86. There was an intimate connection between them, as if they'd known each other always. They were not strangers; they'd merely never met before.
Sherry Thomas
#87. The secret of success is doing things not merely because they are popular, but because you deeply believe in them.
Goswami Kriyananda
#88. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.
Tommy Lapid
#89. The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace ... but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#90. On the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government: I think it should be made clear that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, they have not got into bed together; they are merely sharing a room.
Gyles Brandreth
#91. Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky's greatest friend in the regiment.
Leo Tolstoy
#92. Sex is not merely an entertainment; it is a courtesy and affability.
M.F. Moonzajer
#93. Being a fool for God was not merely alright but liberating.
Joy Davidman
#94. The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
Colin Wilson
#95. I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.
Chuck Palahniuk
#96. Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
#97. It's not merely that conservatives are better at selling their product, or that they happen to have an easier-and undoubtedly simpler-ideological product to sell. It's that they know what they are selling. Liberals in general and Obama in particular cannot say the same.
Eric Alterman
#98. Nothing that exists in this world is not amazing! It is all merely a matter of personal
preference!
Ryohgo Narita
#99. We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#100. ...we'd be okay. Not perfect, not entirely healthy, not even rational where our love for one another was concerned. Just okay. Merely sufficient, at best. But there'd be only acceptance - never shame - in being two divine failures as we emerged from slumber, perfectly flawed, and wide awake.
AngstGoddess003
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