Merely Quotes

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.

My mission was always intended to be slightly outside the public eye, because that makes me appear more interesting than I really am. A lot of people don't realise that merely by staying away, you can create a myth.

Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy.

The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

What a different world this would be if people would listen to those who know more and not merely try to get something from those who have more.

Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?

I merely consider myself a father, and one role of a father is to provide financial resources for his family.

The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day.

The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.

In physics, to be in two places at the same time would be a miracle; in politics it seems not merely normal, but natural.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

I would not have a woman go to Congress merely because she is a woman.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale.

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.

Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one.

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.