Merely Quotes

A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.

There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre.

Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use.

I am not making spiteful assertions now but merely stating the facts-that, for instance, among Hungarian generals there is such a considerable percentage of men of German origin, who of course had, in most cases, to alter their names if they wanted to get anywhere.

We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

I submit, on the other hand, most respectfully, that the Constitution not merely does not affirm that principle, but, on the contrary, altogether excludes it.

Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

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.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.