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Mere Quotes

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Mere Quotes

“Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.”

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Book:Lectures Upon Shakspeare
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“Hamlet 's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.”

IfsThinkingWantShouldMayDoeReasonPlayCharacterSeemsLastsOpportunityNaturalEffectsObjectsHabitSkillsMereAccidentsPracticalsCuriousIncidentsSmack
Book:The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
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“Health is more than the mere absence of disease, it's the presence of a superior state of well being, a pizzazz, a vitality that has to be worked for each and every day of your life. You cannot get it in a bottle or from Dr. Phil. Its got to be gotten through diet and execise and rest and recreation and attitudes of mind working all together every day of your life and then, young men can become supermen and old men can become older.”

MenMindWellsStatesTogetherYoungAttitudeDiseaseMereAbsenceSuperiorsWell BeingDietsYoung ManOld ManBottlesDrsVitalityRecreationDr PhilPizzazz
Author:Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz
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“The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday’s love is part of today’s and the confidence in tomorrow’s love is also part of today’s. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die - I almost believe, rationalist though I am - that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.”

BelieveFactsTodayDiesUniverseMemoriesLove IsTomorrowEternalRemainsMereWarmYesterdayBreathingLife And DeathIndifferentRough TimesIndestructibleEnrichingBonds Of Love
Book:It's Been a Good Life
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“Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so. . . . People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes.”

PeopleIfsWritingDoneExampleBecomingPeriodsClothesMereImpressionSatisfiedExcellentOutsidersLocationTravel WritingPrague
Author:George Fetherling
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“All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.”

ArtMadeFormPurposeDivineHolyEssenceMereComplexesPatientStorytellingColourMagicianSecrecyMedievalSymbolicPonderingPortraitureTalismans
Author:William Butler Yeats
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“Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.”

LawCoursesIndividualForeverRichEventsShapesLimitsMereSpeciesDetailsScalesTensionFascinatingLaws Of NatureExquisiteLarge ScaleContingencyFrills
Book:Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history
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“It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom , as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.”

PeopleIfsWorldMayWholeConsciousnessGoneClearThis WorldShotsMereCeaseWhole WorldVoidMe AlonePhantoms
Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.”

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Book:Autobiography John Stuart Mill: Top Biography
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“One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.”

ThinkingMenHelpingHandsBabyHusbandClothesGardenEmptyMereBridgesServantPlatoDaddyMicrobesEmbroideryEmpty WordsParallelogram
Book:Daddy-Long-Legs
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“There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.”

IfsYearsPhilosophyUniverseNamesExercisePhilosophicalMereFinalsIntellectDoctrineUselessAnalysisDescriptionPassagesChaptersParagraphPlausible
Book:Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
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“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”

PeopleThinkingWayMindKindSeemsLosingCleanMereDrivingSurrenderIntenseRhythmConcentrationLos AngelesSecularCommunionParticipationVocationLanesRaptureResistingParticipatingFreewaysDriving On
Author:Joan Didion
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“If happiness is a state of the inward life, we have to look for its chief obstructions not in outward conditions but in deeper places. Happiness depends in the last issue, as we saw, on the essential view of life. It is not a matter of distractions, nor even of mere pleasurable sensations. There may be an appearance of great prosperity with incurable sadness hidden at the heart, as there is an outward peace which is only a well-masked despair. The way to happiness is indeed harder than the way to success; for its chief enemies entrench themselves within the soul.”

IfsWayWellsLooksHeartMaySoulMatterStatesLastsHappinessViewsEnemyIssuesSawsSadnessConditionsDependsEssentialsDespairHarderMereProsperityAppearanceDeeperChiefsSensationsDistractionInwardObstructionWay To Success
Book:Happiness
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“If I advance new views in Philosophy or Theology, I cannot expect to have many adherents among minds altogether unprepared for such views; yet it is certain that even those who most fiercely oppose me will recognize the power of my voice if it is not a mere echo; and the very novelty will challenge attention, and at last gain adherents if my views have any real insight.”

IfsMindRealPhilosophyLastsCertainVoiceChallengesViewsAttentionGainsMereInsightTheologyEchoesNoveltyUnprepared
Author:George Henry Lewes
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“Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.”

IfsThinkingWantFirstsHumansSaidIdeasRealWholeSeemsEarthStuffAliveInformationAmbitionDeserveMereBrandsWhat IfFoundersArtifactsHuman Thought
Book:You Are Not a Gadget
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“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters”

WorldWayWellsDoeDifferentDifferencesCreativityCreativeOur LivesEqualFunctionMereToleranceDenialFundSparksNew WaysAdvocatingCharterSustenanceTolerationDialecticsPolarity
Author:Audre Lorde
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“The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.”

MenHas BeensIdeasSelfDesireOrderAnimalMoralPrinciplesDutyHigherMereSatisfactionImpressionRecognitionImpulseRisingMasterySelf MasteryBundlesMouldAnimal LifeSubordinationMoral Life
Book:Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)
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“Whatever man uses without the fear of God, whatever he applies to the mere gratifying of his flesh, cannot fail to operate as a poison to the soul, however pleasant and salutary it may appear to be to the body.”

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Book:True Christianity: A Treatise on Sincere Repentance, True Faith, the Holy Walk of the True Christian, Etc
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“Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.”

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Author:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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