Browse 2337 quotes about Mere.
“There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.”
Source: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – The Complete Collection: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Voyage, Roscoe, A Royal Poet, A Sunday in London and many more (Illustrated)
“As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart.”
Source: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – The Complete Collection: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Voyage, Roscoe, A Royal Poet, A Sunday in London and many more (Illustrated)
“If there is to be responsible party government, the party label must be something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principles, of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the popular will.”
“In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.”
“Criticism is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults of authors ; nay, the critic is disgusted less with their absurdities than excellence ; and you cannot displease him more than in leaving him little room for his malice.”
Source: The Works of John Dryden: In Verse and Prose, with a Life
“Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.”
Source: Pierre; or The Ambiguities
“Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.”
Source: The Political Economy of the American Revolution
“It is not the mere study of the Law, but to become eminent in the profession of it, which is to yield honor and profit.”
Source: The Writings of George Washington: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts
“Strength without agility is a mere mass.”
“Our mere anticipations of life outrun its realities.”
Source: Aesop's fables
“Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .”
Source: Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
“The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.”
Source: Faustus
“Mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.”
Source: Evolutionary Writings: including the Autobiographies
“Either be a true friend or a mere stranger: a true friend will delight to do good--a mere stranger will do no harm.”
Source: Moral and religious aphorisms collected from the manuscript papers of the reverend and learned Doctor Whichcote; and published in 1703, by Dr. Jeffery. Now re-published, with very large additions, ... by Samuel Salter, ... To which are added, Eight letter
“Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society.”
Source: The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren
“We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?”
“A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will--in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains--nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt.”
Source: The Meaning of God in Human Experience
“A new danger now beset him [Grotius], the danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for this or that client: a mere legal beast of prey. Fortunately for himself and for the world he took a higher view of his life-work: his determination clearly was to make himself a thoroughly equipped jurist, and then, as he rose more and more in his profession, to use his powers for the good of his country and of mankind.”
“For all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.”
“Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exericised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the law.”
“From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.”
“My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant, someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there's maybe more to it all than the mere hum-drum quality of existence.”
“In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.”
“The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color.”
“My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing ... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.”
Source: H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Complete Fiction in One Volume: The Call of Cthulhu, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror and Many More: The Whisperer in Darkness, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The Rats in the Walls, The Shunned House, The Shadow Out of Time, The Alchemist, The Dreams in the Witch House, The Silver Key, The Templeäó_
“A true community consists of individuals - not mere species members, not couples - respecting each others individuality and privacy while at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally - free spirits in free relation to each other - and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; noone says the individual.”
“No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.”
“One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln
“The loyalty, well held to fools, does make Our faith mere folly.”
Source: The Dramatic Works and Poems of William Shakspeare: With Notes, Original and Selected, and Introductory Remarks to Each Play
“Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.”
“Mere bashfulness without merit is awkward; and merit without modesty, insolent. But modest merit has a double claim to acceptance, and generally meets with as many patrons as beholders.”
Source: The works of ... Joseph Addison, with notes by R. Hurd
“I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.”
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)
“No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.”
“It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.”
Source: Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Essays, Literary Studies, Criticism, Cryptography & Autography, Translations, Letters and Other Non-Fiction Works: The Philosophy of Composition, The Rationale of Verse, The Poetic Principle, Old English Poetry, Maelzel's Chess Player, Eureka, The Literati of New York, Fifty Suggestions, Exordium, Marginalia…
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ' Socialism ' and ' Communism ' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
Source: Orwell's England: the Road to Wigan Pier in the context of essays, reviews, letters and poems selected from the Complete works of George Orwell
“Truly speech has wonderful strength and power, that through a mere word, proceeding out of the mouth of a poor human creature, the devil, that so proud and powerful spirit, should be driven away, shamed and confounded.”
Source: The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt
“He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.”
Source: The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt
“In a word, the Holy Scripture is the highest and best of books, abounding in comfort under all afflictions and trials. It teaches us to see, to feel, to grasp, and to comprehend faith, hope, and charity, far otherwise than mere human reason can; and while evil oppresses us, it teaches how these virtues throw light upon the darkness, and how, after this poor, miserable existence of ours on earth, there is another and an eternal life.”
Source: The Table Talk Or Familiar Discourse of Martin Luther
“We ought not to criticize, explain, or judge the Scriptures by our mere reason, but diligently, with prayer, meditate thereon, and seek their meaning.”
Source: The Table Talk of Martin Luther
“Manchester, one of the greatest, if not really the greatest mere village in England.”
“The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.”
Source: Great Tales of the Golden Age of Science Fiction
“Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.”
“Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora the lovely Roman?Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,Neither of them the fairer woman?Where is Echo, beheld of no man,Only heard on river and mere-She whose beauty was more than human?-But where are the snows of yester-year?”
Source: Selected Poems and Translations
“We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.”
“I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance
Throughout my being's limitless expanse,
Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages
I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.”
“Who gives is positive; who receives is negative; still there remains an immense class of mere passives.”
“The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.”
Source: The clouds: Translated by William Arrowsmith, with sketches by Thomas McClure
“What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“By the Law of Slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.”
Source: The Complete Works of Charles Sumner
“Now I wonder what our knowledge has in common with God's knowledge according to those who treat God's knowledge... Is there anything else common to both besides the mere name? ...there is an essential distinction between His knowledge and ours, like the distinction between the substance of the heavens and that of the earth.”
Source: The Guide for the Perplexed