Mere Quotes

When your mother asks, 'Do you want a piece of advice?' it is a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway. (Erma Bombeck)
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.' View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved. View quote
Lafcadio Hearn
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. View quote
Carl Jung
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone. View quote
Charles Darwin
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. View quote
John Updike
In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact. View quote
Ernest Renan
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. View quote
Ezra Pound
Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. View quote
Edmund Burke
There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man. View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! (Robert Browning)
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. View quote
Hermann Hesse
There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink. View quote
F. H. Bradley
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. View quote
Havelock Ellis
It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation. View quote
Carl Friedrich Gauss
The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas-in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude. View quote
Jürgen Habermas
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect. View quote
Walter Scott
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. View quote
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love. (Honoré de Balzac)
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary. View quote
Andrew Jackson
When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion. View quote
George Eliot