Mere Quotes

1764 Mere quotes by 1115 unique authors

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology… — Michael Pollan
All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles,… — Jean Rhys
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.… — Hans Urs von Balthasar
A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are,… — RyÅ«nosuke Akutagawa
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of… — H P Lovecraft
I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation… — Ian Mcewan
No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be… — Ezra Pound
I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all. So, tell me why should it be true, that I get a… — Cole Porter
Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days. — Ellen DeGeneres
Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to… — Jiddu Krishnamurti
But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,--cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned… — Anthony Trollope
The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction… — Libba Bray
I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and… — Anais Nin
Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit… — Michel Foucault
I want to punish them. I want that punishment to be so hard, so vicious that the next who takes their place wets himself at… — Ilona Andrews
...she could express her soul with that voice, whenver I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology...she could really hear,… — Audrey Niffenegger
Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous… — Chuck Klosterman
The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by… — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of… — Henry David Thoreau
Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that… — Lynsay Sands
I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. — Arthur Conan Doyle
In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up… — C.S. Lewis
A girl who would fall in love so easily or want a man to love her so easily would probably get over it just as… — Lucy Maud Montgomery
I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank… — Lucy Maud Montgomery
Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your… — J.R.R. Tolkien

Who Wrote These Mere Quotes

1,115 authors contributed a total of 1,764 Mere Quotes, led by these top contributors: