Merely Quotes

3319 quotes by 1909 authors

I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if… — Edward Abbey
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru… — Edward Abbey
Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness. — Edward Abbey
A lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it. — Jane Austen
No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it… — J.R.R. Tolkien
The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is… — Philip K. Dick
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a… — Immanuel Kant
I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself. — Immanuel Kant
I believe that one always does himself and his audience an injustice when he speaks merely for the sake of speaking. I do not believe… — Booker T. Washington
The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics. — Margaret Sanger
I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of… — Vikram Seth
One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty… — Mohsin Hamid
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world.… — William James
The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world… — Martin Heidegger
We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing — Thucydides
We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the… — George Balanchine
My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason. — Mikhail Lermontov
Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage. — Mikhail Lermontov
I have a congenital desire to contradict; my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind. When faced… — Mikhail Lermontov
The appeal of science fiction has always been its iconoclasm . . . But in order to be an iconoclast, an author must be more… — Alfred Bester

Who Wrote These Merely Quotes

1,909 authors contributed a total of 3,319 Merely Quotes, led by these top contributors: