Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
We cling nervously to the melody, but we don’t handle it freely, we don’t really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.
Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
True education is limited to those people who would die without knowing, whereas the masses in the institutions are merely going through the motions, for education is a way of living.
There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy’s entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.
You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
To most people who have a point of view, merely being on TV is an intrinsic good.
A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to be mean to the scammers. There are lots of people online who do that. I’m content merely having fun inventing, and I figure any time they’re spending with me is time in which they’re not scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings.
Not in purity or in holiness merely, for in Paradise man was holy, and he shall be holy when redeemed through the sacrifice of Christ and made an heir of heaven.
My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.
I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant – it no longer existed.
New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.
What a man calls his ‘conscience’ is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.
He believes in romance. He isn’t merely going through the mechanical movements of a man in an exciting situation. He is, vitally and positively squeezing the last drop of delight from living the best life he knows in the best way he can.
A ‘new thinker’, when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
The conclusion you first draw about someone is often informed merely by what you’re bringing to it, and it will lead you to underestimating the full depth of the people you have so judged.
Prices don’t merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.
Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It’s the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
The bass player’s function, along with the drums, is to be the engine that drives the car… everything else is merely colours.
People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.
The passenger pigeon, the golden toad, the Caspian tiger: they are all gone, and other species hang by a thread. Our actions are not merely driving other species to extinction: we threaten our own survival, too, by destabilising ecosystems and destroying biodiversity.
I am merely an amateur; being referred as a lyricist is a far fetched dream for me, and I feel I don’t entirely deserve it yet.
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
No one has any license to brag because he is honest. That should be natural instinct and, besides, if you are not, they put you in jail. Honesty is merely a form of insurance.
I don’t think you need to dumb down to a child, you merely have to be clear, you know?
We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +’s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +’s.
Agrarian reform should not merely subdivide misery, it must raise living standards. Ownership raises the farmer from his, but productivity will keep him on his feet.
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages.
For those who have obtained unobstructed knowledge of Self, the world is seen merely as a bondage causing imagination.
People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
The British system denied any role for human creativity, and instead argued, that if man merely followed his hedonistic desires, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, objective laws would naturally guide society to achieve the best allocation of wealth.
We inculcate young people with the message that if they don’t succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color.
One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.
One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there’s no confusion about who’s to blame: you are.
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.
Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as ‘founding fathers.’
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
How is it possible to defame Trump? When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a ‘moron,’ was that defamatory or merely the prosaic truth?
Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.
When the standard of success becomes merely acting – when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite – we propel ourselves ahead.
It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer’s position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men.
We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it’s really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.
To me, Valentine’s Day is not merely limited to a lover but speaks of universal love.
I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary.
Most cops are not looking for understanding. They work in a world filled with a sense – real or imagined – of danger lurking around each corner and every hallway. Most cops are merely looking for respect.
Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.
