Mere Quotes - Page 34

• How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

  John Burroughs

  Book, Reading, Doe

  John Burroughs (1905). “The Writings of John Burroughs”

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• Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

  Jean Cocteau

  Appreciation, Art, Moral

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• Someone praising a man for his foolhardy bravery, Cato, the elder, said, ''There is a wide difference between true courage and a mere contempt of life.

  Plutarch

  Men, Differences, Bravery

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• I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Way, Facts, Fairy Tale

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• I have heard it said that living out of our vision is more powerful than living out of our circumstance. Holding on to a vision invokes the circumstances by which the vision is achieved. Vision is content; material circumstances mere form.

  Marianne Williamson

  Powerful, Vision, Holding On

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• Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured.

  Seneca the Younger

  Sick, Disease, Facts

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• Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.

  Andre Gide

  Sometimes, Vow, Resolution

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• A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

  Samuel Johnson

  Respect, Selfish, Men

  Samuel Johnson (1836). “Johnsoniana: Or, Supplement to Boswell: Being Anecdotes and Sayings of Dr. Johnson”, p.416

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• I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

  Wallace Stevens

  Crush, Men, Garden

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• Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

  Joseph Conrad

  Teacher, Reality, Men

  Joseph Conrad (2016). “Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels [Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, etc.] (Book House)”, p.1433, Book House

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• The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.

  Herman Wouk

  War, Wind, Mutiny

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• No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

  James Bryce

  Men, Careers, Political

  James Bryce (1889). “The American Commonwealth”

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• The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.

  Thomas Love Peacock

  Reading, Class, Poetry

  Thomas Love Peacock, Herbert Francis Brett Brett-Smith (1921). “Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Browning's Essay on Shelley. Edited by H.F.B. Brett-Smith”

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• Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

  Ellen Glasgow

  Ends, Materials

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• One of the most visible effects of a child's presence in the household is to turn the worthy parents into complete idiots when, without him, they would perhaps have remained mere imbeciles.

  Georges Courteline

  Children, Parent, Imbeciles

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• I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

  Ezra Pound

  Way, Pressure, Months

  Ezra Pound (1958). “Pavannes and Divagations”, p.55, New Directions Publishing

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• To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.

  Margaret Fuller

  Writing, Hours, Scene

  Margaret Fuller (1860). “At Home and Abroad, Or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe”, p.8

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• The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.

  William H. Seward

  Class, Southern, Slave

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• In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Horse, Shoes, Space

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Sex, Waiting Rooms, Preamble

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.4, Grove Press

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• Women aren't as mere as they used to be.

  Walt Kelly

  Used, Used To Be

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• How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Ignorance, Past, House

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• The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.

  Gustav Mahler

  Men, Differences, Feels

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• A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.

  Alice Meynell

  Children, Years, Infancy Is

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• All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.

  Theodore Parker

  Men, Needs, Use

  Theodore Parker (1855). “Ten Sermons of Religion”, p.119

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