Mere Quotes - Page 24

• The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Museums, Self, Intellectual

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• Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Effort, Understanding, Impatient

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.174, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.

  Joseph Butler

  Sorrow, World, Satisfaction

  Joseph Butler (1852). “The Analogy of Religion ... A new edition, with an introductory essay, by Rev. Albert Barnes; and a complete index”, p.437

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• The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Technology, Men, Hula

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• A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Happiness, Lying, Home

  H.L. MENCKEN (1958). “PREJUDICES A SELECTION”

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• The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Friendship, Best Friend, Together

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• The necessities of our condition require a thousand offices of tenderness, which mere regard for the species will never dictate.

  Samuel Johnson

  Office, Humanity, Thousand

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy, Francis Pearson Walesby (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Rambler”, p.469

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• Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Political, Liberty, Phrases

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• Ah! I need solitude. I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon - to behold and commune with something grander than man. Their mere distance and unprofanedness is an infinite encouragement. it is with infinite yearning and aspiration that I seek solitude, more and more resolved and strong; but with a certain weakness that I seek society ever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Encouragement, Strong, Distance

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.135, Courier Corporation

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• The religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct.

  Muhammad Asad

  Spiritual, Religious, Real

  Muhammad Asad (1961). “The Principles of State and Government in Islam”, p.10, Univ of California Press

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• A poem is but a thought, a mere memory caught at play. From hand onto paper, bleeding thoughts emerge.

  Robert M. Hensel

  Memories, Hands, Play

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• Lobbying' is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a mixed economy-of government by pressure groups. Its methods range from mere social courtesies and cocktail-party or luncheon "friendships" to favors, threats, bribes, blackmail.

  Ayn Rand

  Party, Government, Pressure Groups

  Ayn Rand (1990). “The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought”, p.241, Penguin

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• It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

  Edmund Burke

  Loss, Men, Political

  Edmund Burke (1999). “The Portable Edmund Burke”, p.433, Penguin

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• No state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Essence, Ideas, Liberty

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• If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Views, Numbers, Liberty

  First Inaugural Address, 4 Mar. 1861

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• Chemistry is yet, indeed, a mere embryon. Its principles are contested; experiments seem contradictory; their subjects are so minute as to escape our senses; and their result too fallacious to satisfy the mind. It is probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Science, Mind, Age

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”

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• Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

  F. H. Bradley

  Writing, Heart, Blood

  "Aphorisms". Book by F. H. Bradley No. 25, 1930.

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• There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).

  Antonin Scalia

  Practice, Justice, Demand

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• There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring, and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic. Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  School, Adversity, Iron

  Mahatma Gandhi (1965). “Glorious Thoughts of Gandhi: Being a Treasury of about Ten Thousand Valuable and Inspiring Thougths of Mahatma Gandhi, Classified Under Four Hundred Subjects”

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• A developed India by 2020, or even earlier, is not a dream. It need not be a mere vision in the minds of many Indians. It is a mission we can all take up - and succeed.

  Abdul Kalam

  Dream, Mind, Vision

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• To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric.

  Tom Regan

  Animal, Rights, Humanity

  Tom Regan (2004). “The Case for Animal Rights”, p.53, Univ of California Press

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• Studying goes deeper than mere reading. There are surface nuggets to be gathered but the best of the gold is underneath, and it takes time and labor to secure it.

  Mary McLeod Bethune

  Reading, Gold, Nuggets

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• Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle-a great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy.

  Herman Melville

  Wise, Spiritual, Sweet

  Herman Melville (1995). “Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall-Street”, p.29, Lulu.com

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• Let us be today's Christians. Let us not take fright at the boldness of today's church. With Christ's light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man, who dies on the cross to cleanse God's image, which is soiled in today's humanity, a humanity so enslaved, so selfish, so sinful.

  Oscar Romero

  Christian, Fashion, Selfish

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• Creativity is more than mere imagination. It is imagination inseparably coupled with both intent and effort.

  Alex Faickney Osborn

  Creativity, Imagination, Effort

  Alex Faickney Osborn (1953). “Applied imagination: principles and procedures of creative thinking”

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