Mere chance. . . alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.
Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Don't fuss about trifles. Don't permit little things-the mere termites of life-to ruin your happiness.
For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
The dullard finds even wine tasteless, while the sorcerer is intoxicated by the mere sight of water.
Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.
When we visualize something, we establish a relationship to the thing itself, not to some mere subjective representation of it inside us.
Ninety-nine Christians in every hundred are merely playing at Bible study; and therefore ninety-nine Christians in every hundred are mere weaklings, when they might be giants, both in their Christian life and in their service.
There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living. . . a way in which life itself is sheer knowing.
Manchester, one of the greatest, if not really the greatest mere village in England.
Death mattered not -- It was a mere puncutation
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
In any case it is not normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put into their work.
Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.
Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.
For those at home, as well as for those in battle, war is curiously disabling. The mere realization that one's country is at war poisons the bloodstream, creates an incessant mood of worry that infiltrates even the most casual moments.
The mere athlete becomes too much of a savage.
It was one of those dreams that invade the space between seconds, proving sleep has its own physics- where time shrinks and swells, lifetimes unspool in a blink, and cities burn to ash in a mere flutter of lashes.
Common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders than mere intelligence.