In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.
Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.
For all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.
The mere fact that you have obstacles to overcome is in your favor.
Christianity is not a mere religion but an experimentally testable science.
Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape from death is mere good fortune.
Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.
Health is more than the mere absence of disease, it's the presence of a superior state of well being, a pizzazz, a vitality that has to be worked for each and every day of your life. You cannot get it in a bottle or from Dr. Phil. Its got to be gotten through diet and execise and rest and recreation and attitudes of mind working all together every day of your life and then, young men can become supermen and old men can become older.
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.
You must all be aware that modern war is not a mere matter of military operations. It involves the whole strength and all the resources of the nation. Not only soldiers, but also all citizens without exception, take part.
My aim is to give you only the things with which I am completely satisfied, even if it means asking you a little more [time] for them. . . for if I were to do otherwise I'd turn into a mere painting machine and you would be landed with a pile of incomplete work which would put off the most enthusiastic of art collectors.
Don't say that you want to give, but go ahead and give! You'll never catch up with a mere hope.
Liberalism can only be defined negatively. It is a mere critique, not a living idea
Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. its aim like that of science was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.
Some men are mere hunters; others are turkey hunters.
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.
The world is waiting for men with vision - it is not interested in mere pictures.
Mere allocation of huge sums of money for quality will not bring quality.