The practical man is the adventurer, the investigator, the believer in research, the asker of questions, the man who refuses to believe that perfection has been attained. . . . There is no thrill or joy in merely doing that which any one can do. . . . It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way.
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.
You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
In order to fight any issue, it is necessary to fight for something, not merely against something.
I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.
All the world is a stage and we are merely players.
Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.
The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic.
That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.
Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures.
What is called liberality is often merely the vanity of giving.
Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.
The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
Mission is at the heart of what you do as a team. Goals are merely steps to its achievement.
England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.
Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
To prefer it is better than to only know it. To delight in it is better than merely to prefer it.
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
