When you consider all the stars I have managed, mere submarines make me smile.
Charles Frohman

When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it is a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
Erma Bombeck

Wherefore the mere practical architect is not able to assign sufficient reasons for the forms he adopts; and the theoretic architect also fails, grasping the shadow instead of the substance.
Marcus V. Pollio

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?
Carol P. Christ

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Johannes Brahms

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Women aren't as mere as they used to be.
Walt Kelly

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.
Roy H. Williams

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.
Muhammad Iqbal

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.
William Shakespeare

Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.
John Moody

Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion.
Tony Snow

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.
David Hockney

You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun.
Elizabeth Gilbert