Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.
Ivan Pavlov

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
E. B. White

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
Hermann Hesse

Even if my mother had no qualms of conscience concerning ownership of negroes, her sense of duty carried her far beyond the mere supplying of their physical needs, or requiring that they render faithful service.
John Sergeant Wise

Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions.
John Bates Clark

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
Immanuel Kant

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Thomas Sowell

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.
Henry Mayhew

Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!
Davy Crockett

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Emily Dickinson

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
Karl Marx

For tis not in mere death that men die most.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter mush. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
Robert Jackson

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.
John Henry Newman

From the described experiment it is clear that the mere act of eating, the food even not reaching the stomach, determines the stimulation of the gastric glands.
Ivan Pavlov

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.
Wilhelm Dilthey

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.
Charles Sanders Peirce

God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.
James Cash Penney