Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
George Farquhar

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
Richard P. Feynman

Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.
James M. Baldwin

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound

Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.
Giacomo Casanova

Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
Benjamin Jowett

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
Emile Durkheim

So we do have our exits and our entrances and we are perhaps mere, but I think if one keep a certain joyousness in life which should be in playing, then good for one, but it's slightly more serious than that.
Janet Suzman

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.
Joyce Maynard

Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves - and be free.
Cesar Chavez

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

The awesomeness of God is that even in the works of the Beach Boys, Beatles, etc., the beauty of the music is a mere reflection of what God does everyday. He creates music of all kinds and moods.
John Foster

The Church's note must be a supernatural note which distinguishes incarnation from immanence, redemption from evolution, the Kingdom of God from mere spiritual process.
Arthur Middleton

The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
Imre Lakatos

The dearest friend on earth is a mere shadow compared to Jesus Christ.
Oswald Chambers

The difference between one man and another is not mere ability it is energy.
Thomas Arnold

The film's dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.
Edward Dmytryk

The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application.
Miguel de Cervantes

The here-and-now is no mere filling of time, but a filling of time with God.
John W. Foster

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.
Henry Hazlitt