The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
David Herbert Lawrence

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations.
Richard Owen

The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.
William H. Seward

The rest is a mere matter of detail, to be settled with judgment, discretion, and caution.
John Griffin Carlisle

The roads are filled with armed robbers, and murders for mere plunder are of daily occurrence.
John White Geary

The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.
Arthur Young

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
Aristotle

Thence, I suppose, my natural disposition to make fresh acquaintances, and to break with them so readily, although always for a good reason, and never through mere fickleness.
Giacomo Casanova

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
Edgar Allan Poe

There is a kind of thinking in the Church that wants to reduce the priest to a mere functionary, a managing director, where administration rather than doctrine and worship are to determine the form of the Church.
Arthur Middleton

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
Bertrand Russell

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
Edgar Allan Poe

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.
Brian Ferneyhough

They definitely mean to maintain that the process called death is a mere severence of soul and body, and that the soul is freed rather than injured thereby.
Oliver Joseph Lodge

They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races.
Emperor Hirohito

They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature, whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions.
Ethan A. Hitchcock

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
Neil Gaiman

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
Salman Rushdie