Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.
Lord Chesterfield

Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one.
Lord Chesterfield

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.
Malcolm Forbes

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.
Edward Hopper

The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.
Michael Korda

The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.
Michael Korda

Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.
David Lloyd George

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.
Max Beerbohm

Air power is indivisible. If you split it up into compartments, you merely pull it to pieces and destroy its greatest asset, its flexibility.
Bernard Law Montgomery

You can mark in desire the rising of the tide, as the appetite more and more invades the personality, appealing, as it does, not merely to the sensory side of the self, but to its ideal components as well.
Samuel Alexander

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
Wallace Stevens

The average Nigerian person has come to reconcile himself with the fact that his or her social progress remain essentially in his or her hands in collaboration with other fellow Nigerians and not merely relying on what government alone could provide for him or her.
Ibrahim Babangida

A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in.
Frederick The Great

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.
Erich Maria Remarque

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Emile M. Cioran

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
William Hazlitt

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.
O. Henry

A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
Friedrich Schiller

There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.
J. L. Austin

I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.
Billy Joel