I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary.
Billy Joel

Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects.
Wilhelm Wundt

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
Tom Wolfe

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
Christopher Morley

Without money honor is merely a disease.
Jean Racine

When will the day come that our dignity will be fully restored, when the purpose of our lives will no longer be merely to survive until the sun rises tomorrow!
Thabo Mbeki

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
David Herbert Lawrence

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.
Jim Bishop

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.
Raoul Vaneigem

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle

I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.
Giuseppe Garibaldi

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Edward Albee

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West

When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements.
Edward Thorndike

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas

A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed.
Talcott Parsons

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.
Gustav Mahler

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.
William Feather

Nothing comes merely by thinking about it.
John Wanamaker

Likewise today, some Christians are content to merely exist until they die. They don't want to risk anything, to believe God, to grow or mature. They refuse to believe his Word, and have become hardened in their unbelief. Now they're living just to die.
David Wilkerson