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

The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.
Benjamin Disraeli

Mistakes are merely steps up the ladder.
Paul J. Meyer

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

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.
Calvin Coolidge

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

Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things not as they are but as they might be. Don't merely dream - but create!
Robert Collier

The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.
Ernest Holmes

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
Michel de Montaigne

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.
John Ruskin

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
John Ruskin

Nothing comes merely by thinking about it.
John Wanamaker

It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.
John Wanamaker

Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile.
Gary Ryan Blair

The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.
Henry Clay

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Friedrich August von Hayek

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

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