It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
Ram Dass

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill

All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
John Stuart Mill

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
E. M. Forster

Money and success don't change people; they merely amplify what is already there.
Will Smith

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

Prayer is commitment. We don't merely co-operate with God with certain things held back within. We, the total person, co-operate. This means that co-operation equals committment.
E. Stanley Jones

For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role.
Margaret J. Wheatley

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.
David Viscott

One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
Henrik Ibsen

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.
Paul Samuelson

Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
Democritus

There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.
Xun Zi

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
Marcel Duchamp

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

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.
Alan K. Simpson

There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
Henry Van Dyke