Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter mush. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
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.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.
Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.
The difference between one man and another is not mere ability it is energy.
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.
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.
I think that the mere fact that I'm doing it ought to inspire someone. In junior high school the counselor suggested that I focus on wood shop and metal shop.
As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.
So we do have our exits and our entrances and we are perhaps mere, but I think if one keep a certain joyousness in life which should be in playing, then good for one, but it's slightly more serious than that.
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.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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.
The awesomeness of God is that even in the works of the Beach Boys, Beatles, etc., the beauty of the music is a mere reflection of what God does everyday. He creates music of all kinds and moods.
The mere assemblage of peace loving people to interchange convincing reasons for their common faith, mere exhortation and argument to the public in favor of peace in general fall short of the mark.
I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.
Words, without power, is mere philosophy.
To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere philosophy.
Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.
My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.
Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
The rest is a mere matter of detail, to be settled with judgment, discretion, and caution.
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.
When your mother asks, 'Do you want a piece of advice?' it is a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.
If one accepts Hezbollah's self-description as a resistance movement, in which case one must, in light of the fact that Hezbollah never ceases to provoke, view Israel's mere existence as a continuing act of aggression, then Hezbollah has indeed shown that it can initiate conflict, resist, and survive.
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.
Hedge fund managers charge so much more than mutual fund managers; alpha is even harder to come by. They end up selling a variety of things beyond mere outperformance.
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life.
