We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the Stateas those we deal with here, the prices is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. 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.
Trench says a wild man is a willed man. Well, then, a man of will who does what he wills or wishes, a man of hope and of the future tense, for not only the obstinate is willed, but far more the constant and persevering. The obstinate man, properly speaking, is one who will not. The perseverance of the saints is positive willedness, not a mere passive willingness. The fates are wild, for they will; and the Almighty is wild above all, as fate is.
I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
The only impregnable citadel of virtue is religion; for there is no bulwark of mere morality, which some temptation may not overtop or undermine, and destroy.
The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.
Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?
Bravery ceases to be bravery at a certain point, and becomes mere foolhardiness.
She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her -- she was only an Object of Contempt
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Desirelessness or renunciation does not come for the mere talking about it.
If Al Gore had allowed us and if the Florida Supreme Court had not intervened and rewritten the law, which they're not supposed to do, we could have certified, which is a mere procedural action, and then after that, they could have petitioned any justice for a recount statewide with uniform standards.
Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.
The more imagination the reader has. . . the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
The mere possibility provides no warrant for denying what I clearly grasp.
Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.
Mere lack of success does not discredit a method, for there are many things that determine and perpetuate our sanctified ways of doing things besides their success in reaching their proposed ends.
Civilization, stretching up to recognize that every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some movement to recognize maternity as a business or office needing time and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in among mountains of other slavery.
Happiness is understanding that friendship is more precious than mere things, more precious than getting your own way, more precious than being in situations where true principles are not at stake.
Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could.
A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.