The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand.
What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.
The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.
Why was I chosen?' 'Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.
Where has the Scripture made merit the rule or measure of charity?.
In ethics all individual humans are rightly seen, not only as beings to whom things matter, but as beings who accordingly merit concern and solicitude.
Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits.
Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.
More glorious to merit a sceptre than to possess one.
The flatterer easily insinuates himself into the closet, while honest merit stands shivering in the hall or antechamber.
I have been writing my heart out all my life, but only getting a living out of it now. . . . . . . it's not a question of the merit of art, but a question of spontaneity and sincerity and joy I say. I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it his own way and then we'd have something to read in our old age.
Fauvism was our ordeal by fire. . . colours became charges of dynamite. They were expected to charge light. . . The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact.
I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.
If merit is not recognised, still it is merit, and it ought to be honoured as such; but if it is rewarded, it becomes valuable in the eyes of all, and everybody is encouraged to pursue that course in which merit obtains its due reward.
I am told so many ill things of a man, and I see so few in him, that I begin to suspect he has a real but troublesome merit, as being likely to eclipse that of others.
The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do.
And for yourself, whatever there has been either of sin or duty, remember the one and forget the other, and betake yourself wholly to the mercy of God and the merit of Christ.
Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge - that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.
Frege has the merit of. . . finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.