These mere quotes will inspire you. Mere, that is solely or no more or better than what is specified.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging mere quotes, mere sayings, and mere proverbs.
Best Mere Quotes
- “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher. He’d be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he’s a poached egg or else he’d be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others.” ~ Rick Warren
- “Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “As long as you are proud, you cannot know God.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” ~ Jane Smiley
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“The best hiding spots are not the most hidden; they’re merely the least searched.” ~ Chris Pavone
- “Until a vegan or vegetarian enters the room, people don’t see themselves as meat-eaters. They are merely ‘eaters’, and it is we vegans who have made them aware of what they are doing. Often this is discomforting.” ~ Carol J. Adams
- “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was – a woman.” ~ Washington Irving
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“For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into… It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or — if they think there is not — at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence. For example, infants who die from SIDs were actually great people when they were alive for real, so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning one hundred two was obviously a terrible individual who had many many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her own unknown purgatory even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world.” ~ Chuck Klosterman
- “In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.” ~ John Stuart Mill
- “…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.” ~ Sylvia Plath
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“It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man’s life – the priceless moments that will never come back to him again – being wasted in a mere brutish sleep.” ~ Jerome K. Jerome
- “But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.” ~ Rex Stout
- “If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkenness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says the Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“Noooo, there’s no way I, a mere handsome and sexy shopkeeper, could possibly have bankai!” ~ Tite Kubo
- “If I profess with loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” ~ Martin Luther
- “Idealism does not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but in truth it has been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture…Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect just like outward appearance without inner value, and never creative force….The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.” ~ Adolf Hitler
- “It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity)” ~ George MacDonald
- “In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.” ~ Albert Camus
- “I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “And what I was feeling was the wonder Of being more than me, of being more Than mere here and now allowed I had become a shining star, a burning nova Exploded with love Flying through an endlessly Expanding universe Away from the me that was Toward a me that is beyond Understanding.” ~ Walter Dean Myers
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“There must be a stronger foundation than mere friendship or sexual attraction. Unconditional love, agape love, will not be swayed by time or circumstances.” ~ Stephen Kendrick
- “You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.” ~ Hermann Hesse
- “When you’re cooking with food as alive as this — these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh — you’re in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener … this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important – what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right – so long as it’s not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic – and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don’t know. I’ve never known it. I’d like to understand.” ~ Ayn Rand
