"Merely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rigmaroles; he knew the reason for the forms he used: he had not only a technical, but a rational knowledge of his business; and, what is still more uncommon, he knew how to teach what he had learnt. He did not merely set me down at a desk, and leave me skins after skins of parchment to pore over in bewildered and hopeless stupidity; he did not use me like a mere copying machine, to copy sheet after sheet for him, every morning from nine till four, and again every evening from five till ten. Mine was a law tutor ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... accustomed to society and the ways of the great world, can often decide from the first minute the role which anyone is likely to play among them. People of experience, at the first view of this young man, at his first entrance, merely by the way he entered the hall, decided that his role in society would be brilliant—that more than one feminine heart would beat faster for his presence, that more than one dandy's wrath would be kindled by ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... seen that the drama is distinguished from all other forms of art by its essential quality of directly enacting the things to be communicated instead of merely describing them. Since only human things can fitly be so enacted by human beings, dramatic art is generally identical with human art; it is the art of representing the actions of men and women—or of deities conceived as idealized human beings—in such ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... remain but the name and shadow of a peer, which was but a pageant. Notwithstanding all his oratory, the lords relinquished their clause, declaring, at the same time, that they had agreed to pass the bill without alteration, merely in regard to the present urgent state of affairs, as being otherwise of opinion that they had a right to insist upon their clause. A formal complaint being made in the house of commons against the pamphlet entitled, "King William and Queen Mary Conquerors," as containing ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... principles. Thus he proved that certain muscles were under the control of definite sets of nerves by cutting these nerves in living animals, and observing that the muscles supplied by them were rendered useless. He pointed out also that nerves have no power in themselves, but merely conduct impulses to and from the brain and spinal-cord. He turned this peculiar knowledge to account in the case of a celebrated sophist, Pausanias, who had been under the treatment of various physicians for a numbness in the fourth ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
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