Being natural is simply a pose. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Accident is simply unforeseen order. [ Novalis ]
The dancing pair, that simply sought renown,
By holding out, to tire each other down. [ Goldsmith ]
Be not simply good — be good for some thing. [ Thoreau ]
Not a man, for being simply man,
Hath any honour, but honour for those honours
That are without him, as place, riches, favour,
Prizes of accident, as oft as merit. [ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ]
It is simply expression that gives reality to things. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
There are people who lie simply for the sake of lying. [ Pascal ]
Annihilation, as regards matter, is simply impossible. [ Hosea Ballou ]
To be in society is merely a bore, but to be out of it simply a tragedy. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
How many persons fancy they have experience simply because they have grown old! [ Stanislaus ]
His daily prayer, far better understood in acts than words, was simply doing good. [ Whittier ]
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Have something to say, and then say it as simply and straightforwardly as you can. [ Ada Ellen Bayly, a.k.a. Edna Lyall, English novelist and early feminist, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Want of humility or self-denial is simply the want of all religion, of all moral worth. [ Carlyle ]
To a well-deserving man God will show favour, to an ill-deserving He will be simply just. [ Plaut ]
Be not simply good. Be good for something. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]
I have never had a policy. I have simply tried to do what seemed best each day, as each day came. [ Lincoln ]
Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality. [ James A. Garfield ]
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. [ Matthew Arnold ]
The amount of women who flirt with their own husbands is scandalous. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
Never write except when you have something to say, and then say it simply - as Addison, Goldsmith, and Franklin wrote. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Science is simply commonsense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. [ Huxley ]
Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. [ Heine ]
The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people are satisfied with ornament. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Experience is of no ethical value, it is simply the name we give our mistakes. It demonstrates that the future will be the same as the past. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
To be able simply to say of a man he has character, is not only saying much of him, but extolling him; for this is a rarity which excites respect and wonder. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definiteness. [ Edgar Allan Poe ]
We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of our Freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned. [ Carlyle ]
Have something to tell, and tell it clearly, simply, without a trace of affectation or conscious effort at fine writing. I should advise the study of examples in this perfection of art. [ E P. Roe, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Men commonly injure one another without cause, and simply to do something: as an idle promenader in a garden, breaks the young branches, and strips off the leaves of the most beautiful flowers. [ E. Souvestre ]
The main thing in writing is to have distinct, and clear, and well-marshalled ideas, and then to express them simply and without affectation. This forms what we may call the bones of a good style. [ John Stuart Blackie, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Millions of people are provided with their thoughts as with their clothes; authors, printers, booksellers, and newsmen stand, in relation to their minds, simply as shoemakers and tailors stand to their bodies. [ G. A. Sala ]
In Athens the ladies were not gaudily but simply arrayed, and we doubt whether any ladies ever excited more admiration. So also the noble old Roman matrons, whose superb forms were gazed on delightedly by men worthy of them, were always very plainly dressed. [ George D. Prentice ]
People who love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity is either the lethargy of custom or lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what constancy is to the intellectual life, simply a confession of failure. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle; and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hardworking, and intent men - their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Patron or Customer? These nouns are generally used indiscriminately. A patron is a virtual benefactor; one who countenances, aids, or supports. A customer is a purchaser, or buyer, who expects in return for his money full value received. Hence it is erroneous for a merchant to say, He is a patron of mine,
when he means simply a customer. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
In most old communities there is a commonsense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity. [ Whipple ]
Honor is not a virtue in itself, it is the mail behind which the virtues fight more securely. A man without honor is as maimed in his equipment as an accoutred knight without helmet. Honor is not simply truthfulness; it is truthfulness sparkling with the fire of a suspective personality. It is something more than an ornament even to the loftiest. [ George H. Calvert ]
Occur or Transpire? The misuse of these words is very common. Occur means simply to take place, to happen; transpire to leak out, to come to light. Hence, it is incorrect to say, The annual school exhibition transpired last week.
The proper word here is occurred. But transpire is correctly used in such a sentence as, The proceedings of the caucus have not yet transpired
. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]