Example sentences of "is but " in BNC.

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1 For he is but a bastard to the time
2 The New York stock-market had collapsed but five years previously , ushering in a period of need and anguish not only across America and Canada ( New York is but 400 miles from Montreal ) , but throughout Europe , too .
3 ‘ In the multitude of words there wants no transgression ; therefore let thy words be few , ’ is but one admonition regularly repeated in scripture and the sayings of the fathers .
4 Another aspect , quite apart from this shared verse-form and linguistic usage , is the natural hyperbole endemic to it , which is but a step away from the ‘ surrealist ’ usage of language that Lorca essayed .
5 Since this causal chain is but part of a boundless nexus of causal chains that originate before and outside the perceived object and end beyond the perceiving body , it is not very clear why the former should count as an ‘ origin ’ .
6 Between a focus on Britain and a broad appreciation of the world of which it is but a part ?
7 Mr Clarke knows how serious this dispute is but he is prepared to risk people 's lives rather than talk . ’
8 However , this is but the reverse side of the Janus face of justice , for in their eyes it happens more often that criminals are released or are not put in prison for long enough .
9 There is but one type of work which police everywhere enjoy , and that is active crime-fighting on the streets ( for example see Ekblom and Heal 1982 ; Ericson 1982 ; Holdaway 1983 ; Manning 1977 ; Policy Studies Institute 1983b ; Punch 1979a ; Reiner 1978 , 1985 ) .
10 In Britain of the 1960s this challenge of the Welfare State is not isolated : it is but one aspect of the challenge which confronts us throughout the whole political field .
11 Yet in public cinemas we , the customers , watch film in the shadowy company of an anonymous crowd , each one of whom , like us , lives a life of which cinemagoing is but a part .
12 Of ‘ all the oppositions that furrow Freudian thought ’ it can be said that ‘ one is but the other different and deferred , one differing and deferring the other ’ ( Margins of Philosophy , 17 — 18 ) .
13 Even with such insight it has to be said : we go to the exotic other to lose everything , including ourselves — everything that is but the privilege which enabled us to go in the first place .
14 He smiled , ‘ It 's OK , you do n't have to pretend you remember me ; this instant recall is but an outward symbol of the soul-scarring effect you had on me .
15 Cat-equipped two-litre 16-valve engine sounds even more potent than it is but gives good economy .
16 It is the concrete being that reasons ; pass a number of years and I find my mind in a new place : how ? the whole man moves ; paper logic is but the record of it . ’
17 I love it just as it is but it can be sauced with burnt brandy .
18 It will be chaired by Steve Pinhay , the producer of ITV 's Saturday Night At The Movies , a programme which keeps on sending me press releases saying how wonderful it is but , when I actually watch it , seems to ignore the independent cinema entirely , particularly the variety that actually dares to speak in a foreign tongue .
19 This is but a particular example of a new truth .
20 Otherwise , ‘ how great soever the assurance is , that I am possessed with , it is groundless ; whatever light I pretend to , it is but enthusiasm . ’
21 Now this may sound an anathema to some Evangelical ears because for some the Church is but a secondary fact in Christian truth , coming a long way after personal faith and experience .
22 The erosion of values and moral standards , the relativism of life , the shocking things that happen , reveal that our civilization is but a veneer that hides a viciousness and rottenness that frighten us all .
23 Yet apart from the story of his binding , a long account of the finding of a wife for him , for the bulk of which he is off stage , and a story about him on his death-bed which is primarily about his sons , Jacob and Esau , there is but one chapter devoted to him ( ch.
24 It is but the momentary flicker of a candle in the dark .
25 The Hebrew scriptures contained prescriptions that enforced a separateness and particularity of the Jewish people , in tension with the universalism of monotheistic belief : if there is but one God , he is Lord of all peoples , even if some of them feel after him more coherently than others .
26 I have no fear , knowing it is but a passing from one world to another .
27 The human eye , which is but an extension of the fingertips , enjoys travelling not only along a line but also between two that provide an open roadway .
28 It was an unforgivable , though unintended , breach of confidence ; and it is but a small consolation to know that Herr Sussmeyer thereby gained a correspondence with a young woman which he has doubtless found extremely gratifying .
29 Again he said , in an argument strangely reminiscent of Erastus , Richard Hooker and Matthew Arnold , that ‘ the State is more sacred than any Church … for the State stands for the whole people in their manifold collective life ; and any Church is but a fragment of that life , though one of the most important fragments ’ .
30 As in so many things , the ways of the Victorians , while looked on with horror in late twentieth-century England , have survived in America ; unashamed fervour in holding and expressing religious and patriotic beliefs which easily blend into one another is but one example .
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