"Littleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leaving them but a shroud, and hast clothed obscurity and poverty with their eternally suggestive robe; thou hast affirmed, and thou preserved, that grim average of life which greatness refuses, which littleness fears, to realize. Romance and Poetry and Fancy are thy wards, making as thou dost the most holden eyes to overleap time's poor horizon, following departed treasure with wistful and unresigning love, as birds follow their ravaged nests, ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... as Lady de Brantefield confidently affirmed, King John of France, and the Black Prince, had sat and supped at it. I marvelled much in silence—for I had been sharply reproved for some observation I had unwittingly made on the littleness and crookedness of a dark, corner-chimneyed nook shown us for the banqueting-room; and I had fallen into complete disgrace for having called the winding staircases, leading ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... it is impossible for any man to understand. In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He feels more vividly than any others can feel, the utter incomprehensibleness ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... during his lifetime, has passed away; the violent reaction, which followed, has spent itself; and the world can now, I think, bear to hear the truth, and to see the man exhibited as he was,—a strange mixture of greatness and littleness, virtues and vices. I have all his works, and shall take them in my cabin on the voyage. But my library is not particularly rich in those books which illustrate the literary history of his times. I have Rousseau, and Marmontel's Memoirs, and Madame du Deffand's Letters, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... now discuss the moral titles of the Olympian scheme; what I dwell upon is its intense humanity, alike in its greatness and its littleness, its glory and its shame. As the cares and joys of human life, so the structure of society below is reflected, by the wayward wit of man, on heaven above. Though the names and fundamental traditions ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... literature which has had a refreshing effect upon his style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs—out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... there of the Bohemian, Who still to worth has been a willing stranger. The halter of Jerusalem shall see A unit for his virtue, for his vices No less a mark than million. He, who guards The isle of fire by old Anchises honour'd Shall find his avarice there and cowardice; And better to denote his littleness, The writing must be letters maim'd, that speak Much in a narrow space. All there shall know His uncle and his brother's filthy doings, Who so renown'd a nation and two crowns Have bastardized. And they, of Portugal And Norway, there shall be expos'd with him Of Ratza, who hath counterfeited ill ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... reason is not far to seek. Persons of the social grade of Mackenzie were inconceivably odious to this "diner-out of the first water;" while men like Bidwell and Baldwin made him painfully conscious of his own littleness and insufficiency for the task which he had undertaken. Yet he could not venture to call to his Council any of the remnant of the Tory Compact, and thereby utterly ignore the Liberal principles which were presumed to have dictated his appointment. The Tories, moreover, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... was from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... friends are either Englishmen or men of the big world that belongs to the big Powers. All the serious part of my life has been lived in that atmosphere: all the serious part of my work has been done with men of that sort. Just think of me as I am now going back to Rosscullen! to that hell of littleness and monotony! How am I to get on with a little country landagent that ekes out his 5 per cent with a little farming and a scrap of house property in the nearest country town? What am I to say to him? What is he to say ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... outlook both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its immeasurable bulks and interspaces. Miss Alicia said something like this to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... great towards persons of dignity and affluence, and unassuming towards the middle class." In the fourth place, it is said that he cannot associate with others: this means that he is not at home with others than his friends: because he altogether shuns flattery and hypocrisy, which belong to littleness of mind. But he associates with all, both great and little, according as he ought, as stated above (ad 1). It is also said, fifthly, that he prefers to have barren things, not indeed any, but good, i.e. virtuous; for in all things he prefers the virtuous to the useful, as being greater: ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... this child had not the giddy, thoughtless disposition usually characteristic of girls of her age. She had too early gained an insight into the uncertainty and emptiness of all earthly magnificence, not to appreciate the littleness of those things upon which young girls usually place so high an estimate. Her thoughts were not occupied with the adornment of her person, and she did not bend her young head beneath the yoke of capricious fashion: for her, there were higher and nobler enjoyments, ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... and oft, but being still Deliberately bent upon the right, Had kept it in the main; one that much loved Whate'er in man is worthy high respect, And in his soul devoutly did aspire To be it all: yet felt from time to time The littleness that clings to what is human, And suffered from the shame ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... crowds assembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from the breaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, in the early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness of a town viewed from high up on the side ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... that Napoleon Bonaparte governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity, caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to himself alone, and by himself alone commanded massacre; that the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... thee in rain, And with wide parent wing Shadowed thee, nested thing, Fed thee, and slaved for thy Impotent tyranny. Nature's broad thews bent Meek for thy content. Mastering littleness Which the wise heavens confess, The frailty which doth draw Magnipotence to its law— These were, O happy one, these Thy ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things, should be studiously silent about almost every one ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... friendship with a proper degree of sensibility. I am pleased with your idea of paying whatever we owe to Spain. Their pride, perhaps, might forbid them to receive the money. But our pride has been so hurt by the littleness of their conduct, that I would in that case be for leaving it at the gate of the palace, and quit the country. At present such a step would not be expedient, though the time will come when prudence, instead of restraining, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... accepted; nothing is accepted if that be wanting. God desires that. He can do all the rest. After all, He is the sole agent, for the 'willing mind' comes alone from Him. This is comforting, for when we think of the feebleness and littleness of all we do, we might despair of having our services accepted, were we not assured that it is not these God looks to, except in so far as they are indications of the state of ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of the vices and follies of mankind, and this misanthropic tone is also disfigured or brutalized by his obtrusion of physical dirt and coarseness. I think Gulliver's Travels the great work of Swift. In the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag he displays the littleness and moral contemptibility of human nature; in that to the Houyhnhnms he represents the disgusting spectacle of man with the understanding only, without the reason or the moral feeling, and in his horse he gives the misanthropic ideal of man—that is, a being virtuous from rule ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... on for a poem to celebrate the sixth hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, Tennyson, feeling his own littleness before "this central man of all ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... great painter, is he that can so embellish his subject as to make her more than human, whilst yet by a cunning art he has so based his apotheosis on the nature of the case that the woman can go on being a true woman, and give her character free play, and show littleness, or cherish spite, or be greedy of common pleasures, and he continue to worship without a thought of incongruity. To love a character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness of ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... policy the training that Patrick Henry received would be rank ruin. Educational systems are designed for average intellects, but as if to show us the littleness of our little schemes, Destiny seems to give her first prizes to those who have evaded all rules and ignored every axiom. Rules and regulations are for average men—and so ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... must arm your hook, with the line in the inside of it; then take your Scissers and cut so much of a browne Malards feather as in your own reason wil make the wings of it, you having with all regard to the bigness or littleness of your hook, then lay the outmost part of your feather next to your hook, then the point of your feather next the shank of your hook; and having so done, whip it three or four times about the hook with the same Silk, with which your hook was armed, ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... the untold glory above and beneath me, I felt oppressed with the littleness, as well as the greatness of my nature. How insignificant I appeared amid these gigantic forms; and still I exulted in the consciousness that "My Father made them all, that Father with whom I could commune, and whose Son I was privileged ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... younger and without ties and responsibilities would fain do the same. It is a sacrifice, no doubt, to give up civilization and to begin life anew, but it is what our colonists are always doing. At any rate it is freedom—freedom from the corruption, the intrigue, the sloth, and the littleness of a decaying power like that of Carthage. You will be happy at least in having your wife with you, while the gods only know when I shall see the face of my ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... and he alone felt their littleness. The autumn night was crisp, and from his seat on a log he held out his fingers to the warm blaze. Now and then a yellow or red leaf caught in the light wind drifted to his feet and he gazed up half in fear at the great ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... use to the buyer than he was to the seller. But Cato, as if he took a pride in these things, tells us, that when consul, he left his war-horse in Spain to save the public the charge of his conveyance. Whether such things as these are instances of greatness or littleness of soul, let ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... very small for her age, and everybody called her "little;" but she got very few privileges on account of her youth and littleness. In those days, and especially in a family like Josiah Thayer's, where there were so many children that each had to scratch for itself at an early age or go without, six years was considered comparatively mature, and the child who ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... to be back in this friendly house with its narrow stairways and endearing littleness; it had been his American mother's before him. Within its walls were the exquisite traces of a temperament and taste that had been hers. She hadn't always been a great lady; to the end of her days there had remained with her the love of small ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... feet of a drinking deer, and was badly startled when it bounded away with a snort and a smashing of brush. But he saw nothing dangerous and went back to his camp and to bed. There he lay awake for an hour, still troubled, oppressed by a vague feeling of the littleness ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... and with Uathach and with Aife, [2]thou wast not a man worthy of me, for[2] thou wast my serving-man, even for arming my spear and dressing my bed." "That was indeed true," answered Cuchulain; "because of my youth and my littleness did I so much for thee, but this is by no means my mood this day. For there is not a warrior in the world I would not drive off this day [3]in the field ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... His absolute immensity solely by Himself," while, "by the little mind of man, He is reduced to littleness that suits man's faculty." In these words, and others that might be quoted, the poet shows that he is profoundly impressed with the distinction between human knowledge, and that knowledge which is adequate ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... domestic peace in Spain gave assurance of more successful opposition to the Moslem rule. But the pope was firm, his holy permission had not been obtained before the marriage had been celebrated, and, piqued at this unintended slight which had been put upon his august authority, he revealed his littleness ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of the untiring Hollander, who rules the waves even more proudly than the Briton, and has cheated them of the very ground beneath his feet. And if sermons may be found in bricks as well as stones, one has a thought while looking at them about Christianity itself. Certainly there is often pitiful littleness and short-comings in the individual believer, just as each separate brick of these millions is stained or worn or fractured; and yet the Christian Church, august and significant, still towers before men; even as these old blocks of clay compile vastly and undeniably ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... and your crown of gold, and your loyal eyes, I know by heart, as well as your name. Dear Phyllis. And I know, too, your quick and beautiful mind; its clear, wise judgment of the true and the false. I know its freedom from selfishness, and all littleness. I know its purity and its steadfastness I know your capable hands, Phyllis, and your eager, pitying heart,—for I have seen them at work day after day, and week after week. I love you, my dearest, and I must tell you so. I think I have loved you longer than I have known ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... run when the belittling process is fully carried out nations will disappear. Every one who seeks instruction on this point can look at Venice, Madrid, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Rome; all places which were formerly resplendent with mighty powers and are now destroyed by the infiltrating littleness which gradually attained the highest eminence. When the day of struggle came, all was found rotten, the State succumbed to a weak attack. To worship the fool who succeeds, and not to grieve over the fall of an able man ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... heard of him on all sides, stories of other actions so marvellously ruthless and of things so wondrously mean. Upon a bargain so shameless he had built so wondrous a career—a faithfulness of service so magnificent he had closed with a treachery so base. All greatness and all littleness, all heroism and all crimes, seemed to combine themselves in this one strange being. Having shamelessly sold his youth to a King's mistress, he devoted his splendid maturity to a tender, faithful passion for a beauteous virago, whose displeasure was the sole thing ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... uncomplainingly to the end against injustice. He would cheerfully have watched the whole world depart from him, if he had had the consciousness of righting in a good cause. He had thought scornfully of the people who had betrayed their littleness by ignoring him. But what if they had been right, and his had been ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... with mind; the one man without avarice, anger, pettiness, littleness; the one man generous and truly great of all history. It is enough to make one despair to think of the mere brutes butting to death the great-minded Caesar. He comes nearest to the ideal of a design-power arranging the affairs of the world for good ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Instead of "a holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable watering-place—and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him as it ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... into a bower. In the midst of these shrubs a few stones were to be seen, blackened with fire and sprinkled with thin ashes; here the hearth had no doubt been, and the chimney in falling had covered it with rubbish. I stood for some time in silent admiration of the exuberance of nature and the littleness of man; and when I was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, I exclaimed with melancholy, "Are ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... better, sir, to send the men away,' said he to the colonel, for he was a much privileged subaltern. He put his arms round the ragbound horror as he spoke, and dropped him into a chair. It may not have been explained that the littleness of Mildred lay in his being six feet four and big in proportion. The corporal seeing that an officer was disposed to look after the capture, and that the colonel's eye was beginning to blaze, promptly removed himself and his men. The mess was left ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... observed my limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favourite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high. After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... spare from slobbering over his minions, and wasting the treasures of the realm to supply their insatiate greed, was devoted to polemical divinity, in which he displayed his learning, indeed, but changed his positions and contradicted himself day by day. The magnitude of this wonderful sovereign's littleness oppresses the imagination. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Or whether it be little or be much. Discourse to him of prodigious armaments Assembled to besiege his city now, And of the passing of a mule with gourds— 'Tis one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact,—he will gaze rapt 150 With stupor at its very littleness, (Far as I see) as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results. And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we too see not with his opened eyes. Wonder and ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... visions of heaven's glories or northern auroras are necessary to give peace to the troubled soul. Even so found unhappy Oowikapun, for when the excitement of these night visions wore off, he felt more than ever crushed down with a sense of his own littleness, while darker seemed his spiritual vision than ever before these auroral glories had ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... one man forever springing beside the grave of another must work sadness in God. Yet Sainte-Helene did not know any young supplanter was there. He did not miss or care for the fickle vanity of applause; he did not torment himself with the spectres of the mind, or feel himself shrinking with the littleness of jealousy; he did not hunger for a love that was not in the world, or waste a Titan's passion on a human ewe any more. For him, the aching and bewilderment, exaltations and self-distrusts, animal gladness and subjection ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... were the issues of Henry's policy, it shrinks into littleness if we turn from it to the weighty movements which were now stirring the minds of men. The world was passing through changes more momentous than any it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... tendency, originates in some soft kindly emotions, and adds a new interest to the spirit of the warrior; it humbles him, to whom the earth is subject, before those mysterious Powers which weigh the destinies of man in their balance, in whose eyes the greatest and the least of mortals scarcely differ in littleness. Wallenstein's confidence in the friendship of Octavio, his disinterested love for Max Piccolomini, his paternal and brotherly kindness, are feelings which cast an affecting lustre over the harsher, more heroic qualities wherewith they are combined. His ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... would be some dark and obscure intimations of his design, made in order to satisfy himself that she would not really oppose it. To ask her, woman as she was, to take any part in such a deed, or to communicate to her beforehand any of the details of the arrangement, would have been an act of littleness and meanness which such magnanimous monsters as Bothwell ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... tall, in fact, than otherwise. Of his figure, which was well enough formed, though somewhat of the leanest, he entertained the highest admiration; and with his legs, which, in knee-breeches, were perfect curiosities of littleness, he was enraptured to a degree amounting to enthusiasm. He also had some majestic, shadowy ideas, which had never been quite fathomed by his intimate friends, concerning the power of his eye. Indeed he had been known to go so far as to boast that he could utterly quell and subdue the haughtiest ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from the bright to the dark, from ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... movement denotes strength, and bigness of conceptions. A mere wrist gesture suggests littleness, flippancy, weak traits. Similarly if a man walks from his hips, he suggests the characteristic of strong personal opinion. If he walks principally from the knees, or over-uses his ankles and minces along, ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... philosophy is unable to explain, it seems to me an immense endowment when a man can say with confidence, I look through Nature, and beyond Nature, up to Nature's God. I say the presumption of the thing does repel me."—"Let the profound sense of our own littleness, which here creeps in upon us, check the dogmatic spirit and arrest the presumptuous world; we stand in the great presence of Nature, whose inspiration should be that of modesty, humility, and love."—"When my friend talks so much about matter, ... his reasoning ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... depressed, I am self-condemned already; spare me, therefore, this insupportable humiliation, wound me not with your scorn, oppress me not with your superiority! I aim at no competition, I attempt no vindication, I acknowledge my own littleness as readily as you can despise it, and nothing but indignity could urge ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... and Mrs. Hetherington a queer friendship had sprung up; her quickness, her absolute lack of continuity, her littleness and her transparently minx-like qualities seemed so pathetic that Marcella took her under her wing. She never came out of her cabin for breakfast; the stewardess, with her nose very high in the air ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contention between mighty factions, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... heart: for by it the great art of colour, which should be royal, aspiring, and free, becomes a poor slave to the petty crafts of writing and printing, and is fettered, imprisoned, and made little, body and soul, to match the littleness of books, and go to church in a rich fool's pocket. Natheless affection rules us all, and when the poor wench would bring me her thorn leaves, and lilies, and ivy, and dewberries, and ladybirds, and butterfly grubs, and all the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... appreciate others so well fail to make him feel his own great superiority? But that relative superiority which he felt in himself left him perfectly modest, or he knew it was subject to other relations that showed it to him in extreme littleness: that is to say, the relation of the finite with the aspiration toward the infinite. It was the appreciation of the immense distance existing between what we know and what we ignore, between what we are and what we would be; the consciousness, in fact, of the limits ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... by strange fatality, was aboard with her child and Aunt Lois. Her presence, when first they came face to face, startled him; not the event, but the littleness of the great earth; that his hatred and her crime could not keep them farther apart. The Endicott in him rose up for a moment at the sight of her, and to his horror even sighed for her: this Endicott, who for a twelvemonth had been so submerged under the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... are covered with paintings and sculptures, the colors of which are wonderfully fresh and vivid. If, as seems probable, the great design of Egyptian architecture was to impress man with a feeling of his own littleness, to inspire a sense of overwhelming awe in the presence of the Deity, and at the same time to show that the monarch was a being of superhuman greatness, these edifices were well adapted to accomplish their purpose. The Egyptian beholder and worshiper was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... private street-mansion, or a haberdasher's warehouse. St. Paul's Church, Covent-Garden, is an instance of the unhappy effect produced by a combination of a similar kind; great in all its parts, with its original littleness, it very nearly approximates to the character of a barn. Inigo Jones doubtless desired to erect an edifice of stately Roman aspect, but he was cramped in his design, and, therefore, only aspired to make a first-rate barn; so far unquestionably the great architect ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... with others. The question then is, how from the same impression and the same idea we can form such different judgments concerning the same object, and at one time admire its bulk, and at another despise its littleness. This variation in our judgments must certainly proceed from a variation in some perception; but as the variation lies not in the immediate impression or idea of the object, it must lie in some other impression, that ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... chosen from the galaxy of heaven a region worthy her command, it must have been that pale and holy star, which, splendid and alone in the firmament, heralds the approach of day; so unfitted might she have been deemed to mingle with a world less pure, so completely placed by nature above all the littleness of ordinary life. Her noble and majestic form was the casket of a rich and holy treasure, and her father's conscience had often quailed, when contemplating the severity of her youthful virtue. Dearly ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old dwelling and its princely gardens, I feel like a grasshopper that, chirping about the grounds, escaped the scythe only by my littleness. Even now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... know thee too well to depend upon any thing thou sayest on this subject. Thou lovest to make thy friends the objects of ridicule to ladies; and imaginest, from the vanity, (and, in this respect, I will say littleness,) of thine own heart, that thou shinest the ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... stranger; but as it has no foundation in fact, I hope the Doctor will be so good as to take his own way in undeceiving the publick, I principally mean my friends and connections, who will be first angry at me, and next sorry to find such an instance of my littleness recorded in a book which has a very fair chance of being much read. I expect you will let me know what he will write you in return, and we here beg to make offer to you and Mrs. Boswell of our most ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... scruple or shame, whenever they interfered with his interest, or with what he called his glory. His perfidy and violence, however, excited less enmity than the insolence with which he constantly reminded his neighbours of his own greatness and of their littleness. He did not at this time profess the austere devotion which, at a later period, gave to his court the aspect of a monastery. On the contrary, he was as licentious, though by no means as frivolous and indolent, as his brother ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... own room. It was easy for her to see that Mr Harrel was bent upon using every method he could devise, to entangle her into some engagement with Sir Robert, and though she could not imagine the meaning of such a scheme, the littleness of his behaviour excited her contempt, and the long-continued error of the baronet gave her the utmost uneasiness. She again determined to seek an explanation with him herself, and immovably to refuse joining the ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... at whose threats men quailed, at whose vast and intricate schemes men gasped in palefaced awe, has left behind him the record of his interior being. Let us consider whether he was so potent as his fellow mortals believed, or whether his greatness was merely their littleness; whether it was carved out, of the inexhaustible but artificial quarry of human degradation. Let us see whether the execution was consonant with the inordinate plotting; whether the price in money and blood—and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... these infinitesimal billows are not much, though somewhat, broken by it; but when they reach the terraqueous globe itself, they dash into foam which goes whirling and eddying down into solids and liquids, among their wild caverns of ultra-microscopic littleness, and this foam or whirl-storm of ethereal substance is heat, if we are not much mistaken. According to its intensity, it expands by its own mere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... there who has not revelled in the thought of something new, the eager desire to see something fresh? The country boy to see vast London with all its greatness and littleness, its splendour and its squalor, its many cares and too often false joys—the town boy to plunge into that home of mystery and wonder, the country. And though as a rule the country boy is disappointed, he of the town, when once he has tasted the true joys of the country and seen Nature at her ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... that the other gentlemen took the opportunity of being near her: of what use in the world was their admiration while she had an uneasy sense that there was some standard in Deronda's mind which measured her into littleness? Mr. Vandernoodt, who had the mania of always describing one thing while you were looking at another, was quite intolerable with his insistence on Lord Blough's kitchen, which he ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... past few days. It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of his open, generous nature, and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than if he were an ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, as is his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none, except the education of his son, in which ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... the mind from height to greater height. Men were long in accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming in the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... we account for the littleness of the men representing "the people," who have been rushed into the big positions, and for the vulgarity of the present age? Vulgarity in public worship; vulgarity in the manners, the speeches, and the ideals of the House of Commons; ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... bring himself down to the littleness of her daily life, he determined to show his disapproval of every phrase of its meanness as far as he could without offending her. He had made her feel that he condemned her course towards Miss Burton that evening, and he ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... littleness and humility; he had paid, as it were, like a gentleman, for Goldenhorns. "Here you are," he could say. "I've brought along a horse; we can ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... infinitude." Their infinite universe, after all, is not an "absolute," but a "relative" infinite; that is, the indefinite. "The universe must extend indefinitely in time and space, in the infinite greatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts—in the infinite variety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of existence. The finite can not express the infinite but by being multiplied infinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in any reasonable relation, or in any intelligible proportion ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... diplomat has graven the truth, that an error may be worse than a crime; and the errors of the Confederate Congress—from alpha to omega—were born of weakness and feeble grasp on the prompt occasions of a great strife, like this which so submerged their littleness. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... equally in external nature with the local differences of different colours. Yet Sir Joshua seems to argue that the grandeur, the effect of the whole object, is confined to the general idea in the mind, and that all the littleness and individuality is in nature. This is an essentially false view of the subject. This grandeur, this general effect, is indeed always combined with the details, or what our theoretical reasoner would designate as littleness in nature: ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... which we think especially of the name of God. A day which, to a wise man, may well be one of the most solemn, and the most humiliating days of the whole year. For is it not humiliating to look stedfastly, even for a moment, at God's greatness, and then at our own littleness; at God's strength and at our own weakness; at God's wisdom, and at our own ignorance; and, most of all, at God's righteousness, and ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... being then narrow, the interest is narrow in the objects of knowledge; consequently the sensibilities are not scattered, are not multiplied, are not crushed and confounded (as afterwards they are) under the burden of that distraction which lurks in the infinite littleness of details. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... painful[126]; little or almighty. I had beheld the immemorial works Of endless beings; skirred extinguished worlds; And, gazing on eternity, methought I had borrowed more by a few drops of ages From its immensity: but now I feel My littleness again. Well said the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... powers of nature, which had hitherto slumbered quietly, now came into play. The breeze freshened and a tremendous storm of thunder, lightning, and rain came on, as if to mock the fury of man, and humble him under a sense of his relative littleness. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... economy was proposed with respect to the finances; and the utmost diligence used in procuring materials, as well as workmen, for ship-building, that the navy of France might speedily retrieve its former importance. In the midst of these truly patriotic schemes, the court of Versailles betrayed a littleness of genius, and spirit of tyranny, joined to fanaticism, in quarreling with their parliament about superstitious forms of religion. The sacraments had been denied to a certain person on his death-bed, because he refused to subscribe to the bull Unigenitus. The nephew ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... that even stony-face Time himself is but a short-lived, puny mortal—a little greater than some others, that is all—to the dim eyes of this old servant of his? Has he, ticking, ticking, all these years, come at last to see into the littleness of that Time that looms so great to our ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... ruinous to your ambition!" cried Kirkpatrick; for so help me God, I believe that an honester man than William Wallace lives not in Scotland! And that ye know, and his virtues overtopping your littleness, ye would uproot the greatness which ye ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... be the especial glory of Love, that it doth make unto all Sweetness and Greatness, and doth be a fire burning all Littleness; so that did all in this world to have met The Beloved, then did Wantonness be dead, and there to grow Gladness and Charity, dancing ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Betty—"sometimes, lately, in Con's eyes I have seen the look! It was as if he were asking me whether he had yet been punished enough! And I've been thinking of myself—thinking what Con owed me; what I wanted; when I should have it! I hate and despise myself for my littleness and prudery; why, he's a thousand times finer than I! That's what pedestals have done for women. But now, Betty, I'm down; and I'm down ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... not unjust, toward all others. Thus, for instance, the Pantheon, the Apollo Belvedere, some colossal heads, and very recently the Sistine Chapel, have by turns so won my whole heart, that I scarcely saw any thing besides them. But, in truth, can man, little as man always is, and accustomed to littleness, ever make himself equal to all that here surrounds him of the noble, the vast, and the refined? Even tho he should in any degree adapt himself to it, then how vast is the multitude of objects that immediately press upon him from all sides, and meet him at every turn, of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, the kinship of all life, faith that the unknown is greater than the known and is only the As Yet Unknown, and resolution to find a manly highway to it, have been forgotten in a paroxysm of littleness and terror in which nothing is active except concupiscence and the fear of death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify his cruelty, and any ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... so pointedly paid his respectful devoirs; and there was as much pride and haughtiness in Gabrielle's heart as in theirs. Poor thing! she said truly, that "early shadows had darkened her soul," and what had she left but pride? Not an iota of woman's besetting littleness had my sister—noble, generous, self-denying, devoted where she loved; her sweetness had been poisoned, nor had she sought that fountain of living water which alone can purify such bitterness. Gentle in manner, pure in heart, affectionate in disposition, Gabrielle's pride wrought her misery. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... throne. On a morning like this there is no death, the sin of the world is swallowed up; theological and metaphysical problems cease to have any meaning. Men and books make me painfully aware of my littleness and defects, but here on the shore in silence complete save for the music of the ebbing sea, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... involuntarily courts with the Prometheus of Aeschylus. Both are examples of fortitude under suffering—of the mind's conflict with its fate. In either play a dreary waste, a savage solitude, constitute the scene. But the towering sublimity of the Prometheus dwarfs into littleness every image of hero or demigod with which we contrast it. What are the chorus of mariners, and the astute Ulysses, and the boyish generosity of Neoptolemus—what is the lonely cave on the shores of Lemnos—what the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
