"Pettiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a part of masculinity. It may be very absurd to read of two Irish gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of two Irish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But the very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same conception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it is really this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterful mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and its industrial ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... perplexities, all her bitterness of ennui, all her questionings and doubts, were swept away on the keen desert wind into the endless plains. She had come from her last confession asking herself, "What am I?" She had felt infinitely small confronted with the pettiness of modern, civilised life in a narrow, crowded world. Now she did not torture herself with any questions, for she knew that something large, something capable, something perhaps even noble, rose up within her to greet all this nobility, all this mighty ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... form of an accusation couched in the most vehement terms, because of a libertine raid made by a few young gallants in the night, on a house supposed to be inhabited by a woman of damaged character, is inconceivable to us—a certain parochial character, a pettiness as of a village, thus comes into the great national struggle. The Queen's uncle, who had accompanied her to Scotland, was one of the young men concerned, along with Earl Bothwell and another. "The horror of this fact and the raretie of it commoved all godlie hearts," said Knox—and yet there ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... longer puzzled, we were vibrant with a common purpose. I was angry and disgusted; Mick was moved to the inmost sanctuary of his Celtic being. He manifested the last degree of outrage and insult, of agonised anger. For the moment we were cleansed of all the pettiness and grossness common to manhood, inspired only with a new-born worship of the inviolable right of the individual to the disposal of its own ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Maitland was ignorant of the former relations between his mistress and Gorka. Countess Steno's grandeur, that which made a courageous woman almost a heroine in her passions, was an absolute sincerity and disgust for the usual pettiness of flirtations. She would have disdained to deny to a new lover the knowledge of her past, and the semiavowals, so common to women, would have seemed to her a cowardice still worse. She had not essayed to hide from Maitland what ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Every regulation is necessary, if only because it contributes to the desired end, namely, discipline. Let no one ask, then, to what purpose the innumerable religious and ritual regulations, sometimes reaching the extreme of pettiness, to what purpose the comprehensive code in which every step in the life of the faithful is foreseen. The Talmudic religious provisions, all taken together, aim to put the regimen of the nation on a strictly uniform basis, so that everywhere the Jew may ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... in in the autumn. It was to be feared that Indians under Lane would inevitably revert to savagery. There would be no one to put any restraint upon them and their natural instincts would be given free play. Conceivably then, it was not mere supersensitiveness and pettiness of spirit that moved General Hunter to take exception to Lane's appointment but regard for the honor of his profession, perchance, also, a certain feeling ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... was just what she had been a year ago—just what she would always be. Rilla Blythe's nature in that year had changed and matured and deepened. She found herself seeing through Irene with a disconcerting clearness—discerning under all her superficial sweetness, her pettiness, her vindictiveness, her insincerity, her essential cheapness. Irene had lost ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... kind to everybody, nobody was taken into her confidence. Her nature was apart from theirs; one of those rare and few whose fate it is for the most part to stand alone in the world; too fine for the coarseness, too delicate for the rudeness, too noble for the pettiness of those around them, even though they be not more coarse or rude or small-minded than the generality of mankind. Sympathy is broken, and full communion impossible. It is the penalty of eminence to ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... item after item. Am I in rags, that I should endure this thing? And I get sick of my everlasting "No, thank you"—the monotony shows up so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety. I feel all the unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise of my poor little purchase compared with the catholic fling he suggests. I feel angry with myself for being thus played upon, furiously angry with him. "No, no!" ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... say to Paul a few flattering phrases as to Natalie's manner, language, and beauty, ending by remarks, cruelly calculated to deter him, on the lavish extravagance of the Evangelistas, the Pink of Fashion replied with a disdain that was well-deserved by such provincial pettiness. This method of receiving such speeches soon silenced them; for he now set the tone to the ideas and language as well as to the manners of those about him. He had imported from his travels a certain development of the Britannic personality with ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... such as you believe all femininity should be hedged with. I couldn't endure it. I never had to, and I couldn't submit to being estimated every day and in the intimacy of home life—according to the old-fashioned standards that narrow a woman's heart and mind until they hold nothing but pettiness and smallness and meanness of spirit. Because I couldn't, I should make you ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... you bring, my America? Is it uniform with my country? Is it not something that has been better done or told before? Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?—is the good old cause in it? Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literates of enemies, lands? Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here? Does it answer universal needs? will it ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... brilliant, influential; and now, when you have attained all this, now you are still unsatisfied, now you long to resign all this again. But you will reflect, Leonore; you will listen to reason. You will consider what we have suffered from the pettiness, the pitifulness, the arrogance, and the selfishness of men. You will remember how often you vowed, with angry tears, to avenge yourself some day for all that we have suffered. Remember, child, remember! Have you forgotten how we starved and pined, when ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... she stood looking at him, her grievances dwindled into pettiness. The words she had come to speak were dumb upon her lips, forgotten in a womanly impulse to go to him, to put her arms about that tired head, and to hold it as though he were nothing more than a little boy. So, presently, ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... ordinary grocers and certainly not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the use of their scheme and we'll have to find another for ourselves ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our pettiness into their own immensity. Every little fantasy finds its place and propriety in them, like a flower ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Christianity which is afforded by the denominational exhibit in the village works great harm to boys. It is not only that they are deprived of that guidance which true Christianity would give them, but they are confronted from the first with a spectacle of pettiness, jealousy, and incompetency which they will probably forever associate with Christianity, at least in its ecclesiastical forms. Villages are at best sufficiently susceptible to those unfortunate human traits that make for clique and cleavage in society, and when the Christian ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... lengthen the nave by two bays, destroying the proportions of the whole, and hiding the dome from view on a near approach. The present tasteless faade was Maderna's work. The splendid atrium or portico added (1629-67), by Bernini, as an approach, mitigates but does not cure the ugliness and pettiness of this front. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... growing old gracefully, in possession of our senses and faculties, we die prematurely or go into physical and mental decay. Bleary eyes, pettiness, childishness and lost mental faculties are no part of nature's plan for advanced years. Those manifestations result from man's ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... on the religious thought of their countrymen. As yet however this rationalizing movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some co-operation on ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... the change not so much to a gradual diminution of fortune as to a spiteful wish to annoy his hostess. It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness. ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... who do. As Director-General of the Answers to Correspondents column of The Family Herald Mr. Runciman was brought into more vitalising touch with the broad and solid realities of the average life of the average human being, with all its wretched pettiness and its pathetic anxieties, its carking cares and its wild, irrational aspirations, than he would have been if he had spent his nights in dining out in Mayfair and lounged all day in the clubs of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... for sympathy! I know she was the confidante of all our love affairs. I cannot speak for girls; but I fancy she was much the same with them. Many of us owed our life's happiness to her. She would chide us gently in our pettiness and folly, and teach us, by her very presence and example, what thing it was that alone could keep life sweet. How well we all remember the little Surrey cottage, the little home fireside where the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... read here the tranquillity of a self-poised life, the Inner sight of clairvoyance, the bitterness of disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans, the amiability that is not founded upon strength, the pettiness that puts pique above principle, the frankness that scorns affectation, the comprehensiveness that embraces all things in its vision, and commands not only acquiescence, but allegiance, the great-heartedness that by virtue of its own magnetism attracts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... it has been by me from my infancy, would still be something in your eyes? Here, then, is that something. Why cannot this book be set apart exclusively for those lofty spirits who, like you, are preserved from worldly pettiness by solitude? They might impress on it the melodious rhythm which it lacks, and which, in the hands of one of our poets, might have made it the glorious epic for which France still waits. Still, they will accept it from me as one ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... always do as we mean to do, and I have told you I was at the perilous age. And so you can understand how I felt when I saw your father—there was something more than pettiness and frivolity in ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... with an impish pettiness. "I hate young men in flannels. I hate houses. I hate afternoon frocks. I hate clean hands. I hate having to be polite. I want The Kid, giggling insanely at his own silly jokes. I want The Bear's den and The Bear inside it. I want to have grubby hands and old shoes and a red face, and eat things ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... its apogee, becomes sterile; and inertia would be its sole teaching did it not, after recognising the pettiness, the nothingness, of our passions and hopes, of our being, and lastly, of reason itself, retrace its footsteps back to the point whence it shall be able once more to take eager interest in all these poor trivialities, in this same nothingness, as holding them the only things ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... had raised her eyes, and they sought the solemn lines of the horizon. She looked as if she saw something infinitely lifted above the pettiness he retailed ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... upon this, for we must verify the laws of morality. Louis Bonaparte remained, even after the 4th of December, Napoleon the Little. This enormity still left him a dwarf. The size of the crime does not change the stature of the criminal, and the pettiness of the assassin withstands the immensity ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... I have always thought, that you undervalue Harcourt. He is a fine fellow in his way. I like a man to be strong, and Harcourt is strong—he has no pettiness in his nature. He is rather a severe critic, perhaps—and demands a little too much from other people—but you will find that he always ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... what a great passion like that means; I have never felt what you feel, and surely to live one's life with all its pettiness and pain, yet never to know its extreme experiences, is sadder than to have those experiences and suffer ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... lucky thing for Jim Thorpe that he was dealing with a really strong man, and a fearless one. One weak spot in the character of Doc Crombie, one trifling pettiness, which could have taken umbrage at the defiance of his authority, one atom of small-mindedness, whereby he could have been influenced by the curious evidence against this man, and the yelping hounds of Barnriff would have been let loose, and set raging at his ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... together. This is the one movement that brings women of different classes together for a common purpose. If you could see how it gives them souls, women who have taken things for granted, who have given themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity...." ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... man given this knowledge? Because the creature must qualify before being allowed to receive it, and too many hold back from the tests. By these experiences we learn some little portion of the mystery which lies between the pettiness of that which we now are and the great glories that we shall come to; and in this awful heavenly mystery in which are fires that have no flame, and melody which has no sound, the soul is drawn to Everlasting Love. But we cannot endure the bliss of it, and the soul prays to be covered ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... and were then suddenly transported to the Hotel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship, you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand, simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... this, as nicely as she could, in a note which she had left for Philip. It distressed her to write such a note, partly because her education inclined her to reverence the male, partly because she had got to like Philip a good deal after their last strange interview. His pettiness would be dispersed, and as for his "unconventionality," which was so much gossiped about at Sawston, she began to see that it did not differ greatly from certain familiar notions of her own. If only he would forgive her for what she ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... prate of respect due the Majesty. There's nothing to induce feelings of that sort. Round me there is naught but weakness, hypocrisy, pettiness. I see shame and thievery stalking side by side in these gilded halls—gilded for show, ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... and his partisans were at least as resourceful as their opponents. The Cretan had never been able to bear contradiction. If his greatness had created him {45} many enemies, his pettiness had created him more. His tone of prophetic and impeccable omniscience was vexatious at all times, but particularly galling at this agitated period. It was now his constant cry that the situation called for the work of a statesman ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... State, was inclined to favor Burr and his followers; but the President already felt a deep distrust of Burr and finally surrendered to the importunities of DeWitt Clinton, who had formed an alliance with the Livingston interests to drive Burr from the party. Despite the pettiness of the game, which disgusted both Gallatin and Jefferson, the decision was fateful. It was no light matter, even for the chief magistrate, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... about was worth while, and treated it all with a well-bred contempt. Spurling was usually the one who was unjust, and I the one who complained; so I was usually the one to start the wrangle. Therefore, though he despised Spurling, he always seemed to blame me for my pettiness." ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... dealt the minor affliction of being banished from a court that consisted of nothing but harassment and pettiness. He wrote an amusing song at the expense of the mufti, which the latter hardly noticed; and he took to voyaging from planet to planet in order to develop his heart and mind[8], as the saying goes. ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... irregularity, pettiness, ill-health, and unserviceableness of modern woman seems to lie, therefore, along educational lines. Not in a general and cultural education alone, but in a special and occupational interest and practice for women, married and unmarried. This should be preferably gainful, though not onerous nor ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... And that unspeakably atrocious pettiness forms the only relaxation of a very considerable number of Englishmen. If any member of a corporation were to propose that a great hall should be opened free, and that good music should be provided at the expense ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... What would be fame unless shared with the idol of his soul? Existence was for him henceforth a dreary waste; and yet his only fault had been that in the ecstasy of heaven-sent passion he had over-leaped the bounds imposed by human pettiness. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... equality of mankind first were whispered, then shouted as battle cries, and finally chiseled with enduring letters into the foundations of States. "But if all this was good for men, why not for women—why should they be fettered by illiteracy, pettiness, dependence; why should they be voiceless in the state and world?" So asked the feminists. The factory called for women as labor; they became the clerks, the teachers, the typists, the nurses. Medicine and the law opened their doors, at least in part. And now we are ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... his was, probably," said Dr. Denslow, "until his opportunity came. It is opportunity that makes the hero, as well as the less reputable personage, and I haev no doubt that when yours comes, you will redeem yourself from all blame of selfishness and pettiness." ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... you mean. In that swamp of pettiness, idiocy, and materialism, a man of your nature could not long abide. Religion—it has not yet responded to your need. And without faith your sins lose their savour. The arts—you don't know them all, the Seven Deadly Arts and the One Beautiful Art!" She paused. Her voice ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... connection between last Sunday and other days. What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought—Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place—some beloved place or tree—we thought you ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... met with so much pettiness and folly masquerading as patriotism that it is delightful to welcome such a truly ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... "It is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he thought, when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate return. "The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good stinging reproof will stop it ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... and despair with the fit of a glove or the shade of a ribbon must not wonder if people rate her as of about equal consequence with gloves and ribbons. These vices make their victims low and petty; and the contempt with which they are regarded is simply the recognition of the pettiness and degradation which the vices ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... childhood, while towards his former school-fellow it went forth in unmixed kindliness. For it appeared to him that for one who had so lately held converse with approaching death, it would be a very scandal of light-minded pettiness to nourish resentment against any fellow creature. In near prospect of the eternal judgment, private and temporal judgment can surely afford to declare a universal amnesty in respect of personal slights and injuries. Therefore, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... happening in the capital had been fully anticipated by him. It pleased the Grand Vizier very much that Kheyr-ed-Din should take this long journey to see him; not from any ridiculous idea that this was an act of homage due to the dignity of his position—Ibrahim was far too great a man for such pettiness—but because it enabled him to see for himself what manner of man was this redoubtable pirate on whom he was relying to defeat the enemies of the Sublime Porte at sea. The corsair must have made the most favourable impression possible on the Grand ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... and to fight for Freedom! It is the pathway of supreme suffering, but also the only pathway of real glory and merit. Any other way for England's greatness was impossible. England had to choose either the way of pettiness or of greatness. She chose ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... shut close within her own breast,—but out of many griefs and poverty-stricken days of struggle and cruel environment, she had educated herself to a wonderful height of moral self-control and almost stoical rectitude. Her nature was a broad and grand one, absolutely devoid of pettiness, and full of a strong, almost passionate sympathy with the wrongs of others,—and she had formed herself on such firm, heroic lines of courage and truth and self-respect, that the meaner vices of her sex were ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... through the darkened glass of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, in constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into his pettiness. He fancied, alas, that he could build her universe over again out of the politics of old Rome and the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... devotion, was but an abstraction, a rhetorical expression for a mass of individuals. To these individuals I might indeed render affection, service, compassion, tenderness, self-sacrifice; but their number and pettiness forbade me the glow of adoration with which service was touched in religions which offered a personified object of adoration. When, finally, I confided these troubles to Regnier, I expected to be rebuked; but on the contrary, and to my great discomfiture, he embraced ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... often smiled, when I then denied the strength of the Colossus and asserted his fragility, when I used to say: "He must not die with a halo of glory; let him witness rather the bankruptcy of his moral estate and give proof of the pettiness of his character and evidence of his unbridled lust for power. Let the effrontery of his lies return to him in bitterness?" And together, you and I, we have now seen Prince Bismarck, not hurled down, but slowly crumbling to ruin; there has been nothing great about his fall, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges, too, calls attention to a false note in the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... follows, as concave implies convex, that by daily converse and association with these great ones we take their breeding, their manners, earn their magnanimity, make ours their gifts of courtesy, unselfishness, mansuetude, high seated pride, scorn of pettiness, wholesome ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... was an equal; and this he not only said with his lips, he lived it in his feelings. The time came when he went out into the world, and learned to understand the world's idea, that woman meant vanity and pettiness and frivolity; but Thyrsis let all this pass, knowing the woman-soul. Somewhere underneath, not yet understood and mastered, was pent this mighty force that in the end would revolutionize all human ideas and institutions. Here was faith, here ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... one last time to see for one's self. And on this occasion no pettiness of disguise, Miss Levering's aspect seemed to say—no recurrence of any undignified flight. She had been frightened away from her first meeting, but she would not be frightened from the second, which was also to be ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... answered Miss Milbourne haughtily. Then she turned to the person next her, a recumbent figure lying at full length on the grass. "I don't know anything of which one grows so weary as of watering-place life when one has seen much of it," she said. "Its pettiness, its routine, its vapidity, its gossip, all oppress one like a hideous nightmare. I don't think I shall ever go ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... seamy side of "good society" now to be able to accept this explanation of his calmness. It was not want of sensitiveness, she was sure of that: he was by no means obtuse: it was simply that his large, strong nature rose above the pettiness of resentment and complaint. The suspicion under which he labored was a grave thing—a trouble, a blow; but it had not made him sour, nor borne him to the earth with a conviction of ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... say there was considerable pettiness about the way in which I saved my earnings instead of squandering them with glad youthfulness, as did most of my colleagues. There was something of the huckster's instinct, no doubt, in many of the trivial journalistic ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... of mystery in that day of wind-blown sunshine. Beneath her, above her, before her, seemingly the element in which she was poised, was space, illimitable space. She had never been conscious of such vastness, she was abashed by it, she was exalted by it, she knew a moment of acute shame for the pettiness of her personal grievances. For a time her spirit was disembarrassed of the sorry burden of egotism, and she drank deep from the cup of healing which Nature holds up in such instants of beatitude. Her eyes ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... cleverness they possess; we watch them climbing, we admire their agility, but once at the summit we see only their absurd and contemptible parts. The reverse side of my host's character was made up of pettiness with the addition of envy. The peerage and he were on diverging lines. To have an ambition and gratify it shows merely the insolence of strength, but to live below one's avowed ambition is a constant source of ridicule to petty minds. Monsieur de Chessel did not advance with ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... compassionately as very imperfect, morbid creatures. In his love-affairs he had not been specially fastidious. His mother had been a downtrodden little woman, who had never understood him; his sister full of provincial pettiness. So he had no very high opinion of the sex. Incidentally he considered horses also as particularly stupid animals, and was capable of flying into a temper when a horse-lover tried to prove the contrary. All his views were very deeply ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... live, move and have their being, think and aspire, only in the material world. The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all men. Lessons of manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever of good or ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the necessity for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for doing, speaking and thinking everything that is good, and for the bringing of the mind into subjection so ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... compensation, that this very pettiness makes her chronicles of the age very vivid in details. How she revels in the silver brocades, the violet-colored velvet robes, the crimson velvet carpets, the purple damask curtains fringed with gold and silver, the embroidered fleurs de lis, the wedding-caskets, the cordons ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... We're tryin' to be cheerful, An' keep this home from gettin' tearful. We hold it dear Too dear for pettiness an' meanness, An' nasty tales of men's uncleanness. Here you shall come to joyous smilin', Secure from hate an' harsh revilin'; Here, where the wood fire brightly blazes, You'll hear from us our neighbor's praises. Here, that they'll never grow to doubt us, We keep our friends always ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... respond to appeals made to the flesh rather than appeals made to the spirit, we are becoming sensual. We may loathe and despise the character of the avaricious worldly man; we may see its littleness, and pettiness, and greed, and selfishness: but do our own hearts go out in response to any offer of gain more eagerly than they go out to Christian work or to the interests of Christ's kingdom? Then we are becoming worldly and avaricious; we are becoming ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... Garry was right. He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had passionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the good and the evil in our conduct, and giving or withholding help according to our worthiness. The Universal is too great to be measured and doled in that way. Nothing but our own pinchbeck ideas could ascribe to Him this pettiness. As it is the kind of sliding scale we ourselves adopt, we limit the Divine Generosity by ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... life of a man of great and intense intellectual powers, who cannot avoid seeing through human beings and observing the vanity of their thoughts and of their avocations, their dishonesty and self-deceptions, the insincerity of their emotions, their cowardice, the pettiness of their real ambitions. Actually, considering that Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, one must be amazed at the balance and justice of his observations; much greater maturity is required for these qualities, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... Etzelt, spoken as Medardus is about to be shot, after having refused to save his own life by a promise not to make any attempts against Napoleon's: "God wanted to make a hero of him, and the course of events turned him into a fool." The obvious interpretation is that the pettiness of Viennese conditions defeated the larger aspirations of the man, who would have proved true to his own possibilities in other surroundings. A more careful analysis of the plot shows, however, that what turns the ambitions of Medardus ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... Universal Suffrage and State-Capitalized Associations—"only let us wait till the war is done with!" En attendant, the profit of his strange alliance with this thorn in his enemies' flesh, was wholly to the Minister. But Lassalle, exalted to forgetfulness of the pettiness of the army at his back, almost persuaded himself to believe as he believed Bismarck believed. "Bismarck is my tool, my plenipotentiary," he declared to his friends. And to his judges: "I play cards on table, gentlemen, for the hand is ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... for. We are so wrapped up in politics that our vision of the motions of the Human Spirit is obscured. There were lots of politics in Republican Rome, and you may say none in the empire; so we make for the pettiness that obsesses us, and ignore the greatness whose effects are felt yet. Rome played at politics: old-time conqueror-race Patricians against old-time conquered-race Plebians: till the two were merged into one and she grew ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... described. However, the end is drawing very near, and since we have had a safe and prosperous journey criticism may well waive the opportunity. Yet there are few among the travellers who will not experience a keen feeling of relief in exchanging the pettiness, the monotony, and the isolation of the voyage for the activity of great enterprise and the interest of real affairs: a relief which may, perhaps, be shared by the reader of these letters. Yet if he has found the account of a dull voyage dull, he should not complain; ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Spirit' as the Christian alternative or substitute to being 'drunken with wine.' But the daring comparison suggests deep truth. The spurious exhilaration, the loosening of the bonds of care, the elevation above the pettiness and monotony of daily life, which the drunkard seeks, and is degraded and deceived in proportion as he momentarily finds, are all ours, genuinely, nobly, and to our infinite profit, if we have our empty spirits filled with that Divine Life. That exhilaration does not froth away, leaving bitter ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... on his mind; and as Dickens started out to produce not a faithful picture, but a startling emotion, his scene is accordingly gaudy, theatrical, false. For observe, the wind is a respectable wind, and yet afflicted with pettiness of tyranny, and it wreaks vengeance; and this vengeance-wreaking wind does not come up flying, as you would expect of a wind, but it happens to come up leisurely, evidently taking an after-dinner stroll, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... we may experience a thousand sensations, arrive at a thousand judgments, and make a thousand responses to things about us. In that hour we may experience joy, sorrow, love, hate, envy, malice, sympathy, kindliness, courage, cowardice, pettiness, magnanimity, egoism, altruism, cruelty, mercy—a list, in fact, that reaches on almost interminably. If we only had a spiritual cyclometer attached to us, when the clock strikes ten we should have an interesting moment ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... but life in this quiet village of Friendship did. His talk with Miss Betty had brought him face to face with them. He was conscious now that his attitude had been one of complacent superiority. He had held himself above the pettiness of village life only to discover, as he admitted frankly, that he had been ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... the Duke of Wellington has pronounced rags to be the livery only of wilful idleness—has stamped on the withering brow of destitution the brand of the drunkard. Therefore, clap your hands to your pulpy sides, oh well-dressed, well-to-do London, and disdaining the pettiness of a simper, laugh an ogre's laugh at the rags of Manchester—grin like a tickled Polyphemus at the hunger ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... and would have liked not to answer. But, alas, would she not by degrees have discovered all the pettiness that is ill-concealed under my thin veneer of self-control and determination? I tried to reveal it all ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... a hotel; Daniel himself lived in the castle. The rehearsals were held with zeal and seriousness. Though the name of the Chancellor was still darkened by the clouds of political life, by the enmity of his opponents, by pettiness and misunderstanding, all these young people felt the power of the great Immortal, and were delighted with the idea of meaning something to him, even in the guise of an imaginary world and for only a fleeting hour or two. Agatha von Erfft, the wife of Herr von Erfft, was indefatigable ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... was mistaken. The last forty hours of common peril, of a central interest, had lifted Bilkins from that pettiness usually burdensome in servants of his type. He was, as a matter of fact, cheerfully alert to take the job, accepting it with the same enthusiasm that Gates, and later the mate, had straddled the bowsprit. So I realized that Bilkins had doffed ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... unfortunately the case that, in spite of Mr. Lincoln's appeal to loyal men to "eschew cliquism" and "work together," there were abundant rivalries and jealousies and personal schemings. All these vexations were dragged before the President to harass him with their pettiness amid his more conspicuous duties; they gave him infinite trouble, and devoured his time and strength. Likewise they were obstacles to the advancement of the business itself, and, coming in addition to the delays inevitable upon elections and ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... to get their pieces played; they previously submit them to the judgment of actors; they solicit a word of praise from the Mercure; they read fables at the sittings of the Academy. They become involved in the bickering, in the vainglory, in the pettiness of literary life, and still worse, of the life of the stage, inasmuch as they are themselves performers and play in company with real actors in hundreds of private theaters. Add to this, if you please, other petty amateur talents such as sketching in water-colors, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... human being which makes the imagination translate what the other is suffering into terms of self, and that is after all the method by which the most vivid human sympathy is evoked. He felt he knew her so well—her aims and ideas, her likes and little gusty hates, her sweetnesses and her pettiness—that he suffered with her now more ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Washington, despite her anxiety about her uncle and, lately, Bob, The serene and happy life the whole household led under the roof of "Fairfields" had a great deal to do with this transformation, for the bickering and pettiness of the daily life at Bramble Farm had worn Betty's nerves insensibly. She tried to say something of this ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... Gorky shows us, in the first of these stories, the spread of socialism among the agricultural proletariat. He depicts village life with its pettiness and ignominy. The village is for the most part a backward place, hostile to everything that makes a breach in tradition. The hatching of socialism goes on slowly. From day to day, new obstacles, helped on by the ignorance of the peasants, hinder those who ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... masterpiece of art, like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection, such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, - has now, as an invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest falsifications of truth ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... she gave him a chance he told her what Greenleaf had said about her and the ocean. Also he confided to her his envy of small-statured people, and told how it hurt him to go about showing the bigness of his body and hiding the pettiness of his soul. And he came the next evening and the next, and the next, and the next, and ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... temper. Amidst the storm of battle his soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which he sometimes solved problems which had ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... Sophocles; or the alternative story of the same authority that the cause of his chagrin was that Simonides' elegy on the heroes slain at Marathon was preferred to his own. Apart from the inherent improbability of such pettiness in such a man, neither story fits the facts; for in 467, the next year after Sophocles' success, we know that Aeschylus won the prize of tragedy with the Septem; and the Marathon elegy must have been written in 490, fourteen years before his first ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... impression—retained an appearance infinitely mean and miserable in my eyes. I hated and loathed its intrigues and its jealousies, the folly which trifled in a closet while rebellion mastered France, and the pettiness which recognised no wisdom save that of balancing party and party. I thanked God that my work there was done, and could have welcomed any other occasion that forced me to turn my back on it, and sent me at large over the pure heaths, through the woods, and ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... thoroughbred gentleman. His voice was low, and his manner in speaking ungainly; an awkward and finicking gesture with the right hand below the table, to which he advanced when speaking, gave an idea of pettiness of thought, which his manner in other respects aided. The Earls of Winchelsea and Fitzwilliam seemed very desirous to have something to say; no one seemed willing to listen, and at last, by Lord Derby's interposition, they ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... which we survey that winding up of the affair, we can afford to forget the infamous display of faction during the discussion of the Arms' bill. Any thing like it, in pettiness of malignity, has not been witnessed during this century: any thing like it, in impotence of effect, probably will not be witnessed again during our times. Thirteen divisions in one night—all without hope, and without even a verbal gain! This conduct the nation will not forget ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... would be so ashamed of, that they would hasten to put them out of their mind. His occasional shabbiness in money matters, his jealousies, his envies, all his petty faults, which are despicable on account of their pettiness. Fancy any man writing this. He is describing how he visited a friend and was reading a book from his library. "A very good book," says he, "especially one letter of advice to a courtier, most true and good, ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... Violet, a kind of commonplace-ness about English life; a silver-slippered religion, a pettiness that does not satisfy, a sense of comfort incompatible with the strong desire to do the work which others will not do in the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... turned round. It is this spectacle which has drawn off your friend's attention; and you notice his whole figure twisted into an ungainly form, intended to be dignified or easy, and assumed because he fancied that the passerby was looking at him. Oh the pettiness of human nature! Then you will find people afraid that they have given offence by saying or doing things which the party they suppose offended had really never observed that they had said or done. There ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... What's of significance is sweet, however mistaken; one could make up one's mind to what's insignificant even. But pettiness, pettiness, that's ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... in the tragic elements that his true power comes out. The motives of his stories may be trivial, but never the sentiment. The deep manly emotion makes us forget not only the frequent clumsiness of his style but the pettiness of the incident, and what is more difficult, the rather bread-and-butter tone of morality. If he is a little too fond of bringing his villains to the gallows, he is preoccupied less by the external consequences than by the natural working of evil passions. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... themselves, and thus to slowly reach for one another and form darkness. Jenieve had lain on the grass, crying, "O Mama—Francois—Toussaint—Gabriel!" But she sat up at last, with her dejected head on her breast, submitting to the pettiness and treachery of what she loved. Bats flew across the open place. A sudden rankness of sweetbrier, taking her breath away by its icy puff, reminded her of other things, and she tried to get up and run. Instead of running she seemed to move sidewise out of herself, and saw Pontiac standing ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... confusion? For in her there shone a divine brightness, a radiance of youth that blended all her bewildering characteristics in a certain completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and beneath ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... of horses, as a delineator of witching horsemanship, of vivid landscapes—true integral decorations—and of the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of daily life, of its unheroic aspects, its comical snobberies and shocking hypocrisies; and all expressed without a melodramatic elevation of the voice, without the false sentimentalism of Zola or the morbidities ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... companion of his life. For de Windt, so speedily and so easily attracted to Gregoriev, was the most difficult officer in the regiment to know. This peculiarity, indeed, he carried with him through life: for from boyhood to death, he was always unhappily swift to read the meaner faults of men; and pettiness, hypocrisy, selfishness and vanity, were stamped, to his piercing eyes, upon the faces of ninety out of every hundred with whom he came in contact. By the time he had reached twenty-five, his inbred pessimism was so deeply rooted ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... lives are so planless, so haphazard and without order that an achievement of such magnitude representing years of labour and concentrated thought in steadily following out a preconceived plan cannot fail to be a tremendous contrast to the smallness and pettiness of the majority—a contrast so great that it is mentally and spiritually a glimpse of the world of new possibilities attainable when once the feverish clinging to the ideals of the totem post is abandoned. This vast nave, reminiscent in many ways of Winchester, ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... and an aggravated impatience, a growing rebellion, seized him. He wouldn't stay with his wife at Java Head a day longer than necessary; and if anyone, in his family or outside, showed the slightest disdain he could retaliate with his knowledge of local pettiness, the backbiting enmities ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness which, for that matter, can be found on any and every social level, will realize the awe with which the bourgeoisie of Angouleme regarded the Hotel de Bargeton. The inhabitant of L'Houmeau beheld the grandeur of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... think that Swift knew the tendency of his creed—the fatal rocks towards which his logic desperately drifted. That last part of Gulliver is only a consequence of what has gone before; and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride, imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock greatness, the pompous dullness, the mean aims, the base successes—all these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies against Heaven, shrieking in his ears, that ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... only did she show no provocative favor to another, but she seemed to have gained in dignity and pride since his arrival, actually to have kissed her hand in farewell to the childhood he had been so slow in divining; grown—he felt rather than analyzed—above the pettiness of coquetry. Once more she had stirred the dormant ideals of his early manhood; there were moments when she floated before his inner vision as the embodiment of the world's beauty. Nor ever had there been a woman born more elaborately equipped for the position ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... her; but I did not convince her in the least. She demonstrated to me, by numerous examples, to what an extent enterprise was lacking in Denmark, and I was obliged to restrict myself to explaining that the tremendous pressure of political pettiness and weakness had brought a general slackness with it, without people feeling or suspecting it, and had robbed nearly every one of daring and success. The result of the conversation was that Denmark was shown to ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... outcome of exaggerated self-esteem, of inflated vanity; it is the claim of a moth, shrivelled in the flame of a candle, to outlive the sun, the claim of a worm to survive the destruction of this terrestrial globe in which it burrows. Those who take this view of the pettiness and transitoriness of man compared with the vastness and permanence of the universe find little in the beliefs of savages to alter their opinion. They see in savage conceptions of the soul and its destiny nothing but a product of childish ignorance, the hallucinations of hysteria, the ravings of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... by poisonous flies, and hollowed like the stone by many drops of wickedness: thus did I sit among them, and still said to myself: "Innocent is everything petty of its pettiness!" ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... ever had of gaining a large measure of self-government. Knowing all that happened within the Party in the years of which I am writing, knowing the methods that were employed, rather unscrupulously and with every circumstance of pettiness, to bear down any member who showed the least disposition to exercise legitimately an independent judgment—knowing how the paid organisers of the League were at once dispatched to his constituency to intrigue against him and to ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... judgest, remember what a thing is envy!—that foul sickness of the mind which makes the jaundiced eye of pettiness to see all things distraught—to read Evil written on the open face of Good, and find impurity in the whitest virgin's soul! Think what a thing it is, Harmachis, to be set on high above the gaping crowd of knaves who hate thee for thy fortune and thy wit; who gnash their ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... Kleist, therefore, set himself other tasks; he knew and had perhaps experienced in his own person, that life's process of destruction is not a deluge but a shower, and that man is superior to every great fatality, but subject to every pettiness. He proceeded from this theory of life, when he delineated his Michael Kohlhaas, and I maintain that in no German novel have the hideous depths of life been projected upon the surface in such vivid fashion as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the ice, deep and pure as infinity; the silent, starlit polar night; nature itself in its profundity; the mystery of life; the ceaseless circling of the universe; the feast of death—without suffering, without regret—eternal in itself. Here in the great night thou standest in all thy naked pettiness, face to face with nature; and thou sittest devoutly at the feet of eternity, intently listening; and thou knowest God the all-ruling, the centre of the universe. All the riddles of life seem to grow clear to thee, and thou laughest at thyself that thou couldst be consumed by brooding, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... of his predecessors had allowed it, and Theiner answered that none of them had defined the Immaculate Conception. In a paper which Doellinger drew up, he observed that Pallavicini cannot convince; that far from proving the case against the artful Servite, the pettiness of his charges indicates that he has no graver fault to find; so that nothing but the production of the official texts can enforce or disprove the imputation that Trent was a scene of tyranny and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... us go forth! Follow me, all ye hermits who through some mortification in love, some negligence in friendship, have withdrawn into your rooms far from the pettiness and infidelity of mankind! But quit your dismal thoughts, I pray you. Every minute you lose some pleasure without gaining any wisdom in place of it. Deign to accompany me on my travels. We shall go by easy stages, laughing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... of articles. It was argued that a man would pay a small duty on a large number of things with less inconvenience and consciousness of burden than if the same tax was levied upon a few prominent articles. The pettiness of the tax would keep him in a kind of deception as to the total amount he was paying, which not even the frequency with which he was called upon to pay it would entirely remove. This theory, together with a condition of state in which the wants of Government were constantly increasing, produced, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... you to say. Since when has a Kaye stooped to the pettiness of locking up an unwelcome visitor like a rat in a trap? A pretty greeting and meeting, Cuthbert, after all these years!" he cried, turning next toward ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... invoked by ritual—for example by special days of national prayer or an increased observance of Sunday—or made malignant by neglect or levity. It is almost fundamental in their idea of him. The ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of this magic pettiness of God, and the belief of China in the magic propitiations and resentments of "Heaven" is at ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... good in yours; content, also, to receive your discharge, and work and fight no more, sure that God is working and fighting, whether you are in hospital or in the field. And with this growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will grow on you a respect for simple labours, a thankfulness for simple pleasures, a sympathy with simple people, and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and my little tours about that moorland which I call my winter-garden, and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... know the feeling; for all God's children might be great, and it is with miserable mortification that we detect ourselves in one or another pettiness. Seneca goes home to say: "This wild Easterner has rebuked the Emperor as I have so often wanted to rebuke him. He stood there, as I have wanted to stand, a man ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door. His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... by the liberties which it authorizes. All the other feelings of that heart ought consequently to bear the stamp of nature: it will be true, simple, free, frank, sensible, and straightforward; all disguise, all cunning, all arbitrary fancy, all egotistical pettiness, will be banished from his character, and you will see no trace of them ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him through her sensitiveness to his patronizing attitude; as the course of development brings them together in a happy union, the lesson of toleration, of mutual comprehension, sinks into the mind. The reader realizes the pettiness of the worldly wisdom which blocks the way of joy. As we have said, "Northanger Abbey" speaks a wise word against the abuse of emotionalism; it tells of the experiences of a flighty Miss, bred on the "Mysteries of Udolpho" style of literature, during a visit ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... had connexions with some of the nobles rather than because his reply inspired respect. But while the aristocracy was making war on individuals, the work of the dead man went on, as if even from the grave he was destined to bring into sharper relief the pettiness of their projects by the grandeur ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... legislative department, and entered it. But notwithstanding his most accurate and conscientious attention to his duties, he found nothing in them to satisfy his desire to be useful. His discontent, due to the pettiness and vanity of his immediate superiors, grew until an opportunity offered to enter the Senate. He was better off in the Senate, but the same feeling of dissatisfaction pursued him. He constantly felt that ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... Until their marriage, music was to them another life within their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... off to church in his wooden shoes on Sunday. They had no influential friends, no learned patrons—the men at the University never so much as nodded to millers. Her lot was lowly, mean, obscure, and filled with drudgery and pettiness. And now some one was saying her boy Rembrandt was lazy; he would neither work nor study. The taunt stung her mother-pride—"He will do nothing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I ever heard said of him was that he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... mounting to her forehead, struck the horse sharply with her crop. The pettiness of the predicament, the small meanness of her situation struck across her face like the flagellations of tiny whips. That she should stoop to this! She who had held her ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... change, but the chime was immutable. And always, whatever came, it rang out calmly over the beautiful old city of Morningquest, and entered into it, and was part of the life of it, mixing itself impartially with the good and evil; with all the sin and suffering, the pitiful pettiness, the indifference, the cruelty, and every form of misery-begetting vice, as much as with the purity above reproach, the charity, the self-sacrifice, the unswerving truth, the patient endurance, and courage not to ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Paul quietly. But his brother left the room without noticing the remark, and, retiring to his room, he revenged himself by writing a long letter to his mother, in which he explained at length the violence and, as he described it, the "impossibility" of his brother's character. He had all the pettiness of a bad child; he knew that he was his mother's favorite, and he naturally went to her for sympathy when he was angry with his brother, as he had done from his infancy. Having so far vented his wrath, he closed his ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... consumedly, but he makes his reader laugh no less; and it is only when the book is finished that the true meaning of it is borne in upon the mind. Then it is that the scintillating pages begin to exercise their grim unforgettable effect; and the pettiness and misery of man seem to borrow a new intensity from the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... How vain the world had grown to be! How mean all people and their ways, How ignorant their sympathy, And how impertinent their praise; What they for virtuousness esteem'd, How far removed from heavenly right; What pettiness their trouble seem'd, How undelightful their delight; To my necessity how strange The sunshine and the song of birds; How dull the clouds' continual change, How foolishly content the herds; How unaccountable the law Which bade me sit in blindness ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... since she had been rashly assured by Lord Melbourne that there would be no difficulty either as regarded income or precedence. The indications were not encouraging to the stranger thus met on the threshold. But his mission was to disarm adverse criticism, to shame want of confidence and pettiness of jealousy, to confer benefits totally irrespective of the spirit in which they might be taken. And even by the irritated party-men as well as by the body of the people, the Prince was to be well received for the Queen's ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... old time—that serious old time which is passing away, the impress of which he carries on his physiognomy—he dignifies, by what in him is neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming its mere pettiness into grace. It looks certainly very graceful, fresh, animated, "piquant," as they love to say—yes! and withal, I repeat, perfectly pure, and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a fallacious grace, not its own. For in truth Antony Watteau is still the mason's boy, and ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... Shetland fiords, there may be men who had in them the makings of eminent preachers; but whose powers have never been called out, and are rusting sadly away: and in whom many petty cares are developing a pettiness ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... hardihood to defend him against them! In private, the author of Political Justice at one time reminded those who knew him of the metaphysician engrafted on the Dissenting Minister. There was a dictatorial, captious, quibbling pettiness of manner. He lost this with the first blush and awkwardness of popularity, which surprised him in the retirement of his study; and he has since, with the wear and tear of society, from being too pragmatical, become somewhat too ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... every minute of it. For this old fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London's grime is; or London's vastness and London's pettiness; or London's wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back streets; or its still more dismal slums—or anything that ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... was engrossed with larger matters, and ignored my petulance. She is a large-natured woman and above pettiness. ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his achievement and endurance takes a complexion of greatness from the vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer—he is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the calamities and horrors of war came to the nation a larger life. Communities had been lifted out of pettiness, churches had half forgotten their sectarianism, to millions of souls a sublimer meaning in life had been disclosed. Lowell ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Elsley, delighted. "I have written, of course. Who can help writing, sir, while Nature is so glorious, and man so wretched? One cannot but take refuge from the pettiness of the real in the contemplation of the ideal. Yes, I have written. I will send you my last book down. I don't know whether you will ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the inspiration of the ideal which each built on the other's so different character; the one more compact of fire, the other more of noble patience, different, but alike in a largeness of soul and freedom from pettiness, which made their forty years of united life something out of the common. She believed in him; in the darkest season of disappointment she bade him remember that a man should pursue those things for which he is most fitted, let them be ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... reputation, I cared but little for these insinuations. I wrote such letters to my sisters and to Dale as I felt sure would be believed, and let the long-eared, gaping world go hang. Besides, I had other things to think of. Physical pain is insistent, and I have suffered damnable torture. The pettiness of the legal inquiry has been also a maddening irritation. Nothing has been too minute for the attention of the French judiciary. It seemed as though the whole of the evil gang of the Cercle Africain were called as witnesses. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... of my fellowship with them. That a gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the only recognised superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... facts, insufficient for the slightest quarrel, intolerable in the pettiness of the issue disclosed, and monstrous as reason for war between two civilized nations, became the welcome pretext. Swiftly, and with ill-disguised alacrity, the French Cabinet took the next step in the duel. On the 15th of July the ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... slovenly. He had 'teached' for twenty years, he said, but in spite of this there was about him something indescribably rural, something of the sod—not the dignity, the sturdiness of it, but rather of the pettiness, the sordidness of it. It showed in his dirty, flapping garments, his unlaced shoes, his stubble beard, in his indecent carelessness in expectorating the tobacco he was ceaselessly chewing. But these, after all, were some of his minor traits. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... and, recognising, remembered wherein lay her special skill. He found himself looking for characteristics that were known to him in the portraits of the men and women he was studying. There was no attempt at concealment—vices and virtues, liberality of mind, pettiness of soul were set forth in naked truth. A sympathetic picture of Peters arrested him, though the name written beneath it puzzled. He looked at the kindly generous countenance with its friendly half-sad eyes and tender mouth with a feeling of envy. He ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... assailed on all sides with matters of urgent importance, and he had not a moment to devote to his own affairs. When at length it was possible for him to consider himself at all, he felt that the accident had raised him out of the narrow pettiness which threatened to submerge his soul; he was at close quarters with malignant fate, and he had waged a desperate battle with the cruel blindness of chance. He could only feel an utter scorn for the people who bespattered him with base charges. For, after all, his ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... than Zephirine and Jacqueline were seized with remorse; they imagined that, possibly, they themselves had forgotten their stake; they believed—they doubted—but, after all, the chevalier was rich enough to bear such a trifling misfortune. These dignified and noble personages had the delightful pettiness of suspecting each other. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel would almost invariably accuse the rector of cheating ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... error is to wait for some big opportunity. People prepare themselves for some tremendous sacrifice and forget the little things of everyday life, in which the mind is knitted to objects by a myriad tiny threads. These things, by their pettiness, fail to attract attention, and in waiting for the large thing, which does not come, people lose the daily practice of dispassion towards the little things that are around them. By curbing desire at every moment, we become indifferent to all the objects that surround us. Then, when the great ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... upper galleries of a theatre. He had rebelled at this, looking with some hostility at the well groomed men and women who accepted it with such assurance that it was for them alone, but now he realized the pettiness of that position. With a few unmortgaged dollars in his pocket, he was instantly one of them. He could stride in and use the quiet luxury of the ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett |
