"Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a small stone structure something like a sentry-box, only with an iron door and grated windows. In this negroes, petty criminals, vagrants, and drunkards were confined. It stood at the junction of the two most important streets of ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... said that the details of New England history were essentially dry and unpoetic. Everything is near, authentic, and petty. There is no mist of distance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give characters and events an imaginative loom. So much downright work was perhaps never wrought on the earth's surface in the same space of time as during the first forty years after the settlement. But mere ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had, from ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... coxcomb, a fribble, and the least bit in the world of a snob: his Monk is not very clean fustian, and most of his other work rubbish. But he was, though not according to knowledge, a sincere Romantic; he had no petty jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... city; now the little insight he had gained into domestic affairs—the peep behind the curtain given him by my mistaken maiden aunt, had served to embitter his existence, surrounding his path with those nettles of life, household trifles, vulgar cares and petty annoyances. I almost echoed Biddy's ejaculation as the carriage drove from the door with my aunt and her numberless boxes, each one arranged on a new, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... our author's seems to have been taken upon memory, and is not very exact. Schovten's seamen, or rather the petty officer who commanded his long boat, insulted the natives grossly before they offered any injury to his people; and then, notwithstanding they fired upon them with small arms, the islanders obliged them to ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... without seamen until within the last fortnight, when the officers began to enter men as fast as possible. A lieutenant with a party came to Buffalo, a tolerably large village opposite Fort Erie, and procured several hands, but, not satisfied, a petty officer was sent to our side to inveigle others. The magistrates, hearing of this, sent to apprehend him; but ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... intruding into the private affairs of ducal and princely houses is often a most unthankful business. I have ever found it more satisfactory and less nerve racking to undertake a mission into some foreign country than to become involved with some petty local affair of royalty. For some such affair I judged to be the dilemma of the ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... in. 'Abide in Him' by continual direction of thought, love, desire to Him; by continual and reiterated submission of the will to Him, as commanding and as appointing; by the honest reference to Him of daily life and all petty duties which otherwise distract us and draw us away from Him. Then, dwelling in Him we shall share in His life, and shall bring forth fruit ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... along the deck that narrowed into a passage about three feet wide as they reached the forward house, which apparently contained the petty officers' rooms. In the centre was the door that opened into the engine-room. Only the upper works of the big engines were visible. The boys stopped. A man, evidently the engineer, or one of his assistants, sat on a leather-covered seat facing the levers and indicators. He looked up for ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... their side, or that they purposely sought to quarrel with us; thieving, which gave rise to the whole, they were equally guilty of, in our first and second visits. It was the cause of every misunderstanding that happened between us; their petty thefts were generally overlooked, but sometimes slightly punished; the boat, which they at last ventured to take away, was an object of no small magnitude to people in our situation, who could not possibly replace ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... "I told you so," by either word or look. She was too wise for such a petty triumph. Besides, there was something in that afternoon's Express, which Bruce had handed her that interested her far more than his wrathful recital of Blind Charlie's treachery; and although she was apparently giving Bruce her entire attention, and was in fact mechanically ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... aided with his money and his name popular movements, which would have taken place just the same without him, and which had another object than his elevation. It is still a common error to attribute the greatest of revolutions to some petty private manoeuvring, as if at such an epoch a whole people could be used as the ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... States General gave him the means for carrying on war, by establishing the odious "gabelle" on salt, and other imposts. John hoped with his new army to drive the English completely out of the country. Petty war began again on all the frontiers,—an abortive attack on Calais, a guerilla warfare in Brittany, slight fighting also in Guienne. Edward in 1335 landed at Calais, but was recalled to pacify Scotland; Charles of Navarre and the Duke of Lancaster were on the Breton border; the ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... concrete presentment in space of the soul of a people. If that soul be petty and sordid—"stirred like a child by little things"—no great architecture is possible because great architecture can image only greatness. Before any worthy architecture can arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannons of Europe ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... had had a skirmish with the dragoons, and had lost eight or ten of his men. He bore a complaint straightway to the council concerning the manner in which we had deserted him; but great events were coming fast upon us now, and there was small time to inquire into petty matters of discipline. For myself, I freely confess, looking back on it, that as a soldier he was entirely in the right, and that from a strict military point of view our conduct was not to be excused. Yet I trust, my dears, even ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that was brimming over with love for him. His name came riding on every breath. It was Philip, Philip, Philip! And bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, he heard all the pitiful story of her love, of her petty stratagems, of the wicked little plot she had made, of the traps from which he had extricated himself, of the pretended sprain in her ankle, of her watching and waiting, of the anguish he had caused her, of her solitary communion with the stars on Mount Avalanche, ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the other physicians were mentioned in different terms, where the terms themselves were equivalent, or where in effect that which was applied to him was the most honourable, perhaps they who wrote the paper cannot now remember. Had they expected a lawsuit to have been the consequence of such petty variation, I hope they would have avoided it[1113]. But, probably, as they meant no ill, they suspected no danger, and, therefore, consulted only what appeared to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... is decidedly the aristocratical part of the establishment. The second floor is scarcely less aristocratical and magnificent; the other floors go on lessening in splendor as they gain in altitude, and end with the attics, the region of petty tailors, clerks, and sewing-girls. To make the filling up of the mansion complete, every odd nook and corner is fitted up as a joli petit appartement a garcon (a pretty little bachelor's apartment), that is to say, some little dark inconvenient nestling-place for a poor devil ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... pictures that pursue the visual aspect of objects to a sufficient completion to contain the suggestion of these other associations, that they understand at all. Other pictures, they say, are not finished enough. And it is so seldom that a picture can have this petty realisation and at the same time be an expression of those larger emotional qualities that ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... matters of taste; but it is certain that a very large number of people, who, like myself, are neither rich nor in a position which justifies them in giving themselves airs, consider quiet, comfort, and the absence of petty cares the most essential conditions of a holiday. These views necessitate some expense and generally limit the excursions of those who entertain them to their native land; but, on the other hand, they have ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... an Act of Parliament was passed making it necessary for a company of players who wished to exercise their profession without unnecessary interference from petty officials and municipal authorities, to secure a licence as the players, or servants, of a nobleman; lacking such licences members of their calling were classed before the law, and liable to be treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... though in peaceful garb arrayed, And weaponless except his blade, His stately mien as well implied A high-born heart, a martial pride, As if a baron's crest he wore, And sheathed in armor bode the shore. Slighting the petty need he showed, He told of his benighted road; His ready speech flowed fair and free, In phrase of gentlest courtesy, Yet seemed that tone and gesture bland Less used to sue than ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... traits of Goethe's parents, and possibly something of his wife is in Dorothea. Hermann's mother bears the name of the poet's and reveals many of her qualities. But some of these are given to the landlord-father, while the elder Goethe's pedantry and petty weaknesses are shown in the apothecary. The poet's experiences in the field are realistically reproduced in many particulars of character and incident, as are doubtless also his mother's vivid reports of events in Frankfurt during July and August, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... too timid, and, let me hope, too girlishly modest, to wish to attract in any way his attention—but because the sun shone there, and I was just chilly enough to enjoy its mingled light and heat. Thus it was I came to notice the following petty occurrence. In the yard of the house next to that occupied by Mr. Allison was kept a tame rabbit, which often took advantage of a hole it had made for itself under the dividing fence to roam over the ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... of the people" he thought great. "I do not love," he says, "the word people." But he had a high idea of what was worthy of a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of which James could not resist. In his new office he once more urged on, and urged in vain, his favourite project for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law. This was a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd of lawyers ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... inferior, writers it is most fortunate that our design has taken so wide a scope. These can go on with their perennial wrangle over the petty question of penal and educational flagellation, while we grapple with the higher problem, and unfold the broader philosophy of an universal walloping. Reflections upon the Beneficent ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... a mean desire to retaliate, a petty and ignoble spite, that prompted me thus to poison Brutus's confidence, and I regretted the words as soon as ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... own counsel than if we take the officers of the law, or, for that matter, anyone else, into our confidence. You undoubtedly noticed how carefully M. Godin kept his own counsel. Official methods, and the hasty generalisations which form a part thereof—to say nothing of the petty rivalries and the passion for notoriety—can do much to hinder our own work, and, I believe, nothing to help it. What say you?" "That we keep our work to ourselves," Gwen quickly rejoined, and I signified that I was of the same opinion. "Then," ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... his father had become great by thinking, not for his own clan alone, but for all the people—it was because of the long reach of his power that they called him Long-Hand. Now that he was gone there would be nothing but quarrels and petty jealousies. 'They will hunt the same grounds twice over,' said Taku-Wakin; 'they will kill one another when they should be killing their enemies, and in the end the ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... advantages necessary to produce and perpetuate such a combination—that is the Greek conception of well-being; and it is because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert the soul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labour and trade. "The arts that are called mechanical," says Xenophon, "are also, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... elements of discord, it was impossible for good order long to be maintained. The nobles quarrelled, and their retainers were not backward in taking up the quarrel. The feudatory knights had disagreements among themselves, and carried on petty war against each other. Confederated bands of lawless men traversed the country, seizing property wherever it could be found, outraging women, taking prisoners and ransoming them, and making war against all who opposed their progress or were personally obnoxious to them. Castles and estates ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... how sudden commotion flashed up like gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women old and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if they started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... went away to better herself after a few weeks residence), assembled simultaneously at the hall door, and drew their visitor from the bitter blast into the stove lit parlour. One yet more humble welcomer was there of the vagabond tribe—petty larceny in every curve of his ungainly form, and his spirit so broken by adversity that he only ventured to wag his shabby tail in recognition of ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... for their reception. The ambassador vaunted the power and the triumphs of Atahuallpa; but Pizarro was not to be outdone, and did not hesitate to declare that the Inca was as much inferior to the King of Spain as the petty chiefs of the country were to the Inca. After another march of two days the Spaniards began the descent of the eastern side of the Cordillera, meeting by the way another and more important envoy, and seven days later the valley of Caxamalca ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... topic, I am sure of recovering their natural expression; sure of seeing all the little precious every-day peculiarities of the man or woman peep out, one after another, quite unawares. The long maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome recitals of petty grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the faintest suspicion of anything like general interest, which I have been condemned to hear, as a consequence of thawing the ice off the features of formal sitters by ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... near the Falls was a son of the "Emperor." It was partly the exaggeration of the times to magnify discoveries, and partly English love of high titles, that attributed such titles as princes, emperors, and kings to the half-naked barbarians and petty chiefs of Virginia. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... prosecute his business unmolested; shielded by the same laws which protect them from the attacks of malicious libellers out of the theatre, and the insults of capricious Ignorance or stupid Malevolence within. "Reproof," says Dr. Johnson, "should not exhaust its power upon petty failings;" and "the care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature. On this principle the editors will unalterably act. And, since they have cited the great moralist's maxim as a direction for critics, they, even in this ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... become aggressive and mutinous. He disliked the presence of Adrian Gilbert, Raleigh's brother, who had been made Constable of Sherborne Castle, and who overlooked Meeres on all occasions. There began to be constant petty quarrels between the bailiff of the manor and the constable of the castle, and when Raleigh at last dismissed the former bailiff and appointed another, Meeres put himself under the protection of an old enemy of Raleigh's, Lord Thomas Howard, now Lord Howard ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... fellow, and did owe his crowne he got to himself as much as any man that ever got one. Thence to the office, and there begun the account which Sir W. Pen by his late employment hath examined, but begun to examine it in the old manner, a clerk to read the Petty warrants, my Lord Bruncker upon very good ground did except against it, and would not suffer him to go on. This being Sir W. Pen's clerk he took it in snuff, and so hot they grew upon it that my Lord Bruncker left the office. He gone (Sir) W. Pen ranted ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... mouth, knowing that it was she and nobody else whose economies would provide for the due celebration of the Sabbath. Only by a constant course of vigilance, mendacity and petty peculation at her husband's expense could she manage to support the family of four comfortably on his pretty considerable salary. Reb Shemuel went and kissed her on the sceptical mouth, because in another instant she would have ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure of feeling, the first treachery of the heart. Wishart's hopes and hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty faculties, had aroused in him no echo, no response. His soul ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... personal vanity, the borders of which meanness she had just touched, but never crossed. Perhaps, also, she was too conscious of her own loveliness, and admired herself too ardently to care for attracting the petty admiration of others. She took it quite as a matter of course; and was no more surprised at being worshipped than if she had been ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... first boats that came alongside sat Bailie Duke wrapped in a great gray plaid. He hailed one of the petty officers of the cutter, and Mr. Fox came forward and asked ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... regards his petty affairs as of prime importance to the world, and he shows with great care, and not a single flash of wit, how all of Thomas Gainsborough's success in life was brought about by Thicknesse. And then, behold! after Thicknesse had made the man by hand, all he received for pay was ingratitude and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa, the original form of government was a family republic, but the enormous power of the sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle they possessed came to them almost wholly in the shape of presents bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their principal art was that of rain-making. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... formal gardening requires stately proportions. Without these it is almost certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny gardens of British and European peasants, it is true, a certain formality of design is often practised with pleasing success; but these gardens are a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we have no joy in contemplating an American ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... decisively determining their reciprocal relations and circumstances. The art of the poet accordingly consists in separating from the fable whatever does not essentially belong to it, whatever, in the daily necessities of real life, and the petty occupations to which they give rise, interrupts the progress of important actions, and concentrating within a narrow space a number of events calculated to attract the minds of the hearers and to fill them with attention and expectation. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... petty tale of this day's ride I shall not dwell upon. Indeed, I scarcely noted the miles as they pass'd. For all the way we were chattering, Delia telling me how Captain Settle and his gang had hurried ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both Flanders ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... AJMER, a city of British India in Ra)putana. which gives its name to a district and also,to a petty province called Ajmere-Meirwara. It is situated in 26 deg. 27, N. lat. and 74 deg. 44, E. long., on the lower slopes of Taragarh hill, in the Aravalli mountains. To the north of the city is a large artificial lake called the Anasagar, whence the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... delight which only a philosopher in search of facts to fit his theory can know, has delved in a stratum of theological literature now covered from the common eye by more important deposits, in order to prove that in the seventeenth century the people of Scotland were ruled by a set of petty theological tyrants, as ignorant and as inhuman as ever disgraced a civilized society, and that their ignorance and inhumanity were all the more influential from being called by the name and acting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... fury upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the Alps, though comparable, was not equal to this in force. The whole of a Pyramid, shot from a colossal catapult, would not have been the petty charge of a pea shooter to it. Imagine Niagara, or a greater even than Niagara, falling upon an ordinary collection of ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... bottle, was to carry off the whistle as a trophy of victory. The Dane produced credentials of his victories, without a single defeat, at the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Warsaw, and several of the petty courts in Germany; and challenged the Scotch Bacchanalians to the alternative of trying his prowess, or else of acknowledging their inferiority. After man overthrows on the part of the Scots, the Dane was encountered by Sir Robert Lawrie, of Maxwelton, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... up. "Gentlemen and brothers of the syndicate," he began, "I'm satisfied that the back-bitin', the scrappin', the petty jealousies and general cussedness that characterized our lives on the old Maggie will not be duplicated on the Maggie II. Them vicious days is gone forever, I hope, an' from now on the motto of ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... think so!" broke in the explosive Wheatcroft. "The Major has been with us for thirty years now. I'd suspect myself of petty larceny as ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the delicate carpet with their heavy boots. Maurice trembled in thinking of the liberties which they, in their insolent familiarity, might venture upon. He fancied he could see them examining and handling the thousand petty trifles with which young girls love to surround themselves; they opened the presses, perhaps they were reading an unfinished letter lying ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Canaanites, recovering from the terror which had fallen upon them in the commencement of the Hebrew invasion, attempted, not only to regain possession of their ancient territory, but even to obliterate all traces of their defeat and subjection. What movements were made by the petty sovereigns of the country, in order to effect their object, we are nowhere expressly told; but we find, from a consultation held by the southern tribes of Israel, soon after the death of Joshua, that the necessity ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... Texan, who would have cursed the petty mishap of an ill-thrown loop to the imminent damnation of his soul, enduring the physical torture in stoic silence. Once or twice he smiled grimly, the cynical smile that added years to the boyish face. "When I see her safe at some ranch, I'll beat it," he muttered thickly. ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... School! Consider the horror of it! I expect her brother must be a very low sort of person. If she can read and write it is as much as we need hope for. That is the worst of living in one of those petty villages, completely out ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman. Although Shakespeare knew the Homeric version of the Trojan war, he worked in 'Troilus and ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... reflect that it is seldom a great fault which destroys liking for a person. A great fault can be forgiven. It is small personal offences constantly repeated; little acts of meanness, and, above all, the petty plans and provisions of a selfish nature. Besides which, the soul has often marvellous intuitions, unmasking men and things; premonitions, warnings, intelligences, that it cannot doubt and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... not bitter, but expressed his quiet contempt for the systematic petty insults which his jailer was now heaping on him daily. His physician had demanded that he take exercise in the open air. Miles always walked with him and never permitted an occasion of this kind to ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Regent of Portugal—was the first to act on this information. Portugal was then very far from being a petty state. It had wealth at home and rich colonies abroad, while its flag was seen on every sea. The queen regent, being at odds with Spain, and wishing to secure an ally against that power, made overtures to Charles, asking him ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... matters when we are near at hand? Etretat is, moreover, the country of gossip and scandal. From five to seven o'clock you can see people wandering about in quest of nasty stories about others, which they retail from group to group. As you remarked to me, my dear Aunt, tittle-tattle is the mark of petty individuals and petty minds. It is also the consolation of women who are no longer loved or sought after. It is enough for me to observe the women who are fondest of gossiping to be persuaded that you are ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... merchant-ship, he sailed for Cornwall, and there was taken to the court of King Alef, a petty British chief, who, on true patriarchal lines, disposed of his children as he would, and had betrothed his fair daughter to a terrible Pictish giant, breaking off, in order to do it, her troth-plight with Prince ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... is placed in the chair of criticism, he declares loudly for the noble simplicity of our ancestors, in opposition to the petty refinements, and ornamental luxuriance. Sometimes he is sunk in despair, and perceives false delicacy daily gaining ground, and sometimes brightens his countenance with a gleam of hope, and predicts the revival of the true sublime. He then fulminates ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... perfectly," answered Vane. "The one is big—the other is petty. And when we live through an age of big things ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... the verge of the great beyond,—her body "struck" and no longer under control of her iron will,—no divine visions floated across her tired brain; nothing but petty cares and sordid anxieties. Not all at once can the soul talk with God, be He ever so near. If the heavenly language never has been learned, quick as is the spiritual sense in seizing the facts it needs, then the poor soul must ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... it. At home he was the slave of his own incapacity; now he was the slave of memories. He had come out on an errand, with a chance to recover his lost self-respect, and lo! he was as far as ever from attainment. His lost capacity for action was not to be found here, in the midst of this petty diplomacy and ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... God; you do not even fear him but with a slave's fear; it is hell and not God whom you fear. Your religion consists but in superstitions, in petty superficialities. You are like the Jews, of whom God said: 'Whilst they honor me with their lips, their hearts are far from me.' You are scrupulous upon trifles and hardened upon terrible evils. You love only your own glory and comfort. You refer everything to yourself as if you ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... immediate executive officer. We all have to work together. Let's see if we can't do it a little more smoothly, eh?" Hardy smiled and turned back to his chair. "But one thing more, Sykes. If there are any more petty disagreements, please settle them with Vidac. Don't come up here again, unless I ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... pillaged their houses, loudly praying for a new and just assessment of the land; while, throughout the country, the farmers have hailed with acclamations the resumption of the sovereign power by the Mikado, and the abolition of the petty nobility who exalted themselves upon the misery of their dependants. Warming themselves in the sunshine of the court at Yedo, the Hatamotos waxed fat and held high revel, and little cared they who groaned or who starved. Money must be ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... society, personal merit will not serve you so much as money will. Sir, you may make the experiment. Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most. If you wish only to support nature, Sir William Petty fixes your allowance at three pounds a year; but as times are much altered, let us call it six pounds. This sum will fill your belly, shelter you from the weather, and even get you a strong lasting coat, supposing it to be made of good bull's hide. Now, Sir, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... as that of many others of more or less national and local prominence, such as Thomas Dixon, Jr., of the Clansman fame; Hon. E. Yates Webb, Congressman Ninth District; Col. A. M. Lattimore, of Lattimore; Capt. O. D. Price, the old-time singer; Capt. Pink Petty, the famous fox-hunter with the silver-mounted horn; Capt. Nim Champion, the standing candidate for the Legislature on the one-plank platform—the restoration of the whipping-post. Then we have Frank Barrett, the old ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... have many worries. He does not have notes to meet at the bank. He does not have to face the ingratitude of employes and petty jealousies, for he has no employes ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... seaport groggery, or Germans over a keg of lager. Jolly, happy-go-lucky fellows though they outwardly appear, they prove no exception, however, to the general run of their countrymen in the matter of petty dishonesty; although I gave them money enough to purchase twice the quantity of provisions they brought back, besides promising them the customary small present before leaving, in the morning they make a further attempt on my purse under pretence of purchasing more butter to ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... if he is caught he is taken from his occupation for a longer time. The great hazard involved in this trade and also the physical strength and fitness of those who follow it lead to its abandonment more frequently than is the case with a pickpocket or a petty thief. Robbery is seldom a profession. It is usually the crime of the young and venturesome and almost surely leads to early disaster. Murder, of course, is never a profession. In a broad way it is the ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. "Woman is a stumbling-block in a man's career," remarks a philosophical husband in "Anna ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... got warm he thought how remote all this—the storm, and the hut, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room—how remote it all was from the life he desired for himself, and how alien it all was to him, how petty, how uninteresting. If this man had killed himself in Moscow or somewhere in the neighborhood, and he had had to hold an inquest on him there, it would have been interesting, important, and perhaps he might even have been afraid to sleep in the next room to the corpse. Here, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... us that anything that interests us is not without interest to Christ. Anything that is big enough to occupy our thoughts and our efforts is large enough to be taken into His. All our ignoble toils, and all our petty anxieties, touch a chord that vibrates in that deep and tender heart. Though other sympathy may be unable to come down to the minutenesses of our little lives, and to wind itself into the narrow room in which our histories are prisoned, Christ's sympathy can steal into the narrowest cranny. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... under his care. At length he fell a victim to his own conduct. It may be a question whether it would not have been better to hang a man at once than to transport him to Van Dieman's Land; but there can be no question whatever that to class one who had been guilty of some petty theft, with the abandoned wretches that convicts speedily become, is a deed of which the wickedness can hardly be exaggerated. The system, too, had a bad effect upon the free inhabitants. While the convicts were no better than slaves, in the masters were engendered some of the autocratic ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.' The spirit of Christianity is a spirit of universal love and philanthropy. She looks down with pity, and, if she could, she would look with scorn upon all the petty distinctions that exist among men. She casts her benignant eye abroad over the earth, and, wherever she sees man, she sees him as man, as a being made in the image of God, whether an Indian, an African, or a Caucasian sun may shine upon him. She stoops from heaven to raise ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... to be such powerful instruments of his grace, as, by the miraculous change of so many hearts, to plant in entire barbarous nations not only the faith, but also the spirit of Christ. Preachers, who have not attained to a disengagement and purity of heart, suffer the petty interests of self-love secretly to mingle themselves in their zeal and charity, and have reason to suspect that they inflict deeper wounds in their own souls than they are aware, and produce not in others the good ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... are really too great to be possessed by petty weaknesses. If I ever did excel you, which is most unlikely, I know you would be glad both for me and for yourself. No, it is not that; I am ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... his eyes, 'grey and slightly bloodshot, as though their surfaces concealed passions violently struggling for expression. At the turning platform of the stair he paused. In darkness above and in darkness below the country house was still; all the little life of its day, its petty sounds, movements, comings, goings, its very breathing, seemed to have fallen into sleep. The forces of its life had gathered into that pool of light where George stood listening. The beating of his heart was the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... perceived that he had been rude, and would have tendered an apology, but his customer had already shaken the dust of the bank off his feet and taken his departure, so that there was no present opportunity of accommodating the petty quarrel. As events subsequently turned out it was destined never to be accommodated in this world, for the two never met again ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... long boots had pinched my leg in several places, that I had eaten nothing since the day before, and that I was too weak to walk further. My whole body was aching in every limb. At a little distance I saw petty traders with country ponies, carrying burdens. I hired one of these animals. In the afternoon I came to the Rungit River and crossed it. A bath in its cool waters revived me. I purchased some fruit ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a cup of tea, a boiled egg, bread and butter; and in the evening. There is no law of trespass in India, and it is delightful to canter for miles while sharing the freedom of the Son of the Desert who is carrying you. There is nothing like these lonely scampers as a cure for petty worries, for you can put them so far behind you, that on your return you have forgotten their existence. Calcutta is an ideal riding city, with its beautiful maidan (plain), where there are miles of springy turf for galloping, a large race-course with ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... let me speak for myself! Of course, so far as truck is concerned, I'm not in it with you and Will. But as for the USE I put my rooms to—! Besides, I already have Pete there, and would have Dong Ling probably, if he slept here. However, if you want any of my rooms, don't let my petty wants and ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... it would appear that the coming of the Wise Men—the Magi—was in accordance with the astrological signs, of the interpretation of which they were adepts and masters. When this truth is known, how puerile and petty seems the myth of the "traveling star" of the commonly accepted exoteric version? And the pictures of the Wise Men being led by a moving heavenly body, traveling across the skies and at last standing still ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... peculiar treatment, and nobody treated him in a way that did not grate on the finer nerves of his feelings. He had higher notions of existence than could be bounded by that old rotten hole in a hollow tree; he had thoughts that soared far above the miserable, petty details of every-day life, and he could not and would not bring down these soaring aspirations to the contemptible toil of laying up a few chestnuts ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... noxious weed, once lived and loved." We busy ourselves about the style of a coat or the cut of a corsage; we dispute anent our faiths and plan new follies; we struggle for wealth that we may flaunt a petty opulence in our fellows' faces and win the envy of fools—and the span of Life but three score and ten, while a thousand years are but as one tick of the horologe of Time! We quarrel about our political creeds and religious cults, as though it ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... unimportant people trying to make themselves of importance. Of course they make a great point about what is called "official rank" in India, and the women squabble terribly over their warrants of precedence: the gradations thereof would puzzle even the chamberlain of some petty German court. The Anglo-Indian ladies of Bombay struck me for the most part as spiritless. They had a faded, washed-out look; and I do not wonder at it, considering the life they lead. They get up about nine, breakfast and pay or receive visits, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... the inhabitants of that great empire. The government also of Japan is perfectly uniform and well settled, so that there cannot be any diversity of interests; for, though several of its provinces are denominated kingdoms, yet all these petty kings are under the strictest subjection to the emperor, and the laws of the country extend over all. These laws pay the strictest regard to private property, the father transmitting to his children not only the patrimonial estate, but all the acquisitions of his own industry; and this is certainly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... at twenty years of age, and passed the next eight years of his life in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, where he held some petty office under government; and took to himselfmany bad habits and a Polish wife. After this he was Music-Director at various German theatres, and led a wandering, wretched life for ten years. He then went to Berlin as Clerk of the Exchange, and there remained till ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... once a conglomeration of petty rival states is now one constitutionally governed kingdom. Italy has ceased to be only a geographical name; she is now a nation whose voice is listened to at the council ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... contains a proclamation by the Queen for putting into execution an Act of Parliament for the encouragement and increase of seamen, and for the better and speedier manning of Her Majesty's fleet, which authorises all justices to issue warrants to constables, petty constables, headboroughs, and tything-men, to enter and, if need be, to break open the doors of any houses where they shall believe deserting seamen to be; and for the further increase and encouragement of the navy, to take able-bodied ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conceived to make a wholesome social life possible. Greater cooperation is necessary if rural people are to make progress, and this cooperation is impossible when families are jealous and suspicious. This obstacle in the way of wholesome rural culture, made by selfish and petty family motives, it is useless to ignore. Unless the obstacle can be pushed aside, other efforts to inspire country people to a realization of their social opportunities must surely fail. Family life in the country can be saved from its besetting sin when rural ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... follow her into the adjoining gallery, at that time occupied by Sir Peter Lely for the completion of his exquisite series of portraits of the beauties of Charles's court. In their own idle comments and petty jealousies arising from the resemblances before them, Lady ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... extraordinary resemblance in their modes and habits of thought, between Lyell and Darwin; and this likeness was also seen in their modesty, their deference to the opinion of younger men, their enthusiasm for science, their freedom from petty jealousies and their righteous indignation for what was mean and unworthy in others. But yet there was a difference. Both Lyell and Darwin were cautious, but perhaps Lyell carried his caution to the verge ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... and State interests. It could not be sin in the man of the North, if God and his country ever clashed, to say, that well as he loved his country, he loved his God yet more. But what plea shall shield the sin which claims to love one's own petty State better than either country or God? They have virtually tunneled and honey-combed into ruin the fundamental obligations of the citizen. Jesuitism had made itself a name of reproach by the doctrine of mental reservation, under which the Jesuit held himself ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... steppe-land to the northeast, or from the forest-land to the north-west, would thunder on the long mountain barrier, only to trickle across in rivulets and form little pools of humanity here and there. Petty feuds between plain, shore, and mountain, as in ancient Attica, would but accentuate the prevailing division. Contrariwise, on the southern side of the Mediterranean, where there was open, if largely desert, country, there would be room under primitive conditions for a homogeneous race ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... officer had arrived, and it was agreed, at the suggestion of the Duke of Shoreditch, to take the offender to the Curfew Tower. Accordingly they crossed the lower ward, and passing beneath an archway near the semicircular range of habitations allotted to the petty canons, traversed the space before the west end of Saint George's Chapel, and descending a short flight of stone steps at the left, and threading a narrow passage, presently arrived at the arched entrance in the Curfew, whose hoary ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... highest universality, they can only be understood in their setting. It adds but little to our knowledge of Shakespeare's work to regard him as the great Elizabethan; there is nothing temporary in his dramas, except petty incidents and external trappings—so truly did he dwell amidst the elements constituting man in every age and clime. But this cannot be said of any other poet, not even of Chaucer or Spenser, far less of Milton, or Pope or Wordsworth. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... at Rome. If the Italians are excusably envious, their envy is at least accompanied with admiration.' The gratified sculptor bowed and slightly blushed. Walstein loved art and artists. He was not one of those frigid, petty souls who are ashamed to evince feeling in society. He felt keenly and expressed himself without reserve. But nature had invested him with a true nobility of manner as well as of mind. He was ever graceful, even ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... system of espionage to which all were subjected. In Paris and the large towns, the reaction itself carries the physiognomy of its own epoch; it irritates more than it cows; in the country, it becomes low, moan, petty, tiresome, vexatious,—in a word, it becomes "gensdarme." It is easily understood how three years of the gensdarme regime, sanctified by the regime of the clergyman, was bound ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... she had gone to sleep the night before, and waked again upon this scene unchanged, brilliant, full of colour, a chaos of decoration—confluences of noisy, garish streams of life, eddies of petty labour. Craftsmen crowded one upon the other in dark bazaars; merchants chattered and haggled on their benches; hawkers clattered and cried their wares. It was a people that lived upon the streets, for all the houses seemed empty and forsaken. The sais ran before the Pasha's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... equally harmful to themselves and others. 'Laws of labour,' says an African writer, [Footnote: Sierra Leone Weekly Times, July 30, 1862.] 'may be out of place (date?) in England, but in Sierra Leone they would have saved an entire population from trusting to the allurements of a petty, demoralising trade; they would have saved us the sight of decayed villages and a people becoming daily less capable of bearing the laborious toil of agricultural industry. To handle the hoe has now become a disgrace, and men have lost their manhood by becoming gentlemen.' I shall presently ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art was a personal ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... with an outburst of indignant impatience from the petty arguments into which his love for the exhibition of the whole truth in all its details had led him, "what are you told by the most respectable and conscientious witness who has appeared here to-day? What is the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... make none of the men understand me. Most of them were Finns—big broad-shouldered, ruddy, light-haired, bearded fellows; very good-natured and merry, notwithstanding the harsh treatment they often received. Big as they were, they were knocked about like so many boys by the petty officers, and I began to feel rather uncomfortable lest I should come in for share of the same treatment, of which I had had enough from the hands of old Growl. I determined, however, to grin and bear it, and do, as well as I could, ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... shall leave with you on quitting England, which I shall do the day Lionel is married; and then, dear old friend, calm days, clear consciences:—In climes where whole races have passed away—proud cities themselves sunk in graves—where our petty grief for a squirearch's lost house we shall both grow ashamed to indulge—there we will moralise, rail against vain dreams and idle pride, cultivate vines and orange trees, with Horace—nay, nay, Dick—with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Crystal Lake ever became a member of the Royal Flying Corps. Already, from among the hundreds of strangers, half-a-dozen stood out as men he was determined to know better. Taking them altogether the men were a fine sight as they lounged about the decks in the sunlight, the petty rivalries and jealousies of camp days forgotten. Their youth seemed to flow together, like their brown uniforms. Seen in the mass like this, Claude thought, they were rather noble looking fellows. In so many of the faces there was a look of fine candour, an expression ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... every other language known since the Tower of Babel. Arab guides lit up the Sphinx with flaring magnesium, an impertinence that should have made hideous with hate the insulted features, but instead turned them for a thrilling instant of suspense into marble. Indeed, none of our petty vulgarities could jar or even fret the majestic calm of the desert and the stone Mystery among its billows. The Sphinx gazed above and past us all. She was like some royal captive surrounded by a rabble mob, yet as undisturbed in soul as though her puny, hooting tormentors ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... game laws, eliminating prosecutions on petty technicalities, educate the public to co-operate in fish and game protection, enact legislation to encourage rather than handicap the propagation of fish ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... would be out of place, though it would be not uninteresting, to tell how this great resident power—this strong will and authority, this capacious, clear, and beneficent intellect—dwelt in its petty sphere, like an oak in a flower-pot; but I cannot help recalling that signal act of friendship and of power in the matter of my father's translation from Rose Street to Broughton Place, to which ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fulness thereof. But if, on the other hand, it is petty self-complacency in your own skill, trust in precepts and laws, hope for academical or popular approbation, or avarice of wealth,—it is quite possible that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance, you may win the applause, the position, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... on board ship," continued the Admiral, with a twinkle in his eye, watching to see how Tom took his remark. "Not only are they inferior in rank to all the commissioned officers, but to the three warrant officers who have risen from before the mast, and even the petty officers and men are inclined to treat them as nurses do the babies under their charge; so you must not be disappointed if you do not meet with the respect you may possibly expect from those whom you may look upon as your inferiors, though they'll obey you readily when you repeat the orders you ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... of domestic warmth and comfort. And yet—sorry for Elinor! That was not the word. His heart was sore for her, torn away from all her moorings, drifting back a wreck to the little youthful home, where all had been so tranquil and so sweet. John had nothing in him of that petty sentiment which derives satisfaction from a calamity it has foreseen, nor had he even an old lover's thrill of almost pleasure in the downfall of the clay idol that has been preferred to his gold. His pain for Elinor, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... and dutiful spirit. But now it dawned upon them all at once how the little they as soldiers had been obliged to learn had been made quite unnecessarily difficult for them. They stripped off, like a troublesome strait-waistcoat, the superfluity of petty rules to which they had been subjected; and the recognition of the needless compulsion they had so long endured produced, as its inevitable consequence, a violent reaction, which quite naturally manifested itself in a hasty change of opinion. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... wrote you an answer to your last, which, on reflection, pleases me as little as it probably has pleased yourself. I will not wait for your rejoinder; but proceed to tell you, that I had just then been greeted with an epistle of * *'s, full of his petty grievances, and this at the moment when (from circumstances it is not necessary to enter upon) I was bearing up against recollections to which his imaginary sufferings are as a scratch to a cancer. These things ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy in the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the riverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care not for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on brown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulated to-morrow, next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers would bloom, fruit-tree ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... not a bad one. I had soup, veal, eggs, and a fair wine. I had also a companion, but would rather have been without him. He was a young man, whose appearance gained by the contrast of a dusty wayfarer's, and he gave himself airs accordingly. I set him down as a petty functionary of the place, and a pensionnaire of the auberge. All the time I was with him his mind was exceedingly restless as to my intentions and business in those parts, and such explanations as I gave him to appease his insatiable curiosity ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... have given the petty officer a quick briefing on courtroom phraseology. He stood up, holding Baby Fuzzy, while the three judges filed in and took their seats. As soon as they sat down, the Chief Justice rapped briskly with ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... crisp clear air held an intoxicating quality unknown in the East; where the eye foamed on and on over limitless expanses of waving green, till the mind was staggered at the vastness of the prospect; where the very largeness of nature seemed to enter into a man and to {35} crush out things petty and selfish? In doing this he would be beating the air. They were incapable of understanding him. They ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... a question I want to ask. I refer to Lesson Seven, 'Petty Thievery, Detecting Same, Charges Therefor.' I have had some trouble with ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... believe you guilty, although appearances look very black. You have many faults, but I feel sure that I cannot be mistaken in supposing you too noble-minded for a revenge so petty and so mean. Come to me, dear boy, if I can help you in any way. I trust you, Eric, and will use every endeavor to right you in the general estimation. You are innocent; pray to God for help under this cruel trial, and be sure that your character will ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the boat finally drew up alongside. Willing hands helped Ted and Bill up the steep side of the Dewey and they were tendered such a reception as they had never known before. Then ensued a parley between the petty officer of the sunken gunboat Strassburg and the ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... Woman o' Fortune remains unmarry'd, she's a Petty-Queen; Lovers innumerable trace her Steps; each Coxcomb thinks to be the happy Man, and ev'ry were her Presence makes a Court—but when her Reason's once subdu'd by Love, and the fond, foolish Nymph resigns her Pow'r, she's but a ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... the Cat must stay at home, Yet that is but a crush'd necessity, Since we haue lockes to safegard necessaries, And pretty traps to catch the petty theeues. While that the Armed hand doth fight abroad, Th' aduised head defends it selfe at home: For Gouernment, though high, and low, and lower, Put into parts, doth keepe in one consent, Congreeing in a full ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... could find it in secular moralisers. Defoe, always keenly alive to the general taste, had tried to supply the demand not only by his queer History of the Devil but by appending a set of moral reflections to Robinson Crusoe and other edifying works, which disgusted Charles Lamb by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the Rambler to recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... as has already been pointed out, was by nature restive, impulsive, and quarrelsome. That he did not make every seigneury a hotbed of petty strife was due largely to the stern hand held over him by priest and seigneur alike, but by his priest particularly. The Church in the colony never lost, as in France, the full confidence of the ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... him to forego the prosecution of his ambitious designs, the influence of the monarchy had been extended over eastern and central France—from Flanders, on the north, to the volcanic mountains of Auvergne, on the south. Meanwhile the oppressed subjects of the petty tyrants, whether within or around his domains, had learned to look for redress to the sovereign lord who prided himself upon his ability and readiness to succor the defenceless. His grandson, the more illustrious Philip Augustus (1180-1223), by marriage, inheritance, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... newsboys, zig-zagging among the crowds like bats in the dusk. "Extry! All about the horrable acciDENT! Extry!" It struck Sheridan that the papers sent out too many "Extras"; they printed "Extras" for all sorts of petty crimes and casualties. It was a mistake, he decided, critically. Crying "Wolf!" too often wouldn't sell the goods; it was bad business. The papers would "make more in the long run," he was sure, ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... should not be. Douglas had said: "I would blot out the lines of the map which now mark our national boundaries on this continent and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself. I would not suffer petty rival republics to grow up here, engendering jealousy of each other, and interfering with each other's domestic affairs, and continually endangering their peace. I do not wish to go beyond the great ocean—beyond those boundaries which the God of nature has ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... these, passing from chief to chief, descended to the minor chieftains, who held lands in fee of those more sovereign lords. Petty interests extinguished gratitude for general benefits; and by secret meetings, at the heads of which were Athol, Buchan, and March, a conspiracy was formed to overset the power of Wallace. They were to invite Edward once more to take ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... bully, or group of bullies; so this is merely a forecastle matter and no concern of the afterguard. The ship's work goes on. The only effect I can conjecture is an increase in the woes of the unfortunates who must bow to this petty ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... and smiled. "You may be quite correct. Historically speaking, perhaps, the Earth government has usurped the functions that rightfully belong to kings, dictators, and warlords. To say nothing of local satraps and petty chieftains. Hm-m-m. Perhaps we should return to that? Perhaps we should return to the human suffering that was ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... quickness of his race de Vasselot noted everything—the trend of the watersheds, the colour of the water, the prevailing wind as indicated by the growth of the trees—a hundred petty details of Nature which would escape any but a trained comprehension, or that wonderful eye with which some men are born, who cannot but be gipsies all their lives, whether fate has made them rich or poor; who cannot live in towns, but must breathe the air of open heaven, and deal by sea ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the community has always attributed many criminal acts to intoxicating drinks. I am convinced that with such crimes as murder, burglary, robbery, forgery and the like, alcohol has had little to do. Petty things, like disorderly conduct, are often caused by intoxicating liquor, and these land a great many temporarily in jail, but these acts are really not criminal. Men have been temporarily locked up for over-drinking. If over-eating had been treated the same as over-drinking, ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but God for us all—then indeed we might despair. But ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... times of strike. The moral effect of the victory in Newcastle, like that in Schenectady, after the bitter labor struggles of recent years, cannot be questioned, and this, together with temporary relief from petty persecution by local authorities, is doubtless worth all the efforts that have been put forth—provided the Socialists have not promised themselves and their supporters any larger ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... known that we were preparing to sail a number of the natives from other parts of the island were constantly with us, and petty thefts were committed whenever the negligence of our people afforded an opportunity: but no attempt of any ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... or senates, or demagogues, is generally so hateful, and at the same time so contemptible, so grasping, so irritable, so unscrupulous, and so oppressive—so much dictated by ambition, by antipathy and by vanity, so selfish, often so petty in its objects, and so regardless of human misery in its means, that a sovereign who behaves to other nations with merely the honesty and justice and forbearance which are usual between man and ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... started by Express Drivers' Union No. 927 over the handling of a small heap of baggage at the Ferry Building. A few heads were broken, a score of arrests made, and the baggage was delivered. No one would have guessed that behind this petty wrangle was the fine Irish hand of Hegan, made potent by the Klondike gold of Burning Daylight. It was an insignificant affair at best—or so it seemed. But the Teamsters' Union took up the quarrel, backed by the whole Water Front Federation. Step by ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... so doing, General Hood had marched into Tennessee, and after various petty successes, was defeated, after two days' hard fighting, near Nashville. In the third week in January, 1865, Sherman set out with 60,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry from Savannah, laying waste the whole country—burning, pillaging, and destroying. The town of Columbia was ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... and the curved hull, or glued to their special gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether—but one will never forget the eyes or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in particular. On deck his was no more than a grave, rather striking countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as I saw him in profile handling a vital control, he looked like the Doge of Venice, the Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order, an old-time Pope—anything that signifies trained and stored intellectual power utterly and ascetically devoted to some vast impersonal ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... appetites make him luxurious. He was incessantly active and vigilant, his prejudices were few, and his views tolerant and enlightened. He was only cruel when his authority was impeached. His best portraiture is in his acts. He found a country semi-barbarous, convulsed by disorders, a prey to petty tyrannies, weak from disunion, and trembling before powerful neighbors. He left it a first-class power, freed in a measure from its barbarous customs, improved in social life, in arts, in science, and, perhaps, in morals. He ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... in educational matters is the most wasteful of all misplaced thrift. Let the reformers be dealt with wisely and generously, and the harvest will exceed even the expectations of those who are working most hopefully upon the problem. Withhold the funds on some niggardly and mistaken principle of petty economy, and the present progress will be discouraged and the educational tree become stunted in its growth. From an administrative point of view, nothing, finance apart, would contribute more to the efficiency of Irish Education than the amalgamation ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... Squire had sat prosing over their port or Chateau Lafitte, and felt as if he were living in a new world—a world in which full-blooded friendship and boisterous hospitality were out of fashion. People whose talk had hitherto been intensely local—confined, for the most part to petty sessions, commoners' rights, hunting, and the parish church and schools—found themselves discussing the widest range of topics, from the prospect of a European war—that European war which has been impending more or less distinctly for the last twenty years—to ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... man who has failed. All men strive—who succeeds? His enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe—everywhere the done is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... to help you to do anything you wish," answered Green, "provided it doesn't amount to treason or petty larceny." ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; or if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"—then Simmons was in a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less any petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame. He hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him want to hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which most of us have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind attention to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been married herself, but it was so long ago that the human interest of it all was lost in a pottle of petty detail which was all she could recall. Before the story was half finished, Sebastian's attention had strayed elsewhere, though his spare figure remained in its attitude of attention and polite forbearance. His mind had, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and self-interest, that allows you to avoid it. Is it not better and more worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty bargainings of diplomacy? ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a great while before the mothers began to come in with their petty savings, also, and after a long talk with Mr. Barrington, one day, a real banking institution was incorporated, with the stock issued in dollar shares. Mr. Barrington, as president, headed the list of stockholders with a hundred, Miss Lavillotte following with seventy-five, while ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Her long gaze, now, told him that. It seemed to give him time, as it were, to take her in and to arrange with himself how best to adjust himself to a changed life. It was not the glance of a flirt; it held no petty consciousness; it was the gaze of an enchantress aware of her own inevitable power. Gregory met the cold, sweet, melancholy eyes. But as she gazed, as she slowly smiled, he was aware, with a perverse pleasure, that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... great judgment in setting up as a dairy-woman. One of the most provoking of the petty difficulties which beset a small establishment in this neighbourhood is the trouble, almost the impossibility, of procuring the pastoral luxuries of milk, eggs, and butter. Hannah's Alderney restored us to our rural privilege. Speedily she established ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... must have strangely altered, then, in five years. Our New York population has hitherto had very little of the assassin-like character. Tar and feathers are the blackguards', and have been the petty tyrants' weapons, from time immemorial, in this country; but not ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions and by actual use of the fist on the Head Instructor and ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... in the world to be perfectly satisfied with the choice of the officers. The second and third lieutenants, the lieutenant of marines, two of the warrant officers, and several of the petty officers, had been with me during the former voyage. The others were men of known abilities; and all of them, on every occasion, shewed their zeal for the service in which they were employed, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... burials were not sufficient to prevent haunting. The conclusion of the work of Thyraeus is devoted to exorcisms, and orthodox methods of expelling spirits. The knockings which herald a death are attributed to the Lares, a kind of petty mischievous demons unattached. Such is the essence of the learned Jesuit's work, and the strange thing is that, in an age of science, people are still discussing his problems, and, stranger still, that the reported phenomena ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... are yours, Lady Davers, they must be so. One is, That every condescension (to speak in a proud lady's dialect) comes with as much difficulty from her, as a favour from the House of Austria to the petty princes of Germany. The second, Because those of your sex—(Excuse me, Madam," to the countess) "who have once made scruples, think it inconsistent with themselves to be over hasty to alter their own conduct, choosing rather to persist in an error, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson |
