"Pettiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worm! (Pause.) And now that we're so far from the world and its pettiness, tell me this: why did you leave him in those ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... first, I hesitated, as you shall think, because of her way; but truly, my heart knew that her heart did be proper unto me; and, moreover, I should be small in my nature, if that I let any pettiness put a silence upon me; though, in verity, if that the Maid had not been inwardly loving to me, I had been that I had told her no word; and this to be very natural, whether it be of ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... would darkness steal over all, unrelieved by a glimmer of light; and misfortune itself, contemptuous of its too facile success, would leave naught behind but a handful of colourless cinders. Nor is it necessary for me to see my neighbour again to be aware that his sorrow will have brought to him pettiness only; for sorrow does merely restore to us that which our soul had ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... was the truth. Irene 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 for ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... dogmatic rivals 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 man's part with the ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... 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
... then, shaking off the dejected tone, said, 'Well, I suppose you will have a letter from Wrangerton to tell you it is settled. I wonder if you will go to the wedding. Oh! Violet, if you had had one particle of selfishness or pettiness, how many unhappy people you ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... better marks the place where the city of New York got clean and clear out of provincial pettiness into metropolitan tolerance than the advent of the Bohemians. Twenty-five years earlier they would have been a scandal and a reproach to the town. Not for their literature, or for their wit, or for their hard drinking, or even for their ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... of blood—experience had removed that 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 under the wide ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... from the sordid by spiritual motives which are unseen. If all moral life is a monotonous warfare, the life of a Saint is warfare in the very first ranks where the trenches are filled with water and the shells fall thickest and the general discomfort and pettiness are at their maximum. It is misleading and not in strict accord with known realities, to paint the portrait of a Saint in rose color and sunlight, diffusing an iridescent atmosphere of cheerful gayety ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... 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 ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... surroundings inspired in them. A scene which men have dreamed of during moments of spiritual uplift, and have longed to behold and imitate and become a part of, and escape from the sordidness and pettiness of mundane existence and live the life of men where life is life and every breath is freedom; where the desire to live is dominant and the future holds no terrors, and each new day and sun and moon and procession of the stars are greeted with the joy that is born ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been which had made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness, the human insufficiency to express the best that must come in any mortal relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They were not better in memory than they had been ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... vanished. He scrutinized his own heart in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept. All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Stenhouse, Duthil, and Schaunard had said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for Berselius; the man seemed so far from and unconscious of the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness, that the half liking which always accompanies respect could not but find ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... We are uplifted. The entire scale of being is raised. Our outlook on life seems all at once to have been heightened. And not only is there this sense of elevation: we seem purified also. Meanness, pettiness, paltriness seem to shrink away abashed at the sight ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... was energetic. He spoke frequently. That his temper was hot no one who looked at him could doubt, but he had it in tight control. Although he encountered unfriendly demonstrations, especially in New York, the pettiness of ruffled vanity did not appear. Nothing could be more easy and graceful than his manner on these occasions. His expository statements, lucid, smooth, and equally free from monotony and abruptness, were models of their kind. In dealing ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander |
