"Pettiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nature—its helpful, sunny side—was asserting itself at the moment. For the life of her she could not feel the indignation he deserved just then, for the contrast between the grandiloquence of his sentiments and the pettiness of that unpaid lodging-bill almost forced her ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... days, when nature was in a mood that suggested grace and peace, when the waves lapsed along the shore and the cicada sang in the hedge, did Father Damon unfold to Edith his ideas of the spiritualization of modern life through a conviction of its pettiness and transitoriness. How much more content there would be if the poor could only believe that it matters little what happens here if the heart is only pure and fixed on ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... has been already explained, and may be further shown by a review of the virtues. Besides fortitude and temperance, already described, liberality is a mean between prodigality and stinginess; magnificence between vulgar display and pettiness: magnanimity between vainglory and pusillanimity; truthfulness between exaggeration and dissimulation; friendship between complaisance, or flattery, and frowardness,—and so of the rest. The golden mean must be taken in relation to ourselves, because in many matters of behaviour and the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... nature has alone the right to profit also 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 in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it is to 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 dulness, the mean aims, the base successes—all these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... "humbug chivalry;" of Lew. Wallace, whose heat and intolerance were appropriately urged in the most exceptional English; of Howe, whose tirade against the rebel General Johnson was feeble as it was ungenerous! This court was needed to show us at least the petty tyranny of martial law and the pettiness of martial jurists. The counsel for the defence have just enough show to make the unfairness of the trial partake of hypocrisy, and the wideness of the subjects discussed makes one imagine that the object of the commission ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... to complaint. 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 ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... data it may be confidently surmised, furthermore, that at least one household in every ten among the eighty-three thousand white inhabitants of the colony held one or more slaves. These two features—the multiplicity of slaveholdings and the virtually uniform pettiness of their scale—constituted a regime never paralleled in equal volume elsewhere. The economic interest in slave property, nowhere great, was widely diffused. The petty masters, however, maintained so little system in the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... sent us to effect this knowledge. Why, then, is not every 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 ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... I put it?" he went on thoughtfully. "Well, first of all, then, I feel that the Democrats, when they come into power, are going to develop as swiftly as may be all the fevers, the sore places, the jealousies and the pettiness of every other political party which has ever tried to rule the State. I see the symptoms already and that is what I think makes my heart grow faint. I have given the best years of my life to toiling for others. Who believes it? Who is grateful? Who would not ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to look on it as a more sudden change than it really was; and the outer aspect of the Restoration does much to strengthen this impression of suddenness. The whole face of England was changed in an instant. All that was noblest and best in Puritanism was whirled away with its pettiness and its tyranny in the current of the nation's hate. Religion had been turned into a system of political and social oppression, and it fell with that system's fall. Godliness became a byword of scorn; sobriety in dress, in speech, in manners ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... No, no, no! That was never Cytherea's import. He didn't want to impoverish himself by the cheap flinging away of small coin from his ultimate store. He didn't, equally, wish to keep on exasperating Fanny in small ways. That pettiness was wholly to blame for what discomfort he had had. His wife's claim was still greater on him than any other's; and what, now, he couldn't give her must be made up in different ways. This conviction invested him ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 strong enough. Perhaps before a year is over Universal ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the truth of this history is only too dramatic. And remember, the historian should never forget that his mission is to do justice to all; the poor and the prosperous are equals before his pen; to him the peasant appears in the grandeur of his misery, and the rich in the pettiness of his folly. Moreover, the rich man has passions, the peasant only wants. The peasant is therefore doubly poor; and if, politically, his aggressions must be pitilessly repressed, to the eyes of humanity and religion he ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... 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
... by 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 that ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... breaking the wax, has been successfully solved; it has the same thirst for scandal, the same intense interest for the most contemptible trivialities, the same constantly impending danger of suicide from ennui, did not human nature adapt itself to its environments, and sink into pettiness as naturally as though there were no such things as towns and cities, and enlarged views of man and nature in the world: all these it has the same as any British Little Pedlington. Then it has its circles of social intercourse, as rigidly defined and as intensely ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... perfectly conscious of his littleness as opposed to our better intellectual nature, and does evil for evil's sake. Satan is sublime through the grandeur of his primitive elements, pride and ambition. Mephistopheles is only grave in his pettiness; he does not refuse an orgie with drunken students, indulges in jokes with monkeys, works miracles in the witch's kitchen, delights in the witch's "one-time-one;" distributes little tracts "to stir up the witch's heart with special fire." Satan has nothing vulgar in him: he ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... great for him to take. His advice was always given warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first took me to him said, "We shall see the greatest man in Europe." I have it on the same authority that Rossetti's aptitude for art was considered amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For example, that he could take ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... canvass Conkling 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
... and love. But all over Europe to-day, in hospital and out, men are learning to think in terms of life and death. What will be the result? A general brutalising? The loss of much that is fine? Perhaps. There are some who think that it will scourge men's souls clean of pettiness, teach them proportion, give them a larger outlook. But is it petty to labour and love? Is the duty of the nation greater than the duty of the home? Is the nation greater than the individual? Is the whole greater than the sum ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... too weighty, but for favours truly great there is scarce anything but ingratitude." They must have been small favours that Wordsworth had conferred when "the gratitude of men had oftener left him mourning." Indeed, the very pettiness of the aid we can generally render each other, makes gratitude the touching thing it is. So much is repaid for so little, and few can ever have the chance of incurring the thanklessness that Rochefoucauld found ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... His protection by weighing 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 our ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... axes so as to follow without the head being 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 are people who fancy that in church everybody is looking at them, when in truth no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... 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
... 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 poverty; but for their brotherhood, and for their calm ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... 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 acutely ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... to attach a certain importance to her individual existence even while she realized the pettiness of it, comparatively speaking. She was an infinitesimal part, but the whole could not be without that part. Suddenly the religious instruction which she had drank in with her mother's milk took possession of her, but she had a breadth of outlook which would have terrified her mother. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... becomes the well-born and the illustrious. The house of the magnificent man will be of suitable splendour; everything that he does will show taste and propriety. The extremes, or corresponding defects of character, are, on the one side, vulgar, tasteless profusion, and on the other, meanness or pettiness, which for some paltry saving will spoil the effect ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... words of 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 into dreams and ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... stress 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 History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... of life and thought. It would have been inconsistent with Mr. Choate's nature for him to have been "wrong-headed" in any direction. Such largeness of view, such dramatic and interpretative imagination, such volatile play of thought and fancy, and such perception of the pettiness and hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser "blood-sympathies," the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary and smaller objects and issues, which distinguish the American politician, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... thinking that 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 connection she had broken off ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... 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" ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... seller. Yet Cato for all this glories that he left that very horse in Spain, which he used in the wars when he was consul, only because he would not put the public to the charge of his freight. Whether these acts are to be ascribed to the greatness or pettiness of his spirit, let every one ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... be taken by police—too insignificant to tempt the legions out of camp. Brigandry was as distasteful to him and as far beneath his dignity as the pursuit of brigands was beneath the dignity of any of those Roman generals who owed their rank to Commodus. For them, as for himself, the pettiness of brigandry led nowhither. Only one object appealed to them—fame and its perquisites. Only one object appealed to himself: to redeem his estates and to avenge his father. That could be accomplished only by the death of Commodus: He laughed, as he thought of himself pitted ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... luxuries to which she was accustomed. The floor of her reception room was not even waxed, the walls were still hung with dingy tapestries; she used the country furniture, burned tallow candles, and followed the customs of the town,—adopting provincial life, and not shrinking from its pettiness or its many disagreeable privations. Knowing, however, that her guests would pardon luxuries if provided for their own comfort, she neglected nothing which conduced to their personal enjoyment, and gave them, more especially, ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... foot to induce the Swiss Government to prosecute the unfortunate entertainer, abortively of course, since it could not have been legally done? Surely the head of a State who could allow his Government to descend to such contemptible pettiness must be devoid of all sense of common self-respect, not to say personal dignity. And this is the fellow who claims to be hardly second in importance to his "dear old God"! In this connection it is only fair to recall the very different behaviour of King Edward VII when an Irish ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... better, and would have cheerfully parted with their own happiness for his. He was but one of a large herd of youths, possessing no will of their own, yet enjoying the reputation of a strong one; for moved by liking or any foolish notion, his pettiness made a principle of, he would be obstinate; and the common philosophy always takes obstinacy for strength of will, even when it springs from utter inability ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... 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, than for any mathematical or scientific greatness. How easily his brooding ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... CATIN might die some day (for she is now deep in chaotic ailments, deepish even in brandy) seems never to have struck him; at least there is nowhere any articulate hint of it,—the eagle-flight of one's imagination soaring far above such a pettiness! Hope is very beautiful; and even fallacious hope, in such a Friedrich. The one hope that did not deceive him, was hope in his own best exertion to the very death; and no fallacy ever for a moment slackened him in that. Stand to thyself: in the wide domain of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... castle of the laird trembled like stars through the sky. For a long time he sat and drank in the beauty of the scene, and his soul seemed to feel a peace that it had not known for many days. All the pettiness and annoyance and silly fears of the past weeks seemed blotted out, and a new holy calm took the vacant place. In this sweet and solemn mood he reviewed his late action calmly, and felt ashamed of himself for his vanity and for the obstinacy which had followed it. And then and there ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... to escape from the malice inspired by the envy my literary talent aroused? I had certainly expected that a man of the famous editor's reputation would be above such pettiness. I was too dismayed and downcast by the meanness of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... 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, three daughters of heaven, whose choir was led ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... of his defeat in the dramatic contest of 468 by 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
... was spared, probably because he 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 of ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... 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 ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse. Unexcelled as a painter 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 ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... 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
... 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 work of grace. As yet Arminianism was ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... 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 when ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... 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
... This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps alive our stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, a little less dull, than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of—I ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... repeated. "This is the end. Don't you darken my doors ag'in. I've done with you,—egg an' bird!" She closed the door, shutting out Josiah and the keen spring wind, and went back to the window, to watch him down the drive. His back looked poor and mean. It emphasized the pettiness of her victory. Even at that moment, she realized that it was the poorer part of her which had resented attack on a citadel which should be impregnable as time itself. Just then Enoch stepped into the kitchen behind her, and his voice jarred upon ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... probably to some secret instructions from St. Petersburg. It would seem, however, that the provincial henchmen of the central Government had overreached themselves in their eagerness to carry out the behest of "curbing the Jews." The pettiness of their demands, which, moreover, were illegal, such as the order to take off the hats before the officials, or to give up the seats in the trolley cars, merely served to ridicule the representatives of Russian officialdom, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... are often false, intoxicated with vanity, selfish and self-absorbed, frivolous and shallow; yet of all women, when they love, they sacrifice their personal feelings to their passion; they rise but so much the higher for all the pettiness overcome in their nature, and become sublime. Then Eugene was struck by the profound discernment and insight displayed by this woman in judging of natural affection, when a privileged affection had separated ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... As a lawyer, my life has been spent in a prolonged quarrel about money, land, houses; cattle, thieving, slandering, murdering, and other villainy. The little episodes of politics that have given variety to my career have only shown me the baseness of human nature, and the pettiness of human ambition. There are men who will fill these places and do this work, and who want and will choose nothing better. Let them have all the good they can get out of such things. But the minister of the gospel who comes down from the ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... "it is mere pettiness to carp at incidental statements on matters on which Haeckel is known to have or to exercise no peculiar authority, or to labour in determining the precise degree of evidence for the monism of the inorganic or ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... it body or spirit that rules him—his fear, lust, vanity, gluttony, surliness, or sloth? his humility, generosity, piety, sense of justice, sense of duty? Is his cardinal weakness a vice or only a foible—a crime that degrades or only a pettiness that ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... produce a poetic 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 shelter ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... are best calculated to teach the value of such co-operation; to bring home to men of all classes their essential inter-dependence on one another, as well as to bring home to each individual the pettiness and meanness of personal vanity and ambition in the presence of anything so great, so stately, as the common heritage and traditions of the ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... 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 ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... fountainhead at which we draw and drink. And to know that your waters are pure, unstained by taint of personal prejudice and the love of power, will fortify us considerably. Am I to assume, then, that above all passion and pettiness, you are an impersonal force whose innumerable daily editions reflect nothing but abstract truth, and are in no way the servants of a preconceived and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... when the organ burst forth in a kind of tender rapture, rolling pearly waves of harmony along the large spaces, and filling the dome with the foam and spray of interlacing measures, it seemed as if angels were welcoming the young child to heaven." The pettiness of a brief burial service in a private parlor or in a meagre meeting-house would not have touched her heart so profoundly, because it would not have recalled heaven so impressively in all its grandeur ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Mr. Carlyle's work, that 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... probable that close inquiry would show few if any classes to be free from immoralities that are as great, relatively to the temptations, as those which we have been exposing. Of course they will not be so petty or so gross where the circumstances do not prompt pettiness or grossness; nor so constant and organised where the class-conditions have not tended to make them habitual. But, taken with these qualifications, we think that much might be said for the proposition that the trading classes, neither better nor worse intrinsically than other ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Americans, without regard to party, let us rise to the occasion. Let us put aside partisanship and pettiness and pride. As we embark on this course, let us put our country first, remembering that regardless of party label we are all Americans. And let the final test of everything we do be a simple one: Is it good for ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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 head ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... great deed 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 ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... by the hereditary defects of its character—that is, by the particularism of the individual races and States, the theoretic dogmatism of the parties, the incapacity to sacrifice personal interests for great national objects from want of patriotism and of political common sense, often, also, by the pettiness of the prevailing ideas. Even to-day it is painful to see how the forces of the German nation, which are so restricted and confined in their activities abroad, are wasted ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... is the shrewd and witty analysis of Irish problems, the high range of vision which exposes the shortcomings and reveals the illimitable possibilities of a regenerated Ireland and the ceaseless and implacable war waged by the Editor upon all pettiness, melancholy, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... he thought he would be willing to spend his days and nights searching for him. There was neither justice nor fairness in it. He had improved steadily, even Splinter acknowledged that he had, and had passed the required exam, and yet for the sake of the professor's pettiness and the red tape of the college rules he must take another, and then if he should pass that he would be all right. Bah! Greek was bad enough, but Splinter was worse. What kind of a man was he to put in charge ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... 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, to offend ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... love. He wished to die. 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
... tried to accomplish its purpose in another way. During the gigantic wars of Napoleon Bonaparte, extending over most of the first fifteen years of the present century, "The Times" surpassed all newspapers in procuring early intelligence from the seat of war. The government stooped to the pettiness of stopping at the outposts all packages addressed to "The Times," while allowing dispatches for the ministerial journals to pass. Foreign ships bound to London were boarded at Gravesend, and papers addressed ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... like Fay, who towered head and shoulders above the ordinary run of women, removed to a height apart from their low level of pettiness and vanity, by her simplicity and nobility and capacity for devotion—could such a woman ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... folks here. 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 ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... the pettiness and the prejudice which he found in his home. Reading no books, for they thought it waste of time to read, the minds of his father and mother had sunk into such a narrow sluggishness that they could interest themselves only in trivialities. Their thoughts were ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides which our nations looked like quarreling children—feebleminded ones ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... those often 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 smallness ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Pope's election, showing already how men discerned what was in store for Valentinois. Giustiniani wrote to his Government that he had not gone lest his going should give the duke importance in the eyes of others.(1) The pettiness and meanness of the man, revealed in that dispatch, will enable you to attach to Giustiniani the label ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... the letters. There was no need of it. I knew that they were in his mind and that he was perfectly conscious of the pettiness of his action. But for me his simple ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... speechless. How could he wilfully distort facts in this barefaced way? It seemed a revelation of some incredible pettiness of character hitherto unsuspected in him. When she found her voice she ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... to themselves an eternally 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 heart-woes, 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 • Melville
... otherwise be calm, serene, and beautiful. I do not see that any of the people concerned are the better for any of the incidents which have occurred—indeed, I think that they are all the worse for them. It is not encouraging or inspiring to have the meanness and pettiness of human nature brought before one, and to feel conscious of one's own weakness and feebleness as well. Some sorrows and losses purge, brace, and strengthen. Such trials as ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The ridge of his back sloped down to hind-quarters disproportionately small, finished off with a little, meagrely tufted tail that on any beast less regal in mien and stature would have looked ridiculous. The majesty of a bull moose, however, is too secure to be marred by the incongruous pettiness of his tail. From the lower part of his neck, where the great muscles ran into the spacious, corded chest, hung a curious tuft of long and very coarse black hair, called among woodsmen the "bell." As he turned to ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... both fainter and in a measure 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 when lived, for the best remembrance makes ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... this 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 improve manners? Can ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... how to picture the Orbans' existence in Queensland. There was a touch of pettiness about it—a feeling of poverty and "hugger-muggerness," if one may coin such a word. The thought of her uncle going daily to his work in his shirt-sleeves; of her aunt helping in the housework; her cousins ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... 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 of a public man's mate; nor more ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... unquenchable truths—couched in more or less ridiculous language. I, as a rule use rhyme, he does not; therefore, I am his Superior (which is also a lake in his great and glorious country). I scorn, with the unutterable scorn of the despiser of pettiness, to take a mean advantage of him. He writes, he sells, he is read (more or less); why then should I rack my brains and my rhyming dictionary? I will see the public hanged first! I sing of America, of the United States, of the stars and stripes ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... saying the world was not worthy of his labours. "What? Expose my noble work (things he had conceived but not done) to the prate and pettiness of the common buyers who hang it on their walls! No, I will rather paint the same monotonous round of Virgin, Child, and Saints in the quiet church, in the sanctuary's gloom. No merchant then will traffic in my heart. My pictures will moulder and die. Let them die. I have not vulgarised ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... discourses upon his own work. It would be difficult to find in any literature so complete a condemnation of one's own serious and extensive endeavor, so candid a criticism of one's own work, so frank an acknowledgment of the pettiness of one's achievement. He says his work, as an imitation of Sterne's two novels, has "few or absolutely no beauties of the original, and many faults of its own." He states that his enthusiasm for Tristram ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... 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 tokens ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... 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 ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... into it—that woman he was painting. The huge picture rose up between them, parted them as with a wall, beyond which he lived with the other. That duplication of herself well nigh drove Christine mad with jealousy, and yet she was conscious of the pettiness of her sufferings, and did not dare to confess them lest he should laugh at her. However, she did not deceive herself; she fully realised that he preferred her counterfeit to herself, that her image was the worshipped one, the sole thought, the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... when those little excursions of his had been so much to her interest. She attributed 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
... gipsy encampment is to be pictured. 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 in this, when the theft by a squire, of two miserable horses, forms the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... 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 ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... education and position, being asked why he had never crossed the Atlantic, gravely replied that he could not endure to travel in a country where you had to black your own boots! Such instances of ignorance and pettiness may seem absurdly trivial, but they are quite sufficient to act as grits in the machinery of social intercourse. Americans are very fond of citing as an example of English manners the legend of a great lady who, at an American breakfast, saw her husband declining a dish which ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... seeing this exhibition of pettiness on the part of the general. He had heard more than once that German officers, from sub-lieutenants upward, were terribly severe with their men, treating them brutally, and acting as though they ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... always, Zelma, in the first hour of success, feeling, in spite of herself, the pettiness and egoism of her husband's nature, with a sense of humiliation in which it seemed her very soul blushed, offered to renounce forever the career on which she had just entered. Mr. Bury, however, angrily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... servile part of the German Press improved on these suggestions, and stigmatised the Bulgarian Revolution of the ensuing autumn as an affair trumped up at London. So far is it possible for minds of a certain type to read their own pettiness ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... probably be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes of God would not be very 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 which is to me as full of glory and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... same aim: to save the honour of the Cross 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 the second. ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... ever reflected on the fact that, despite the horrors of the war, it is at least a big thing? I mean to say that in it one is brought face to face with realities. The follies, selfishness, luxury and general pettiness of the vile commercial sort of existence led by nine-tenths of the people of the world in peace time are replaced in war by a savagery that is at least more honest and outspoken. Look at it this way: in peace ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... irregular length, and which certainly, to a partial extent, could be controlled by the will. Such a period of vital power began usually with a sensation of melancholy, and it quickened my normal revolt against the narrowness of conventional life into a red-hot detestation of the paltriness and pettiness with which so many mortals seem to content themselves. As the mood grew in intensity, this scorn of the lower things mixed with and gave place to a vivid insight into higher truths. The oppression began to give place to a realization ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... like a boy from the 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
... difference between great men and little ones—the little ones are concerned solely with to-day; the great ones think only of the future. They have gained that largeness of vision and of understanding which perceives the pettiness of everyday affairs and which disregards them for greater things. They live in the world, indeed, but in a world modified and colored by the divine ferment within them. There are some who claim that America has never produced a genius of the first order, or, at ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... present powers appeared trifling and their exercise a deed unsatisfying before this frenzy. What happiness could be achieved by flinging Blanchard into prison for a few months at most? What salve could be won from thought of this man's disgrace and social ruin? The spectacle sank into pettiness now. His blood was surging through his veins and crying for action. Primitive passion gripped him and craved primitive outlet. At that hour, in his own deepest degradation, the man came near madness, and every ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... opposing opinion without arousing antagonism, to yield a desire for the sake of a greater love than that of self, to adhere to principle without unpleasant discussion; in short, to be dignified and womanly without pettiness or littleness of any kind. You remember the words of Ruskin, that the woman must be "incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation," and that will be the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... 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 Prime-Minister read from the tribune a manifesto setting ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... the Deodars" and in "The Gadsbys." That worthy pair, with their friends, are to myself as unsympathetic, almost, as the characters in "La Conquete de Plassans." But Mr. Kipling is too much a true realist to make their selfishness and pettiness unbroken, unceasing. We know that "Gaddy" is a brave, modest, and hard-working soldier; and, when his little silly bride (who prefers being kissed by a man with waxed moustaches) lies near to death, certainly ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... months of solitude, of darkness—on board the admiral's ship, stranded in the guardship at Plymouth, bumping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had been darkness all the time. Jove! That Cuban time, with its movements, its pettiness, its intrigue, its warmth, even its villainies showed plainly enough in the chill of that blackness. It had been romance, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... his vision of the small necessary unessentials, and stared forth wide-eyed at the big simplicities of life—truth as one sees it, loyalty to one's ideal, charity toward one's beaten enemy, a steadfast front toward one's unbeaten enemy, scorn of pettiness, to be unafraid. Unless the struggle is for and by these things, it is useless, meaningless. And one's possessions—Keith's left arm tightened convulsively. He had come near to losing the only possession worth while. At ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... natures: all are there, but with them are souls reaching after God and often flowering into beauty, and we reverence the quenchless aspiration of maligned human nature for an ideal far above its reach. He achieves the rare feat of portraying every pettiness and prejudice, even the meannesses and dishonors of a poor and hidebound country village, yet leaving us with both sincere respect and warm liking for it; a thing possible only to one himself of a fine nature as well as of a large mind. Nor is there any mawkishness or cheap surface ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 the artist, ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... the cavalry of the Consular Guard, he merely remarked to Kellermann: "You made a very good charge"; to which that officer is said to have replied: "I am glad you are satisfied, general: for it has placed the crown on your head." Such pettiness was unworthy of the great captain who could design and carry through the memorable campaign of Marengo. If the climax was not worthy of the inception, yet the campaign as a whole must be pronounced a masterpiece. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... frown. The County News presented no problems, 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 ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... hopes to find in their libraries when they have come to administer homes of their own. She is directing her thinking into such channels as will bear the thoughts of her pupils out into the open sea of bigness and sublimity. Knowing that pettiness will be inimical to society in the next generation, she is careful to banish ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... That was the soul and secret of our rapid and luminous onward march. Now fifty patented, incorporated respectabilities will put the curb on, will hamper the expansion. Academies turn to fossils. My hope is that the true American spirit will soar above the vanity and pettiness of corporated wisdom, and that this scientific Academy bubble will end in inanity and in ridicule. I am sorry that Congress was taken in, and committed such a blunder. It was ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... 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 ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... 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 ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... endurance, and, as a picture, is only saved 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 ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... liked the hearty laugh with which she always ended up some jolly and well-told story. She never gave him digs about his children as other Glen women did; she never bored him with local gossip; she had no malice and no pettiness. She was always splendidly sincere. Mr. Meredith, who had picked up Miss Cornelia's way of classifying people, considered that Ellen belonged to the race of Joseph. Altogether, an admirable woman for ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... but a proof of the inherent pettiness of the actor's art, that though it places its votary in the very midst of literary and artistic influences, and of necessity informs him of the best and worthiest, he is yet, so far as his own culture is concerned, left out in the ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... better, as the use of the fingers tends towards boldness of design and vigour of execution. People, in starting a new employment, are very apt to be finiking owing to timidity, and this must be overcome from the outset—this tendency to pettiness—and in the case of modelling, the best way to overcome it is to do all the preliminary work with the fingers. Build up the design boldly and freely, studying only the principal masses and most important forms. When ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... not merely strength of temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute, persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... Queen, and that almost in the 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 ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... tasted of that bitter, no honey more seems sweet, and even the highest, sweetest bliss, the bliss of love, of perfect nearness, of complete devotion—even that loses all its magic; all its dignity is destroyed by its own pettiness, its brevity. Yes; a man loved, glowed with passion, murmured of eternal bliss, of undying raptures, and lo, no trace is left of the very worm that devoured the last relic of his withered tongue. So, on a frosty day in late autumn, when all is lifeless ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... her. It was not right, he said to himself, not right at all. She ought to show a little consideration for the men who had served her so well and faithfully. Besides, it was unworthy of her to betray such pettiness and spoil Cassie's dance. He felt for the girl's humiliation, and, though not in love with her, he was conscious of a sentiment that hated to see her hurt. He would not accept Florence's invitation to dine in the saloon, sending word that he had a headache and begged to be excused; and after ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... all that, let the sanctuary be ever so immense and imposing in its sombre gloom, the idols ever so superb, all seems in Japan but a mere semblance of grandeur. A hopeless pettiness, an irresistible effect the ludicrous, lies at the bottom of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... 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 the ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... square has its horizon—the morning-star flames out, a red and yellow sunrise burns behind the silver cloud of the Capitol dome, and the whole city, in its splendor and its squalor, bared to view, gives you a suffocating sense of the pettiness of all other places before the opulence of sky, the width and height, the light and space and air, that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... is destined. All this with Denoisel was spontaneous, natural, and instinctive. This never-ending victory of Parisian intelligence over all the extravagance of life had nothing of the meanness and pettiness of sordid calculation about it. It was the happy discovery of a scheme of existence under satisfactory conditions, and not a series of vulgar petty economies, and in the well-organized expenditure of his six hundred pounds a year the man remained liberal and high-minded: ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... was never ruffled by an outbreak of 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 baffled cabinets. The touchy pride ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... certain 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
... unsparing attacks on him; but woe to any poor devil who had the 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, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... that hedged her strange life around. In that life she had blossomed out, a fair, unique thing. There were times when Eric almost regretted that one day he must take her out of her white solitude to a world that, in the last analysis, was only Lindsay on a larger scale, with just the same pettiness of thought and feeling and opinion at the bottom of it. He wished he might keep her to himself for ever, in that old, spruce-hidden orchard ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fame, the stubborn power we call Our self-respect, our hopes of worldly good, Our jealousies and fears, how in the flood Of this new light they faded, poor and small; Showing our pettiness beside God's truth, Besides His ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... hills, or in curacies like Sydney Smith's on Salisbury Plain, or wandering sadly by the shore of 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 of nature. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Lyons or Lord Cromer, would have enlightened him on the subject and prevented him from uttering the unwarranted imputations which he did. Yet in his great parliamentary speeches of 1854 he rose high above all pettiness and made a deep impression on a hostile house. Damaging though his speech of December 22 was to the Government, no minister attempted to reply. Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, with all their power, were unequal to the task. Disraeli told Bright that a ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Nan, with high moral purpose and excellent capacity, who would make the college strong and to be respected. Not such doctors as several of whom he reminded himself, who were disgracing their sex, but those whose lives were ruled by a pettiness of detail, a lack of power, and an absence of high aim. Somehow both our friends lost much of the feeling that Nan was doing a peculiar thing, when they saw so many others following the same path. And having seen ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and warm attachment sprang up between us; our souls understood each other. I am glad and proud that she loves me and that acquaintance with me may perhaps make her happy. A heart fashioned altogether for sympathy, far above the pettiness of ordinary social circles, full of noble, pure feeling for truth and virtue, and admirable even where her sex is not usually so. I promise myself divine days in ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... 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 ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... in good form, signed by the minister of war, which will force you to do so." He drew a paper from his pocket and held it out. "Do you suppose we are such fools as to leave that girl to do as she likes? We are endeavoring to suppress a civil war, and the grandeur of the purpose covers the pettiness ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... always the most welcome guest! How often we boys would go to her 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 husband had never been! I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... people after they had lived there even a few years. The influence held good, too, in the cases of men who daily went to business or professions in New York. Even Wall Street was no sinecure. Back they would come at night, and the terrible, narrow maelstrom of pettiness sucked them in. All outside interest was as naught. International affairs seemed insignificant when once one was really ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... She 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
... quantities, or weak endings, if there is an absence in the third act of some one who appeared in the first—it is always much simpler to complain of this than to feel or describe the essence of the whole. But this very pettiness in our criticism is, fortunately, a sort of safeguard. The French writer Buffon said: "Bien crire, c'est tout; car bien crire c'est bien sentir, bien penser, et bien dire." ... Let the artist ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... shows such a marvellous activity and gives evidence of such whole-hearted enthusiasm that I cannot bring myself to join issue with the critics who have lately attacked the Schola, though their attacks have been in some degree merited. Pettiness is to be found even in great artists, and imperfection in every human work; and defects reveal themselves most clearly after a victory has been won. The Schola has not escaped the critical periods that accompany growth, through which every work must pass if it is to triumph and endure. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... desire gardens, then, nor the pettiness of plump terraced hills. She was in the Real West, and it was hers, since she had won to it by her own plodding. Her soul—if she hadn't had one, it would immediately have been provided, by special arrangement, ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis |
