"Belittled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... likely to remember is the Duke of Guise. Yet his portrait is of inferior workmanship. The murders by which he tries to reach the throne are too treacherous to be ranked in the grander scale of crime. Even the vastness of his organized massacre is belittled for us by the stage presentment of individual assassination in which Guise himself plays a butcher's part. Greatness is more often attributed to outward aloofness and inactivity than to busy participation in the execution of a plot. Moreover, it was a tactical error to ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... word that could be used to cover all of this, if we only knew its full, rich, sweet meaning. That is the little understood, the much misunderstood, much belittled-in-use word, "love." All that has been said of the character of our Lord Jesus can be found inside that four-lettered word. Each trait spoken of is but a fresh spelling of love, some one side of it. Love planned the ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... suspicion that he was not the head of the family; that Mrs. Taylor had actually usurped his powers and prerogatives; that she dared to think and act for herself and her son without much, if any, regard to him. He felt belittled and degraded; not because he was a drunkard, and neglected to provide for his family, but because he was not in fact, as he was in name, the head of the house. He was thirsty and hankering for rum, and this condition made ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... off across the room to greet Nora, and the doctor could not help observing how the attention of all the company was bent on his friend. Before his entrance all had been chatting or laughing easily with their neighbours; now they seemed as constrained and belittled as is a crowd of courtiers when a royal personage appears in their midst. In truth, Julius at all times had a grace, an ease, and a distinction of manner not unworthy of a prince; but on this occasion he had an added something, an indefinable attraction which strangely ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... set in motion by the extravagances of the Paris Commune, wished to rid themselves at the earliest possible time of this self-confident little bourgeois who seemed to stand alone between them and the realisation of their hopes. Their more unscrupulous members belittled his services and hinted that love of power alone led him to cling to the Republic, and thus belie his political past. Then, too, the Orleans princes, the Duc d'Aumale and the Prince de Joinville, the surviving sons of King ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried the book so straight to the heart of the nation. There was something noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which had started with ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... resurrection, but assert that he made use of the assumed legend concerning Jonah, as we might illustrate any fact in history by a familiar statement from fiction. To such an assumption we reply that our Lord was dealing with tremendous realities, such as could not be belittled by turning for support or illustration to a fictitious story. He quoted from Old Testament history to illustrate and enforce New Testament truth. On another occasion he said: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... of the city seemed to her now so small and so petty. Always she had known a passionate love of things fine and good. But civilization had thwarted her purposes, belittled her expression of them. Environment had driven her into grooves of convention. Here at last she ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... the epigrammatic quotations already mentioned, were more immediately concerned with his daughter. She had been proud of her father—proud! She had never belittled him with hidden pity, not even on that night when she surprised him, all in evening black and white, immaculate and wasted, before a mirror which hung over the buffet in the dining-room. He was holding a goblet in an uplifted hand, ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... could not be separated from that host of ideas and beliefs which make up the psychological side of the social structure. It was to be studied as a piece of natural history first of all. Whether it involved more than this they left to be settled later. It cannot be said that they belittled the power of religion; on the contrary, the investigations showed it to be one of the most potent of the forces that shape social institutions. But they demonstrated the absurdity of placing religion in ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... I know nothing about divine attributes or whatever you call them; but I can feel when I am being belittled. It was from you that I learnt first to respect myself. It was through you that I came to be able to walk safely through many wild and wilful paths. Dont go back on your ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... self-help; scorning to ask for aid, save what was entirely legitimate in the way of one comrade giving help to another. A number of the examining surgeons, at the muster-out, spoke to me with admiration of the contrast offered by our regiment to so many others, in the fact that our men always belittled their own bodily injuries and sufferings; so that whereas the surgeons ordinarily had to be on the look-out lest a man who was not really disabled should claim to be so, in our case they had to adopt exactly ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... kind woman, or an old priest who had seen and forgiven much, or men who knew and pitied youth, would have understood. Neither of the men to whom she spoke realized the significance of that childishly pitiful confession. Champneys felt that she had shamed his name, belittled the sacred Family which was his fetish; Glenn thought she had made a fool of him for her own amusement. Never again would he trust a woman, he told himself. And in his pain and shame, his smarting sense of having been duped, his hideous revulsion of feeling, he spoke out brutally. Nancy was ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Jack Horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all synthetic tasks and capabilities; at another time it was the industrious worker who had got a scent of OTIUM and refined luxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another occasion it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of REFUTED systems, and an extravagant expenditure which "does nobody any good". At another time the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... "Manichees," "Paulicians," etc.). The Remonstrance was answered in A Letter to Sir Walter Scott, etc., by "Harroviensis." Byron welcomed such a "Defender of the Faith," and was anxious that Murray should print the letter together with the poem. But Murray belittled the "defender," and was upbraided in turn for his slowness of heart (letter to Murray, June 6, 1822, Letters, 1901, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... unfaithful partner it is evident how strongly the patriarchal idea of woman as property has crept into the family relations. We find that a woman "who has set her face to go out and has acted the fool, has wasted her house or has belittled her husband," may either be divorced without compensation or retained in the house as the slave of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Christ is mentioned in this formula of absolution. But if you look closer you will notice that Christ's merit is belittled, while monkish merits are aggrandized. They confess Christ with their lips, and at the same time deny His power to save. I myself was at one time entangled in this error. I thought Christ was a judge and had to be pacified by a strict adherence to the ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther |
