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More "Paltry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... four months' editorial labor. "And, as you may well suppose," he says, "I have undergone very grievous vexations. Unless they pay me the whole amount shortly, I shall return to Salem, and stay there till they do." It seems a currish fate that puts such men into the grasp of paltry and sordid cares like these! But there is something deeper to be felt than dissatisfaction at the author-publisher's feeble though annoying scheme of harnessing in this rare poet to be his unpaid yet paying hack. This deeper something is the pathos of such possibilities, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... poking the young man in the ribs with his stick, an implement which he had grasped a moment before as though he meditated putting it to a less pacific use, "you young divils of business-men are too much for poor old Tobias. Ged, sir, to think of being stuck in the mud for the want of a paltry tenner! Tommy Heathcote will laugh when he hears of it. You know Tommy of the 81st? He gave me good advice: 'Always sew a fifty-pound note into the lining of each waistcoat you've got. Then you can't go short.' Tried it once, and, be George! if me demned man-servant didn't stale that ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... jewellery. 'I am looking out for a handsome gig and horse,' said Francis Ardry, at the conclusion of his narration; 'it were a burning shame that so divine a creature should have to go about a place like London on foot, or in a paltry ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Ch'un more than ever, and twisting her head round, "Even you have grown dull!" she cried. "She does, of course, indulge in expectations, but they are actuated by some underhand and paltry notion! She may go on giving way to these ideas, but I, for my part, will only care for Mr. Chia Cheng and Madame Wang. I won't care a rap for any one else. In fact, I'll be nice with such of my sisters and brothers, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... stop at a place he knew of and tell them to send her in two dozen of their best Burgundy. She must want picking-up sometimes! Only in Richmond Park did he remember that he had gone up to order himself some boots, and was surprised that he could have had so paltry an idea. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was no paltry gilding here, but massive golden cornice, frieze, plate, stud, and boss ornamenting the massive walls—glistening, sparkling, and flashing back the sun's light, while, as if these were not sufficient, emeralds and other precious ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... pretty straight anyway. We'll shake hands and I reckon I'll keep out of your track for a day or so till I size up things and put them on the new elevation." And then he went away, saying, "Good evening, Lady Valmond." I could have cried, Mamma, I felt so small and paltry. He is a great big splendid creature and I wish I had not been so silly as to pretend in the beginning. Octavia thinks him delightful. He never appeared for two days—then he came up as if nothing had happened; only ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... he was surprised, and said to himself, "These articles arc so paltry and of such trifling value as not to be worth an arbitration; for surely this shabby cap, the drum, and the wooden ball, cannot be worth altogether more than half a deenar; but I will inquire farther about ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... for surrender. The heart of the valiant Champlain was wrung. He had inspected his empty magazine and the rickety fort which the improvidence of the Company had allowed to fall into ruin. But even the weakness of his starved and paltry garrison did not affect his fortitude. Kirke's envoy was courteously dismissed, with the bold assurance that Quebec would defend itself to the last man. Champlain still clung to the hope that supplies would arrive from ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... "This is paltry," she exclaimed. "A man's actions are the actual man. He can make his own opportunities. No, Mr. Cleveland. You will never convince me of your intrinsic ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... "a man by the name of John M. Williams, of Georgetown, D.C., who was in the wood business, and kept a wharf." As to treatment, he said that he had not been used very hard, but had been worked hard and allowed but few privileges. The paltry sum of twenty-five cents a week, was all that was allowed him out of his hire. With a wife and one child this might seem a small sum, but in reality it was a liberal outlay compared with what many slaves were allowed. Perry being a ready-witted article, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Kenneth a thing of no interest or moment. Galliard had ruined him with these Ashburns. He could never now hope to win the hand of Cynthia, to achieve which he had been willing to turn both fool and knave—aye, had turned both. There was naught left him but to return him to the paltry Scottish estate of his fathers, there to meet the sneers of those who no doubt had heard that he was gone South to marry ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... with that? A merveille! Good! We can proceed. This next little fact—no! Ah, that is curious! There is something missing—a link in the chain that is not there. We examine. We search. And that little curious fact, that possibly paltry little detail that will not tally, we put it here!" He made an extravagant gesture with his hand. "It is significant! It ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... with the increased scale of living that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with "millions in it." Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... grass should never grow where the hoofs of my war-horse trod; Scythia should be mine; Persia should be mine; Rome should be mine. And look you, sir emperor, the time shall surely come when the king of the Huns shall be content not with paltry tribute and needless office, but with naught but Roman treasure and ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... they affected him in the same way, and he looked at them file past him with horror; they were so ugly and there was such meanness in their faces, it was terrifying; their features were distorted with paltry desires, and you felt they were strange to any ideas of beauty. They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity. Their humour was a low facetiousness. Sometimes he found himself looking at them to see what animal they resembled (he tried not ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. —Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, Put me where I may look at him! True peach, Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! Draw close: that conflagration of my church —What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... of our creation, has been to lead us to happiness—to perfect, abundant, eternal happiness. It would be of little account to be happy here, unless we are also to rejoice eternally. It would be a poor exchange and a paltry satisfaction, to be present at the feasts of men, only to forfeit our place at the banquet of angels. But our heavenly reward and our celestial crown are to be merited and won here below; they are to follow upon our earthly labors. "Only he shall be crowned," says St. Paul, "who has legitimately ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... up, desperately pressed by his duns, had received a small remittance from his father, a struggling Clergyman. The sum amounted to L50, just enough to pay the young fellow's bills, and leave him a paltry sovereign. Do you think he was such a fool as to have read my Circular in vain? He very wisely brought the money to me. I bought Boomerangs at 11 3/4. In 57 1/2 hours that young man was a millionnaire. He has magnificent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... in plenty to be had, but, like most of the new- comers, he was not satisfied to take fixed wages. They seemed paltry indeed compared with the drunken figures that were on every lip. In the presence of the uncertain he could not content himself with a sure thing. Nevertheless, he was soon forced to the necessity of resorting to it, for through the fog ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... takes the cigar out of his mouth. O, the vulgarity, the bestiality of it! Think of those poor patient Persian weavers who weave the tissues of their hearts into such beautiful work, and of this proud and paltry Boss, whose office should have been furnished with straw. Yes, with straw; and the souls of those poor artist-weavers will sleep in peace. O, the ignominy of having such precious pieces of workmanship under the feet and spittle of such vulgar specimens of humanity. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... was CHEPSTOWE, the poet. I am old enough to remember him; and it pleases me sometimes to call back to my mind this paltry and forgotten little literary Bombastes. As I write, I have before me some of the reviews that greeted his boisterous invasion of the regions of song. "Mr. CHEPSTOWE," said one, "has struck a note which is destined to vibrate so long as the English language ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... him with their servile complaisance, have come to offer to a new power the tribute of their petty machiavelism? Now, as then, is it not upon the basis of vanity and corruption that the whole edifice of their paltry science rests, and is it not from the traditions of the imperial government that the counsels of their wisdom ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... not the thirty dollars, to which he had limited himself in thought, but his entire month's salary,—he might lose all by the lack of a paltry dollar or so. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to renew the attack in person, or to endanger his reputation by a further defeat at the hands of men whom he had described as a nest of paltry bandits, but entrusted the direction of further operations to the Marquis de Feuquieres, who had his laurels still to win, while Catinat had his to lose. The Balsille was again completely invested by the 12th of May, according to the scheme of operations prepared ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their comfortable places ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... day the watchful girl observed the life of a student—its scholarly tastes, its high ideals, its scorn of worldliness and paltry aims or petty indulgences, and forever ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... many-coloured crotchet-mats and anti-macassars with which Miss Opie loved to decorate the apartment; nor was a paper frill adorning a paltry green flower-vase wanting to complete ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... grandfather, losses and gains were to her alike. Exulting in some brief triumph, or cast down by a defeat, there he sat so wild and restless, so feverishly and intensely anxious, so terribly eager, so ravenous for the paltry stakes, that she could have almost better borne to see him dead. And yet she was the innocent cause of all this torture, and he, gambling with such a savage thirst for gain as the most insatiable gambler never felt, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... half-a-crown or eighteenpence apiece; and, in short, do any thing and every thing that is mean and infamous. Alas for the dignity of the bar! The common mechanic, who earns his regular thirty shillings a week, the scene-shifter, the paltry play actor, enjoys more of the comforts and real respectability of human life than one of those miserable aspirants to the wool-sack, who spends his day in the desperate quest for a brief, and sits at night in his garret shivering ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... more. The boat sailed on, and they sat there talking; it was all they had to do. She asked where he came from and what his trade was, and it seemed he was nothing important, only a paltry carpenter, and his mother had a small farm. Would the lady like a simple ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... kept three cars for private use, reduced an already paltry allowance made to a dependent because the price of petrol had ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... the simple process of putting it in trenches when digging plots for early seeds. In sheds and outhouses many tasks may be found, such as making large substantial tallies for the garden; the little paltry things commonly used being simply delusive, for they are generally missing when wanted, from their liability to be trodden into the ground or kicked anywhere by a heedless foot. Make ready pea-sticks, stakes of sizes, and at odd ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... despite thy meditative air, I hold thy stock of wit but paltry pelf— Thou show'st that same grave aspect everywhere, And wouldst look thoughtful, stuffed, upon ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... shallow-pated for the production of more pretentiously polished lucubrations—aye, not even if they burn the night-light oil and hear the chimes at midnight! I will not be hoodwinked by the superficiality of your cui bono, and shall make you the answer that I am willing for an exceedingly paltry honorarium to rush into the Gordian knot and write you the most superior essays on every conceivable and inconceivable subject under the sun, as per enclosed samples which I forward respectfully for your delightful and golden opinions, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... us the impression that he was a firm believer, that he strove to live a Christian life, that he was very amiable, and that he was quite free from the paltry vice of jealousy at another's ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... difficult to reach, it looked to them, this paltry common-place ideal of theirs. For the house with its four bedrooms would have to be enlarged; for the girls' education, with its Anglo-French and stumbling music, would have to be adorned by the requisite accomplishments. This ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... truly at my disposal. But there is one discrepancy between your vision and the fact—I will not wear the silk robes, nor welcome the pilgrims with the assurance that they have here reached the City of God. I will not because I cannot. I refuse to accept from the hand of God such paltry things as money and display, or even the honest affluence of our people, as compensation for the fire and blood through which we have waded. If there be a God who is the shepherd of those who seek him, this is not the sort of table that he spreads, this is not the cup which he causes to run ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... directly replying to the Colonel, "there is a base conspiracy got up against me; and I can perceive, moreover, that there is evidently some unaccountable intention on the part of Colonel B. to insult my feelings and injure my character. When paltry circumstances that have occurred above ten years ago, are raked up in my teeth, I have little to say, but that it proves how very badly off the Colonel must have been for an imputation against my conduct and discretion as his agent, since he finds himself compelled ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... had access to men in the very highest positions—to ministers, ambassadors, to the sons of a king, and even to the late king himself, it is much to his credit that he has contented himself with a paltry riband and a modest place, as Conservateur de la Bibliotheque Mazarine. M. de Sacy belongs to a Jansenist family. Apropos of this, M. Texier tells a pleasant story concerning him. A Roman Catholic writer addressing him one day in the small gallery reserved for the journalist ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... wise men fable call, Give paltry facts the mighty range; To me it seems just what should ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... time, the fashion had so far changed, that the poetical progeny of old Ben seem to have incurred more ridicule than honour by this ambitious distinction. Oldwit, in Shadwell's play, called Bury Fair, is described as "a paltry old-fashioned wit and punner of the last age, that pretends to have been one of Ben Jonson's sons, and to have seen plays ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... twenty millions engaged in occupations? Even you laugh at the idea. Does the middle class, with its eight million occupied members? No more than the proletariat. Who, then, controls the government? The Plutocracy, with its paltry quarter of a million of occupied members. But this quarter of a million does not control the government, though it renders yeoman service. It is the brain of the Plutocracy that controls the government, and this brain ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... houses on the banks, as I had understood was the case. The few that are seen have a slovenly, neglected appearance, by no means announcing the splendours and riches of the great mercantile city we had now nearly reached. Paltry wine-houses, with shabby gardens, border the river, and flat meadows and reclaimed marshes give a meagre effect to the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... cannot help one's dear friends in distress. Still, I know you wouldn't let me help you, for men of your stamp cannot borrow from a woman, no matter how desperate their need. And yet—you only need a paltry fifty thousand dollars!" ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... Brotteaux stood surety for the monk's good faith; Brotteaux himself was reputed to believe only a part of what he said. His ideas were too singular not to appear affected and satisfied nobody entirely. He dubbed Jean-Jacques a dull, paltry rascal. Voltaire, on the other hand, he accounted among the divinely-gifted men, though not on the same level as the amiable Helvetius, or Diderot, or the Baron d'Holbach. In his opinion the greatest ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... illumined by this new knowledge; the world lay newly made under my eyes. Vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea of a great country, when I exchanged Polotzk for America, it was no such enlargement as I now experienced, when in place of the measurable earth, with its paltry tale of historic centuries, I was given the illimitable universe to contemplate, with the numberless aeons of ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the blood again coursing warmly in his veins, all that was paltry and depressing passed from his mind and heart, as a mist is rolled away by the wind. The sweet, wild air, that in those regions is an elixir of life to the stranger, making him young if he be old, and if he be young making him feel as demigods ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... head: "What do you know about it, Bessie? It is dreadfully hard on an ambitious fellow to be forced to turn his back on all his fine visions of usefulness and distinction for the paltry fear that death may ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... hope that he could ever make good enough to dare to ask her to marry him. The sky and the air were rare, but his thoughts were rarer still, and his soul was lifted up with joy. He was earning good wages now. In two more weeks he would have enough to pay back the paltry sum for the lack of which he had fled from his old home and come to the wilderness. He would go back, of course, and straighten out the old score. Then what? Should he stay in the East and go back to the old business wherewith he had hoped to make his name honored and gain wealth, or should ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... shopping, and the colonel was perpetually leaving the young people to fire shots at sea-gulls and gannets, greatly to the astonishment of the passers-by, who could not conceive why any man should waste his powder on such paltry game. ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... Sh&-bo-bo-ah have also a great number of mules, which among the Indians I find are much more highly prized than horses. an eligant horse may be purchased of the natives in this country for a lew peads or other paltry trinkets which in the U States would not cost more than one or two dollars. This abundance and cheapness of horses will be extremely advantageous to those who may hereafter attemt the fir trade to the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... you mean to let your gifts go to waste? To bury your talent? Do you think your paltry achievements at Leipsic amount to the ne plus ultra of genius? Let us but once get to the great world—Paris and London! where you get your ears boxed if you salute a man as honest. It is a real jubilee to practise one's handicraft ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Why, everyone owns That is natural, 'neath the black flag and cross-bones. No mere paltry maker of fireworks am I, But a Rover who's free, whose sole roof is the sky. The law of the land may the petty appal. But frighten the Rover? Oh no, not at all! And ne'er to Commissions or Colonels I'll yield, Whilst there's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... he has. His work in the university I have fairly gloated over. And yet—and yet, Dr. Kennedy, can you not see that I am different from Jack? What would I do with the income of the wife of even the dean of the new school? The annuity provided for me in that will is paltry. I need millions. From the tiniest baby I have been reared that way. I have always expected this fortune. I have been given everything I wanted. But it is different when one is married—you must have your own money. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... a fickle heart, Mine of a paltry love: Take it or leave it as you will, I wash my ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... there ought to have been six when I was promoted, so the whole duty fell heavily on me. The rest had been wounded at some time or other before, and then never pushed on much to get back to their regiment; many when recovered preferring to skulk in the hospitals in paltry situations such as doorkeepers or ward-masters, so getting a little extra pay, and then, as I shall again have occasion to show, being too ready to make their appearance when the war was over. Fortunately, however, ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... venture, nothing gain," replied Lawrence to the old merchant's good advice. "I am not content to eke out a thousand or two dollars every year, and, at the age of fifty or sixty, retire from business on a paltry twenty or thirty thousand dollars. I must get rich fast, ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... Before the castle lies a vast green sward the trees of which had recently been cut down. On either side of the entrance bridge are two small dwellings where the gardeners live, connected across the road by a paltry iron railing without character, evidently modern. To right and left of the lawn, which is divided in two by a paved road-way, are the stables, cow-sheds, barns, wood-house, bakery, poultry-yard, and ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... home and all its pleasures, Afric's coast I left forlorn, To increase a stranger's treasures, O'er the raging billows borne; Men from England bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold; But, though theirs they have enroll'd me, Minds are never to ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... advantage of us, but can only admire them for knowing how to take advantage of a good opportunity. We had the opportunity first; it was offered us in the first instance by Persia which needed a loan of a paltry sixty million francs, or a little over two million pounds sterling. The concession was offered as a guarantee for the loan, but we, as usual, temporised and thought it over and argued—especially the people who ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... in that of the species only. It is taken for granted that anything that is high, great, or noble by its very nature stands isolated in a world where no better expression can be found to signify what is base and paltry than the term which I have mentioned as being ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... friends, and part forever. Before we became such intimate friends there was something within that told us we were destined to mingle our lives. Let our souls never know that we have parted upon earth; let not the paltry chance of a moment undo our ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... herself. He might be a cad, but he was real; his honest love possessed him body and soul. It was a matter of expediency to her; a thing to debate with herself, to dally over, with paltry pros ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... gifts, and these you are intending to abuse in a shameless way, like a bad crafty knave, and so putting your knife at your own mother's throat? You mean to say you are going to traffic in justice as in some cheap paltry ware in the public market, and weigh it out with false scales to the poor peasants and the oppressed burgher, who in vain utter their plaintive cries before the soft-cushioned seat of the inexorable judge, and going ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... down as accessories to the whole, should yet be worked out so carefully as to possess individual merit of their own. I see, though; I see how to remedy the defect you have suggested. I can easily bring him out by darkening the shadows of the background. Then, this fairy at his elbow is paltry, and too near him besides. I shall paint her out altogether. She takes the eye off my principal figures, and breaks that grand line of light pouring in from the morning sky. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... of the public spirit shown by the U.V.F. in the first month of the war was a paltry recompense for the Government's breach of faith, as Mr. Bonar Law immediately pointed out in a stinging rejoinder. The leader of the Opposition concluded his powerful indictment by saying that such conduct by the Government ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... this young soldier came in I had caught bits of speech in the clatter and din From the fine men about me in life's dress parade Who were boasting the cash sacrifices they'd made; And I'd thought of my own paltry service with pride, When I turned and that ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... interfere with my voting on that day," the bishop declared, with grim emphasis. "We must dispose of this fellow's pretensions once for all. It is preposterous that a professional baseball player and street-car conductor should aspire to become mayor of Warwick. An orator? Nonsense! Just a paltry gift of the gab. Balaam's is n't the only ass whose mouth the Lord in his inscrutable wisdom has seen ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Shirley. I would tell him all about my finding the gold in the mound. It touched me to think that these poor fellows, who did all that they could to help us escape, and then, when they got safely home, started immediately to find us in order that they might give us some of that paltry twelve thousand dollars—give to us, who are actually millionaires, and who may be richer yet! It would not do to let any of the crew get ahead of their captain in fair dealing, and that was one reason why I determined to tell him. Then, there was another ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... and price. The loads from the seed depots and outworks, come rolling up in the afternoon, and have all to be weighed, checked, noted down, and examined. Every man's hand is against you. You cannot trust your own servants. For a paltry bribe they will try to pass a bad parcel of seed, and even when you have your European assistants to help you, it is hard work to avoid being over-reached ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... that their instinct teaches them they must deposit their eggs. You can hardly find them by day, for they are cunning and secrete themselves. "They love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil." They are a paltry looking, insignificant little grey-haired pestilent race of wax-and-honey-eating and bee-destroying rascals, that have baffled all contrivances that ingenuity has devised to conquer ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... scrutinize this triumph of order, to depict this government so vigorous, so firm, so well-based, so strong, having on its side a crowd of paltry youths, who have more ambition than boots, dandies and beggars; sustained on the Bourse by Fould the Jew, and in the Church by Montalembert the Catholic; esteemed by women who would fain pass for maids, by men who want to be prefects; resting on a coalition of prostitutions; ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... you. You'll come to dinner, George? [Aside to Mrs Ford] Look who comes yonder: she shall be our messenger to this paltry knight. ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... rights again. But when he heard the fatal trick played by the false merchants he was ready to throw himself out of the window, cursing a thousand times the ignorance of his daughter, who, for the sake of a silly doll had turned him into a miserable scarecrow, and for a paltry thing of rags had brought him to rags himself, adding that he was resolved to go wandering about the world like a bad shilling, until he should get tidings of those merchants. So saying he threw a cloak about his neck and a wallet on his back, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended until the next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then, when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the editor as a convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with either of them. At the age of fifteen he considered himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... at last, when she offered him a monetary consideration in exchange for his silence. "But I am not content with a few paltry roubles. I am collecting for my new monastery at Kertch, and what you give will atone to God ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... sometimes, but rarely, Clarendon accompanied me: he had become more retired; his spirits had declined with mine; and though he was glad I should go out and amuse myself, yet he was always exact as to the hours of my return. I was often late—later than I ought to have been, and I made a multitude of paltry excuses; this it was, I believe, which first shook his faith in my truth; but I was soon detected ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... an idol in the market-place of Altdorf, to which he requireth blind homage to be paid by fools and cowards. Now, the King of Babylon's idol, the prophet tells us, was of solid gold, a metal which the world is, I grieve to say, too prone to worship; but Gessler's paltry Baal is but the empty ducal bonnet of Austria, which he hath exalted on a pole; and he commands the men of Uri to bow down before it, under penalty of death. Wouldst thou wish thy husband to degrade the name of a Swiss, by ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... down his master's shutter! In a musty play, observe the jailor at the dungeon door! Without massive keys jingling at the belt the older drama must have been a weakling. Only lovers, then, dared to laugh at locksmiths. But now locksmiths sit brooding on the past, shriveled to mean uses, ready for paltry kitchen jobs. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Wagner self-willed and perverse because he could not conform to their notions of what is right for an artist, who attempt to measure an infinite mind by the paltry canons of self-interest, reflect upon the harvest that we are now reaping from his unswerving loyalty to his art. To him alone, and to the conductors whom he trained, do we owe the almost perfect performances of our modern orchestras. It has been truly observed that ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... skillful fingers, and how her pleasure in her appearance had been turned into humiliation by Simeon's petty tyranny, when she asked him to pay for her hat. And then she was ashamed of her own thoughts—distressed that she had let the paltry reminiscence force itself into her mind; for great happiness should put us in charity with all. Never again would she allow an unkind remembrance to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... done in the event of the non-arrival of the rescue party within a reasonable limit; Seth fretting and worrying himself the while as much as any, although he tried to preserve a quiet demeanour in order to reassure the rest, and exclaiming against the "paltry wounds," as he called them—which gave him much pain in spite of Jasper continually soaking the bandages around them with cold water in pursuance of his directions—that prevented him from taking an active part in his protege's recovery, instead of waiting idly ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... is indeed sad to see professors, for the sake of paltry pelf, or to escape from persecution, denying the Lord Jesus. It subjects religion to scorn and contempt, and doubles the sorrows and sufferings of real Christians. Bunyan expresses himself here in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... data, to reason from, must be established, admitted, or denied. Mr. Burke with his usual outrage, abused the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls "paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man." Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things as rights anywhere, and that he has none himself; for who is ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... an appointment and a liberal pension. "Can I leave my good Emperor?" said Mozart with emotion. The proposal, however, made its impression, and shortly afterwards probably encouraged him, at Vienna, on occasion of fresh intrigues against him, to tender his resignation of his paltry situation there. But a kind-like appeal from his imperial patron drove him at once from his intention, and fixed him where he was. It was afterwards hinted to him that he might, at least, have taken this opportunity to stipulate for a better provision for himself. "Satan himself," he replied, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... suck'd his victuals thro' a quill. Untouch'd it pass'd between his grinders, Or't had been happy for gold-finders: He cock'd his hat, you would have said Mambrino's[3] helm adorn'd his head; Whene'er he chanced his hands to lay On magazines of corn or hay, Gold ready coin'd appear'd instead Of paltry provender and bread; Hence, we are by wise farmers told[4] Old hay is equal to old gold:[5] And hence a critic deep maintains We learn'd to weigh our gold by grains. This fool had got a lucky hit; And people fancied he had wit, Two gods their skill in music tried And both chose ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... demand upon its protection; for the State is like fortune, it comes only to the rich. This estate, well managed, will become, in the course of time, one of the finest in France; it will be the pride of your grandson, who may then find the chateau paltry, comparing it with ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... petty perfidy, Have I not seen what human things could do? From the loud roar of foaming calumny To the small whisper of the as paltry few, And subtler venom of the reptile crew, The Janus glance of whose significant eye, Learning to lie with silence, would SEEM true, And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh, Deal round to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... drag him forth; Hang him, I say, and set his quarters up: And bring his head back presently to me. Q. Isab. For my sake, sweet son, pity Mortimer! Y. Mor. Madam, entreat not: I will rather die Than sue for life unto a paltry boy. K. Edw. Third. Hence with the traitor, with the murderer! Y. Mor. Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel There is a point, to which when men aspire, They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd, And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... The wife gossiped as usual, with a tap now and then to the child, a bone to the dogs, and a smile to the philosopher. Not once did Heurtebise turn towards us, and yet he was not asleep. I hardly know whether he thought. Dear, valiant fellow! In those paltry and ceaseless struggles, the mainspring of his strong nature had broken, and he was already beginning to die. The silent death agony, which however was rather an abandonment of life, lasted several months; and then Madame Heurtebise found herself a widow. Then, as no tears had dimmed ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... had been doing seemed so paltry. To carry a glass of jelly to the Crisps, a pot of pink hyacinths to Miss Marietta, to write a letter for Aunt Cindy, to sit for an hour with Mrs. Bisbee,—these all were so trivial and pitifully ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... had seen, and ordered an immediate search to be made for the keys of those apartments. She apprehended that some person had penetrated that part of the edifice with an intention of plunder; and, disdaining a paltry fear where her duty was concerned, she summoned the servants of the castle, with an intention of accompanying them thither. Vincent smiled at her apprehensions, and imputed what she had seen to an illusion, which the solemnity of the hour had impressed upon her ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... to think that from the Fall till now man has gone on continually producing and reproducing scenes like this—sometimes, no doubt, unavoidably; but often, too often, because of some trifling error, or insult, on the part of statesmen, or some paltry dispute about a boundary, or, not infrequently, on grounds so shadowy and complex that succeeding historians have found it almost impossible to convey the meaning thereof to the intellects ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... state the right of rapine and murder. For this is the line of argument pursued by the representative of Athens in the Melian Debate. The substance of what he says may briefly be stated as follows "You are weak—we are strong; Melos is a paltry island, Athens is queen of the Aegaean, and the existence of an independent city in these waters is an insult to her empire. Let us waste no time in discussions about abstract law and right. For the mighty there is but one law—to get what they can, and to keep it; and the weak have ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... of the best families, whom he boarded on his own terms and undertook to instruct in the French and Latin languages, so as to qualify them for the colleges of Westminster and Eton. While this plan was in its infancy, he was so fortunate as to meet with Jennings, who, for the paltry consideration of thirty pounds a year, which his necessities compelled him to accept, took the whole trouble of educating the children upon himself, contrived an excellent system for that purpose, and, by his assiduity and knowledge, executed all the particulars to the entire ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only occasionally they matter. And this is only when something threatens us from the outer mechanical, or accidental death-world. When anything threatens us from the world of death, then ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... did—I knew right off that that invention was what we had to have to make our business a success; without it every cent the other stockholders and myself had put into the thing would be lost. I offered the young fellow a paltry amount, and when he wouldn't accept it, I let him go away. Our engineers worked hard to get his idea, but they couldn't. After a few months he came back. He looked ill and he was shabby and low-spirited. ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... he said, "that though you forgot you were my son, and refused to act as my son, when you withheld the paltry sum for which I begged, yet I could not refrain from coming once more to look on my child's face—to look on the face of my departed wife in yours—for I know that a very brief period must finish ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... hundreds of others, as shallow-pated as himself, had been made to believe such was the case, and vituperation being the easiest of all ignoble occupations, they had probably done their best to circulate the paltry slander. Lord Elgin, however, needs no goose-quill defender; the unprecedented increasing prosperity of the colony under his administration is the most valuable testimony he could desire. It is not every governor who, on his arrival, finding a colony in confusion and rebellion, has ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... he could not rest if he thought there was an aching heart in the whole parish. Every paltry cottage was in a little time converted into a pretty, snug, comfortable habitation, with a wooden porch at the door, glass casements in the windows, and a little garden behind, well stored with greens, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... said Mr. Oldbuck, with great contempt; "will you speak of your paltry prose-doings in my presence, whose great Historical Poem, in twenty books, with notes in proportion, has been postponed ad Grcecas Kalendas?" The Preses, who appeared to suffer a great deal during this discussion, now spoke with dignity and determination. "Gentlemen," he said, "this sort ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... whether a verbal manifesto against hostile aggression, or a single cannon shot on the frontier, would not have served the purpose of protest. But assuredly all men of good feeling will be with us in our rejection of these paltry counsels. Mere utilitarianism is no sufficient ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... thought, as her face was close to the child's, "I wonder if I look to my little girl as Cousin Hetty used to look to me?" and startled and shocked that the idea kept recurring to her, assuming an importance she was not willing to give it, she cried out to herself, "Oh, stop being so paltry about that!" ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... posterity, Lord Timothy Dexter has a right to historic immortality. If the true American spirit shows itself most clearly in boundless self-assertion, Timothy Dexter is the great original American egotist. If to throw off the shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry rules and examples of grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special province and the chartered privilege of the American writer, Timothy Dexter is the founder of a new school, which tramples under foot the conventionalities that hampered and subjugated ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and Baboo CHUCKERBUTTY RAM attended for the purpose of arranging their evidence, when I regret to say the former made a rather paltry exhibition of himself, being declared by Mr SMARTLE himself to be totally incompetent to prove anything whatever material to the case, and I am therefore resolved to refuse ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... my silent, lonely life, and this dull house—and I always a reserved and seeming loveless man—you may well pine for something more, some lighter, gayer time, and ever brood over the means to find it. But remember, my son, that you are by birth above the paltry pleasures of the herd; that you can come to me and ask for money if you covet some pastime that befits you; that you need conceal nothing from me—have no friend that I may ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... possess. What is a draughty doorway to an old Norman portal, massively arched and quaintly sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of fancy may see the ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass noiselessly to and fro? What is a paltry piazza to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth century—a long stone gallery or cloister repeated in two stories, with the interstices of its carven lattice now glazed, but with its long, low, narrow, charming ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... it is, John, We've long watch'd your career, You take your fags' advice to save Your paltry sums ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... alcaldes share with these people that which might bring them some profit; but usually they furnish the commodities which they bring from Manila, at the very highest prices, receiving in exchange those of the provinces at the lowest and most paltry rates." ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... ruins of ancient Greece, we found nothing but pusillanimous, sham imitations of Egyptian art. Would we not despise such a paltry method of making matter serve for mind—such a miserable make-shift to save the labor of invention? And yet it is this same servile imitation of classical and foreign models that is fettering the progress of art in America. Instead of honestly constructing what we want, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Philip, they do purchase human life cheap, and make a rare profit of it, for without these poor fellows how could they hold their possessions in spite of native and foreign enemies? For what a paltry and cheap annuity do these men sell their lives? For what a miserable pittance do they dare all the horrors of a most deadly climate, without a chance, a hope of return to their native land, where they might haply repair their exhausted energies, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... hapless broils Between your sovereign and some of you. Yet let me thank you for this worthless life— Worthless indeed, could I so lightly join So grave a cause as yours. Still deem me not The serf of custom to uphold a wrong, Or slave of tyrants to deny a right, Or such a one whose brib'd and paltry soul Aims shafts of malice at a patriot's heart, Hating the deed he cannot estimate: As if, when some great exile to our land Whose lips were touched with freedom's sacred fire, But poor in wealth as virtue's ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... and seemed to hesitate. Suddenly he wheeled his horse and blew a blast upon his bugle. "Back!" he cried somewhat bitterly. "We will not linger here for a paltry doe. Let us leave this cursed wood and this crusty hermit. Back to our own demesne, where we shall find sport ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... conduct, and 'tis incongruous, 'tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame—the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race—he "who can soar above this little scene of things"—can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terraefilial race fret, and fume, and vex themselves! O how the glorious triumph swells my heart! I forget that I am a poor, insignificant devil, unnoticed and unknown, stalking up and down fairs and markets, when I happen to be in them, reading a page or ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the residence of the American consul. European states had purchased immunity for their commerce by paying tribute to these rapacious pirates; and the United States had followed the custom. The Pasha of Tripoli, however, was dissatisfied with the American tribute, a paltry eighty-three thousand dollars, and demanded more. The other Barbary powers threatened to make common cause with him. Anticipating trouble, Jefferson had sent a small squadron to the Mediterranean even before the dramatic act of the Pasha at the American consulate; and hostilities began on ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... going to command, would be like that; if we weren't like it, we wouldn't be any good as officers. This Artillery School had a violent way of sifting out a man's moral worth; you hadn't much conceit left by the end of it. I had not felt myself so paltry since the day when I was left at my first ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... arts she tries, The tint of cheek, the gold of hair, To mimic nature for the eyes Of those who scorn her paltry care, And spurn those charms—if aught abide Within her beauty's narrowed scope— Now touched with less a wanton's pride Than with ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... Forces, and to whose credit there stood at the Bank of England, as Mr. Trevelyan assures us, a million pounds of the public money, the interest of which was paid to him "or to his creditors." This was a much better thing than Grosvenor Bedford had with his paltry collectorship at Philadelphia; and the interest on a million pounds, more or less, had it been diverted from Mr. Rigby's pocket to the public treasury, would perhaps have equaled the entire increase in the ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... never, except in a few faint glimpses, seen anything glorious or good in human nature. With these the feeling of humanity has a perpetual struggle for existence, their minds tend by a fatal gravitation to the belief that the happiness or misery of such a paltry race is wholly unimportant; they may arrive finally at a fixed condition, in which it may be said of them without qualification, that "man delights not them, nor woman neither." In this final stage they are men who, beyond the routine of life, should not be trusted, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... an old proverb, 'Shoemaker, stick to thy last;' it seems that thou shouldst stick to thy needle. Thou hast not, indeed, merited much mercy at my hands, but one has supplicated for thee, whom this day I can refuse nothing; therefore give I thee thy paltry life; but, if I may advise, haste ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... of Him who has made Himself the Saviour should receive the prayers of women, cannot affect, so far as I can see, purity, religious sanctity, or religious sentiment itself. But here is where the change begins. In order to accommodate a religion to all natures, all sorts of petty, miserable, paltry things are introduced. The pomp of the ceremonies, instead of being a true pomp which lays hold on the soul, often degenerates into a commerce in relics, medals, of little saints and Virgins. To what, gentlemen, do the minds of children, curious, ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... meanest services. Our readers need not be disquieted with details; though our own equanimity has been sorely disturbed as we have seen scribblers dragging from the skies a "name at which the world grows pale, to point a moral, or adorn a tale." Political squibs, paltry chapbooks, puny satires, and penny imbecilities, too numerous for mention here, with an occasional publication of merit, have been printed and sold at the expense of the man in the moon. For the sake of the curious we place the titles and dates of some of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... hoard of her own, as many of them have—a thousand pounds or so in a stocking. Had she put by thirty pounds a year, as well she might, for the thirty years of her marriage, there would have been nine hundred pounds clear, and no mistake. But still I was angry to think that any such paltry concealment had been practised—concealment too of MY money; so I turned on her pretty sharply, and continued my speech. "You say, Ma'am, that you are rich, and that Pump and Aldgate's failure has no effect upon you. I am very happy to hear you say so, Ma'am—very happy that you ARE rich; ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pounds, exclusive of the annuity, in her hands, adding, that if she did not pack up the best half of every thing, it was her own fault. Look at this, ye venal, calumniating crew, and hide your diminished heads. Ye paltry tools of the Baronet, ye Places, Adamses, Clearys, Brookses, and Richters, belonging to the Rump of Westminster! You have dragged this statement forth, you have given me an opportunity of doing justice to ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... who, according to Mr Maher's sworn testimony, "desire no such improvements, even when they are paid promptly for their execution;" or that drainage will be effected, in the hope of their being allowed a paltry consideration in case they are dispossessed, "by persons who threaten with death those who are willing to give them at once the full value of their labour?" Not a bit of it. Any attempt to legislate on the subject will only increase the present difficulties. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... saw house upon house, patches of yellow corn-land and green meadows; and food was so scarce that a gentlemanly old raven had to fly miles and miles for a paltry sow's ear. ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... sold into such cruel slavery should be estranged from the fathers who for a few paltry ducats sell the liberty and happiness of their children. Even where the contract is for a limited terms of years, the boys in five cases out of ten are not returned at the appointed time. A part, unable to bear the hardships and privations of the life upon which ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... nature: he seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. Just in the same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness. How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal? No, if it is desirable that man should triumph over the cruelty ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to which his capture of Lusigny was to be the first step. He would enjoy that greatness not a whit the less because fortune had hitherto dealt out to him more blows than caresses, and he was still at forty, after a score of years of roughest service, the governor of a paltry ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... as he went homewards by himself, was disturbed by various thoughts. If it really was to be the case that Polly Neefit wouldn't have him, why should he stay in a country so ill-adapted to his manner of thinking as this? Why remain in a paltry island while all the starry west, with its brilliant promises, was open to him? Here he could only quarrel with his father, and become a rebel, and perhaps live to find himself in a jail. And then what ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "long blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... by drawing me aside into the room in which we had supped, where, after rallying me on the whimsical notion of the Grand Master of the Ordnance and Governor of the Bastile being besieged in a paltry inn, he confessed that he had been wrong, and that the adventure was likely to prove serious. "Ten to one this is the very band that Bareilles ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... incidents—of that direful night? The lean figure in the black frock-coat, and black silk waistcoat, with that great gleaming watch-chain, the long, shabby, withered face, and flushed, bald forehead; and those paltry little eyes, in their pink setting, that nevertheless fascinated her like the gaze of a serpent. How had that horrible figure come there—why was this meeting—whence his knowledge? An evil spirit incarnate he seemed to her. She blanched before it—every vestige ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... is useless to palliate, let our other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his life we are certain that he wished it undone—the death and eating of that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke. Lampe had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke, under pretence of teaching him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to murder him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting himself, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... shall consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character are clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities and shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was, with his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and paltry self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom. I cannot but think that his portrait will thus gain more in truth than it can lose in ideal beauty. Or let me come nearer to my purpose by means of a simile. Talking with Sir David Gill one evening on ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... slight angular figure, who was still on her mother's hands. The illustrious matches made by her sisters had, in fact, been secured by extravagant dowering, which had left nothing for poor Lady Constance except a miserable three hundred pounds a year, at which paltry figure no man had as yet offered to take her. The Countess (Dowager) habitually assumed that Marmaduke Lind ardently desired the hand of his cousin; and Constance herself supported tacitly this view; but the Earl was apt to become restive when it was put forward, though he ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... and his paltry measure of self-control with it, Matey started to chase Finn with a stick. Now and again he succeeded in getting a blow home, as Finn wheeled and leapt before him within the narrow limits of the yard; and every time the stick touched him Finn barked angrily. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... three-penny tax on tea, or the paltry tax on paper and sugar to which our revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with the taxation of the women of this Republic? The orphaned Pixley sisters, six dollars a day; and even the women who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... compartment, which, fortunately, I continued to have all to myself, and was soon being rolled westward across the great Musashi plain, ruminating. My chief quarrel with railway rules is, I am inclined to think, that they preach to the public what they fail to practice themselves. After having denied me a paltry five minutes' grace at the station, the officials proceeded to lose half an hour on the road in a most exasperating manner. Of course the delay was quite exceptional. Such a thing had never happened before, and would not happen again—till the next time. But the phenomenal character ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... moulding whatever we look at into the forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted. There is our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to reproduce things as we know they certainly are, or we ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... is a small and shallow stream. Although from the extent of the stockade Mogoung has evidently in former periods (during the Shan dynasty) been of extent and consequence, it is at present a mean and paltry town. It derives any little consequence it possesses from being the rendezvous of the Shan-Chinese, who flock here annually for ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Ottawa woman, for she knew that she stood in the presence of the god of her people, the Great Michabou. Nor was that awe and fear diminished, when the angry god spoke in a voice of thunder to the Great Elk, demanding why he had enticed the son whom he loved into a marriage with the daughter of a paltry Elk. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... So, with a paltry excuse, he jumped out of the carriage before it reached the gate, and stood looking after it, holding his hat—the glossy tuba which Giovanna had with her elbow stroked and stroked the right way of the silk, when she laid out her signorino's ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... head of each procession walked an Indian beating a drum, tap, tap, tap, without a vestige of time. The other processions with stoles and canopies, and the officials of the city in dress-coats and yellow kid gloves, were paltry affairs enough. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... her. I had no dislike to the work, and our gains were very large; but I was anxious to get back to India to secure the reward which had been promised me. It may seem strange that I should be eager after a sum which was paltry, compared to what I was now making; but I did not like to lose what I considered my right, gained, too, with so ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... to think that sober ecclesiastical influences contribute a serious grace to the life of Oxford, yet I am glad to feel that the spirit of the place is liberal rather than ecclesiastical. Such traces as one sees in the chapels of the Oxford Movement, in the shape of paltry stained glass, starved reredoses, modern Gothic woodwork, would be purely deplorable from the artistic point of view, if they did not possess a historical interest. They speak of interrupted development, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... are doing their duty to themselves and their families when they move heaven and earth to rise a few steps in the world. The moment we find ambition taking a purely social form, it becomes ridiculous. The aim is so paltry in comparison with the effort, and so out of proportion with the energy- exerted to attain it, that one can only laugh and wonder! Unfortunately, signs of this puerile spirit (peculiar to the last quarter of the nineteenth century) can be seen on all ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... discreet, To know where wisdom prompts, and where conceit. Alike their draughts to every scribbler's mind (Blind to their faults as to their danger blind); - We write enraptured, and we write in haste, Dream idle dreams, and call them things of taste, Improvement trace in every paltry line, And see, transported, every dull design; Are seldom cautious, all advice detest, And ever think our own opinions best; Nor shows my Muse a muse-like spirit here, Who bids me pause, before I persevere. But she—who shrinks ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... for not being as prompt as himself)—he, of course, looked sulky and answered shortly. Then you pouted and finally worked yourself into quite a temper over his inconsiderateness and crankiness because of that paltry little fifteen minutes he had to wait. He worked himself into a temper because you were not on time; you worked yourself into a temper because he wasn't "nice." All that working ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... ordered off contrary to his wishes), and which might have been anticipated by those who appointed me to the situation; but it would have been derogatory to the exalted rank of their highnesses to bestow any consideration on such trivial matters as related to the comfort or convenience of a paltry apprentice! Their neglect, however, might have been attended on this occasion with serious consequences to the Company's interests, as I had never seen any of the Indians of that quarter before, and knew very little of their mode of trading. It ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... paltry trash!" said Edward, with the same emotion. "No, father, it was rivalry—it was jealous rage—it was the love of Mary Avenel, that rendered me the unnatural ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... throne burdened by the debts of his father, and by an expensive war, which the Commons incited, but would not pay for. They granted him, to meet his difficulties and maintain his honor, the paltry sum of one hundred and forty thousand pounds, and the duties of tonnage and poundage, not for life, as was customary, but for a year. Nothing could be more provoking to a young king. Of course, the money was soon ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... thou speak'st, and like thyself, my lord, Whom I may term a Damon for thy love: Therefore 'tis best, if so it like you all, To send my thousand horse incontinent [9] To apprehend that paltry Scythian. How like you this, my honourable lords? Is it not a ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... Adelaide de Montemare known from the court of Castile to that of Byzantium. And how was I requited?—When I returned with my dear-bought honours, purchased by toil and blood, I found her wedded to a Gascon squire, whose name was never heard beyond the limits of his own paltry domain! Truly did I love her, and bitterly did I revenge me of her broken faith! But my vengeance has recoiled on myself. Since that day I have separated myself from life and its ties—My manhood must know no domestic home—must ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... life totally opposite to that which is found beside the silver streams of the Tweed and its tributaries. When we passed near any of these spots, we were sure to catch the unlovely details, so frequently, though so unnecessarily attendant on factory-life—the paltry house, the unpaved, unscavengered street, the fry of dirty children. It was a beautiful tract of natural scenery in the process of being degraded by contact with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... blaspheme when ye say that a few paltry speeches of yours about God and souls will make me fail my mother's memory and the remembrances of ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... made that home so dear to your boyhood, so real to your after-years,—standing amid all the flights of your youthful ambition, and your paltry cares (for they seem paltry now), and your doubts, and anxieties and weaknesses of heart, like the light of your hope—burning ever there under the shadow of the sycamores,—a holy beacon, by whose guidance ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... pardon me," he said, "but the attack was so violent, the blow so savage, the weapon must have been so keen, that it is almost impossible to connect it with a mere attempt to commit a paltry robbery. I thought, and the police thought, that it was a ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... petulance and faltering, elicited that some old forgotten London bills had come down and swamped this Midsummer quarter's allowance, so that the promise must stand over till—till Michaelmas; or it might be that Ferdinand's matters were arranged, and then what would such a paltry sum be? Wilmet turned away in shame and disgust at having trusted for a moment to such offers. She could only do what she had never done before—apply to Mr. Froggatt for an advance on Felix's account: and she detained him after dinner ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... circles could evade official quest even for forty-eight hours. K Division's explanation, too, that there were no less than eighty Chinamen resident in and about Limehouse whose names either began or ended with Sin, he looked upon as a paltry evasion. That very morning he had awakened from a species of nightmare wherein 719 had affected the arrest of Kazmah and Mrs. Sin and had rescued Mrs. Irvin from the clutches of the former. Now—here was hope. 719 would ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... and live on bread and tea for a month, to save the price of a gay ribbon. This is trying, no doubt, to a philanthropist, but is it not partly a starved sense of beauty asserting itself? If it has none of the usual outlets, where can imagination express itself if not in some paltry ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... with an offer of $1,500 for the Tennessee Land. Mrs. Hawkins said take it. It was a grievous temptation, but the judge withstood it. He said the land was for the children—he could not rob them of their future millions for so paltry a sum. When the second blight fell upon him, another angel appeared and offered $3,000 for the land. He was in such deep distress that he allowed his wife to persuade him to let the papers be drawn; but when his children came into his presence in their poor apparel, he ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the trumpets which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the reveil of the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of the struggle of that day, the Italians were already judged ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... absolute generosity is a thing unknown to the negro. Not being aware of the value of the offering, I simply requested the Sheikh to give him four yards of American sheeting, and thought no more about the matter, until presently I found the cloth returned. The "Sultan" could not think of receiving such a paltry present from me, when on the former journey he got so much; if he showed this cloth at home, nobody would believe him, but would say he took much more and concealed it from his family, wishing to ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... new coco-palm plantation means a voyage beyond the narrow confines of the home island, there dwells a race whose splendid chest and arm muscles were developed in the gymnasium of the sea; who, living on a paltry 515,000 square miles (1,320,300 square kilometers) of scattered fragments of land, but roaming over an ocean area of twenty-five million square miles, are not more at home in their palm-wreathed islets than on the encompassing deep. Migrations, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... foreboding—the deep voice of an elemental power that knows no mercy. Within twenty feet of them men and women were struggling like dumb and driven animals for bare life—struggling, shouting, quarrelling over a paltry precedence of a minute or so in going to the boats; within a hundred yards of them, out over the dark waters, Agatha's mother, thrown from an overturned boat, was struggling her last struggle, with her silly old face ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... fleet and forces were victualled for ten weeks only, and they could not depend upon a supply of provisions from New England, they should return home without making any further attempt. Such was the issue of this paltry expedition, intrusted to the direction of an officer without talents ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... About the time of the Queen's marriage to Philip Gresham went to Spain, to start from Puerto Real fifty cases, each containing 22,000 Spanish ducats. All the time Gresham resided at Antwerp, carrying out these sagacious and important negociations, he was rewarded with the paltry remuneration of L1 a day, of which we often find him seriously complaining. It was in Antwerp, that vast centre of commerce, that Gresham must have gained that great knowledge of business by which he afterwards enriched himself. Antwerp exported to England ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... d'Aumale) was offered on her behalf to the Vidame de Chartres, who was kept poor by the far-sighted policy of Francois I. In fact, when the Vidame de Chartres and the Prince de Conde first came to court, Francois I. gave them—what? The office of chamberlain, with a paltry salary of twelve hundred crowns a year, the same that he gave to the simplest gentlemen. Though Diane de Poitiers offered an immense dowry, a fine office under the crown, and the favor of the king, the vidame refused. After which, this Bourbon, already factious, married Jeanne, daughter ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... his genius had been properly felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty names older than his, yet there scarcely was to be found among them all a spirit more thoroughly original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts of passing taste are laid to rest forever, it will be found that this man has written his signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of the register of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... the First Consul's disposal might have been considered sufficient to dispense with these paltry devices; for when the squadrons of Brest, Lorient, Rochefort, and Toulon had joined their forces, they mustered thirty-two ships of the line and thirty-one frigates, with more than 20,000 troops on board. So great, indeed, was the force as to occasion strong ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... fist anger. In vain then is the flesh restrained if the mind allowed to drift to inordinate movements be wrecked by vice." And Augustine says (in the same sermon) that "fasting loves not many words, deems wealth superfluous, scorns pride, commends humility, helps man to perceive what is frail and paltry." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... whether, after all, riches are the one desirable thing in the world, or even the most desirable. But this was only a passing thought. So fascinated was Midas with the glitter of the yellow metal that he would still have refused to give up the Golden Touch for so paltry a consideration as a breakfast. Just imagine what a price for one meal's victuals! It would have been the same as paying millions and millions of money (and as many millions more as would take forever to reckon up) for some fried trout, an egg, a potatoes a hot ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... them an emotional satisfaction which brings comfort to all, and amongst these any of hysterical nature probably become far happier and better citizens under her wing than they would otherwise have been. No nets will catch the expanding soul which is rising out of its paltry self ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Was it her fault that he chanced to be engaged in scientific pursuits? And when he took her face so tenderly in his two hands—looked so far down into her eyes—and told her in a voice she would follow to the ends of the earth that he loved her—was there any time then to think of paltry ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... restrained by the presence of more reflective natures.—It was asked, "Why tertian and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects." Some interesting physiological relation would be naturally suggested. The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry equivocation, that they SKIP a day or two.—"Why an Englishman must go to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch." The answer proves to have no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as no better reason is given than that island—(or, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... happened, Janet—sich a lot o' deaths I've been in at, to be sure—all great folks, too, none o' your paltry little fellows of poachers or gamekeepers, but real quality. What do you think of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... is about a paltry gilt ring that Nerissa gave me, with words upon it like the poetry on a cutler's knife: 'Love me, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Baron Badlihoff, who, a few days ago, made his appearance on the monkey-board of an omnibus, whence he was suddenly escorted by policeman B. 1001, to the presence of a magistrate, who unsympathisingly transferred him to Clerkenwell Jail, for certain paltry threepenny defalcations, due to a lapse of memory which our shameful code persists in regarding as worthy of incarceration and hard labour. He is now an active member of a company legally incorporated under government sanction, for grinding the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... upon an immense domain of wilderness, they found the ground already occupied with a scanty and curiously mixed population, which had taken on a simple form of polity and was growing into a state. The region adjoining Virginia was peopled by Puritans from the Nansemond country, vexed with the paltry persecutions of Governor Berkeley, and later by fugitives from the bloody revenge which he delighted to inflict on those who had been involved in the righteous rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon. These had been ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... wanting to assure the success of the vast projects that the pope and his son were founding upon the friendship of Louis and an alliance with him—that is,—money. But Alexander was not the man to be troubled about a paltry worry of that kind; true, the sale of benefices was by now exhausted, the ordinary and extraordinary taxes had already been collected for the whole year, and the prospect of inheritance from cardinals and priests was a poor thing now that the richest of them had been poisoned; but Alexander ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... should hardly compress 'Twixt the leaves of a treatise on Statics: life's stress Needs scope, not contraction! what rests? to wear out At some dark northern court an existence, no doubt, In wretched and paltry intrigues for a cause As hopeless as is my own life! By the laws Of a fate I can neither control nor dispute, I am ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... glory to think that even a Mexican rebel could not have been guilty of so heinous a crime. The performer of that cowardly deed was a Frenchman, living among the Indians of the west, who, for the sake of a paltry sum of gold, came to the aid of the rebels with many thousands of the savages. His next step was to enter St. Francisco, and there the horrors he committed recall to our mind the bloody deeds performed in his country during the ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... and beautiful, and the feeling of summer came over our bosoms; the flowers blossomed and the birds sang; and, as the sun looked from the blue sky, the quiet of nature banished from our thoughts all the poor and paltry cares that embitter life, and all the pitiful considerations which are but too apt to be the only concerns of the busy and bustling, from their awaking in the morning to their lying down on the pillow of evening rest. Peter and myself felt this ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... will say to themselves with a smile, 'that is but a paltry medicine for so great a disease—a pitiful ending, forsooth, to such a severe sermon as this, to recommend just the Church Catechism!' Let those laugh who will, my friends. If you think you can bring up your children to be blessings to you,—if you think you can live so as to be blessings ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... best, or rather one of the few I like at all. I find that the pleasure I derive from churches is mainly due to their being the most inhabited things in the world: inhabited by generation after generation, each bringing its something grand or paltry like its feelings, sometimes things stolen from previous generations like the rites themselves with their Pagan and Hebrew colour; bringing something, sticking in something, regardless of crowding (as life is ever regardless of other life): tombs, pictures, silver hearts and votive ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... place of exile, gave him his majesty's orders that he should see no person, and receive no visits. This order did not proceed from me, but was the work of the duc de la Vrilliere, who sought, by this paltry action, to avenge himself upon M. de Choiseul for the reception he had given him. It was wholly useless, however, for in the exile of the duke was seen a thing unheard of, perhaps, before, and, in all probability, unlikely ever to occur again—the ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... proved mortal, and certainly were of very bad consequences to many." He recommended a quick and prompt punishment in all such cases. "No man," said he, "should be pestered by giving the way (sometimes) to hundreds of pack-horses, panniers, whifflers (i.e. paltry fellows), coaches, waggons, wains, carts, or whatsoever others, which continually are very grievous to weary and loaden travellers; but more especially near the city and upon a market day, when, a man having travelled a long and tedious ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... windows on this side, a paltry, insignificant view, for there is always that bustling and noisy inn, which is a very disagreeable neighbor. I had four windows here, but ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of "El Dorado"—the golden realm!—the home of an everlasting summer! Rob pauses dramatically; he comes to a full stop. How mean is the parlour of the comfortable Wood Street tavern! How paltry its pewter pots and clumsy flagons! How dull its ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... if on purpose, to abridge the pleasures of Lady Mary's intended tour. "It was very distressing—she heartily wished there was no such thing as money in the world—it made people very miserable—they were a much happier couple, she contended, when they were merely Honourables, and lived upon a paltry two thousand and the expectancy—there never was any difficulty then about money transactions, and a proposition for a trip to a watering-place was always hailed with pleasure."—"True, Lady Mary; but then you forget we travelled in a stage ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... 'Could you not come here by some easier road than a cloister?' they ask. 'If you must sell your soul, why did you not get something for it?' Brethren, there be devils waiting for some of us; they are laughing at your paltry shifts and evasions, at your efforts to make things easy,—for they know how it will all end at last. Rouse yourselves! Awake! Salvation is no easy matter,—nothing to be got between sleeping and waking. Watch, pray, scourge the flesh, fast, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... pall of clouds over the sky and the complaining of the gale-swept tops of the great trees, in spite of the vast dull roar of the great falls, that had seemed a dirge, a ray of cheer had entered the little shack. It had seemed to her like such a paltry and mean excuse for a dwelling, when she had first seen it, and had been so thoroughly in keeping with the sordid nature she had at once attributed to this man whom she believed to have brought her there with amazing lies. But now, in some way, it had become a link, and ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... the fact that Vado was now held in force by the Austrians, the importance of British co-operation by the fleet, at this critical moment, becomes strikingly apparent. The future thus throws back a ray of illuminating significance upon the otherwise paltry and obscure campaign of 1795, dragging out into broad daylight the full meaning of lost opportunities in the early year, and of Nelson's strenuous efforts in ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... that blessed mother gone to the unknown world, to face in its stead the idea of a female justice of the peace or township constable? For my part I want when I go to my home—when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what we call the prizes of this paltry world—I want to go back, not to be received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman. I want to go back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a lecture upon finance or the tariff, or upon ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... the colleges that record them rather guess at than solve. But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt by the hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives the most commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and shallow as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of poets, had sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast the uses for which I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as great as heaven ever gave to man, it would ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... still live, is beyond me. As he told me before he lost the power of speech, not to be too hard on the railroad company, though some railroads would be glad to pay him $20,000, and no questions asked, he begged me, as heir to his estate, to let you off for a paltry $10,000." ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... sent to San Francisco. The lucky speculators had gained five or six hundred per cent. profit for their ventures of preserved and dried fruits, champagne, other wines and liquors, Madeira nuts and the most paltry stuff imaginable. In five months some of the Valparaiso merchants had cleared five hundred thousand dollars. The excitement was still unabated. Shippers were still loading and dispatching their goods daily for San Francisco. ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... to greet each moment as the manifestation of the divine will we could find in it all the heart could desire. Nor what indeed is more reasonable, more perfect, more divine, than the will of God? Can its infinite value be increased by the paltry difference of time, place, or circumstance? The present moment is always filled with infinite treasures; it contains more than one is capable of receiving. Faith is the measure of these blessings; in proportion to your faith will you receive. By love also are they ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... rooms once tenanted by the Canterbury pilgrims; the gallery probably differing but little in appearance from what it was when Chaucer frequented it in search of good wine. The landlord eventually became insolvent; the paltry tavern was shut up, and the bedrooms were dismantled. In that plight they might be seen some years ago, may still possibly be seen—empty, dusty, dreary—ranged above ground-floor premises which do duty as a parcels' conveyance office, and abutting ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... politicks was introduced. JOHNSON. 'Pulteney was as paltry a fellow as could be[907]. He was a Whig, who pretended to be honest; and you know it is ridiculous for a Whig to pretend to be honest. He cannot hold it out[908].' He called Mr. Pitt a meteor; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... audience!" wailed Jane, falling into convenient arms. "Why not install a ghost in Madison if you are all so keen on it? I can't see how you expect one paltry spook to ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... not at the vulgar accusation, the paltry sneer, but at the prophecy relating to Godolphin: "he had never distinguished himself in anything—he never would." Rank, wealth, power, Constance felt these she wanted not, these she could command of herself; but she felt also that a nobler vanity of her nature required that ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lashes stung, She spoke her shameful speech. Serene He heard the fury of the queen, And to her words so vile and dread Gently, unmoved in mind, he said: "I would not in this world remain A grovelling thrall to paltry gain, But duty's path would fain pursue, True as the saints themselves are true. From death itself I would not fly My father's wish to gratify, What deed soe'er his loving son May do to please him, think it done. Amid all duties, Queen, I count This duty first ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not-they can not at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... him less than the knight, possibly because we know that men of the Dwining stamp, when they have had the control of nations, often do good simply from the dictates of superior wisdom—the wisdom of the serpent—which, no Ramorney ever did. The skill with which the crawling, paltry leech controls his fierce lord; the contempt for his power and pride shown in Dwining's adroit sneers, and above all, the ease with which the latter casts into the shade Ramorney's fancied superiority in wickedness, is well set forth—and such a character ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bundle emphatically with his fist,—"an' th' handsome young lasses all stannin' out on the stone steps, it ud' ha' been summat like openin' a pack, that would. It's on'y the poor houses now as a packman calls on, if it isn't for the sake o' the sarvant-maids. They're paltry times, these are. Why, mum, look at the printed cottons now, an' what they was when you wore 'em,—why, you wouldn't put such a thing on now, I can see. It must be first-rate quality, the manifactur as you'd buy,—summat as 'ud wear as well as ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... within the hive that their instinct teaches them they must deposit their eggs. You can hardly find them by day, for they are cunning and secrete themselves. "They love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil." They are a paltry looking, insignificant little grey-haired pestilent race of wax-and-honey-eating and bee-destroying rascals, that have baffled all contrivances that ingenuity has devised to ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... come—and this is the result. I am separated from my broomstick, which has all the germ-bombs hanging from its collar—the germs are those of dissension and riot—I am marooned upon an English cloud, with no enemy at my mercy but a paltry and ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... there be any right better founded and stronger than that of conquest, such right belongs unquestionably to the saviors of Rome. They have saved it for the Christian world, for mankind, for the Church. It is no man's property. It cannot be let, like a paltry farm, to those who shall bid the highest, in vain compromises and delusive hopes of liberty. Should the Roman people, of their own free will, pretend to give themselves away,—to sell themselves to a faction whose subversive principles they abhor, their forefathers of all preceding ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Larmer—he is an animal without manners. But no matter. I am glad you are reasonable, my friend. You buy a respite for a few weeks. I shall forget you with all my heart—until I have a migraine, and suddenly remember you again. But it is too cheap; I cannot live decently on this paltry sum. Good-bye, my ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Land-marks, Rights of chase, Sheriffs and Factors, Lairds and Thanes, Would all have seem'd but paltry things Not ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... friends are here), Why should we blame the Spartans for all this? For people of ours, some people of our own,— Some people from among us here, I mean: But not the People (pray, remember that); I never said the People, but a pack Of paltry people, mere pretended citizens, Base counterfeits,—went laying informations, And making a confiscation of the jerkins Imported here from Megara; pigs, moreover, Pumpkins, and pecks of salt, and ropes of onions, Were voted to be merchandise from Megara, Denounced, and seized, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tobacco you found in his hand, and had I returned before you came up, I should have as readily perceived, and as soon induced him to deliver it. If I might venture, sir, to express an opinion, I would say, at most, the offence is a paltry one, and could well be left unnoticed; more especially as he is, as I have premised, a servant ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... right. He'd have to go out and sleep in the scrub, where the mosquitoes and bulldog ants would bite him out of his sleep. I hate the man who's always whining about his mother through his nose, because, as a rule, he never cared a rap for his old mother, nor for anyone else, except his own paltry, selfish little self. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... for assistance and protection to one who will feel for the indignity that has been shown her. How will his generous nature shudder, when he hears that she is on the point of being dragged to a loathsome dungeon, for want of the paltry sum of fifty pounds! Retrospection may convince the man of her heart, that her soul is superior to mercenary considerations; else, she would not now be reduced so low in the power of her enemies: she scarcely knows ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... thy meditative air, I hold thy stock of wit but paltry pelf— Thou show'st that same grave aspect everywhere, And wouldst look thoughtful, stuffed, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... I believe he frightened you into this composition: I believe you gave it him out of fear, pure, paltry fear—confess. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... was made an earl not long since—you may have heard of the fuss about it. Uncle Sam's only a miserable baron yet. And Uncle Cuthbert is that paltry insect—a baronet. ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... it was!—looking up drearily into the drifting heaps of gray. What a wretched, paltry balk the world was! What a noble part he played in it!—taking out his pistol. Well, he could pull a trigger, and let out some other sinner's life; that was all the work God thought he was fit for. Thinking of Dode all the time. He knew her! He could have summered her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... discovers on which side it is most accessible. He avails himself of this weakness by addressing her in a language exactly consonant to her own ideas. He attacks her with her own weapons, and opposes rhapsody to sentiment—He professes so sovereign a contempt for the paltry concerns of money, that she thinks it her duty to reward him for so generous a renunciation. Every plea he artfully advances of his own unworthiness, is considered by her as a fresh demand which her gratitude must answer. And she makes it a point of honour to ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... up for the great county gentry; give very grand entertainments, dinners, etc., and go also to grand dinners, so their time is fully taken up going and receiving; they never scarce honour the little paltry town of Bury St. Edmunds. Bloomfield, the old butler, is gone to service again; he could not bear himself without horses, so he is gone to the Wigsons, near Bury, where he will have plenty of hunters to look after; he wished to live ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... the Duke sighed deeply and murmured: "Dios mio! if only I had a son of my own blood like that boy! What a pity he should be tied down to paltry pettifoggery!" ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... barons of Jerusalem," he said, as he and the pilgrim emperor entered the audience-hall, "'t is for us to act. Lay we aside all paltry jealousy and bickering. Our brothers from the West are here to aid us. 'T is for us to wield the sword of Godfrey and raise the banner of the Cross, and marching in the van deal death to the pagan Saracen. Up, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... no game, and his poverty frequently putting out of his reach the procuring of the needful sporting gear, where he does follow hunting, it is pursued with much-weakened ardor, and often bootless issue. He is moved now to its pursuit, solely with the hope of realizing a paltry gain from the sale of the few prizes he ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Memnon, had the chief command. The veteran general Parmenio advised Alexander to delay the attack till the following morning; to which he replied, that it would be a bad omen at the beginning of his expedition, if, after passing the Hellespont, he should be stopped by a paltry stream. Thereupon he directed his cavalry to cross the river, and followed himself at the head of the phalanx. The passage, however, was by no means easy. The stream was in many parts so deep as to be hardly fordable, and the opposite bank was steep and rugged. The ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... his address, which was meant as much for the public ear as for that of the judge, he said: "These paltry charges, may it please your Honor, these foul and slanderous charges, the filthy ooze of an irresponsible newspaper, are incredible, preposterous—nay, mendacious! They are not made in good faith. ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... delusive, and, it was soon found, was based upon the hope of a lottery! When the time for action came, the promised millions melted away, and all that the unfortunate monarch could scrape together, on the eve of entering upon a campaign on which hung his life, was a paltry fifty thousand dollars! ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... are to be met with everywhere. And what is her attraction? That she is old and sickly. Upon my word, Miss Anne Elliot, you have the most extraordinary taste! Everything that revolts other people, low company, paltry rooms, foul air, disgusting associations are inviting to you. But surely you may put off this old lady till to-morrow: she is not so near her end, I presume, but that she may hope to see another day. What is her ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... working for God. Oh! what will you say to God when your precious children stand at His bar, without the sheaves they might have gathered, and the souls they might have won? What will you say to Him? And why do you hold them back? Oh, the mean, paltry considerations that you would be ashamed to own before this congregation! Is it for fear of suffering? Not in many instances; but, even if it were, did you bargain with Jesus Christ when you gave yourself and children to Him, that ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... then how often have we repeated already that on the present occasion there is no reason why brevity should be preferred to length; for who is 'at our heels?' as the saying goes, and it would be paltry and ridiculous to prefer the shorter to the better. It is a matter of no small consequence, in some way or other to prove that there are Gods, and that they are good, and regard justice more than men do. The demonstration of this would be the best and noblest prelude of all our laws. ...
— Laws • Plato
... Poor, paltry slaves! yet born 'midst noblest scenes— Why, Nature, waste thy wonders on such men? Lo! Cintra's glorious Eden intervenes[45] In variegated maze of mount and glen. Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen, To follow ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... all its pleasures, Afric's coast I left forlorn; To increase a stranger's treasures, O'er the raging billows borne. Christian people bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold: But though slave they have enrolled me Minds are never to ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... match (for it was quite dark within this passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp in the corner of the room. Lady Tamworth ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... instant with a sort of bitter, desperate regret. These men were not men of mere ordinary intelligence; their cleverness, their power, the amazing scope of their organisation, all bore grim witness to the fact that they would be blinded not at all by any paltry ruse. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... of war, but we forget its calamities. Let us remember that we should not sacrifice one life for this paltry abstraction. Let us remember how great are the miseries of war. Let us think of the rush of angry armies, of the widows and orphans, of the sorrow and desolation that war always ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... every day, when we were little children together, just as you play with your mates. Now that we perceive how great she was, now that her name fills the whole world, it seems strange that what I am saying is true; for it is as if a perishable paltry candle should speak of the eternal sun riding in the heavens and say, "He was gossip and housemate to me when we were candles together." And yet it is true, just as I say. I was her playmate, and I fought at her side in the wars; to this day I carry ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... to sacrifice every personal feeling to his sense of duty. It is with some impatience that one finds the grand schemes of discovery and colonization interrupted by such contemptible means, and the course of the narrative checked by the necessity for recording, however briefly, the paltry dissensions of vile miscreants such as Roldan and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... tell you that we are all to share alike and have everything in common, instead of one being rich and another poor, and one having hundreds of acres and another not enough to make him a grave, and one a houseful of servants and another not even a paltry foot-boy. I am going to introduce communism ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the gem in my hand all ready, and when the old man squeaked peevishly, 'Out with it then, let's see, let's see,' I reached it out to him. He stretched down over the banisters, and took it; holding out his palm hollowed, as if 'twas some little paltry stone that might otherwise fall and be lost. It nettled me to have him thus underrate our treasure, even though he had never seen it, and so I plumped it down into his hand as if it were as big as a pumpkin. Now the hall was a dim place, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... order, this very instant! It is utterly preposterous to waste six days sending letters backwards and forwards about a paltry matter that can be settled by word of mouth in as many minutes. No wonder the troops have ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... have been made, and the retreat might have been effected with inconsiderable loss. Such a precaution was the more necessary, as he could not be ignorant that Bluecher's troops had already gained a march upon him, and was waiting for him at the Saale. Thus the want of a few paltry wooden bridges proved as ruinous to the French army as the battle itself. It lost, solely because it was unprovided with them, great part of its yet remaining artillery, several thousands of dead, who were mostly drowned, and a great number of prisoners. It was evident that such a retreat, conducted ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... so you mean to let your gifts go to waste? To bury your talent? Do you think your paltry achievements at Leipsic amount to the ne plus ultra of genius? Let us but once get to the great world—Paris and London! where you get your ears boxed if you salute a man as honest. It is a real jubilee to practise one's handicraft there on a grand scale. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... cookery—that they were continually tempting him to excess, etc. He says, that after having withstood all the temptations that the noblest lampreys and oysters could throw in his way, he was at last overpowered by paltry beets and mallows. A victory, by the way, which, in the case of the eater of plain food, is very ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... improvement in his lodgings he was punished indirectly. Poor Sim had dislocated a bar of the window in pushing the straw into Ralph's hands, and for this offence he was apprehended and charged with prison breaking. Four days later the paltry subterfuge was abandoned, as we know, for a more serious indictment. Ralph's new abode was brighter and warmer than the old one, and had no other occupant. Here he passed the second week of his confinement. The stone ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... he spoke the words of him that sent him. Well might this woman, if she dared not lift the downcast eye before the men present, yet depart in shameless peace: he who had healed her had called her Daughter. Everything on earth is paltry before such a word. It was the deepest gift of the divine nature—the recognition of the eternal in her by him who had made it. Between the true father and the true daughter nothing is painful. I think also that very possibly some compunction arose in her mind, the moment she ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... and lights A race of slaves! he sets, and his last beam Falls on a slave!—not such as, swept along By the full tide of power, the conqueror leads To crimson glory and undying fame, But base, ignoble slaves—slaves to a horde Of petty tyrants; feudal despots; lords, Rich in some dozen paltry villages, Strong in some hundred spearmen; only great In that ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... understand," she said. "This is no paltry Toy to be exhausted and sickened of in a single hour! This is a real Game! Eth-ical! Psycho-psycho—logical! Unendingly diverting! Hour after hour! Day after day!—Once begun, you understand, ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... state, But not to warp or change it. We are his, To serve him nobly in the common cause True to the death, but not to be his slaves. Mark now the difference, ye that boast your love Of kings, between your loyalty and ours. We love the man; the paltry pageant you: We the chief patron of the commonwealth; You the regardless author of its woes: We, for the sake of liberty, a king; You chains and bondage for a ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... this point of view they are right. The positive cast of their minds prevents them from seeing the beautiful in aught but costly material, well-defined forms, and highly-polished workmanship: hence, to them Bagtche Serai must be a mere group of shabby huts adorned with paltry ornaments, and fit only for ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... had said, Esther was too proud to take help unless it was most tactfully offered. He racked his brains in vain. It was a sickening thought that, with all his wealth, he could give her nothing. Even the few paltry pounds she had unconsciously taken from him would have been indignantly rejected had she known who ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... me? Mountains shall sooner bend their lofty summits to the earth, than I will ever waste a thought on thee." "Do with thee, my fairest!" cried the peer, "why, marry thee. Dost thou think that the paltry Damon shall get the better of my eagle genius? No. Fortune now unfurls my standard, and I drive the frighted fates before me." "Boastful, empty coward! Thou darest not even brave a woman's rage. If my hands were at liberty, I would ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... the very first thing for this man to do is to see that he does not get soured. That attitude of character is an acid which will destroy all success. Keep yourself sweet, no matter how snail-like your progress has been, no matter how paltry your apparent achievements. If you are already soured on men and the world, change that condition by a persistent habit of optimism. All death shows an acid reaction. Hopefulness is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... many volumes, believe that you have a sincere passion for reading. You hold literature in honour, and your last wish would be to debase it to a paltry end. You are not of those who read because the clock has just struck nine and one can't go to bed till eleven. You are animated by a real desire to get out of literature all that literature will give. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... into his service and that of religious art. It is said also that his Madonnas seem 'amiable beings imbued with a lofty grace;' while his saints are 'powerful and noble forms.' But he never descended to the paltry or the vulgar. He knew from the depths of his own soul how to invest a face with moral grandeur. Especially in his representations of our Saviour Gian Bellini 'displays a perception of moral power and grandeur ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... dear"—Sally makes a paltry attempt to laugh—"it's three in the afternoon. It's the fog." But she cannot hear what he says in answer to this, go close as she may. After a pause of rest he ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... this quick-witted and pleasant-spirited lady; yet when we recollect that to the wit and imperious temper of Beatrice is united a magnanimity of spirit which would naturally place her far above all selfishness, and all paltry struggles for power—when we perceive, in the midst of her sarcastic levity and volubility of tongue, so much of generous affection, and such a high sense of female virtue and honor, we are inclined to hope the best. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... sword of Orleans hath not made me smart; These words of yours draw life-blood from my heart: On that advantage, bought with such a shame, To save a paltry life and slay bright fame, Before young Talbot from old Talbot fly, The coward horse that bears me fall and die! And like me to the peasant boys of France, To be shame's scorn and subject of mischance! Surely, ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... prepared to do all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all. But her loyalty, as it exceeded her brother's in fanaticism, excelled it also in purity. Accustomed to petty intrigue, and necessarily involved in a thousand paltry and selfish discussions, ambitious also by nature, his political faith was tinctured, at least, if not tainted, by the views of interest and advancement so easily combined with it; and at the moment he should unsheathe his claymore, it might be difficult to say whether it would ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... materials. In doing this he is aware that he is merely following the example set him by countless culinary experts, who have communicated their ideas to the daily press; but Mr. Punch is not to be deterred from doing a helpful action by any paltry jealousy as to precedence. His readers, he knows, will be grateful ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... or even months, he cried out in worse English that he was ruined. He would have to violate his contract! No impressario would think of engaging him again! His wonderful American tour! If he was not rescued within a week—Oh, my God, the consequences! He did not regret the paltry two thousand a week—for thirty ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... without at least adding the obvious suggestion, that the avarice of Rienzi could have been much better gratified by sparing than by destroying the life of one of the richest subjects in Europe. Montreal, we may be quite sure, would have purchased his life at an immeasurably higher price than the paltry sum lent to Rienzi by his brothers. And this is not a probable hypothesis, but a certain fact, for we are expressly told that Montreal, "knowing the Tribune was in want of money, offered Rienzi, that if he would let him go, he, Montreal, would furnish him not ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... carved triangular pediments. Before the castle lies a vast green sward the trees of which had recently been cut down. On either side of the entrance bridge are two small dwellings where the gardeners live, connected across the road by a paltry iron railing without character, evidently modern. To right and left of the lawn, which is divided in two by a paved road-way, are the stables, cow-sheds, barns, wood-house, bakery, poultry-yard, and the offices, placed in what were doubtless the remains of two wings of the old building similar to ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... moment far too busy to spare time for the making up of returns; and from this list I learned the appalling news that, of our entire complement of fifty-eight, all told, we had lost no less than seventeen killed, and thirty-two more or less severely wounded, leaving only a poor paltry nine of us untouched, of whom I was one. Fortunately, of the thirty-two wounded only about half of them were hurt severely enough to be rendered totally unfit for duty; but that was bad enough in all conscience, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... discernment than yours, that no partial, narrow, contracted, pinched, occasional system will be at all suitable to such an object. It will show you that it is not to be considered as one of those minima which are out of the eye and consideration of the law; not a paltry excrescence of the state; not a mean dependent, who may be neglected with little damage and provoked with little danger. It will prove that some degree of care and caution is required in the handling such an object; it will show that you ought not, in reason, to trifle ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... far shore, there, amidst unalloyed pleasures, to spend immortal days. This region was naturally located on the surface of the earth, where the cheerful sun could shine and the fresh breezes blow, yet in some untrodden distance, where the gauntlet of fact had not smitten the sceptre of fable. The paltry portion of this earth familiar to the ancients was surrounded by an unexplored region, which their fancy, stimulated by the legends of the poets, peopled with mythological kingdoms, the rainbow bowers and cloudy synods of Olympus, from ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... I dare to say that I feel I am happy. I was surfeited with adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but conscious that emotion itself never reached my heart. I have found all the men whom I have known petty, paltry, superficial; none of them ever caused me a surprise; they had no innocence, no grandeur, no delicacy. I wish I could have met with one man able ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... thoughts of this man, now that his adventure was over and his end near? If he were in very truth a prince, how pitiable, how paltry! What cheap martyrdom! If an impostor, had the game been worth the candle?—Death seemed a coin of high value for this short, vanished comedy. The man alone could answer, for the truth might not be known, save by the knowledge that comes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... She will abandon or defer the fray; But that, Troyano's valiant son to right, She will, together with them, wend her way; By which her warlike fame a higher flight, More easily may, even to heaven, assay, Than in a quarrel of such paltry guise, Which offers hindrance ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... best that were ever reared on the banks of the Potomac, would be but a paltry price, for ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... can you accept this heart, such as wasted years, and griefs too fondly nursed, have left it? Can you be, at least, my comforter? Can you aid me to regard life as a duty, and recover those aspirations which once soared from the paltry and miserable confines of our frivolous daily being? Helen, here I ask you, can you be all this, and under the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... that high thought were 50 Linked to a servile mass of matter—and, Knowing such things, aspiring to such things, And science still beyond them, were chained down To the most gross and petty paltry wants, All foul and fulsome—and the very best Of thine enjoyments a sweet degradation, A most enervating and filthy cheat To lure thee on to the renewal of Fresh souls and bodies[112], all foredoomed to be As frail, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... John Milton only by virtue of the epic code of Pere le Bossu. People will consent to place themselves at the author's standpoint, to view the subject with his eyes, in order to judge a work intelligently. They will lay aside—and it is M. de Chateaubriand who speaks—"the paltry criticism of defects for the noble and fruitful criticism of beauties." It is time that all acute minds should grasp the thread that frequently connects what we, following our special whim, call "defects" with what we call "beauty." Defects—at all events those which we call by that name—are ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... declares the inalienable rights of man,—and which, as it makes the tour of the earth, hand and hand with Christianity, is lifting the many from the dust, where for ages they have been trampled, into political life and dignity,—he converts a paltry swindle into its standard and creed, and prostitutes its glorious mission, as a redeeming influence among men, into a ministry of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... I'd care for the office," said Dunn. "Sure it's yerself be's makin' all the fees, and ourselves getting the paltry dollar; and yerself gives us as much trouble to get that as we'd be earning two dollars at magistrate Jiles' beyant. Sure! himself's liberal and doesn't be afraid to give us a division of the fees when the business is good. And sure ye make yer ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... Paymaster of the Forces, and to whose credit there stood at the Bank of England, as Mr. Trevelyan assures us, a million pounds of the public money, the interest of which was paid to him "or to his creditors." This was a much better thing than Grosvenor Bedford had with his paltry collectorship at Philadelphia; and the interest on a million pounds, more or less, had it been diverted from Mr. Rigby's pocket to the public treasury, would perhaps have equaled the entire increase in the revenue ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... bides his time, and day by day Faces defeat full patiently, And lifts a mirthful roundelay However poor his fortunes be— He will not fail in any qualm Of poverty; the paltry dime— It will grow golden in his palm ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... and act at once!" said the Captain, his voice thrilling with intensity. "This piece of property will be gone befo' night! All it takes is a paltry three thousand dolla's, and within ninety days—no man can say what its value will be. We can plat it, and within ten days we may have ouah money back. Allow me to draw ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... so alluring. But you, Count Manteuffel, why are you not like the flute? Why have you spies and eavesdroppers at all places? Why are you an Austrian spy at the court of Prussia—you who have wealth, rank, and standing which should place you above such paltry considerations?" ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... but failed to discover any more money. He felt indignant. It seemed to him that he was badly used. That a miser should have but a paltry ten dollars in his trunk ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... I'd spend in viewing The elemental strife, My soul the while subduing With the littleness of life; Of life, with all its paltry plans, Its conflicts and its cares— The feebleness of all that's man's— The might that's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Morge were discovered missing, Thougor had called the village together, explaining that Thor had left them, taking Morge as a sacrifice because he was dissatisfied with the tribe's paltry blood offerings and worship. Therefore a great death sacrifice of young men and women must be undertaken to pacify Thor and ...
— Regeneration • Charles Dye
... perhaps have been justifiable at first, before you knew exactly the nature of your revenue and expenditure; but with these facts before me, I should think I were degrading the situation which I hold, if I could consent to such a paltry expedient as this. I can hardly think that Parliament will adopt a different view. I can hardly think that you, who inherit the debt contracted by your predecessors—when, having a revenue, they reduced the charges of the post-office, and inserted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
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