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Pettiness   Listen
noun
Pettiness  n.  The quality or state of being petty or paltry; littleness; meanness.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pettiness" Quotes from Famous Books



... magnificence. But thy Barisat, before thou didst fashion him into a god with thy axe, was rooted in the earth, standing there great and wonderful, with the glory of branches and blossoms. Now he is dry, and gone is his sap. From his height he has fallen to the earth, from grandeur he came to pettiness, and the appearance of his face has paled away, and he himself was burnt in the fire, and he was consumed unto ashes, and he is no more. And thou didst then say, 'I will make me another this day, and to-morrow ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... one last time to see for one's self. And on this occasion no pettiness of disguise, Miss Levering's aspect seemed to say—no recurrence of any undignified flight. She had been frightened away from her first meeting, but she would not be frightened from the second, which was also to be ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... fairest chance that Ireland ever had of gaining a large measure of self-government. Knowing all that happened within the Party in the years of which I am writing, knowing the methods that were employed, rather unscrupulously and with every circumstance of pettiness, to bear down any member who showed the least disposition to exercise legitimately an independent judgment—knowing how the paid organisers of the League were at once dispatched to his constituency to intrigue against him and to work up local enmities, I am not, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... flies, and hollowed like the stone by many drops of wickedness: thus did I sit among them, and still said to myself: "Innocent is everything petty of its pettiness!" ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... but woe to any poor devil who had the hardihood to defend him against them! In private, the author of Political Justice at one time reminded those who knew him of the metaphysician engrafted on the Dissenting Minister. There was a dictatorial, captious, quibbling pettiness of manner. He lost this with the first blush and awkwardness of popularity, which surprised him in the retirement of his study; and he has since, with the wear and tear of society, from being too pragmatical, become somewhat ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... regard to party, let us rise to the occasion. Let us put aside partisanship and pettiness and pride. As we embark on this course, let us put our country first, remembering that regardless of party label we are all Americans. And let the final test of everything we do be a simple one: Is it good ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... problems, but life in this quiet village of Friendship did. His talk with Miss Betty had brought him face to face with them. He was conscious now that his attitude had been one of complacent superiority. He had held himself above the pettiness of village life only to discover, as he admitted frankly, that he had been ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard

... was why the Hun spared Noyon. But if he spared Noyon, he spared little else.[2] Every village between here and the present front line has been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. The wilful wickedness and pettiness of the crime stir one's heart to pity and his soul to white-hot anger. The people who did this must make payment in more than money; to settle such a debt blood is required. American soldiers who came to Europe to do a job ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... like his Nan, with high moral purpose and excellent capacity, who would make the college strong and to be respected. Not such doctors as several of whom he reminded himself, who were disgracing their sex, but those whose lives were ruled by a pettiness of detail, a lack of power, and an absence of high aim. Somehow both our friends lost much of the feeling that Nan was doing a peculiar thing, when they saw so many others following the same path. And having seen Nan more than half-settled in her winter quarters, and knowing that one or ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... Cross and to fight for Freedom! It is the pathway of supreme suffering, but also the only pathway of real glory and merit. Any other way for England's greatness was impossible. England had to choose either the way of pettiness or of greatness. She chose ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... Lane would inevitably revert to savagery. There would be no one to put any restraint upon them and their natural instincts would be given free play. Conceivably then, it was not mere supersensitiveness and pettiness of spirit that moved General Hunter to take exception to Lane's appointment but regard for the honor of his profession, perchance, also, a certain feeling of personal ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... breast,—but out of many griefs and poverty-stricken days of struggle and cruel environment, she had educated herself to a wonderful height of moral self-control and almost stoical rectitude. Her nature was a broad and grand one, absolutely devoid of pettiness, and full of a strong, almost passionate sympathy with the wrongs of others,—and she had formed herself on such firm, heroic lines of courage and truth and self-respect, that the meaner vices of her sex were absolutely ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... the chime was immutable. And always, whatever came, it rang out calmly over the beautiful old city of Morningquest, and entered into it, and was part of the life of it, mixing itself impartially with the good and evil; with all the sin and suffering, the pitiful pettiness, the indifference, the cruelty, and every form of misery-begetting vice, as much as with the purity above reproach, the charity, the self-sacrifice, the unswerving truth, the patient endurance, and courage ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... influence, sadly needed in a soldiers' hospital. Third, her life within. From choice, not from necessity, her life continually turned upon itself; from within she found her chief motive, sanction, and reward, and this took from her intercourse with others all pettiness, and made their relations to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... even a few years. The influence held good, too, in the cases of men who daily went to business or professions in New York. Even Wall Street was no sinecure. Back they would come at night, and the terrible, narrow maelstrom of pettiness sucked them in. All outside interest was as naught. International affairs seemed insignificant when once ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... youth that blended all her bewildering characteristics in a certain completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was wholly self-contained; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... mean. In that swamp of pettiness, idiocy, and materialism, a man of your nature could not long abide. Religion—it has not yet responded to your need. And without faith your sins lose their savour. The arts—you don't know them all, the Seven Deadly Arts and the One Beautiful Art!" She paused. Her voice had been as ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... little excursions of his had been so much to her interest. She attributed the change not so much to a gradual diminution of fortune as to a spiteful wish to annoy his hostess. It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness. ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... but she seemed to have gained in dignity and pride since his arrival, actually to have kissed her hand in farewell to the childhood he had been so slow in divining; grown—he felt rather than analyzed—above the pettiness of coquetry. Once more she had stirred the dormant ideals of his early manhood; there were moments when she floated before his inner vision as the embodiment of the world's beauty. Nor ever had there been a woman ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... by dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness which, for that matter, can be found on any and every social level, will realize the awe with which the bourgeoisie of Angouleme regarded the Hotel de Bargeton. The inhabitant of L'Houmeau beheld the grandeur of that miniature Louvre, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... pettiness that called forth the exclamation, but the saddening circumstance that she had put her chopped and seasoned parsley into the sweet mixture ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner

... ripe in years and understanding, beams a genial smile is a living reproach to the detractors of his profession. Painstaking, scrupulous, broad-minded, and intelligent, with a twinkle of humor for the frailities of humanity, he looks on the pettiness of men with a wise tolerance. Beneath his ease of manner and cordiality of intercourse there lies a world of experience, of battles fought and won, of inherent force of character, of public honors received and gracefully borne. There are no limits to the admiration ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells

... suitable splendour; everything that he does will show taste and propriety. The extremes, or corresponding defects of character, are, on the one side, vulgar, tasteless profusion, and on the other, meanness or pettiness, which for some paltry saving will spoil the effect of a great ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... influential; and now, when you have attained all this, now you are still unsatisfied, now you long to resign all this again. But you will reflect, Leonore; you will listen to reason. You will consider what we have suffered from the pettiness, the pitifulness, the arrogance, and the selfishness of men. You will remember how often you vowed, with angry tears, to avenge yourself some day for all that we have suffered. Remember, child, remember! Have you forgotten how we starved ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach

... smaller range of life and thought. It would have been inconsistent with Mr. Choate's nature for him to have been "wrong-headed" in any direction. Such largeness of view, such dramatic and interpretative imagination, such volatile play of thought and fancy, and such perception of the pettiness and hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser "blood-sympathies," the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... the essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and alternation that he will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures. But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of her problems and insipid ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... consequence of his defeat in the dramatic contest of 468 by Sophocles; or the alternative story of the same authority that the cause of his chagrin was that Simonides' elegy on the heroes slain at Marathon was preferred to his own. Apart from the inherent improbability of such pettiness in such a man, neither story fits the facts; for in 467, the next year after Sophocles' success, we know that Aeschylus won the prize of tragedy with the Septem; and the Marathon elegy must have been written in 490, fourteen years before his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... with so much pettiness and folly masquerading as patriotism that it is delightful to welcome such ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... robbed the blow of all hurt—with one exception. Bud's pride, since his wealth and position had meant nothing in the girl's eyes, had been sorely wounded, and it had taken six months of the vast mystery of the plains to reduce this pettiness to the status ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan

... set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea. Four years later he ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... mean between two extremes of excess and defect respectively has been already explained, and may be further shown by a review of the virtues. Besides fortitude and temperance, already described, liberality is a mean between prodigality and stinginess; magnificence between vulgar display and pettiness: magnanimity between vainglory and pusillanimity; truthfulness between exaggeration and dissimulation; friendship between complaisance, or flattery, and frowardness,—and so of the rest. The golden mean must be taken in relation to ourselves, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... the stubborn power we call Our self-respect, our hopes of worldly good, Our jealousies and fears, how in the flood Of this new light they faded, poor and small; Showing our pettiness beside God's truth, Besides His age our poor, ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley

... CATIN might die some day (for she is now deep in chaotic ailments, deepish even in brandy) seems never to have struck him; at least there is nowhere any articulate hint of it,—the eagle-flight of one's imagination soaring far above such a pettiness! Hope is very beautiful; and even fallacious hope, in such a Friedrich. The one hope that did not deceive him, was hope in his own best exertion to the very death; and no fallacy ever for a moment slackened ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... us go forth! Follow me, all ye hermits who through some mortification in love, some negligence in friendship, have withdrawn into your rooms far from the pettiness and infidelity of mankind! But quit your dismal thoughts, I pray you. Every minute you lose some pleasure without gaining any wisdom in place of it. Deign to accompany me on my travels. We shall go by easy stages, laughing all along the road ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... Perverted all things to complaint. How vain the world had grown to be! How mean all people and their ways, How ignorant their sympathy, And how impertinent their praise; What they for virtuousness esteem'd, How far removed from heavenly right; What pettiness their trouble seem'd, How undelightful their delight; To my necessity how strange The sunshine and the song of birds; How dull the clouds' continual change, How foolishly content the herds; How unaccountable the law Which bade me sit ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore

... and Schaunard had said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for Berselius; the man seemed so far from and unconscious of the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness, that the half liking which always accompanies respect could not but find ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... always thought, that you undervalue Harcourt. He is a fine fellow in his way. I like a man to be strong, and Harcourt is strong—he has no pettiness in his nature. He is rather a severe critic, perhaps—and demands a little too much from other people—but you will find that he always practises ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... to say. Since when has a Kaye stooped to the pettiness of locking up an unwelcome visitor like a rat in a trap? A pretty greeting and meeting, Cuthbert, after all these years!" he cried, turning next toward the artist, with ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond

... "Divorce Colony," women in all walks of life, from all parts of the world; women famous and beautiful, all working for the great cause of Humanity without any social prejudices, personal feelings, or pettiness.... So much for the ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... Through emancipation from an easy-going subjectivity and through the positing of life upon external things and, indeed, upon the whole of the great universe, Life, it was believed, would gain more breadth and truth; and in a noteworthy manner man undertook a struggle against the pettiness of his own nature and for the drawing out of all that was merely human and trivial. A great deal has been gained through such a change and new tendency of life. In fact we have discovered far more ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... neighbourhood, made no more than $300 a year; and, with land at sixty to seventy-five dollars per acre, it seemed to him that he would be an old man before he could become the owner of a farm. He was heart sick of the pettiness and sordidness of the farm life, whose horizon seemed to be that of the hundred acres or so that comprised it. Therefore he resolved that to the great West he would go, that great wonderful West with its vast spaces and its vast possibilities of achievement. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... deliberate pettiness and weakness," he thought, when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate return. "The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good stinging reproof will stop it ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of democracy there was mingled, however, a weakness of feeling on the subject of position, which occasionally degenerated into an almost ridiculous pettiness. This was especially true of his later life. His utterances were sometimes so apparently contradictory, however, that it is hard to tell whether justice has been done to his real meaning on account of the difficulty of ascertaining what his real ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... we survey that winding up of the affair, we can afford to forget the infamous display of faction during the discussion of the Arms' bill. Any thing like it, in pettiness of malignity, has not been witnessed during this century: any thing like it, in impotence of effect, probably will not be witnessed again during our times. Thirteen divisions in one night—all without hope, and without ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... pure as infinity; the silent, starlit polar night; nature itself in its profundity; the mystery of life; the ceaseless circling of the universe; the feast of death—without suffering, without regret—eternal in itself. Here in the great night thou standest in all thy naked pettiness, face to face with nature; and thou sittest devoutly at the feet of eternity, intently listening; and thou knowest God the all-ruling, the centre of the universe. All the riddles of life seem to grow clear to thee, and thou laughest ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... one of those old curiosities, the price of which cannot be discovered by the person for whom it is destined. All this with Denoisel was spontaneous, natural, and instinctive. This never-ending victory of Parisian intelligence over all the extravagance of life had nothing of the meanness and pettiness of sordid calculation about it. It was the happy discovery of a scheme of existence under satisfactory conditions, and not a series of vulgar petty economies, and in the well-organized expenditure of his six hundred pounds a year the man remained liberal and high-minded: ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... tries him, in her turn, and floods him with the dead chat of the town and an ocean of family tattle. He finds himself shut up for weeks with a creature who takes an interest in nothing but Uncle Crosspatch's temper and the scandal about Lady X. Little by little the absolute pettiness, the dense dulness, of woman's life, breaks on the disenchanted devotee. His deity is without occupation, without thought, without resources. He has a faint faith in her finer sensibility, in her poetic nature: he ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... human nature, which most men would be so ashamed of, that they would hasten to put them out of their mind. His occasional shabbiness in money matters, his jealousies, his envies, all his petty faults, which are despicable on account of their pettiness. Fancy any man writing this. He is describing how he visited a friend and was reading a book from his library. "A very good book," says he, "especially one letter of advice to a courtier, most true and good, which made me once resolve to tear out the two ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... a part of the setting of some foreign world at which he gazed like a boy from the upper galleries of a theatre. He had rebelled at this, looking with some hostility at the well groomed men and women who accepted it with such assurance that it was for them alone, but now he realized the pettiness of that position. With a few unmortgaged dollars in his pocket, he was instantly one of them. He could stride in and use the quiet luxury of the place as ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... that in order to paint on a small scale really well, you must be able to paint on a larger. And it is said that Meissonier was in the habit all his life of making life-size studies in order to keep his style from falling into pettiness. So, after all, the painting of these big pictures may have been a useful ordeal for the artist who for the next sixty years was to reap ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer—he is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... fathoming the vacuity and emptiness of Mademoiselle Gamard's mind, or stating to himself the pettiness of her ideas, the poor abbe perceived, unfortunately too late, the defects which she shared with all old maids, and those which were peculiar to herself. The bad points of others show out so strongly against the good that they usually ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... Conventions, pettiness, foolish pride, waywardness, secret egotism, fell away from her. The customs of society, with what was valuable in them and what was inadequate, assumed their true proportions. It was as if her House of Life had been ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... my mind for a word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of imagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart.... ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... the hereditary defects of its character—that is, by the particularism of the individual races and States, the theoretic dogmatism of the parties, the incapacity to sacrifice personal interests for great national objects from want of patriotism and of political common sense, often, also, by the pettiness of the prevailing ideas. Even to-day it is painful to see how the forces of the German nation, which are so restricted and confined in their activities abroad, are wasted in ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... the mood which comes over me at times when the pettiness of the past starts up in the presence of these immensities of sea and sky. M., you know, when he would come back to his studio from some yachting cruise in the Channel, and find me in his armchair, would drag me out to look at the ceaselessly changing glories of the river ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... penance. Garry was right. He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had passionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the dim recesses of his mind, he had ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... consecrated: one Nonjuror reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door. His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... politics of the State, was inclined to favor Burr and his followers; but the President already felt a deep distrust of Burr and finally surrendered to the importunities of DeWitt Clinton, who had formed an alliance with the Livingston interests to drive Burr from the party. Despite the pettiness of the game, which disgusted both Gallatin and Jefferson, the decision was fateful. It was no light matter, even for the chief magistrate, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... ever reflected on the fact that, despite the horrors of the war, it is at least a big thing? I mean to say that in it one is brought face to face with realities. The follies, selfishness, luxury and general pettiness of the vile commercial sort of existence led by nine-tenths of the people of the world in peace time are replaced in war by a savagery that is at least more honest and outspoken. Look at it this ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... deal. What his appearance is does not so much matter—indeed, when one looks into it, it does not matter at all, save that you will find that the ugliest face can often give you an index to a lovely character. The chief thing that we require of him is that he should be above all meanness and pettiness. He must be great-thinking and great-feeling for himself and others, especially for others. You will find that a good man is always thinking or working for those others whose names he may not even know. Whatever power or talent he has—however little it may be—he ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... the evil in our conduct, and giving or withholding help according to our worthiness. The Universal is too great to be measured and doled in that way. Nothing but our own pinchbeck ideas could ascribe to Him this pettiness. As it is the kind of sliding scale we ourselves adopt, we limit the Divine Generosity by our ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I ever heard ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... war, which will force you to do so." He drew a paper from his pocket and held it out. "Do you suppose we are such fools as to leave that girl to do as she likes? We are endeavoring to suppress a civil war, and the grandeur of the purpose covers the pettiness of the means." ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... rumbly voice; he liked the hearty laugh with which she always ended up some jolly and well-told story. She never gave him digs about his children as other Glen women did; she never bored him with local gossip; she had no malice and no pettiness. She was always splendidly sincere. Mr. Meredith, who had picked up Miss Cornelia's way of classifying people, considered that Ellen belonged to the race of Joseph. Altogether, an admirable woman for a sister-in-law. Nevertheless, a man did not want even the most ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... part, does not see the good in him through her sensitiveness to his patronizing attitude; as the course of development brings them together in a happy union, the lesson of toleration, of mutual comprehension, sinks into the mind. The reader realizes the pettiness of the worldly wisdom which blocks the way of joy. As we have said, "Northanger Abbey" speaks a wise word against the abuse of emotionalism; it tells of the experiences of a flighty Miss, bred on the "Mysteries of Udolpho" style of literature, during a visit ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... that, let the sanctuary be ever so immense and imposing in its somber gloom, the idols ever so superb, all seems in Japan but a mere semblance of grandeur. A hopeless pettiness, an irresistible feeling of the ludicrous, lies at the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... for Jim Thorpe that he was dealing with a really strong man, and a fearless one. One weak spot in the character of Doc Crombie, one trifling pettiness, which could have taken umbrage at the defiance of his authority, one atom of small-mindedness, whereby he could have been influenced by the curious evidence against this man, and the yelping hounds ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... Shetland fiords, there may be men who had in them the makings of eminent preachers; but whose powers have never been called out, and are rusting sadly away: and in whom many petty cares are developing a pettiness of nature. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... Louis Bonaparte remained, even after the 4th of December, Napoleon the Little. This enormity still left him a dwarf. The size of the crime does not change the stature of the criminal, and the pettiness of the assassin withstands the immensity of ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... days of national prayer or an increased observance of Sunday—or made malignant by neglect or levity. It is almost fundamental in their idea of him. The ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of this magic pettiness of God, and the belief of China in the magic propitiations and resentments of "Heaven" is ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... has pronounced rags to be the livery only of wilful idleness—has stamped on the withering brow of destitution the brand of the drunkard. Therefore, clap your hands to your pulpy sides, oh well-dressed, well-to-do London, and disdaining the pettiness of a simper, laugh an ogre's laugh at the rags of Manchester—grin like a tickled Polyphemus at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... spoken of the letters. There was no need of it. I knew that they were in his mind and that he was perfectly conscious of the pettiness of his action. But for me his simple confession ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... always do as we mean to do, and I have told you I was at the perilous age. And so you can understand how I felt when I saw your father—there was something more than pettiness and frivolity in me ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson

... sighed Granvelle. "As a long period of rain produces fungi in the woods, so this terrible pair calls to life one pettiness after another in the rare man in whom once every trait of character was great and glorious. I knew the boy's mother. Many things might be said of her, among them good, nay, the best ones. As to the boy, his Majesty ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... All the other feelings of that heart ought consequently to bear the stamp of nature: it will be true, simple, free, frank, sensible, and straightforward; all disguise, all cunning, all arbitrary fancy, all egotistical pettiness, will be banished from his character, and you will see no trace of them in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... elfin colors than even that living had been which had made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness, the human insufficiency to express the best that must come in any mortal relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They were not better in memory than they had been when lived, for the best remembrance makes ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... him, no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first took me to him said, "We shall see the greatest man in Europe." I have it on the same authority that Rossetti's aptitude for art was considered amongst painters ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... a scar on the forehead, a few false quantities, or weak endings, if there is an absence in the third act of some one who appeared in the first—it is always much simpler to complain of this than to feel or describe the essence of the whole. But this very pettiness in our criticism is, fortunately, a sort of safeguard. The French writer Buffon said: "Bien crire, c'est tout; car bien crire c'est bien sentir, bien penser, et bien dire." ... Let the artist then, by all means, make ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the universal forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness of his achievement and endurance takes a complexion of greatness from the vague immensity that surrounds and impalpably mixes ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... rationalizing movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As yet Arminianism ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful, colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself where you ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... is a muffled imbecility, that can do nothing but hug and hide its existence, lest some careless breath of hers should blow it out; his pin-head taper must be kept under a bushel, or cease to be even the covert pettiness it is. The wildness of the North is not scenic and pictorial merely, but goes to the very heart of things, immeasurable, immitigable, infinite; deaf and blind to all but itself and its own, it prevails, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... Bismarck promised both Universal Suffrage and State-Capitalized Associations—"only let us wait till the war is done with!" En attendant, the profit of his strange alliance with this thorn in his enemies' flesh, was wholly to the Minister. But Lassalle, exalted to forgetfulness of the pettiness of the army at his back, almost persuaded himself to believe as he believed Bismarck believed. "Bismarck is my tool, my plenipotentiary," he declared to his friends. And to his judges: "I play cards on table, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... election, showing already how men discerned what was in store for Valentinois. Giustiniani wrote to his Government that he had not gone lest his going should give the duke importance in the eyes of others.(1) The pettiness and meanness of the man, revealed in that dispatch, will enable you to attach to Giustiniani the label ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... mentalities seemed merged together. No longer puzzled, we were vibrant with a common purpose. I was angry and disgusted; Mick was moved to the inmost sanctuary of his Celtic being. He manifested the last degree of outrage and insult, of agonised anger. For the moment we were cleansed of all the pettiness and grossness common to manhood, inspired only with a new-born worship of the inviolable right of the individual to the disposal of its own tokens of affection ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... her bitterness of ennui, all her questionings and doubts, were swept away on the keen desert wind into the endless plains. She had come from her last confession asking herself, "What am I?" She had felt infinitely small confronted with the pettiness of modern, civilised life in a narrow, crowded world. Now she did not torture herself with any questions, for she knew that something large, something capable, something perhaps even noble, rose up within her to greet all this ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... of darkness—on board the admiral's ship, stranded in the guardship at Plymouth, bumping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had been darkness all the time. Jove! That Cuban time, with its movements, its pettiness, its intrigue, its warmth, even its villainies showed plainly enough in the chill of that blackness. It had been romance, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... temper. Amidst the storm of battle his soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which he sometimes ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green

... we have a King who understands the need for incessant, acute criticism to keep our collective activities intelligent and efficient, and for a flow of bold, unhampered thought through every department of the national life, a King liberal without laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity. Such, it seems to us who wait at present almost inexpressively outside the immediate clamours of a mere artificial loyalty, are the splendid possibilities ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... those of the distant castle of the laird trembled like stars through the sky. For a long time he sat and drank in the beauty of the scene, and his soul seemed to feel a peace that it had not known for many days. All the pettiness and annoyance and silly fears of the past weeks seemed blotted out, and a new holy calm took the vacant place. In this sweet and solemn mood he reviewed his late action calmly, and felt ashamed of himself for his vanity and for the obstinacy which had followed ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... losses to be redeemed. He prized life more than most. He had so much to do with a life. Half his work still, as he reckoned, was incomplete. The world was young, and abounded in possibilities. To save himself for life and work was worth playing at servility. He could hardly see the pettiness in a James, in his parasites, in his Ministers, for absorption in their one essential quality, their ability, as holding headsman and gaolers in a leash, to keep alive or kill, to bind or let loose. To this age James is an awkward, ludicrous pedant. The spectacle of Ralegh's veneration is ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... have not gathered yet its praise, I sought it not by any baser lure; Man wrongs, and Time avenges, and my name 50 May form a monument not all obscure, Though such was not my Ambition's end or aim, To add to the vain-glorious list of those Who dabble in the pettiness of fame, And make men's fickle breath the wind that blows Their sail, and deem it glory to be classed With conquerors, and Virtue's other foes, In bloody chronicles of ages past. I would have had my Florence great and free;[290] Oh Florence! Florence![291] unto me thou wast 60 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... the glee, the pride, the occasional absence of mind, the frequent appeal for sympathy, the need of a confidence to answer and confirm his own. Such a mood, in spite of its element of childishness, was yet a good one with him. It raised him above pettiness and made him impatient of old Foster's cunning little devices for capturing an enemy or confirming the allegiance of a doubtful friend. He had for the time forgotten himself in his work, the position ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... nothing but the outcome of exaggerated self-esteem, of inflated vanity; it is the claim of a moth, shrivelled in the flame of a candle, to outlive the sun, the claim of a worm to survive the destruction of this terrestrial globe in which it burrows. Those who take this view of the pettiness and transitoriness of man compared with the vastness and permanence of the universe find little in the beliefs of savages to alter their opinion. They see in savage conceptions of the soul and its ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... principle that a tax, to be equitable and easy, should be distributed over a great variety of articles. It was argued that a man would pay a small duty on a large number of things with less inconvenience and consciousness of burden than if the same tax was levied upon a few prominent articles. The pettiness of the tax would keep him in a kind of deception as to the total amount he was paying, which not even the frequency with which he was called upon to pay it would entirely remove. This theory, together with a condition of state ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... beautiful. I do not see that any of the people concerned are the better for any of the incidents which have occurred—indeed, I think that they are all the worse for them. It is not encouraging or inspiring to have the meanness and pettiness of human nature brought before one, and to feel conscious of one's own weakness and feebleness as well. Some sorrows and losses purge, brace, and strengthen. Such trials as ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... is presented in these dear members of his family. And such a man, so far from being mad, is wise as few of us are. Glorious indeed is the self- sacrificer, because he is so sane, because in him all pettiness and detachment are swept away. He appears mad only to those who stand at the opposite point of view, but in his eyes it is they who are ridiculous. In fact, each must be counted crazy or wise according to the view we take of what constitutes the ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... what she would always be. Rilla Blythe's nature in that year had changed and matured and deepened. She found herself seeing through Irene with a disconcerting clearness—discerning under all her superficial sweetness, her pettiness, her vindictiveness, her insincerity, her essential cheapness. Irene had lost for ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... of mankind first were whispered, then shouted as battle cries, and finally chiseled with enduring letters into the foundations of States. "But if all this was good for men, why not for women—why should they be fettered by illiteracy, pettiness, dependence; why should they be voiceless in the state and world?" So asked the feminists. The factory called for women as labor; they became the clerks, the teachers, the typists, the nurses. Medicine and the law opened their doors, at least in part. And now we are on the verge of universal suffrage, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... pendants. They seemed so insignificant—to fall very far short of her mother's passionate description of them, and she began to wonder which was the more pathetic, Mrs. Robson's exaggerated notion of their worth or the pettiness that gave Aunt Julia the tenacity to hold fast ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... not, as usual, in solitude, but in well-lit company. Her ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no permanent consciousness ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... money as many ordinary grocers and certainly not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the use of their scheme and we'll have to find another for ourselves ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... who possessed such a freehold of fifty acres. To vote for governor or for senators in New York, one must possess a freehold of $250, clear of mortgage, and to vote for assemblymen one must either have a freehold of $50, or pay a yearly rent of $10. The pettiness of these sums was in keeping with the time when two daily coaches sufficed for the traffic between our two greatest commercial cities. In Rhode Island an unincumbered freehold worth $134 was required; but in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania the eldest sons of ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske

... angry and annoyed. She felt in an undefined fashion that she herself was the summer night and the flowers and the crescent moon, and all that was fair and beautiful in the whole world to this other soul, and shame seized her instead of pride. He seemed to force her to a sight of her own pettiness, as is always the case when love is not fully returned. She made an impatient motion with the shoulder next ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... unparalleled fierceness and power. He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the fashionable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race. But among the follies and vices of mankind, vanity was the fault most offensive to Swift, and that which he lashed with his most bitter invective. To ridicule human pride, and to expose ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... draw and drink. And to know that your waters are pure, unstained by taint of personal prejudice and the love of power, will fortify us considerably. Am I to assume, then, that above all passion and pettiness, you are an impersonal force whose innumerable daily editions reflect nothing but abstract truth, and are in no way the servants of a preconceived and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... bonhommie, and sincerity in real interests raised him habitually above the pettiness, the bustling malice, the vain self-consciousness, the personalities that infest all literary and social cliques. It is surprising at first that Diderot, who had all his life borne the sting of the gnats of Grub Street with decent composure, should have ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... converse and association with these great ones we take their breeding, their manners, earn their magnanimity, make ours their gifts of courtesy, unselfishness, mansuetude, high seated pride, scorn of pettiness, wholesome ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... a great passion like that means; I have never felt what you feel, and surely to live one's life with all its pettiness and pain, yet never to know its extreme experiences, is sadder than to have those experiences and suffer ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... will. Such a period of vital power began usually with a sensation of melancholy, and it quickened my normal revolt against the narrowness of conventional life into a red-hot detestation of the paltriness and pettiness with which so many mortals seem to content themselves. As the mood grew in intensity, this scorn of the lower things mixed with and gave place to a vivid insight into higher truths. The oppression began to give place to a realization of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... me a shambles, befouled by one great deed of blood—experience had removed that impression—retained an appearance infinitely mean and miserable in my eyes. I hated and loathed its intrigues and its jealousies, the folly which trifled in a closet while rebellion mastered France, and the pettiness which recognised no wisdom save that of balancing party and party. I thanked God that my work there was done, and could have welcomed any other occasion that forced me to turn my back on it, and sent me at large over the pure heaths, through ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... resourceful to be taken by police—too insignificant to tempt the legions out of camp. Brigandry was as distasteful to him and as far beneath his dignity as the pursuit of brigands was beneath the dignity of any of those Roman generals who owed their rank to Commodus. For them, as for himself, the pettiness of brigandry led nowhither. Only one object appealed to them—fame and its perquisites. Only one object appealed to himself: to redeem his estates and to avenge his father. That could be accomplished only by the death of Commodus: He laughed, as he thought of himself pitted alone against Commodus ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably expected me to do. My books are not quite the books I was to write when you and I were young. But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... Marian, and you sit there quite still, in a sort of stupor, drugged into the inebriate's magnanimity, firmly believing that the remainder of your life will be throughout of finer texture,—earth-spurning, free from all pettiness, and at worst vexed only by the noblest sorrows. Bah!" cried the Duke; "I have no patience with such nonsense! You will believe it to the tiniest syllable, that wonderful lying message which April whispers to every living ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... regarded all women in a more charitable manner since her meeting with Mrs. Chumley, and some of her enemies afterwards became her friends, for she bore them no malice, but sought them out and did her utmost to understand them. Her father had taught her to despise the pettiness of women, but in Mrs. Chumley's sweet sympathy she had found a new model of conduct. Her later philosophy ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... unless shared with the idol of his soul? Existence was for him henceforth a dreary waste; and yet his only fault had been that in the ecstasy of heaven-sent passion he had over-leaped the bounds imposed by human pettiness. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... matters of urgent importance, and he had not a moment to devote to his own affairs. When at length it was possible for him to consider himself at all, he felt that the accident had raised him out of the narrow pettiness which threatened to submerge his soul; he was at close quarters with malignant fate, and he had waged a desperate battle with the cruel blindness of chance. He could only feel an utter scorn for ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham

... thrilled with the exquisite joy of living which the scene and the surroundings inspired in them. A scene which men have dreamed of during moments of spiritual uplift, and have longed to behold and imitate and become a part of, and escape from the sordidness and pettiness of mundane existence and live the life of men where life is life and every breath is freedom; where the desire to live is dominant and the future holds no terrors, and each new day and sun and moon and procession of the stars are greeted with the joy ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... this you bring, my America? Is it uniform with my country? Is it not something that has been better done or told before? Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?—is the good old cause in it? Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literates of enemies, lands? Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here? Does it answer universal needs? ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... him their womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac

... psychological Dorsenne was in thinking that Maitland was ignorant of the former relations between his mistress and Gorka. Countess Steno's grandeur, that which made a courageous woman almost a heroine in her passions, was an absolute sincerity and disgust for the usual pettiness of flirtations. She would have disdained to deny to a new lover the knowledge of her past, and the semiavowals, so common to women, would have seemed to her a cowardice still worse. She had not essayed to hide from Maitland what connection she had ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... here. We're tryin' to be cheerful, An' keep this home from gettin' tearful. We hold it dear Too dear for pettiness an' meanness, An' nasty tales of men's uncleanness. Here you shall come to joyous smilin', Secure from hate an' harsh revilin'; Here, where the wood fire brightly blazes, You'll hear from us our neighbor's praises. Here, that they'll never grow to doubt us, We keep our ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest

... example, the sketches in "Under the Deodars" and in "The Gadsbys." That worthy pair, with their friends, are to myself as unsympathetic, almost, as the characters in "La Conquete de Plassans." But Mr. Kipling is too much a true realist to make their selfishness and pettiness unbroken, unceasing. We know that "Gaddy" is a brave, modest, and hard-working soldier; and, when his little silly bride (who prefers being kissed by a man with waxed moustaches) lies near to death, certainly ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... of the whole, and hiding the dome from view on a near approach. The present tasteless faade was Maderna's work. The splendid atrium or portico added (1629-67), by Bernini, as an approach, mitigates but does not cure the ugliness and pettiness ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... irregularity, pettiness, ill-health, and unserviceableness of modern woman seems to lie, therefore, along educational lines. Not in a general and cultural education alone, but in a special and occupational interest and practice for women, married and unmarried. This ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... at seeing this exhibition of pettiness on the part of the general. He had heard more than once that German officers, from sub-lieutenants upward, were terribly severe with their men, treating them brutally, and acting as though they were themselves of a superior class; but this was the first time he had actually come ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach

... facts, insufficient for the slightest quarrel, intolerable in the pettiness of the issue disclosed, and monstrous as reason for war between two civilized nations, became the welcome pretext. Swiftly, and with ill-disguised alacrity, the French Cabinet took the next step in the duel. On the 15th of July the Prime-Minister read from the tribune ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner

... a marvellous activity and gives evidence of such whole-hearted enthusiasm that I cannot bring myself to join issue with the critics who have lately attacked the Schola, though their attacks have been in some degree merited. Pettiness is to be found even in great artists, and imperfection in every human work; and defects reveal themselves most clearly after a victory has been won. The Schola has not escaped the critical periods that accompany growth, through which every work must pass if ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... connection between last Sunday and other days. What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought—Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place—some beloved place or tree—we ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... refines this sentiment and purifies it to such an extent that it loses all its pettiness, and it is pettiness which so often causes it to degenerate, even in its most loyal forms. The social work in common of a man and woman united by true affection, full of tenderness and devotion for one another, mutually encouraging each other to perseverance ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... you feel yourself, Violet, a kind of commonplace-ness about English life; a silver-slippered religion, a pettiness that does not satisfy, a sense of comfort incompatible with the strong desire to do the work which others will not do in the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... our soul the ardour we need for its search, it behoves us to deem it great. And if we should find one day that we have been on a wrong road, that this aim is incoherent and petty, we shall have discovered its pettiness by means of the very zeal its presumed grandeur had created within us; and this pettiness once established, it will teach us what we have to do. In the meanwhile it cannot be unwise to devote to its search the most strenuous, daring efforts of ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... appropriately urged in the most exceptional English; of Howe, whose tirade against the rebel General Johnson was feeble as it was ungenerous! This court was needed to show us at least the petty tyranny of martial law and the pettiness of martial jurists. The counsel for the defence have just enough show to make the unfairness of the trial partake of hypocrisy, and the wideness of the subjects discussed makes one imagine that the object of the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... you are even willing to believe that she is a daughter of the house of France," said Hamilton, with a hearty laugh. "Would that the world were as easily persuaded of what is good for it as of what tickles its pettiness. Shall you ask this daughter of ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... but she had seen too much of the seamy side of "good society" now to be able to accept this explanation of his calmness. It was not want of sensitiveness, she was sure of that: he was by no means obtuse: it was simply that his large, strong nature rose above the pettiness of resentment and complaint. The suspicion under which he labored was a grave thing—a trouble, a blow; but it had not made him sour, nor borne him to the earth with a conviction of the ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... we must have our Heroes still; heroes who master their lives after their own fashion, and who are the conquerors of fate. We cry out for men who are able to transcend the pettiness of every day, who despise it, and ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... thing that it should be judged by man's judgment"; its interests are so much wider than the incidents of a private career that base self-centred indulgence and selfish ambition are impossible to it. It is saved from pettiness, from ignorance, and from bigotry. It will not fall a victim to those undisciplined and disproportioned enthusiasms which we call fads, and which are a peculiar feature of English and North American civilisation. Such reforms as are carried out in this country are usually effected ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... legislative department, and entered it. But notwithstanding his most accurate and conscientious attention to his duties, he found nothing in them to satisfy his desire to be useful. His discontent, due to the pettiness and vanity of his immediate superiors, grew until an opportunity offered to enter the Senate. He was better off in the Senate, but the same feeling of dissatisfaction pursued him. He constantly felt that things were ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... 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 to, for it quickly became an obsession,) and he saw in them all the sheep or the horse or the fox or the goat. Human ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... the historian should never forget that his mission is to do justice to all; the poor and the prosperous are equals before his pen; to him the peasant appears in the grandeur of his misery, and the rich in the pettiness of his folly. Moreover, the rich man has passions, the peasant only wants. The peasant is therefore doubly poor; and if, politically, his aggressions must be pitilessly repressed, to the eyes of humanity and ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... nobles rather than because his reply inspired respect. But while the aristocracy was making war on individuals, the work of the dead man went on, as if even from the grave he was destined to bring into sharper relief the pettiness of their projects by ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley

... skill. He found himself looking for characteristics that were known to him in the portraits of the men and women he was studying. There was no attempt at concealment—vices and virtues, liberality of mind, pettiness of soul were set forth in naked truth. A sympathetic picture of Peters arrested him, though the name written beneath it puzzled. He looked at the kindly generous countenance with its friendly half-sad eyes and tender mouth with a ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... the look of Paris. They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... intellectual powers, who cannot avoid seeing through human beings and observing the vanity of their thoughts and of their avocations, their dishonesty and self-deceptions, the insincerity of their emotions, their cowardice, the pettiness of their real ambitions. Actually, considering that Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, one must be amazed at the balance and justice of his observations; much greater maturity is required for these qualities, than for any mathematical or scientific greatness. How ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... necessary, if only because it contributes to the desired end, namely, discipline. Let no one ask, then, to what purpose the innumerable religious and ritual regulations, sometimes reaching the extreme of pettiness, to what purpose the comprehensive code in which every step in the life of the faithful is foreseen. The Talmudic religious provisions, all taken together, aim to put the regimen of the nation on a strictly uniform basis, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... charges so minute and frivolous?" Minute and frivolous, we grant; but not so in that degree which prevented you gentlemen in opposition from dwelling on then with genial spite, as being odious in proportion to their pettiness. "You, you, it was," says Sir Robert, "that pressed the case!" Certainly: and they it was who would never have withdrawn the case had they not found it untenable. It is thus easy for two men to concert a collusive attack which shall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... better marks the place where the city of New York got clean and clear out of provincial pettiness into metropolitan tolerance than the advent of the Bohemians. Twenty-five years earlier they would have been a scandal and a reproach to the town. Not for their literature, or for their wit, or ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner

... a regal ceremony which shall revive the popularity of the king,—.and now he is desirous of buying the acclamations of the tribune, and believes the nation, like him, to be purchasable at a price. The pettiness of his means of safety are in contrast with the vast increase of perils; there is a vagueness in every idea; we see that he is impelled by the very passions he has excited, and that unable any longer to guide or control them, he betrays, whilst he is yet unable to crush, them. The prime agitator ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... loved him a thousand times better, and would have cheerfully parted with their own happiness for his. He was but one of a large herd of youths, possessing no will of their own, yet enjoying the reputation of a strong one; for moved by liking or any foolish notion, his pettiness made a principle of, he would be obstinate; and the common philosophy always takes obstinacy for strength of will, even when it springs from utter ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... genuflexions; this wilderness of sign and symbol, this elaborate abasement, this theatrical show of exaltation? This an improvement on the old dignified simplicity? Do you tell me that childishness, and prettiness, and pettiness, are valid substitutes for a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various

... material world. The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all men. Lessons of manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever of good or ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the necessity for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for doing, speaking and thinking everything that is good, and for the bringing of the mind into subjection so that these may be accomplished ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... Castle,' and the important reservations that must be borne in mind in describing Arnold as a Wordsworthian will become clearer. It is as a relief from thought, as a beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being so vast and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of human life to nothingness,—it is in these ways that nature has value in Arnold's verse. Such a poet may describe natural scenes well, and obtain by means of them contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty; but he does not penetrate nature ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... hours a firm and warm attachment sprang up between us; our souls understood each other. I am glad and proud that she loves me and that acquaintance with me may perhaps make her happy. A heart fashioned altogether for sympathy, far above the pettiness of ordinary social circles, full of noble, pure feeling for truth and virtue, and admirable even where her sex is not usually so. I promise myself divine days ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... want them," with an impish pettiness. "I hate young men in flannels. I hate houses. I hate afternoon frocks. I hate clean hands. I hate having to be polite. I want The Kid, giggling insanely at his own silly jokes. I want The Bear's den and The Bear inside it. I want to have grubby ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... manoeuvres or in the sight of a stale newspaper, of a great world process going on in which he was now playing no part at all. And a curious irritability manifested itself more and more plainly, whenever human pettiness obtruded upon his attention, whenever some trivial dishonesty, some manifest slovenliness, some spiritless failure, a cheating waiter or a wayside beggar brought before him the shiftless, selfish, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... shows us, in the first of these stories, the spread of socialism among the agricultural proletariat. He depicts village life with its pettiness and ignominy. The village is for the most part a backward place, hostile to everything that makes a breach in tradition. The hatching of socialism goes on slowly. From day to day, new obstacles, helped on by the ignorance of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky



Words linked to "Pettiness" :   littleness, puniness, tightfistedness, narrow-mindedness, unimportance, petty, niggardliness, slightness, meanness, triviality



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