"Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... open grave. There, man and chickens are dumb. Somehow, those who write and talk about the future never impress me so much with how much they know, as with how little. How absolutely nothing they can tell. How echoless is the Awful Silence into which they toss their petty pebbles of theories and hopes and speculations. It seems to me that if it were not for that sensitive disc, the Conscience, which conveys to us the 'still small voice,' from a country far beyond the reach of our petty theories, the Silence that envelops this planet would be intolerable. ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... strifes and vexations, your whims and complaints, (You were not saints yourselves, if the children of saints!) All your petty self-seekings and rivalries done, Round the dear Alma Mater your ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... such vain, unkind little children as the one mentioned above. It is actually unfair to the young children in the home to set the wrong example by being discourteous to the servants. They will only have to fight, later, to conquer the petty snobbishness that stands between them and their entrance ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but God for us all—then indeed we might despair. But who can ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... myself transferred on board the United States corvette Pocahuntas, of twenty guns, and one hundred and fifty men, including officers, marines, and petty officers. I found that she was bound to the North Seas; to look after the interests of the United States fisheries. She was strongly built and strengthened, so as to contend with the bad weather she might expect to meet, and the loose ice she was also likely to encounter. I shall describe ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... it likely that he wished to treat them ill? A few days later Garibaldi wrote a letter in which he promised Cavour (in effect) plenary absolution if he would proclaim a dictatorship. He would then be the first to obey. There was no petty spite or envy in Garibaldi; his wild thrusts had been prompted by "a general honest thought, and common good to all." He was ready to give ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... squirrel may be known by its smaller size. He is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields. He is most abundant in old bark-peelings, and low, dilapidated hemlocks, from which he makes excursions to the fields and orchards, spinning along the tops of the fences, which afford, not only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... that would be a logical move—if they know we are here. They haven't too many of those hounds, and they don't risk them on petty jobs. I'd hoped we'd covered our trail well. But we had to risk that attack on the camp.... I needed the map case!" Again Thorvald might have been talking to himself. "Time ... and the right maps—" he brought his fist down on the raft, making the platform ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... had been directed against the mercantile interest, and excited much general discontent. The Netherlands wished the staple of the English cloth manufacture to be removed from Emden—the petty, sovereign of which place was the humble servant of Spain—to Amsterdam or Delft. The desire was certainly, natural, and the Dutch merchants sent a committee to confer with Leicester. He was much impressed with their views, and with the sagacity of their chairman, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... consisting of three small bateaux, fitted out at Montreal, and conveying a body of pale-faced warriors, under the command of one whose hair was white and whose face was seamed with scars, entered the mouth of the Oswego[A]. This petty armament was joined at the beginning of the following season of sleep by a great number of canoes that contained the traders, artizans, and labourers, with their families, together with such tools and utensils as had been deemed necessary for the commencement of a new settlement, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... shipped, but there was something in their knowledge that the skipper's word was law, that there was no arguing about orders, which must have given a certain polish to their work. Warington, of course, was no petty tyrant, lording it over young brothers, and swaggering in the undisputed character of his sway. Like the rest he is a humourist, and when a gale was not blowing or the yacht was not contesting a race, he was as full of merriment and good spirits as the rest. His ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... other boys, it was O'Brien who came in for most of the abuse. There was no explaining it, except on the ground that his was a stronger and more dominant spirit than those of the other boys, and that he stood up more for his rights, resenting the petty injustices that were meted out to all the boys by the men. Whenever O'Brien came near the men in search of a dry place to sleep, or merely moved about, he was kicked and cuffed away. In return, he cursed them for their selfish brutishness, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... weight of conscription fell upon the poorest classes of the Jewish population, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enrol in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where poor Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from military service. The ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... need to mention particularly contests many years past, and presented to us in print? Words and papers now in print, as also the many petty divisions and names amongst us, sufficiently make this manifest. Wherefore light against light in this last place, or where it is thus repeated, cannot, I think, be more fitly applied than to that now under our consideration; that is to say, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the social valuation of the English servant; for, in the truest sense, England is the paradise of household servants. Liberal housekeeping, in fact, as extending itself to the meanest servants, and the disdain of petty parsimonies, are peculiar to England. And in this respect the families of English merchants, as a class, far outrun the scale of expenditure prevalent, not only amongst the corresponding bodies of continental nations, but even amongst the poorer sections of our own nobility—though ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... those that do not sufficiently balance their length with the magnitude of the idea. Some of Martial's are burdened with this fault; sometimes they accumulate too many commonplace compliments or are too petty in enumeration. For example, in this epigram to what point are so ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... but with the mind of a child is incapable of conforming his or her behavior to the standards of society and will be incapable of giving proper parental care to children. So a considerable percentage of our petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, and dependent are found to be feeble-minded. They are unstable, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... CLEMENTS. Cattle Lifting. Delarey gives us a Field Day. Burnt to Death. The Infection of Spring again. Death of Lieutenant Stanley. His Burial. Promoted to Full Corporal. Petty Annoyances—The Nigger. A Wet Night. The Great Egg Trick. Our Friend "Nobby." "The Roughs" leave us for Pretoria. The breaking up of the Composite Squadron. Life on a Kopje. Death and Burial of Captain Hodge. Camp Life at Krugersdorp. Lady Snipers at Work. Treatment of the Sick. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... an officer in her Majesty's Royal Artillery—is quite without some petty cash. How ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... one appellate court of last resort[Footnote: See Chap. XIX.] and several courts for the trial of original causes. Local justices of the peace are commonly given jurisdiction over prosecutions for petty misdemeanors, and civil cases involving small amounts (seldom over $50 or $100), which do not affect title to land. Then come County Courts (often styled Courts of Common Pleas or District Courts), having cognizance ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... for children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation; the majority of children are trafficked within Chad for involuntary domestic servitude, forced cattle herding, forced begging, forced labor in petty commerce or the fishing industry, or for commercial sexual exploitation; to a lesser extent, Chadian children are also trafficked to Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Nigeria for cattle herding; children may also be trafficked from Cameroon and the Central African Republic to Chad's ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... incredible that such monstrous efforts could have been put forth with the sole object of inflicting punishment and despair upon a poor wretch, because of some error he might have committed—one of those grave human errors which yet are so petty in face of the universe; an error which perhaps had not issued from either his heart or his brain, and had stirred not one blade of grass on ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... 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 and to action, will easily triumph over petty jealousies and all other instinctive reactions of the phylogenetic exclusiveness of natural love. The sentiments of love will thus become ever more ideal, and will no longer provide egoism with the soil of idleness and comfort on which it grows like ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... petty squabble over who gives orders to who," Lynwood answered. "I just work here," he ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object. Consequently, wherever power of any kind or degree has been exerted, the marks and evidence of it are stamped upon its results: it is impossible that ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... them, that is. I am wearied to death with the perpetual annoyances and vexations, and petty calls upon my time—life is not worth having at such a rate! I'll have done ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... Florentine convoys were never safe from attack on the highroads that neighbored the Aretine dominion, and if any brawl broke out between Florence and one of her neighbors, a brawl never provoked by Florence, too magnanimous for such petty dealings, but always inaugurated by the cupidity or the treachery of her enemies, the Aretines were sure to be found taking part in it, either openly or secretly, to the disadvantage and detriment ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Many petty frauds of this kind have been brought to light; amongst other cases, that of a magistrate, not a hundred miles from the county town, who forged seventeen wolf certificates, and succeeded in getting the money for them; and, most likely, emboldened by his success, would have continued ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... is life itself. It is this very 'interruption' that we live for. What does God care about the wretched books you intend to write, the petty occupations you think you discharge so gracefully? He means to teach you a great high truth, worth knowing; and, thank Heaven, He will, however much you shrink and writhe. Do not pick and choose among events: try and interpret ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that wrecked and ruined several lives. Certain prominent persons have decided to punish him. He is to have his life made miserable, he is to have his fortune taken away from him, he is to be subjected to petty annoyances and hard blows alike, driven from this, his home town, forced to realize that a man cannot do what ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... makes me sick," continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, "is to have people assume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do—and, mind you, there's mighty little of it done—amount to, compared with the rottenness of a paper run by my church-going ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... embarrassment as the father of three little daughters. Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the evil yet to come. He was then living in Petty France, Westminster, having been obliged, either by the necessities of his health or of the public service, to give up his apartments in Whitehall. The house stood till 1877, a forlorn tenement in these latter years; far different, probably, when the neighbourhood was fashionable and the back windows ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... moralize—which he didn't—upon the discovery, he would have laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have been wrong. We who have never stooped to petty larceny know that the oars had been placed there at the direction of his evil genius bent upon facilitating his descent into the avernus of crime. Let us, then, pity the poor young man ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... sensuality that you have painted makes the affirmative probable.'—'And my defence of the articles? I will publish it immediately; with a preface stating the whole transaction.'—'You will be to blame.'—'Why so?'—You may be better employed.'—'What! than in exposing vice?'—'The employment is petty; and what is worse, it is inefficient. The frequent consequence of attacking the errors of individuals is the increase of those errors. Such attacks are apt to deprave both the assailant and the assailed. They begin in anger, continue in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... affection, Maurice de Gramont, must be remarkably strong, if you weigh it against your petty, selfish interests,—your professional engagements. But, do as you please,—I ask nothing, expect nothing from you,—not even the protection of your presence, though I have no longer a son who is able to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... good taste enough not to be jealous of my so-called right, and ... otherwise what can I lose? No, Fritz, I am not jealous. [Short pause, it is getting darker.] I had to get accustomed to it; that's true. This secrecy, the petty lies and the false gravity irritated me a little bit too much at first, but I made an effort so that I could still retain a feeling of comradeship. I overcame it daily, because—well because I never really took you ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... the nature of small minds to disparage great ones; and in general Quita would have dismissed the matter with a light retort. But in her present mood, the man's petty personalities jarred more than usual. "I think we won't discuss Captain Desmond," she said without looking round. "To pick holes in a man of that quality only seems to accentuate one's ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... he: 'my uncontrolled tide Turns not, but swells the higher by this let. Small lights are soon blown out, huge fires abide, And with the wind in greater fury fret: The petty streams that pay a daily debt To their salt sovereign, with their fresh falls' haste Add to his flow, but ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... with childish levity and prattle which had no meaning. She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures, poor as they were, could not be preserved pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. They were always jealous of the beauty of each other, of a quality to which solicitude can add nothing, and from which detraction can take nothing away. Many were in love with triflers like themselves, and many fancied that ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... great and petty treasurers; scribes of grain, wine, cattle, woolen stuffs; chief masons, ditch-diggers, naval and land engineers, healers of various diseases, officers over regiments of laborers, police scribes, judges, inspectors of prisons, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... vain, and fond of excelling, was a woman of kind feelings, and entirely superior to the petty jealousies that annoyed Mrs. Ballman, and soured her towards all who succeeded in rivalling her in matters of taste and fashion. Of what was passing in the mind of the lady who had been so troubled at her reception of ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... paroxysm gradually subsided, the sobs became less convulsive and then ceased; by an odd but not quite unnatural conjunction, the captain's soothing current of talk died away at the same time and by proportional steps, and the pair remained sunk in silence. The lagoon broke at their feet in petty wavelets, and with a sound as delicate as a whisper; stars of all degrees looked down on their own images in that vast mirror; and the more angry colour of the Farallone's riding lamp burned in the middle distance. For long they continued ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... petty losses, he followed the game with dogged persistency. And those petty losses soon began to grow larger and larger. His money melted away rapidly, and still fortune frowned ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... had not been of roses. He had captured two hundred towns and fought in sixty battles on his way. He himself had strewed thorns for others as well. His wars spread suffering throughout France. His skirmishings, petty but many, add up to an appalling total of harm. Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure. Read what his Catholic enemies in Bearn said of him, in an address and appeal to the Catholics of France; as now first translated ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... to his wont, the butler informed him that Mr. Gall, the village constable, was below and wanted to see him after breakfast. He received the news in silence and sat down to eat his breakfast and read the morning paper. Gall had probably come about some petty summons, or to ask what he should do about the small boys who threw stones at the rooks and broke the church windows. After finishing his meal and his paper in the leisurely manner peculiar to country gentlemen who have nothing ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... are the gentlemen's lavatories, and smoking saloon and bar. The dining saloon is aft on the lower deck, with ladies' room forward. In the two saloons and ladies' rooms sofa berths can be arranged to accommodate 252 passengers. The crew and petty officers are accommodated in the forward part of the ship. As the profile shows, the vessel is divided by transverse bulkheads into seven watertight compartments, and there are double bottoms. She has six ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity—these are splendid excellencies, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... (in writing to me) as "plain-looking," and as having "entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her." Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... island, who were divided into a great number of petty nations, under a very coarse and disorderly frame of government, did not find it easy to plan any effectual measures for their defence. In order, however, to gain time in this exigency, they sent ambassadors to Caesar with terms of submission. Caesar could ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Sarudine came back. He sat down next to Volochine and asked questions about St. Petersburg, and also about the latter's factory, so as to let the others know what a very wealthy and important person his visitor was. The handsome face of this sturdy animal now wore an expression of petty vanity and self-importance. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... up at the stars that studded the infinity of space. About him were dark, silent forms, rigid in the sleep of death. Those were solemn hours, hours when he looked death in the face, and then backward over the years he had lived. Useless years they seemed to him now, years filled with petty ambitions that had to do solely with self. All the spiritual ideals of life, the things that give lasting joy and happiness because they are of the spirit and not of the flesh, he had scoffingly cast aside and rejected. He had narrowed life down to self and the things ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... of Mrs. Tommy Kidder had determined this petty course. This sprightly young person, being herself a real social force, shared little of the awe in which Mrs. Teunis Van Dam was held by most of her townsfolk and by all newcomers, and Cora, with her own ideas of the part which she, as the governor's wife, should play, had taken Mrs. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... virtuousness or viciousness of the agent; if the principle that governs the act and the effort put forth to conform to the principle be recognized as the true standard by which we are to judge, then two consequences will follow with respect to the conduct of life. The first is that the seemingly petty occasions of life are to be treated as grand occasions in so far as a moral principle is involved. For instance, a petty falsehood spoken for the purpose of securing business advantage or of avoiding business ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... His business was plain before him, and it was business into which he could put his heart. Although he was not an insensitive man, he was a man of generous nature. He pushed away with an almost careless energy those small annoyances, those little injuries of life, which more petty people make much of and cannot easily forgive. The querulous man who was ready, out of his bodily weakness and his mis-directed love, to make little of his friendship, even to thrust away his proffered help, he disregarded as man, regarded as so much nearly ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... supreme sacrifice." ("Amen," screamed a voice.) "In your dark lives," he cried, "who is the King of Glory? Sacrifice. Lift up your heads, then, ye gates of prejudice and hate, and let the King of Glory come in. Forget yourselves and your petty wants, and behold your starving people. The wail of black millions sweeps the air—east and west they cry, Help! Help! Are you dumb? Are you blind? Do you dance and laugh, and hear and see not? The cry of death is in ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... sent for this girl and her mother to keep his house and he is very fond of the girl, and declares that he will leave her all his money, and that she shall marry well. Now, sir, if she was to marry me, a petty officer only, it would not be considered that she married well; so you see, sir, there's ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... management the fortunes of his family,—a point which he accomplished, to a certain extent. His dawning character shewed him to be shrewd and wary, but possessing no extended views, and disposed to rest his hopes of elevation and distinction upon petty intrigues, rather than to look upon probity and exertion as the true basis of greatness. His great talent consisted in the management of his designs, "in which," remarks one who knew him well, "it was hard to find him out ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... midst took place early in September and happened on a Wednesday, the day of the Drumbo Petty Sessions. Our list of malefactors that week was a particularly short one and I was able to leave the court house in good time to see Lalage off at the railway station. I was in fact, in very good time and arrived half an hour before the train was advertised to leave. Canon Beresford ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... in the petty affairs attendant upon such a campaign. When his three old partners went away to their work at four o'clock in the afternoon, a wire had come from far out north that a man who was competent to run the line was starting for ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... once been filled by Egypt and Babylon. But the opportunity was lost; the murder of Joab and the unwarlike character of Solomon effectually checked all dreams of conquest, and Israel fell back into two petty states. ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... the writer, as well as of the reader, is solely confined to a court, a capital, a regular army, and the districts which happen to be the occasional scene of military operations. But a state of freedom and barbarism, the season of civil commotions, or the situation of petty republics, [87] raises almost every member of the community into action, and consequently into notice. The irregular divisions, and the restless motions, of the people of Germany, dazzle our imagination, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... aristocratic regiment without any of the members being able to vote against their admission. The two daughters would surely marry, when they had reached a suitable age with officers of the Hussars whose names bore the magic "von" of petty nobility, haughty and charming gentlemen about whom the daughter of Misia Petrona waxed ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery-players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, tap-rooms, or in the farm-house kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the entire drama of the Christian Faith. We allow ourselves to think of Shakespeare or of Raphael or of Phidias as having accomplished their work by the power of their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... terrible, Isabel, than the English life in a foreign town. It is so narrow, so petty—I had almost said so degraded. I should not have taken your pretty ward into my house here suppose you had prayed me to do it. Nothing could possibly be worse for a young girl; she could not escape its influence. No, I should never have taken ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... executioners. They spared my life because they thought it not worth the taking, and left me the wrecked and crooked thing you see. Yet I have served Milan since her fall—I, the traitor,—served her by a thousand petty treacheries and inventions. It was I who sent Henry Plantagenet the news of Barbarossa's plans. I have the favor of the Emperor, and hidden things are freely discussed before me. They know I am Milanese and despise me, but they believe ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... really too great to be possessed by petty weaknesses. If I ever did excel you, which is most unlikely, I know you would be glad both for me and for yourself. No, it is not that; I am ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... like the human skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate constitution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great governments is regarded ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... bloodshed of war, mankind, wearied with slaughter, will take a few moments' repose, and then their venomous hatred will be displayed in petty and private bickerings. Some, indeed, will every now and then raise piles of wood and fagot, and burn those alive who disagree with them in religion; others will attempt the solution of inexplicable riddles; and those born ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... that these officers lived in complete harmony for three years was proof enough that they were well and wisely chosen, and Scott was equally happy in his selection of warrant officers, petty officers and men, who brought with them the sense of naval discipline that is very necessary for such conditions as exist in Polar service. The Discovery, it must be remembered, was not in Government employment, and so had ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... fixed upon was of no use to them, being part of the sandy Beach upon the shore of the Bay, and not near to any of their Habitations. It being too late in the day to do anything more, a party with a petty officer was left to guard the Tent, while we with another party took a Walk into the woods, and with us most of the natives. We had but just crossed the River when Mr. Banks shott three Ducks at one shott, which surprised them so much ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... the Sikhs are loyal, Canada answers—"for their own sake." If British protection were withdrawn from India to-morrow, a thousand petty chiefs would fly at one another's throats. The idea that expropriation is behind exclusion could be entertained only by an Oriental mind. Expropriation is possible under Canadian law only for treason. Imperial unity is no ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Greek art, classical; Christian art is romantic, bringing into art entirely new sentiments of a knightly and a religious sort—love, loyalty and honor, grief and repentance—and understanding how by careful treatment to ennoble even the petty and contingent. The sublime belongs to symbolic art; the Roman satire is the dissolution of the classical, and humor the dissolution of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... plight now was comparable to that of the strollers of old, hunted by beadles from towns and villages, and classed as gypsies, vagabonds and professed itinerants by the constables. He was no better served than the mummers, clowns, jugglers, and petty chapmen who, wandering abroad, were deemed rogues and sturdy beggars. Yet no king's censor could have found aught "unchaste, seditious or unmete" in Barnes' plays; no cause for frays or quarrels, arising from pieces given in the old inn-yards; no immoral matter, "whatsoever any light and fantastical ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... father, was a local claim-agent on a small railroad. He spent his life pitting his wits against the petty greed of honest farmers and God-fearing, railroad-hating citizens. If a granger let his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for the destruction of a prize-winning ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... to such treatment as this in the whole compass of ancient art. Whoever the master, his hills, wherever he has attempted them, have not the slightest trace of association or connection; they are separate, conflicting, confused, petty and paltry heaps of earth; there is no marking of distances or divisions in their body; they may have holes in them, but no valleys,—protuberances and excrescences, but no parts; and in consequence are invariably diminutive and contemptible in ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... unable to move and handle the enormous eggs, the Countess, whose sweet character was a stranger to vindictiveness or petty resentment, had written to the members of the ornithological committee, revealing the marvellous fortune which had crowned her efforts in the search for evidence to sustain her theory concerning the ux, and inviting these gentlemen to aid ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... period the Czar and his advisers were temporizing and attempting to obtain peace by means of petty concessions. A greater degree of religious liberty was granted, and a new representative body, the Imperial Duma, was provided for. This body was not to be a parliament in any real sense, but a debating society. It could discuss proposed legislation, but it ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... their love for each other, there was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood and intrigue from which his soul turned ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... forced by law to keep a self-respect they had already lost, and have the insufficiency of things he could not eat. For he had as yet no knowledge of political economy. He evidently did not view his case in any petty, or in any party, spirit; he did not seem to look on himself as just a half-starved child that should have cried its eyes out till it was fed at least as well as the dogs that passed him; he seemed to look on himself as that impersonal, imperial ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... rather weak ruler, was greatly concerned by the news that Rezin, king of Syria and Pekah, king of northern Israel, had formed an alliance against him and were marching on Jerusalem. In his extremity this monarch of a petty state turned toward the mighty ruler of Assyria, the greatest military power in the world, and asked his help against the combination. Isaiah, statesman as well as prophet, saw that this was a wrong move. Assyria was aspiring ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of our threefold existence two parts are annihilated,—the what has been, the what shall be. We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking neither backward nor beyond, "Let us bear what is;" and so for the moment the eye can lighten and the lip ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... past weeks a number of petty thefts had been committed. Day-scholars who left small sums of money in their jacket pockets would find, on returning to the cloakrooms, that these had been pilfered. For a time, the losses were borne in silence, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... good to know my parents were now free from petty anxieties, that no unsettled bills hung over my father's head like threatening clouds, and that my mother could, if she would, take more time; to herself. Indeed she was forced to be less busy with hard work, for Aunt Hildy worked with power and reigned supreme here, and I helped her ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... the very last, and bravely came up to the bar when called upon. It required nerves, courage, and virtue, of no common cast, to do this, in defiance of all the authorities, as vindictive and virulent a gang of petty tyrants as ever disgraced the robes of office. In this manner the election proceeded from day to day, without any chance ever having been given by me to enable the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... farmers, Sam Coxen had been wont to look with large scorn on such petty interests as gardening; but a county show down at the Settlement had converted him, and now his cabbage patch was the chief object of his solicitude. He had proud dreams of prizes to be won at the next show—now not three ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... representatives of the United States, charged with the duty of protecting not only its honor, but its interests, in arranging terms of peace, to content themselves with little Porto Rico, away off a third of the way to Spain, plus the petty reef of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific, as indemnity for an unprovoked war that had cost and was to ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... check American slavery and prevent a renewal of the slave trade by American planters, she has even determined to employ the slaves of Africa in the production of cotton: that is to say, the slavery of America is to be opposed by arraying against it the slavery of Africa—the petty chiefs there being required to force their slaves to the cotton patches, that the masters here may find a diminishing market for the products of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... subject to the Ecuadorian government, which is represented by three or four petty alcaldes; but the Jesuit missionaries, who have established a bishopric and three curacies, generally control affairs—spiritual, political, and commercial. The Indians of each village annually elect one of their number governor, who serves without salary, and whose only show of authority ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of several hundred persons. Immediately on his coming in sight, the guards of the king of Bantam rose up, and handled their weapons, not from fear of the king of Jackatra offering any violence, but because there were a number of other petty kings present, who were mortal enemies to the king of Jackatra. On coming near the innermost rank of the Bantam guards, and seeing that he had to pass through among a number of these inimical petty kings, and being afraid of the cowardly stab so usual among this people, he appeared much alarmed, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... consent to it, and that without its consent the marriage could not be concluded. The Princess in question was the issue of double illegitimacy; by her father descended from a pope, by her mother from a natural daughter of Charles Quint. She was daughter of a petty Duke of Parma, and of a mother, entirely Austrian, sister of the Dowager Empress and of the Dowager Queen of Spain (whose acts had excited such disapproval that she was sent from her exile at Toledo to Bayonne), sister too of the Queen of Portugal, who had induced the King, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... wretches that crawl on the earth were shared, we may be sure, by her Grace's waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as little as there was of religion. It was the age of the criminal law which hanged men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... "respectable elements"—that is, those citizens who were of the upper class. There were two other clubs—the Blaine and the Tilden—which were similarly representative of the "rank and file" and, rather, of the petty officers who managed the rank and file and voted it and told it what to think and what not to think, in exchange taking care of the needy sick, of the aged, of those out of work and so on. Martin Hastings—the leading Republican citizen of Remsen City, though for ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... all these sufferings continued in their petty details each day, and that when night came we had not even a bed on which to stretch our weary limbs, some idea may be formed of the privations we endured on this campaign. The Emperor never uttered ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... being a sovereign, and with his son Tippoo Sahib. Our longest and most severe contests were with the Mahrattas, a warlike tribe of Hindus in Western India, who came first into prominence in the seventeenth century under Sivajee, a petty chieftain, and gradually advanced under various leaders till they became for a time the paramount power. Their hordes of horsemen scoured the country in all directions, north and south, east and west, demanding the chauth, the fourth part ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... does not always follow my advice, is sound at heart and a respectable member of the family of nations to be in the least disturbed in my sense of international good will. If I had been irritated I should have contributed to the petty backbiting by the mischievous uninformed which ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... think so!" broke in the explosive Wheatcroft. "The Major has been with us for thirty years now. I'd suspect myself of petty larceny ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... Petty had all the easy familiarity of the backwoods. He treated the boy and man who rode with him as comrades of at least a year's standing, and they felt in return that he was one of them, a man to be trusted. They retained all the buoyancy ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... brown eyes answered hers, but he was puzzled. Had he probed her aright? It was one of those intimate moments that come to nervously organized people, when the petty detail of acquaintanceship and fact is needless, when each one stands nearly confessed to the other. And ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... art is no longer serious, and the intercourse of men is not straightforward. The Englishman will always be emotional in spite of the rigid reserve which he imposes upon himself; he is an enthusiast, and he does truly love earnestness, veracity, and healthy vigour. Take him away from a corrupt and petty society and give him free scope, and he at once lets fall the film of shams from off him like a cast garment, and comes out as a reality. Shut the same Englishman up in an artificial, frivolous, unreal society, and he at once becomes afraid of himself; he fears to exhibit enthusiasm ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the majority applauded, and the vote was carried in behalf of humanity. But the king and his coterie were very angry, and assailed the duke in the most violent terms of condemnation. The king, in a petty spirit of revenge, issued a decree, recalling the ordinance that all the princes of the blood royal were to sit in the Chamber of Peers, and declaring that none in future were to appear there but by special authority of the king, ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... was never anybody who felt so strange in her home. It is not a month since I left my sisters, and I hardly remember that I know them. They all, and even papa, appear to be thinking about such petty things. They complain that I tell them nothing. What have I to tell? My Prince! my own Leboo, if I might lie in the stall with you, then I should feel thoroughly happy! That is, if I could fall asleep. Evelina declares we are not eight miles from Dayton. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... standing in a respectful attitude with his hands at his side in a state of rest; enters a room with his shoes down at heel, or without socks; omits to rise at the approach of his master, mistress, or their friends, and commits numerous other petty breaches of decorum which would ensure his instant dismissal from the house of a Chinese gentleman. We ourselves take a pride in making our servants treat us with the same degree of outward respect they would ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... she forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... know which it was that amazed me most, the almost childish petulance and ungovernable temper of the girl which made her cry out in spite of her surroundings and the circumstances, or the petty rapacity of the man who could stoop to such a low level as to rob her ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... concerted battery of curiosity at Taou Yuen's shimmering figure in the drawing-room screened against the sun. Mrs. Wibird, Sidsall thought—a woman of fat and faded prettiness, with wine red splotches beneath her eyes, and a voice that went on and on in the relating of various petty emotional disturbances—must have resembled Olive as a girl. It was probable, then, that Olive would look like her mother when in turn she was middle-aged. Mrs. Clifford, unseasonably huddled in her perpetual shawl, more than ever suggested a haggard ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlasting the world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be other aeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone. Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sure antidote to all our petty ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... may be termed, perhaps, the happiest of the first century of a settlement. The great cares of life are so engrossing and serious, that small vexations are overlooked, and the petty grievances that would make us seriously uncomfortable in a more regular state of society, are taken as matters of course, or laughed at as the regular and expected incidents of the day. Good-will abounds; neighbour comes cheerfully to the aid of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Alfred, "I leave those complaints to the insane ones: with me the gigantic wrong drives out the petty worries. I cannot feel my stings for my ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... else, the possibilities in the case. And what he saw distressed him greatly. Captain Sam Hunniwell was his life-long friend. Maud had been his pet since her babyhood; she and he had had many confidential chats together, over troubles at school, over petty disagreements with her father, over all sorts of minor troubles and joys. Captain Sam had mentioned to him, more than once, the probability of his daughter's falling in love and marrying some time or other, but they ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Alexander tried, and not in vain, to gain him as a friend. When he continued his progress eastwards across the Acesines, Porus was an active ally. Alexander moved along close under the hills. After crossing the Hydraotes (Ravi) he once more came into contact with hostile tribes, and the work of storming petty towns began again. Then the Hyphasis (Beas) was reached, and here the Macedonian army refused to go any farther. It was a bitter mortification to Alexander, before whose imagination new vistas had just opened out eastwards, where there beckoned the unknown world of the Ganges ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Countess, with a long, weary sigh. "I do, so! Nor out of men's hearts, belike. Well, Avena, to come down to such petty matter as I count I shall be suffered to have, prithee, bring me some violet silk of this shade for broidery, and another yard or twain of red samitelle for the backing. It were not in thy writ of matters allowable, I reckon, that the pedlars ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... partners who seemed to harbor a petty grudge against Brophy finally explained the whole plan to Jimmy. Everything was to be done to carry the impression to the public through the newspapers, who were usually well represented at the training quarters, ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... wood horses, patronized with such glee by the miniature men and women attending and enjoying wakes and fairs, only worked half time. The physical-force majority in the House, and their aiders and abettors, were they to see this, would perhaps laugh at the petty details, but their doing so would not in the least detract from their truth, or render questionable for a moment the deductions I make from them,—that poverty is so wide spread and bitter that the ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... economic, such as the remarkable rise in prices during the last decade. This has seriously enhanced the cost of living in India and has specially affected the very classes amongst whom disaffection is most widespread. The clerk, the teacher, the petty Government official, whose exiguous salaries have remained the same, find themselves to-day relatively, and in many cases actually, worse off than the artisan or even the labourer, whose wages have in many cases risen in proportion to the increased cost of living. Plague, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... and conscience—even conscience—is sometimes soothed into silence, while the sufferer sleeps. But nowhere, perhaps, is its influence more happily felt than in the heart oppressed by the harassing accumulation of petty ills; like a troop of locusts, making up by their number and their stings what they want ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Bright's letter both an able and a manly one, and though I cannot go his lengths, I respect and sympathise with the spirit in which it originated. I think he should draw a distinction between petty meddlings of our own, or interferences for selfish purposes, and an operation like this which really is in support of the public law of Europe. I agree with him in some of the retrospective part ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... here," said Dalny, as the horses slowed down to a walk. "We shall come soon, however, to a more interesting part of the street. Crime lurks here, also; not the more desperate crimes though. The Strada di Mara, in one part, is the resort of thieves who wish to dispose of their petty plunder by turning it into cash. And, as strange merchandise is dealt in here, the shops offer a variety of wares. We will presently look into one ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... did not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them. Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty and perverse such deeds would appear to those who should come after them. For whatever reason, Milton said that it had come about that some of the stories that seemed to be the oldest were in his day regarded as fables; ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... financier, stimulated by the drug. "We've been wasting our time, all these years, with our petty monopolies of beef and coal and transportation and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... not the solitary examples of this recognition of the emptiness and evil of power. Everyone who gains a position of power he has striven for, every general, every minister, every millionaire, every petty official who has gained the place he has coveted for ten years, every rich peasant who has laid by some hundred rubles, passes through this ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... blood in their veins, they must seek some other meeting-place where they can pitch their never-abiding tents, and sit at their humble feasts to recount to each other, amid appreciative laughter, the tricks and devices and pitiful petty schemes for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them the game and comedy of life. Tell me not that Ishmael does not enjoy the wilderness. The Lord made him for it, and he would not be ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... actually inheritable, and that one is transmitted relatively seldom. But among psychic characters one finds that practically all are inheritable. For example, stupidity, credulity, avarice, pecksniffery, lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, meanness, poltroonry, petty brutality, smallness of soul.... I here present, of course, the Puritan complex; there flashes up the image of the "good man," that libel on God and the devil. Consider him well. If you had to choose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jew with the fires of eternity ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... mucus, nothing in them at all. It appeared in the afternoon and disappeared again about 1/2 hour after." And then on January 3: "Last night Scott told us what the plans were for the South Pole. Scott, Oates, Bowers, Petty Officer Evans and I are to go to the Pole. Teddie Evans is to return from here to-morrow with Crean and Lashly. Scott finished his week's cooking to-night and I begin ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... believe so firmly in him that I shall make him true!—Yes, the lowest, the most senseless superstitions, I venerate them, I exalt—I glory in them! The ugliest, the most deformed, the most unreal of our gods, I adore them, and I bow down before their impossibility. [She kneels] Oh, I stifle in their petty narrow world, sad as a forest without birds! Air! Air! Singing! The sound ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... must seek a refuge elsewhere. All Europe was open to them. As a Guise the archbishop would have been welcome wherever Spain had power. With Spain, Italy, and Austria open to him, why should he thus bring danger and misfortune upon the petty dukedom of Sedan? The same may be said of Soissons; however reluctant Bouillon might be to part with so dear a friend, Soissons himself should have insisted upon going and taking up his abode elsewhere. Could he still have brought a large ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... which, he was now evidently loth to leave his guest ere he had learnt the nature of his errand to these parts. An "o'er-sea pilgrim," as they were generally styled, was too choice an arrival for a petty hostel—especially in those times, when newspapers and posts were not circulating daily and hourly through the land—to let slip an opportunity of inquiring about the king of Scotland, as Robert Bruce was then called, or about his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and devoid of desire at the hour when he stood near the corpse of his daughter, joined with the silent smoke of the censer, which rose like light mist in the air. How petty he appeared at that juncture, crushed, as it were, by some giant hand—not a demi-god in any sense, or a Titan, but rather an insect, pushing into some narrow cranny to hide from a bird of prey. Kranitski had seen Darvid then, for, on hearing of ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... fine harbour, where ships arrive daily from different quarters of the world. I frequented also the society of the learned Indians, and took delight to hear them discourse; but withal I took care to make my court regularly to the king, and conversed with the governors and petty kings, his tributaries, that were about him. They asked me a thousand questions about my country; and being willing to inform myself as to their laws and customs, I asked them every thing which I thought worth knowing. There belongs ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail, which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from 120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... have it!" Caesar broke out. "Nothing but blood will do any good here, and petty aggravations will only stir their bile and increase their insolence. Is the painter of whom you speak an Alexandrian?—I pine for the open air, but the wind blows the rain ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... themselves with the narrow things of home put a pipe into their mouths and became philosophers. Poets and dramatists smoked until all ignoble ideas were driven from them, and into their place rushed such high thoughts as the world had not known before. Petty jealousies no longer had hold of statesmen, who smoked, and agreed to work together for the public weal. Soldiers and sailors felt, when engaged with a foreign foe, that they were fighting for their pipes. The whole country was stirred by ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... save my life and my throne, of which I vow to you an equal share. With the help of your Northmen and the legions I command and who cling to me, we can defeat Constantine and rule the world together. This petty fray is nothing. What matters it if some lives have been lost in a palace tumult? The world lies in your grasp; take it, Olaf, and, ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... America, and before the volunteers of Ireland. We shall live to hear the Hampstead Protestant pronouncing such extravagant panegyrics upon holy water, and paying such fulsome compliments to the thumbs and offals of departed saints, that parties will change sentiments, and Lord Henry Petty and Sam Whitbread take a spell at No Popery. The wisdom of Mr. Fox was alike employed in teaching his country justice when Ireland was weak, and dignity when Ireland was strong. We are fast pacing round the same miserable circle of ruin ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... near—how very near, had Death, in his hovering, stooped towards their home! How strange, while treading thus precariously the film which covers the abyss into which all must some day drop, and which may crack under the feet of any one at any hour,—how strange to be engrossed with petty jealousies, with selfish cares, and to be unmindful of the great interests of existence, the exercises of mutual love and trust! Thank God! it was not too late. Margaret lived to be cherished, to be consoled for her private griefs, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... already having troubles enough, he thought, what with the petty annoyances, his grave suspicions of Fred Badger's loyalty, and now this prospect of foul play being attempted by those evil-disposed men from the city, only bent on reaping a harvest of money from the outcome of the game. There ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... of virtues, if destitute of this living, reigning, and triumphant love, was to Blessed Francis but as a petty heap of stones. He was never weary of inculcating love of God as the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... half-planning something of the sort, anyway! And—perhaps, just now," she added sweetly, "it would be a little wiser that way. You see, I understand you, Martie, and I know we seem awfully small and petty here, but—since we ARE in Monroe, why, isn't it better not to give any one a chance to talk? Well, about the picnic! Ida and May always bring cake; I'll take the fried chicken; and Mrs. Ellis makes a ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... were often those we would expect from a slave with a low brow. Even of Shakespeare, it is said in the morning he polished his sonnets, while at midnight he poached game from a neighboring estate. Our era bestows unstinted admiration upon the essays of Lord Bacon. How noble his aphorisms! How petty his envy and avarice! What scholarship was his, and what cunning also! With what splendor of argument does he plead for the advancement of learning and liberty! With what meanness does he take bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems like a palace of marble with splendid galleries and ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... genitive of Mensa." Insignificant as these words may appear, I still regard them as entitled to be recorded—nay, I would even write them as town-motto on the gate of Goettingen, for the young birds pipe as the old ones sing, and the expression accurately indicates the narrow, petty academic pride so characteristic of the "highly learned" Georgia Augusta.[51] The fresh morning air blew over the highroad, the birds sang cheerily, and, little by little, with the breeze and the birds, my mind also became fresh and cheerful. Such refreshment was sorely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Sunday school with her head turned by hearing some foolish talk about her dress. Alas! how often it is that Sunday scholars, on leaving the school, instead of giving one thought to the divine truths they have been hearing, allow their attention to be absorbed with the petty frivolities in which their ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... ago I had a need for an attorney to perform for me a petty service. Just at that critical moment I met a friend who was a lawyer. I employed him forthwith. At a later time I needed a lawyer again, recalled my former experience, and called up the same attorney. This employing ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Port Macquarrie in Australia, where his father was clerk of petty sessions, he was seized at the age of fourteen with an intense longing to go to sea. It is possible that he inherited this passion through his mother, for her father, Charles Beilby, who was private secretary to the Duke of Cumberland, invested a legacy ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... less well-known name, and if I retained the two months' beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance from the spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very small indeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action was plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was there remaining for me ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... and in all her strength, surrounded by the handsome favourites whom she never trusted, and the wise old statesmen whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself the most contradictory qualities of both her parents,—the coquetry, the caprice, the petty malice of Anne,—the haughty and resolute spirit of Henry. We have no hesitation in saying that a great artist might produce a portrait of this remarkable woman at least as striking as that in the novel of Kenilworth, without employing a single ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... accumulated in our souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch had gone away I had a strong impulse to go to my wife. I wanted to go downstairs and tell her that her behaviour at tea had been an insult to me, that she was cruel, petty, and that her plebeian mind had never risen to a comprehension of what I was saying and of what I was doing. I walked about the rooms a long time thinking of what I would say to her and trying to guess what ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... his toe-nails. She sang him to sleep with "Drolien" and the heart-shattering lament for Gerald. She prayed all night outside his door when he had a brief fever. When trouble was coming, she said the "snake's bells" told her, talking loudly; and petty incidents confirmed her so far that, after she found the child's room ablaze from one of Rawling's cigarettes, they did not argue, and grew to share half-way ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... quite authoritatively settled, even by St. Paul, so perhaps she was right. Mankind does not like to admit it, but it is, at the least, a question whether we can oppose our little wills against the forces of a universal law, or derange the details of an unvarying plan to suit the petty wants and hopes of individual mortality. Jess was a clever woman, but it would take a wiser head than hers to know where or when to draw that red line across the writings of ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... but that it will be my duty to do so before long," cried the officer, shaking his head like a petty tyrant, who ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the authour of Clarissa, with a strong yet delicate pencil. I lament much that I have not preserved it; I only remember that he expressed a high opinion of his talents and virtues; but observed, that 'his perpetual study was to ward off petty inconveniences, and procure petty pleasures; that his love of continual superiority was such, that he took care to be always surrounded by women[1093], who listened to him implicitly, and did not venture to controvert his opinions; and that his desire of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... nation. In forty years it was marching behind that beau chevalier Owen Roe O'Neill to battle and victory. O'Neill, a general famous through Europe, the one man who might have measured equal swords with Cromwell, was removed by poison, and then came the massacres. In eleven years, Sir William Petty assures us, 616,000 out of a total population of 1,466,000 perished by the sword or by starvation. For the remainder the policy of root and branch extermination was abandoned in favour of a policy of State-aided migration and ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... advantage of Emily in that she was always sweet-spoken and, on the surface, sweet-tempered. Emily, hurt and galled in a score of petty ways, so subtle that they were beyond a man's courser comprehension, astonished her husband by her fierce outbursts of anger that seemed to him for the most part without reason or excuse. He tried his best to preserve the peace between his wife ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... powdered cheeks and painted eyebrows. It was a strange, restless populace, the majority here to-day, disappearing to-morrow—cowboys, half-breeds, trackmen, graders, desperadoes, gamblers, saloon-keepers, merchants, generally Jewish, petty officials, and a riff-raff no one could account for, mere floating debris. The town was an eddy catching odd bits of driftwood such as only the frontier ever knew. Queer characters were everywhere, wrecks of dissipation, derelicts of the ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... they are inclined to an idle course of life, and prefer petty commerce to agriculture; hence the prohibition not to ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore |
