"Littleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... women of the community. It is true that the matter may be overdone and we may have such a thing as activity merely for the sake of activity. It was Carlyle who said that some people are noted for "fussy littleness and an infinite deal of nothing." The golden mean should apply ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... from them she might gain some inspiration on the subject which Marcus Aurelius in his coldness had denied to her. "From you, who have so nobly claimed for mankind the divine attributes of free action! From you, who have taught my mind to soar above the petty bonds which one man in his littleness contrives for the subjection of his brother. Mackinnon! you who are so great!" And she now looked up into his face. "Mackinnon, unsay ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... must arm your hook with the line, in the inside of it: then take your scissors, and cut so much of a brown mallard's feather as, in your own reason, will make the wings of it, you having, withal, regard to the bigness or littleness of your hook; then lay the outmost part of your feather next to your hook; then the point of your feather next the shank of your hook, and, having so done, whip it three or four times about the hook with the same silk with which your hook was armed; ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... Labor's bold son, his blithe and blooming bride, And lisping innocence, and filial love. To such a scene let proud Ambition turn, Whose aching breast conceals it's secret woe; Then shall his fireful spirit melt, and mourn The mild enjoyments it can never know; Then shall he feel the littleness of state, And sigh that Fortune e'er had made ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... a kingdom. Had this trait been related of a great man and a hero, it would irresistibly excite our admiration; but the character of this prince leaves us in doubt whether this moderation ought to be ascribed to a noble self-command, or to the littleness of a weak mind, which even good fortune could not embolden, and liberty itself could not strip ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... says, "There is going to be a great man in Philadelphia, but never was one." "Oh, is that so? When are you going to be great?" "When I am elected to some political office." Young man, won't you learn a lesson in the primer of politics that it is a prima facie evidence of littleness to hold office under our form of government? Great men get into office sometimes, but what this country needs is men that will do what we tell them to do. This nation—where the people rule—is governed by the people, for the people, and so long ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... partake of that quietude of manner, that modesty of deportment, that compassion for the unfortunate of their class, that unselfish admiration for men who, successful, have deserved success, that abomination of cliques, coteries, and conversaziones, and all the littleness of inferior fry: that such men should have parasites, and followers, and hangers-on; or that, since men like themselves are few and far between, they should live for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... impulsive, frank class of women. She says she belongs to the genus irritabile. She is easily excited to every good emotion, and also to the nobler failings of anger, indignation, and pride. But she is so far above any meanness or littleness, that she don't know them when she sees them. They pass with her for what they are not, and she is spared the humiliation of knowing what her species is capable of. Kate's nature is very charming, but there is a gentler, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... was building himself a house at Athens, being asked by one that observed the littleness of the design why a man so eminent would not have an abode more suitable to his dignity, he replied that he should think himself sufficiently accommodated if he could see that narrow ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... comparison it involuntarily courts with the Prometheus of Aeschylus. Both are examples of fortitude under suffering—of the mind's conflict with its fate. In either play a dreary waste, a savage solitude, constitute the scene. But the towering sublimity of the Prometheus dwarfs into littleness every image of hero or demigod with which we contrast it. What are the chorus of mariners, and the astute Ulysses, and the boyish generosity of Neoptolemus—what is the lonely cave on the shores of Lemnos—what the high-hearted old warrior, with his torturing wound and his ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... truly said "clarum et venerabile nomen"—exercised on all with whom he was connected. If indeed he had a fault, it was that his standard of action was so high, his nature so absolutely above the littleness of ordinary life, that he attributed to inferior men far purer and more unselfish objects than those that really moved them. "Vixit enim tanquam in Platonis politeia, non tanquam in ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the shining mast and saw the stars and stripes floating there so calmly and serenely, and I remembered our glorious mission, and instantly I felt the Everlasting Arms about me. I realized as never before in my life, the utter littleness of man, and the almightiness of God. Here, floating thousands of feet above the earth, we can rest just as implicitly on His promises as we ever ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... morning, November 24th, I met Mr. BALFOUR crossing the Pont du Mont Blanc. He was looking at It with that dreamy smile of his, which seems to laugh at the littleness of man and the futility of his policies. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... not reckon with the two principal parties concerned, Louis XIII. and Cardinal Richelieu. With all his weaknesses of temper and mind, the king had intellect enough to know what were the great interests of his kingdom and power, and on whose shoulders they rested. Above all the littleness of a court cabal he could not but discern the great questions which impended, and with which he felt quite incompetent to deal. And he could perceive but one man in his kingdom able to handle ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... that the feelings are irritated at the imagined audacity of the inanimate object, with the self-conceit of its impotence; and, finally, the eye is offended at its want of size. It does not, as might be at first supposed, enhance the sublimity of surrounding scenery by its littleness, for it provokes no comparison; and there must be proportion between objects, or they cannot be compared. If the Parthenon, or the Pyramid of Cheops, or St. Peter's, were placed in the same situation, the mind would first ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... but as it has no foundation in fact, I hope the Doctor will be so good as to take his own way in undeceiving the publick, I principally mean my friends and connections, who will be first angry at me, and next sorry to find such an instance of my littleness recorded in a book which has a very fair chance of being much read. I expect you will let me know what he will write you in return, and we here beg to make offer to you and Mrs. Boswell of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... and probe it for tender points. "Oh, that was a dreadful thing to say," was a refrain that would keep her awake for hours, wriggling and giggling in her bed over the dreadfulness of it. She had too little egoism. The lack gave her face a look of littleness. A lack of altruism has the same outward effect. A complete face should be full of something, of gentleness, of vigour, of humour, of wickedness. The admirer's face was only half full of anything. All the same there was charm about her, the fact that she was an admirer ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... Northrup bent to Polly's littleness, but she reached up to him with her frail tender arms and seemed to gather him into her denied motherhood. Without a word she kissed him ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... and scan the traces of what I was doing before I created Man,—multiply that problem by the stars which are scattered in number numberless over all the vault of Heaven; and learn to confess that it behoves the creature of an hour to bow his head at the discovery of his own littleness and blindness; and that his words concerning the Ancient of Days had need to be at once very wary, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the treasures of the realm to supply their insatiate greed, was devoted to polemical divinity, in which he displayed his learning, indeed, but changed his positions and contradicted himself day by day. The magnitude of this wonderful sovereign's littleness oppresses the imagination. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... reason is not far to seek. Persons of the social grade of Mackenzie were inconceivably odious to this "diner-out of the first water;" while men like Bidwell and Baldwin made him painfully conscious of his own littleness and insufficiency for the task which he had undertaken. Yet he could not venture to call to his Council any of the remnant of the Tory Compact, and thereby utterly ignore the Liberal principles which were presumed to have dictated his appointment. The Tories, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... French fishermen's children are beautiful, and the little French soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge pompons on their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged fishermen; there is the town idiot, mocking a woman who is screaming ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but which mounts up to a mighty sum in the end, which is an essential part of an important whole, which has consequences greater than itself, and where more is meant than meets the eye or ear. We complain sometimes of littleness in a Dutch picture, where there are a vast number of distinct parts and objects, each small in itself, and leading to nothing else. A sky of Claude's cannot fall under this censure, where one imperceptible gradation is as it were the scale ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... people's creed, he must have divorced himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile. Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage—a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners, the customs are of all varieties and places—Egypt, with its ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... expression; there seems to be a common centre in our inner life that they all appeal to. Possibly at this centre are the great primitive emotions common to all men. The religious group, the deep awe and reverence men feel when contemplating the great mystery of the Universe and their own littleness in the face of its vastness—the desire to correspond and develop relationship with the something outside themselves that is felt to be behind and through all things. Then there are those connected with the joy of life, the throbbing of the great life spirit, the gladness of being, the desire ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... may very fitly serve us, too, with a conclusion to these passages, "believe me, whatever of dignity, whatever of strength we have within us, will dignify and will make strong the labours of our hands; whatever littleness degrades our spirit will lessen them and drag them down. Whatever noble fire is in our hearts will burn also in our work, whatever purity is ours will also chasten and exalt it; for as we are, so our work is, and what we sow in our lives, that, beyond a doubt, we shall ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... Columbus is reported to have said: "I must have another continent to keep the earth's balance true." And I must have the personal conscious future, which is to right the wrongs of the ages, if I am to believe and preach the faithfulness of God. But we must guard against an impatience which is our littleness. In the immense times of the Almighty, every dark mystery of human being can move away, and leave the "sky of Providence at last, arching over the soul with not a cloud to dim its stars." For my present faith I hold it true with ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... stranger. The halter of Jerusalem shall see A unit for his virtue, for his vices No less a mark than million. He, who guards The isle of fire by old Anchises honour'd Shall find his avarice there and cowardice; And better to denote his littleness, The writing must be letters maim'd, that speak Much in a narrow space. All there shall know His uncle and his brother's filthy doings, Who so renown'd a nation and two crowns Have bastardized. And they, of ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... have hitherto mentioned, of its high civilization in times past. It has had for ages the knowledge of the more recent discoveries and institutions of the West, which have done so much for Europe, yet it has been unable to use them, the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before the taking of Constantinople; or, again, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... and herself—to the age-long delectation of readers. On the other hand, the whole speech is Des Grieux', and never was a monologue better suited or justified. The worst of such things is usually that there are in them all sorts of second thoughts of the author. There is none of this littleness in the speech of Des Grieux. He is a gentle youth in the very best sense of the term, and as we gather—not from anything he says of himself, but from the general tenor—by no means a "wild gallant"; affectionate, respectful to his parents, altogether "douce," and, indeed, rather (to start with) ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... were the issues of Henry's policy, it shrinks into littleness if we turn from it to the weighty movements which were now stirring the minds of men. The world was passing through changes more momentous than any it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire. Its physical bounds ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... the old castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, and the old Roman camps and military roads, to appeal powerfully to the boy's lively imagination. Every phase of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in Shakespeare's poetry; just as his characters reflect the nobility and the littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... morning she left her cabin on the Sound steamboat and went out on deck, and then she had unfolded to her the most thrilling scene of the earth. Gazing, almost panting with excitement, it seemed to her that the nature she had known—the hills and fields of New England—shrank to littleness. First there was all about her the sway of the East River, golden—flecked with the morning sun, which glowed through a thin haze. From either shore a city climbed, topped with steeples and mill chimneys—floods of tenements ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... of Honor about the Empress Charlotte. The order was not a military one, else it must have fallen to an officer of rank. It was not even official. But no doubt it enfolded more of weight for that very reason. Napoleon III. believed that in the unofficial, in littleness and dark gliding, lay the way to govern a state. Michel Ney regarded his task as a complete enigma. He had only to see a girl to the end of her journey. He was a slow-thinking, even a non-thinking agent, but in a contingency he could ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... is he that can so embellish his subject as to make her more than human, whilst yet by a cunning art he has so based his apotheosis on the nature of the case that the woman can go on being a true woman, and give her character free play, and show littleness, or cherish spite, or be greedy of common pleasures, and he continue to worship without a thought of incongruity. To love a character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Persons with very pale nails are subject to much infirmity of the flesh, and persecution by neighbours and friends. People with narrow nails are ambitious and quarrelsome. Lovers of knowledge and liberal sentiment have round nails. Indolent people have generally fleshy nails. Small nails indicate littleness of mind, obstinacy, and conceit. Melancholy persons are distinguished by their pale or lead-coloured nails; and choleric martial men, delighting in war, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... height, towered above the man he accused. Fenwick sat, struck dumb. Welby's increasing stoop, which of late had marred his natural dignity of gait; the slight touches of affectation, of the petit-maitre, which were now often perceptible; the occasional note of littleness, or malice, such as his youth had never known:—all these defects, physical and moral, had been burnt out of the man, as he spoke these words, by the flame of his only, his inextinguishable passion. For his dear mistress—in the purest, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... directly to her own room. It was easy for her to see that Mr Harrel was bent upon using every method he could devise, to entangle her into some engagement with Sir Robert, and though she could not imagine the meaning of such a scheme, the littleness of his behaviour excited her contempt, and the long-continued error of the baronet gave her the utmost uneasiness. She again determined to seek an explanation with him herself, and immovably to refuse joining the party to ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps did not get to droop ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the childishness, the frivolity, the instability, the disrespectfulness, the sentimentality, the high falutinism, the superficiality, the looseness of principle, everything that made up the greatness and littleness of the France of the end of last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri, when once he disliked a person or a thing, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in dark valleys Voluminous gathered and grew, and waxing swelled to a gale; An hour I heard it, or more, ere yet it sobbed on my lattice: Far off, 't was a People's moan; hard by, but a widow's wail. Atoms we are, we men: of the myriad sorrow around us Our littleness little grasps; and the selfish in that have no part: Yet time with the measureless chain of a world-wide mourning hath wound us; History but counts the drops as they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and supposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had its beginning in Joe's starting out rather ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization, he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... am sure—this is new since I have known you—that if such a great love as ours be withdrawn it would be an unpardonable wrong for either of us to marry again. That is what puzzles me—confounds the wisdom I used to have, and which in my littleness and pride I thought so sufficient. I didn't believe in God, but now I feel him, through you, though I cannot define him. And one of many reasons why I could not believe in Christ was because I took it for granted that he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... hymns of praise. 'Grandison,' says a Roman Catholic bishop, 'were he one of us, might expect canonisation.' 'How,' exclaims his uncle, after a conversation with his paragon of a nephew, 'how shall I bear my own littleness?' A party of reprobates about town have a long dispute with him, endeavouring to force him into a duel. At the end of it one of them exclaims admiringly, 'Curse me, if I believe there is such another man in the world!' 'I never saw ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... seller. But Cato, as if he took a pride in these things, tells us, that when consul, he left his war-horse in Spain to save the public the charge of his conveyance. Whether such things as these are instances of greatness or littleness of soul, let the reader ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... many other individuals of great physical bulk and strength, had an intellect not much adapted for comprehending subtile and difficult thoughts. He took up the ground that things are what they are in themselves, and was incapable of grasping the idea that greatness and littleness, depth and shallowness, are relative things. An altercation ensued, which resulted in threats on the part of Smith that he would throw Brown into the river; and a coolness was occasioned between the friends which subsisted for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... shelves of great literature, and for the publishers to advertise sets of their Linoleum Classics, but what the people need is the good, homely, honest stuff—something that'll stick to their ribs—make them laugh and tremble and feel sick to think of the littleness of this popcorn ball spinning in space without ever even getting a hot-box! And something that'll spur 'em on to keep the hearth well swept and the wood pile split into kindling and the dishes washed and dried and put away. Any one who can get the country people to read something worth while ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... being turn, Where a ne'er-setting sun illumes the year Eternal, and the incessant watch-fires burn Of unspent holiness and goodness clear,— Forget man's littleness, deserve the best, God's mercy in thy thought ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... in part only, purge his floor, and take away the dross and the tin of his people, and make a man finer than gold. Withal, they grew high, rough, and self-righteous; opposing further attainment; too much forgetting the day of their infancy and littleness, which gave them something of a real beauty; insomuch that many left them, and all visible churches and societies, and wandered up and down as sheep without a shepherd, and as doves without their mates; seeking their beloved, but could not find him, as their souls desired to know him, whom their ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... very essence of tragedy. But something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and lower nature of a man, between his ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the common concerns of life; in the petty matters that wear away the brain at last; in the market-places of the world, this insight is not without its effect. The heart is humbled as the eyes open to the grandeur of the scheme, and to the consequent littleness of individual manhood; but again, the breast swells with the purest of all pride, when the thinker says to himself: I am the King—because the hero or highest type of the Articulata, Radiata, Mammalia, or any order of vegetable or animal life. All these great ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... powerless to sadden souls upheld by a great love and nourished by a noble ideal. We shall return with heads erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe, rejuvenated by our magnificent misfortune, purified by victory and cleansed of the littleness that obscured the virtues which slumbered within us and of which we are not aware. We shall have lost all the goods that perish but as readily come to live again. And in their place we shall have acquired those riches which shall not again perish within our hearts. Our ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... errand-boy or his horse, to light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have room to operate within that tiny body—there is a marvel before ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... so much as a feeling of it when it is present. For according even to them, it is not by nature imperceptible; nay, even Chrysippus in his books of the End expressly says that good is sensible, and demonstrates it also, as he maintains. It remains, then, that by its weakness and littleness it flies the sense, when being present it is unknown and concealed from the possessors. It were moreover absurd to imagine that the sight, perceiving those things which are but a little whitish or inclining to white, should not discern such ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... starved or not, they would shine just the same. The triviality—even ludicrousness—of the sorrow of man, as compared with eternal things, was over the boy. He was maddened at the sting and despite of his own littleness in the face of that greatness. Suddenly a wild impulse of rebellion that was almost blasphemy seized him. He clinched a puny fist at a great star. "Wish I could make you stop shinin'," he cried out, in a loud, fierce voice; "wish I could ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... dead Boswell wrote his life. It is one of the most wonderful lives ever written—perhaps the most wonderful. And when we have read it we seem to know Johnson as well as if we had lived with him. We see and know him in all his greatness and all his littleness, in all his ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... manifested no repugnance—but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... and their crimes, basely exposing the innocent to the censures and punishment that should fall upon their own guilty heads. No, sir; woman as I am I would scorn to stoop to such a low depth of infamy to screen myself from any position, even from death itself; and if you, with all this littleness of mind and cringing cowardice of soul, expect to intimidate me by any menaces, all I have to say is, you have 'reckoned without your host.' And permit me to tell you that there are no words in any language half adequate to express my contempt of ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... as too much education, although educating us primitive men and women is apt to develop unexpected littleness. and thus create ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... courage, and not weak changeableness or fickleness, because it had a noble object. To have adhered to his ordinary course in the colonel's case, when he had become convinced that he had been wronging that officer, would have been obstinacy and littleness." ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... have been or to have posed as being indifferent to popular success, would have required a man of less vivid sympathy with his fellow-men: to have been puffed up and pretentious would have needed one less gifted with a sense of humor, less conscious of the littleness of one man, however talented, in the vast procession of life on the earth's surface. His delight in his work and its success was of the perfect and natural kind, which he could communicate to his wife and daughters, and might have been shared by ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the branches of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of their leafy adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the everlasting and regular change in Nature, to feel the harmony of the wondrous powers pervading all things. He who contemplates them with the eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man amid ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... from the littleness of their surroundings; but he only is great who is great amid greatness. Lincoln had great associates,—Seward, the sagacious diplomatist; Chase, the eminent financier; Stanton, the incomparable Secretary of War; with illustrious Senators and soldiers. Neither ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impression in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman. For the time, one would have been preposterously conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd; you never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way, but unable to distinguish your sensations from those of the mass. If a ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs—out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes, so long ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... actyve, though the body seems lazy and listless. An open spot on a mountain side, where a wide look can be had at the heavens and the 'arth, is a most judicious place for a man to get a just idee of the power of the Manitou, and of his own littleness. At such times, there isn't any great disposition to find fault with little difficulties, in the way of comperhension, as there are so many big ones to hide them. Believin' comes easy enough to me at such times, and if the Lord made man first out of'arth, as they tell ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... stay with the little people, and his adventures later among the giants of Brobdingnag, are classic. Written as a political satire, the narrative has served a gentler purpose than its original one. The littleness of the Lilliputians and the greatness of the giants ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... a step beyond the luminiferous ether—conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... All the littleness of heart and mind which had first shown itself in Grace at the meeting in the cottage, when Mercy told the sad story of her life, now revealed itself once more. The woman who in those past times had felt no impulse to take a suffering and a penitent fellow-creature ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... Ha, demon, smile; I was once happy. But let that be forgotten which can never be recalled. Yes, we have only strength when we pursue wickedness. But wherein am I great? If I were so, should I want thee? Go, cunning flatterer; thou wilt only make me feel my own littleness. ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... without scruple or shame, whenever they interfered with his interest, or with what he called his glory. His perfidy and violence, however, excited less enmity than the insolence with which he constantly reminded his neighbours of his own greatness and of their littleness. He did not at this time profess the austere devotion which, at a later period, gave to his court the aspect of a monastery. On the contrary, he was as licentious, though by no means as frivolous and indolent, as his brother ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... happens, that in things difficult there is danger from ignorance, and in things easy from confidence; the mind, afraid of greatness, and disdainful of littleness, hastily withdraws herself from painful searches, and passes with scornful rapidity over tasks not adequate to her powers, sometimes too secure for caution, and again too anxious for vigorous effort; sometimes idle in a plain path, and sometimes distracted in labyrinths, and dissipated ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... of greatness. Potent, and almost irresistible in every conflict with others, and only to be vanquished by his own acts, he possessed many of the higher qualities of genius. He was rapid, resolute, and daring, filled with contempt for the littleness of mankind, yet molding every atom which composed that littleness to purposes at utter variance with its nature. In defiance of the first essence of republican theory, he built himself an imperial throne on the crushed ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... religious duty of providing for one's own household, only he blundered the text. Bletson wrote long and big words about the political obligation incumbent on every member of the community, on every person, to sacrifice his time and talents to the service of his country; while Harrison talked of the littleness of present affairs, in comparison of the approaching tremendous change of all things beneath the sun. But although the garnishing of the various epistles was different, the result came to the same, that they were determined at least to keep sight of Woodstock, until they were well assured ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... and without feeling; steel your hard hearts in your vile propriety, make yourselves contemptible through your high-mightiness. But as for you, dear youth, when you read this anecdote, when you are touched by all the kindliness displayed even on the impulse of the moment, read also the littleness of this great man when it was a question of his name and birth. Remember it was this very Turenne who always professed to yield precedence to his nephew, so that all men might see that this child was the head of a royal house. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... outlet; and the numerous caves which open along its sides, like the arches of an amphitheatre, seem but its darker cells. It is, in truth, a wild impressive place, full of beauty and terror, and with none of the squalidness of the mere dungeon about it. There is a puny littleness in our brick and lime receptacles of misery and languor which speaks as audibly of the feebleness of man, as of his crimes or his inhumanity; but here all is great and magnificent—and there is ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... that which remains should be spent upon acquisition of religious merit and the gratification of the desire for pleasure. That king who is acquainted with duties and who is possessed of intelligence should never waste what has been stored. The king should never disregard any wealth for its littleness; he should never disregard foes for their powerlessness; he should, by exercising his own intelligence, examine his own self; he should never repose confidence upon persons destitute of intelligence. Steadiness, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... beautiful and lofty ideals only, but the power to translate them into the daily practice of common lives. Not merely the glorious examples of a pure faith, but the actual force which enables men to live by that faith amid the littleness, the depression, the contamination, and the conflict of an ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... of nations, the vast, silent, impenetrable mystery of the world. By continual pondering over the footsteps of the Seekers, the Sought-for seemed to grow to vast proportions, and the Found to shrink to inappreciable littleness. For me, over the dreary ice-plains of the Poles, over the profound bosom of Africa, the far-stretching steppes of Asia, and the rocky wilds of America, a great silence brooded, and in the unexplored void faint footfalls could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... laughter of a crowd of his compeers. Hence a certain indocility and rigidness of mind which they only escape who live out of the fashion or have strength to lead it or to live above it. Simple, whether from greatness or littleness, they escape the narrowing influence inseparable from being identified, even in their own mind, with a school or coterie; and can afford to say things as they ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... and the murder of Buckingham; so in Shire Lane, opposite, the talk must have run on Marlborough's victories, Jacobite plots, and the South-Sea Bubble; Addison must have discussed Swift, and Steele condemned the littleness of Pope. It was the custom of this aristocratic club every year to elect some reigning beauty as a toast. To the queen of the year the gallant members wrote epigrammatic verses, which were etched with ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... neither take away from, nor add to his poetical reputation. There is, occasionally, a littleness of manner, and an unnecessary degree of caution. He appears anxious to say a good thing in every word, as well as every sentence. They, however, give a very favourable idea of his moral character in ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... great fomenter of all corruptions in the human heart. The friend of order has made half his way to virtue. All finery is a sign of littleness. ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... resembled the violence of Africa. There was something terrible about it, yet also something noble, for it suggested a male power, which might make for either good or evil, but which had nothing to do with littleness. For a moment Count Anteoni and the priest were dwarfed, as if they had come into the presence ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... and without ties and responsibilities would fain do the same. It is a sacrifice, no doubt, to give up civilization and to begin life anew, but it is what our colonists are always doing. At any rate it is freedom—freedom from the corruption, the intrigue, the sloth, and the littleness of a decaying power like that of Carthage. You will be happy at least in having your wife with you, while the gods only know when I shall see the face of ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... this the climax to his praise of a woman. And yet, we fear, he saw only too truly. What unexpected failures have we seen, literally, in this respect! How often did the Martha blur the Mary out of the face of a lovely woman at the sound of a crash amid glass and porcelain! What sad littleness in all the department thus represented! Obtrusion of the mop and duster on the tranquil meditation of a husband and brother. Impatience if the carpet be defaced by the feet even of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... such etherialized purity as if made for spirits to travel in, and tempting them to rise and free themselves from the soil; and the stillness, like nature's hand laid upon the soul, bidding it think. In view of all that vastness and grandeur, man's littleness does bespeak itself. And yet, for every one, the voice of the scene is not more humbling to pride than rousing to all that is really noble and strong in character. Not only "What thou art," but "What thou mayest be!" What place thou oughtest to fill what work ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to the young doe's eyes the pretty trusting smile. The girl seemed to smile as if to herself nearly all the time, Dowie thought, and often she broke into a happy laugh at her own small blunders—and sometimes only at the sweet littleness of the things she ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is littleness or greatness, Robert, that must escape minutiae," said his companion, apparently his wife. "If we could reach to the particles, perhaps we might move ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... that they are actually made of jewels. And so God places a solemn value and responsibility on the humble workers, the people that try to hide behind their insignificance the trifling opportunities and the single talents; and our littleness will not excuse us in ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... lands our arid wastes. And I am not at all angry because you sing us the same old song about the English ploughs and arboriculture and silviculture. Not in the least. Men of such great, such very great merit, may be excused for the contempt which they manifest for our littleness. No, no, my friend; no, no, Senor Don Jose! you are entitled to say any thing you please, even to tell us that we are not much better ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... In the littleness of things, it so happened that at a time when John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake, serious, solemn, side-by- side, were telling the widow of Jimmy Blair that the Tidewater Southern ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... he, "as a philosopher and a citizen of the world you will find Melford repay patient study as much as Chambery or Buda-Pesth or the Latin Quarter. It is a garden of Lilliput. Here you will see Life in its most cultivated littleness. A great passion bursting out across the way would convulse the town like an earthquake. Observe at the same time how constant a factor is human nature. However variable the manifestation may be, the degree is ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Mrs. Brace carefully brushing into a newspaper the litter made by his whittling. Her performance of that trivial task, the calm thoroughness with which she went about it, or the littleness of it, when compared with her complete indifference to the tragedy which should have overwhelmed her—something, he could not tell exactly what, made her more ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... owe to him; yet he never preached, or prosed, or played the pedagogue. He talked a great deal, not to us, but with us; we began to have conversation while we were still playing marbles and dolls. I remember hours of discussion with him on some subject so large that the littleness of his interlocutor must have tried him sorely. Time and eternity, theology and science, literature and art, invention and discovery came each in its turn; and, while I was still making burr baskets, or walking fences, or coasting (standing up) ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... cataract, the rushing waters, the frequent perils of avalanches and of tumbling rocks, the total absence of every soft feature of nature, were always reading an impressive lesson, and illustrating the littleness of man, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... however, sees in the seed nothing but its present hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all these things, but it sees also not only appearances but potentialities; or, to recall another of Goethe's phrases, it sees the ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... and interesting account of his escape from the Battle of Worcester, and adventures a Boscobel, and in the "Royal Oak." He kept a very minute and amusing diary, in which he neglected not to enter the most trivial matters, even the purchase of a new wig, or a new riband for his wife. This very littleness of detail has made his Memoirs the most extraordinary picture we possess of the times. He appears to have been a coarse but shrewd man, and fully alive to the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity, caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to himself alone, and by himself alone commanded ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... compel ourselves to spoil this portrait by the avowal of a littleness. The chevalier put cotton in his ears, and wore, appended to them, two little ear-rings representing negroes' heads in diamonds, of admirable workmanship. He clung to these singular appendages, explaining that since his ears had been bored he had ceased to have headaches (he had had ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... with the eyes of visionaries on sudden death, it comes as a shock to discover that back there, where life is so sweetly certain, fear still strides unabashed. They had thought that fear was dead—stifled by heroism. They had believed that personal littleness had given way before ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... am depressed, I am self-condemned already; spare me, therefore, this insupportable humiliation, wound me not with your scorn, oppress me not with your superiority! I aim at no competition, I attempt no vindication, I acknowledge my own littleness as readily as you can despise it, and nothing but indignity could urge me ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... and gentleman, of the House of Ptah of Babylonia—'such a silliness—those troubles and frets; it was not the while-worth that we should ever have sorrowed, because the scheme of time and creation is suchly big; had we grasped but its bigness, and the littleness of our span, should we have felt griefs? Nay, nay—nit,' like the street-youths say—would say the lady and gentleman now so passionless as to have philosophers become. And you, it should mean to you much. Humans are funniest when they weep and tremble before, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... who has not revelled in the thought of something new, the eager desire to see something fresh? The country boy to see vast London with all its greatness and littleness, its splendour and its squalor, its many cares and too often false joys—the town boy to plunge into that home of mystery and wonder, the country. And though as a rule the country boy is disappointed, he of the town, when once he has tasted the true ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... to bring himself down to the littleness of her daily life, he determined to show his disapproval of every phrase of its meanness as far as he could without offending her. He had made her feel that he condemned her course towards Miss Burton that evening, and he had meant to ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... alone. They shall not say that I cannot yet do my own work as a man should do it. I stood up before him, the puny man who is called a bishop, and before her who makes herself great by his littleness, and I scorned them both to their faces. Though the shoes which I had on were all broken, as I myself could not but see when I stood, yet I was greater than they were with all their purple ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... discuss the moral titles of the Olympian scheme; what I dwell upon is its intense humanity, alike in its greatness and its littleness, its glory and its shame. As the cares and joys of human life, so the structure of society below is reflected, by the wayward wit of man, on heaven above. Though the names and fundamental traditions of the several deities were wholly or in great part imported from abroad, their ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... William's part made it impossible to break off without animosity, largely and completely. Infinitely preferable was Mary's state, she thought, where there was a simple thing to do and one did it. In fact, she could not help supposing that some littleness of nature had a part in all the refinements, reserves, and subtleties of feeling for which her friends and family were so distinguished. For example, although she liked Cassandra well enough, her fantastic method of life struck her as purely frivolous; ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... four months, and after he had written incessantly for four and thirty years, he was of all living writers the most widely read. It is of course quite possible that such popularity might imply rather littleness in his contemporaries than greatness in him: but his books are the test to judge by. Each thus far, as it appeared, has had notice in these pages for its illustration of his life, or of his method of work, or of the variety and versatility in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... spite of the straight way he stood, and it was easy to behold how white his face was. She made the presentation of us both at the same time, and as the other man came into the light, my mouth dropped open with wonder at the singular chances which the littleness of our world ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... sprinkled the suns like fruitful seeds across the limitless fields of space. Can human nature contemplate a scene so grand that reaches so far beyond the grasp of mind, and not feel its own insignificance, and the littleness of selfish actions? And yet you can behold these myriads of worlds and systems of worlds wheeling in the dim infinity of space—a spectacle awful in its vastness—and turn to the practice of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... surmounted such acts as the publication of "Fare thee well!" and certain others of his safe appeals to the public, no one could exactly understand. That she forgave them, and loved him to the end, is enough for us to know; for our interest is in the greatness of her heart, and not in the littleness of his. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... dependent on our own imperfections, and therefore, though they produce sublimity, they are unconnected with beauty. For that which we foolishly call vastness is, rightly considered, not more wonderful, not more impressive, than that which we insolently call littleness, and the infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable, not concealed, but incomprehensible: it is a clear infinity, the darkness of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... pleasures which are very small are often obscured and overwhelmed. But that kind has not so many advantages of body, nor any which last so long, or are so great. Therefore, in those in which obscuration follows because of their littleness, it often happens that we confess that it makes no difference to us whether they exist at all or not; just as when the sun is out, as you yourself said, it is of no consequence to add the light ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... call must have been uttered, it came to her, as though from a great distance, thin and of an infinite littleness. Yet she allowed herself to be drawn back into the room, and made no demur to ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... prosperity;—at the same time, strange retardations in things of social concern; a singular want of earnestness in carrying out objects of undeniable utility. Much grandeur, but also much meanness of conception; much wealth, but also much poverty. A struggle between greatness and littleness; intelligence and ignorance; light and darkness. Sometimes we feel as if going forward, sometimes as if backward. One day, we seem as if about to start a hundred years in advance; on the next, all is wrong somewhere, and we feel as if hurriedly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... being alone, and sedulously ignoring the others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,—the soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,—showing itself cognate, already friendly, and needing only to throw off the husk of opposition. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... here far from being at home. Jerusalem was then nearly what it is to-day, a city of pedantry, acrimony, disputes, hatreds, and littleness of mind. Its fanaticism was extreme, and religious seditions very frequent. The Pharisees were dominant; the study of the Law, pushed to the most insignificant minutiae, and reduced to questions of casuistry, was the only study. This ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... And this sense of littleness, of impotence amid the calm, assured movement of the earth's vast bulk, weighed upon my soul, and evoked, and momentarily fanned to flame in me, the shameless human question: "What if I should stretch forth my hand and lay it upon the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... three, that I afterwards learned might be known among the initiated as single Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... do it so naturally every one of us felt that we were ourselves uttering the same prayer. He never ornamented his petitions with any high sounding phrases. He was not so much a man carrying on in a loud voice before his Maker as he was a little boy with a sore toe and troubles appertaining to his littleness and inexperience, and faults and forgetfulness, all of which he let out with the emotion of a child to his father, and with such reality of detail that the whole congregation accompanied him with his lamentations and regrets. Whenever I lifted my head after one ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... independence either of thought or speech. He long persecuted Benjamin Constant after he had taken his place among the members of the Tribunate; and he manifested a persecuting aversion towards Madame de Stael, which betrayed that littleness of character often lying hid under a greatness of mind and views. When I turn over the table of contents of that immense correspondence of Napoleon which reveals the entire man in spite of the prudence of the editors, I find continually the name of Madame de Stael, joined to rigorous measures of ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... men which seeks a pretense for submission. Like a ship disabled in action, and unfitted to continue it, it waits the approach of a still larger one to strike to, and feels relief at the opportunity. Whether this is greatness or littleness of mind, I am not enquiring into. I should suppose it to be the latter, because it proceeds from the want of knowing how to bear ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... he was—trailed along languidly when he was at home, living another life when he was away, getting what he absolutely must have, the irreducible minimum of personal freedom necessary to sanity, by means of small and shabby deceits. My goodness, how he hated deceits, how tired he was of the littleness of them! ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... a coward and a fool, he had been fooled too, for no one had ever warned him to take a firm hold upon life, no one had ever told him of the littleness of fear, or pain, or death; but what was the good of going through it now again? It was over ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... entitle me to forgiveness, I have already much merit; for I despise the littleness of my past conduct. I now find that the heart of any worthy man cannot be gained by invidious attacks upon the rights and characters of others;—by countenancing the addresses of a thousand;—or that the finest assemblage of features, the greatest taste in dress, ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... vain of their virtues; and although pride and vanity have been declared incompatible, probably there never lived a proud man, who was not vain of his very pride. A generous aspect is, however, sometimes assumed by pride; but vanity is inalterably contemptible in its selfish littleness, its restless greediness. Who shall tell its victims—who shall set bounds to its triumphs? Reason is more easily blinded by vanity than by sophistry; time and again has vanity misdirected feeling; often ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... especially being a man so conversant and inwardly familiar with the censures of great men that did discourse of these things daily amongst themselves. Again, a man so gracious and in high favour with the Emperor, as Augustus often called him his witty manling (for the littleness of his stature), and, if we may trust antiquity, had designed him for a secretary of estate, and invited him to the palace, which he modestly ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... small height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Moslem rule. But the pope was firm, his holy permission had not been obtained before the marriage had been celebrated, and, piqued at this unintended slight which had been put upon his august authority, he revealed his littleness ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... mountains. It gave one a different conception of men. They like ants on these mountains, David thought—insignificant, crawling ants. Here was where one might find a soul and a religion if he had never had one before. One's littleness, at times, was almost frightening. It made one think, impressed upon one that life was not much more than an accident in this vast scale of creation, and that there was great necessity for a God. In Kio's eyes, as he sometimes ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... continually, to the day of his death, embellished his works more and more with the addition of these lower ornaments, which entirely make the merit of some, yet he never arrived at such perfection as to make him an object of imitation. He never was able to conquer perfectly that dryness, or even littleness of manner, which he inherited from his master. He never acquired that nicety of taste in colours, that breadth of light and shadow, that art and management of uniting light, to light, and shadow to shadow, so as to make the object rise out of the ground with that plenitude ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... speak without enthusiasm of Mr Browning's open, generous nature and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than any ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none except the education of his son."[95] Browning's visits to Oxford ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... called either for their littleness, or (as Dr. Cajus imagined) because their fins be of so lively a red, as if they were died with the true Cinnabre-lake called Minium: They are less than Loches, feeding upon nothing, but licking one another ... they are a most delicate and light meat ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... scatalogical group, with the two subdivisions of urolagnia and Coprolagnia.[24] Inter faeces et urinam nascimur is an ancient text which has served the ascetic preachers of old for many discourses on the littleness of man and the meanness of that reproductive power which plays so large a part in man's life. "The stupid bungle of Nature," a correspondent writes, "whereby the generative organs serve as a means of relieving the bladder, is doubtless ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... aloud; "You knew the world! You knew the littleness of worldly ambition! You knew that there is only one thing worth living and dying for, and that is Love! Your heart was all love, my Lotys! Deprived of love for yourself, you gave all you had to those who needed it, and when you found my love for you might do me harm in the People's honour, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... mathematicans were misled by the false notion of "mathematical infinitude." Their infinite universe, after all, is not an "absolute," but a "relative" infinite; that is, the indefinite. "The universe must extend indefinitely in time and space, in the infinite greatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts—in the infinite variety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of existence. The finite can not express the infinite but by being multiplied infinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in any reasonable relation, or in any intelligible ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... within forty feet of a drinking deer, and was badly startled when it bounded away with a snort and a smashing of brush. But he saw nothing dangerous and went back to his camp and to bed. There he lay awake for an hour, still troubled, oppressed by a vague feeling of the littleness and ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... selfish woman; undeveloped in her conscience and affections, and strong in her instincts and perceptions; in a blind way using what means were most in her line to carry her purposes. Lillie had always found her prettiness, her littleness, her helplessness, and her tears so very useful in carrying her points in life that she resorted to them as her lawful stock in trade. Neither were her blues entirely shamming. There comes a time after marriage, when a husband, if he be any thing of a man, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... overthrew him. His life was pure as the heart of "the lily maid of Astolat," and demanded in man a purity as great as that of woman. His love was mighty, unsuspicious, tender. He was himself a king, born to rule, fitted to inspire. No littleness sapped his greatness. He rejoiced in others' strength, prowess, victory. His was an eye quick to discover merit in woman or man, as in Lynette. His heart was tender, and a cry for help awoke him from deep sleep. He hated foulness as he hated hell. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... more despicable character than a finished "manoeuverer." It implies a meanness, that can pry into the corners of others' affairs, an indolence, that neglects one's own proper business, and a mental vacuity, and a littleness of purpose, which are the dread of every noble mind. Beware of the impertinence of such persons. Be very sure that you give not your hand and heart where they point, instead of following, as you ought, your own good sense, and ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... name of Mr. Harris was introduced into the discussion, as one thus employed and trusted by our government. It is true he was falsely presented, for the diplomatic functions of this gentleman were purely accidental, and of very short continuance; but there would have been a littleness in conducting an argument that was so strong in its facts, by stooping to set this matter right, and it was suffered to go uncontradicted by me. He therefore possessed the advantage, the whole time, of appearing ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and mountains as they become one by one indistinct and lost in the deepening darkness. Placed as we are at an enormous height, in the wide free atmosphere, we seem already to have quitted this miniature country, already to be freed from the impression of littleness which it has given us, and from the little links by which it was beginning ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... prepared for disappointment in the quality of the reading that is done. At the beginning of my work with the children I was delighted with their enthusiasm over the books. To be sure their choice was often determined by the attractiveness of the cover or big type, or the bigness or littleness of the book. I soon found that it was a rare thing for a child to read a book through. They would often say with pride "I read 30 or 60 pages" and were unwilling to take the book again, though claiming to like it. It is a slow process, but now after over two years they ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... 11-13); but more strikingly so from the contrast of the [Hebrew: mvwl biwral] with the [Hebrew: wpT iwral]. The Judge of Israel in his deepest abasement, is here contrasted with the Ruler of Israel in His highest divine glory. The connection is seen also in the indication of Bethlehem's natural littleness, as contrasted with the greatness to be bestowed upon it by God. What could have induced the prophet thus strongly to point out this circumstance, had it not been that he considered Bethlehem as the type of the Jewish people in their misery, described ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg |
