"Pettiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shone a divine brightness, a radiance of youth that blended all her bewildering characteristics in a certain completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... qualities which produce idolatry and blind allegiance. What his followers gave him was admiration, liking and profound respect. No less than this was strictly due to his high standard of honour, his scorn of all personal pettiness, his control of temper. In twelve years I heard many complaints of the manner in which things were managed in the party: I scarcely ever remember to have heard anyone complain of him. He was always spoken of as "The Chairman"; no one attributed ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... never known what a great passion like that means; I have never felt what you feel, and surely to live one's life with all its pettiness and pain, yet never to know its extreme experiences, is sadder than to have those experiences ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... utmost to stay the progress of the pestilence, as well as to provide for the treatment of the stricken patients. He was nevertheless guilty of a number of indiscretions which rendered him odious to a large proportion of the population. His pettiness of spirit was incessantly asserting itself. No person in the community, however insignificant, was beneath his wrath when his sense of personal dignity was wounded. On one occasion a wretched woman of intemperate habits and loose character was brought before him in the Mayor's Court. She was loquacious ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
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