"Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a small stone structure something like a sentry-box, only with an iron door and grated windows. In this negroes, petty criminals, vagrants, and drunkards were confined. It stood at the junction of the two most important streets of ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... said that the details of New England history were essentially dry and unpoetic. Everything is near, authentic, and petty. There is no mist of distance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give characters and events an imaginative loom. So much downright work was perhaps never wrought on the earth's surface in the same space of time as during the first forty years after the settlement. But mere ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had, from ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... coxcomb, a fribble, and the least bit in the world of a snob: his Monk is not very clean fustian, and most of his other work rubbish. But he was, though not according to knowledge, a sincere Romantic; he had no petty jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... city; now the little insight he had gained into domestic affairs—the peep behind the curtain given him by my mistaken maiden aunt, had served to embitter his existence, surrounding his path with those nettles of life, household trifles, vulgar cares and petty annoyances. I almost echoed Biddy's ejaculation as the carriage drove from the door with my aunt and her numberless boxes, each one arranged on a new, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
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