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More "Paltry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sort were very common, public debates were of weekly occurrence; and little did Martin Luther realize that this paltry half-sheet of paper was to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... caused him to recoil. Then she ordered her great camel, Aboufaki, to be brought, and, attended by her two hideous and one-eyed negresses, Nerkes and Cafour, set out to surprise the lovers. She burst in upon them, foaming with indignation, and said to Vathek: "Free thyself from the arms of this paltry doxy; drown her in the water before me, and instantly follow my guidance." But Vathek replied civilly, but decisively, that he was taking Nouronihar with him; and the princess, having heard her declare that she would follow him beyond the Kaf in the land of the Afrits, was appeased, and pronounced ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... he received them, but when he had left the room, and was out of sight of Kaunitz, he turned toward the door muttering, "As if I were such a fool as to sell my precious secret to you for two paltry ducats! I know of others who will pay me for my news, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... opposed to that of some, who, because the Florentines are merchants, hold them for neither noble nor high-spirited, but for tame and low.[1] On the contrary, I have often wondered with myself how it could be that men who have been used from their childhood upwards for a paltry profit to carry bales of wool and baskets of silk like porters, and to stand like slaves all day and great part of the night at the loom, could summon, when and where was need, such greatness of soul, such high and haughty thoughts, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and merry was the prank which he played upon the extortionate money-lender of Warwick. Riding on an easy rein through the town, Hind heard a tumult at a street corner, and inquiring the cause, was told that an innkeeper was arrested by a thievish usurer for a paltry twenty pounds. Dismounting, this providence in jack-boots discharged the debt, cancelled the bond, and took the innkeeper's goods for his own security. And thereupon overtaking the usurer, 'My friend!' he exclaimed, 'I lent you late a sum of twenty pounds. Repay it at once, or I take ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... deserve the epithets of exigeant and extortionate which are so freely applied to them by the merchants. Haj Ibrahim, who brings some thousand dollars' worth of goods to this part, pays only the paltry sum of some twenty or thirty dollars at the most. In fact, here is free-trade with a vengeance, existing long before it has been attempted to carry it out, with such tremendous consequences, as in Great Britain. France and the Zollverein must send ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... that some of these men, tingling with the consciousness of powers of which these busy, engaged people of the streets and shops knew nothing, turned with disdain from the petty, paltry, many of them non-manly tasks that men pursued solely that they might live. Live! For these last terrible, great and glorious fifty months they had schooled themselves to the notion that the main business of life ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... will not endeavor to dissuade me from sending it. Go it MUST. It is no fiction to say that at present I cannot write this tale. The immense profits which Oliver has realized to its publisher and is still realizing; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it brought to me (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, and the consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work on the same journeyman-terms; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... accustomed men, to use Walpole's lively phrase, to come to breakfast with the question, "What new victory is there this morning?" The brilliant letter-writer's correspondence is full of the gossip arising from these usually paltry affairs; and throughout, whether in success or disaster, the name of Howe appears frequently, and always as the subject of praise. "Howe, brother of the lord of that name, was the third on the naval list. He was undaunted ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... his first sermon before his class, in the presence of his professor of divinity! His immediate impulse was to rush from the house, and home hot-foot to his mother; and it would have been well for him to have done so indeed, confessed all, and turned his back on the church and his paltry ambition together! But he had never been open with his mother, and he feared his father, not knowing the tender righteousness of that father's heart, or the springs of love which would at once have ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... month a freshman, attending philosophical lectures and taking part in student life than the dreaded separation between us two so differently constituted friends came to pass. The provocation was trifling, in fact paltry. One day I was standing in the lecture-room with a few fellow- students before a lecture began, when a freshman hurried up to us and asked: "Is it true, what Sebastian says, that he is the person you think most of in the world?" My reply was: "Did he say that ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only occasionally they matter. And this is only when something threatens us from the outer mechanical, or accidental death-world. When anything threatens us from the world of death, then ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... this Preface without an expression of regret at the dark and terrible fate which overtook the high-minded, patriotic, and distinguished Irishman, Thomas D'Arcy McGee. He was a man who loved his country well; and when the contemptible squabbles and paltry dissensions of the present have passed away, his name will be a hallowed memory, like that of Emmet or Fitzgerald, to inspire men with high, ideals of patriotism ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... Saleh, if the rock-hole isn't there already there won't be time for your God to make it; besides, if you can get what you want by praying for it, let me have a fresh-water lake, or a running river, that will take us right away to Perth. What's the use of a paltry rock-hole?" Then he said solemnly, "Ah, Mr. Gile, you ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... of Browning's knaves cannot be better expressed than by Chesterton. 'They are real somewhere. We are talking to a garrulous and peevish sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of God ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... a cottage in Surrey; you'd entertain, go out a good deal. You'd certainly give up these dingy quarters. My friendship for you deplores a mammoth skeleton in your cupboard, James. My study of advertising tells me that this paltry existence of yours does not adequately push your name before the public. You're losing ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Solons cursed the Lords, And called the malt-tax sinful, Jack heeded not their angry words, But smiled and drank his skinful. And when men wasted health and life, In search of rank and riches, Jack marched aloof the paltry strife, And ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Carwitchet's growl. "You've not been here all this time for nothing. You've been collecting for a Kilburn cot or getting subscriptions for the distressed Irish landlords. I know you. Now I'm not going to see myself ruined for the want of a paltry hundred or so. I tell you the colt is a dead certainty. If I could have got a thousand or two on him last week, we might have ended our dog days millionaires. Hand over what you can. You've money's worth, if not money. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... and he is of little avail in miscellaneous matters; whereas, a very indifferent cur, bred about the house, and accustomed to assist in every thing, will often put the more noble breed to disgrace in those paltry services. If one calls out, for instance, that the cows are in the corn, or the hens in the garden, the house-colley needs no other hint, but runs and turns them out. The shepherd's dog knows not what is astir; and, if he is called out in a hurry for such work, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... to go there, and no real occasion at all—have never been there in their lives before probably—and now all of a sudden have shown the keenest desire and determination to go out there about dusk, or soon after, and with the most paltry and foolish excuses in the world. Of course," he added, "they have been prevented, but the desire, stronger than their superstitious dread, and which they cannot explain, ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... seducing spirits,' is a little superfluous. The fact that a parish-clerk has taken to petty pilfering can scarcely justify those heterodox conclusions. But when we have smiled at Crabbe's philosophy, we begin to wonder at the force of his sentiment. A blighted human soul is a pathetic object, however paltry the temptation to which it has succumbed. Jachin has the dignity of despair, though he is not quite a fallen archangel; and Crabbe's favourite scenery harmonises with ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous: and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dollars to his quota. For two months, he had carried the double load, and beaten his schedule; in early May, he was falling behind at the rate of fifty dollars a week. With twelve weeks ahead, he faced a deficit of a paltry six hundred dollars—and the Mix amendment ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... When he had leased this paltry building for the purpose of converting it into a tavern, he had found this chamber decorated in just this manner, and had purchased the furniture and obtained the orange flowers at second hand, with the idea that this would cast a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and citizen-deputy Heriot was preparing to go out to the small tavern round the corner where he habitually took his dejeuner. Citizen Rondeau, who for the consideration of ten sous a day looked after Heriot's paltry creature-comforts, was busy tidying up the squalid apartment which the latter occupied on the top floor of a lodging-house in the Rue Cocatrice. This apartment consisted of three rooms leading out ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... a paltry way as that! Many thanks for the good advice! You'd like me to look after a bloated aristocrat's geese and then sit on the steps and eat dry bread to the smell of the roast bird, would you? No, thank you! And even if I did—what ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... more than ever, and twisting her head round, "Even you have grown dull!" she cried. "She does, of course, indulge in expectations, but they are actuated by some underhand and paltry notion! She may go on giving way to these ideas, but I, for my part, will only care for Mr. Chia Cheng and Madame Wang. I won't care a rap for any one else. In fact, I'll be nice with such of my sisters and brothers, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... had been preparing the wood for making the cross of our Lord; all was in readiness, and the men were asleep by its side. Judas was filled with horror at the sight: he shuddered and fled when he beheld the instrument of that cruel death to which for a paltry sum of money he had delivered up his Lord and Master; he ran to and fro in perfect agonies of remorse, and finally hid himself in an adjoining cave, where he determined to await the trial which was to take ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... obtain the love of my people, not from any weak thirst for love, but from a queenly ambition. But I am set aside, and Amelia will be a queen; my fate will be that of my elder sisters, I shall wed a poor margrave, or paltry duke, and may indeed thank God if I am not an old maiden princess, with a ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... precious to me than all jewels of the earth—come, let me take thee from thy shelf and hold thee lovingly in my hands and press thee tenderly to this aged and slow-pulsing heart of mine! Dost thou remember how I found thee half a century ago all tumbled in a lot of paltry trash? Did I not joyously possess thee for a sixpence, and have I not cherished thee full sweetly all these years? My Walton, soon must we part forever; when I am gone say unto him who next shall have thee to his own that with his latest breath ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of the building, pointing, in the pride of his heart, to the elegant marble walls, the beautifully-gilded ceiling, the well where the true worshippers drink and wash,—with which we also blessed our palates and moistened our beards,—the paltry reading-desk with the ancient Koran, the handsome columns, and the green stone with the wonderful nails. As soon as we had completed this circuit, pulling a key from his girdle, he unlocked the door of the railing ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... portion ever equal thine, When on some populous town our troops have made Successful war; in the contentious fight The larger portion of the toil is mine; But when the day of distribution comes, Thine is the richest spoil; while I, forsooth, Must be too well content to bear on board Some paltry prize for all my warlike toil. To Phthia now I go; so better far, To steer my homeward course, and leave thee here But little like, I deem, dishonouring me, To fill thy coffers with the spoils ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... was a temporary coolness between them (following violent heat) with regard to some worsted of brilliant rose-madder hue, which a forgetful draper had sold to Mrs. Plaistow, having definitely promised it to Miss Mapp ... but Miss Mapp's large-mindedness scorned to recall the sordid details of this paltry appropriation. The heat had quite subsided, and Miss Mapp was, for her part, quite prepared to let the coolness regain the normal temperature of cordiality the moment that Mrs. Plaistow returned that worsted. Outwardly ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Life gives us the impression that he was a firm believer, that he strove to live a Christian life, that he was very amiable, and that he was quite free from the paltry vice of jealousy at another's ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... feature, an embellished representation of a small house which exists on the west side of the Sabbionera, and which had at one time perhaps that pointed style of architecture which his engraving shows, though its present decoration is paltry and unreal. But it is on the north side of the Court, and on the foundations now occupied by the Malibran theatre, that Venetian tradition and the investigations of Venetian antiquaries concur in indicating the site of the Casa Polo. At the end of the 16th century a great fire destroyed ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... expired with the Sovereign. A paper had indeed been circulated, in which the logic of a small sharp pettifogger was employed to prove that writs, issued in the joint names of William and Mary, ceased to be of force as soon as William reigned alone. But this paltry cavil had completely failed. It had not even been mentioned in the Lower House, and had been mentioned in the Upper only to be contemptuously overruled. The whole Magistracy of the City swelled the procession. The banners of England and France, Scotland and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... they act with the ferocity of true poltroons, slaying all the men, and carrying off the women and children as slaves. As to the property, it is packed upon horses which they bring with them for the purpose. They are mean and paltry as warriors, and altogether inferior in heroic qualities to the savages of the buffalo plains on the east side of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... This dispute, seemingly paltry yet really serious, sudden in its appearance and dependent for its issue upon other considerations than its own merits, may serve to convince us of many latent and yet unforeseen dangers to the peace of the western hemisphere, attendant upon the opening of a canal through the Central American ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... calls this answer paltry, but I find his counter-objection involved. M. Bayle will have those who are for the two principles to take their stand chiefly on the assumption of the supreme freedom of God: for if he were compelled to produce all that which he can, he would ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... words could be addressed to him to whom the first had just been spoken. The Lord had praised him. Peter grew self-sufficient, even to the rebuking of him whose praise had so uplifted him. But it is ever so. A man will gain a great moral victory: glad first, then uplifted, he will fall before a paltry temptation. I have sometimes wondered, too, whether his denial of our Lord had anything to do with his satisfaction with himself for making that onslaught upon the high priest's servant. It was a brave thing and a faithful to draw a single sword against ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... desperate passion which had its hold upon her grandfather, losses and gains were to her alike. Exulting in some brief triumph, or cast down by a defeat, there he sat so wild and restless, so feverishly and intensely anxious, so terribly eager, so ravenous for the paltry stakes, that she could have almost better borne to see him dead. And yet she was the innocent cause of all this torture, and he, gambling with such a savage thirst for gain as the most insatiable gambler never felt, had not ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... it! but I'll scrawl all over the front of your tavern with scorpion-words. For my girl, who has fled from my embrace (she whom I loved as ne'er a maid shall be beloved—for whom I fought fierce fights) has seated herself here. All ye, both honest men and rich, and also, (O cursed shame) all ye paltry back-slum fornicators, are making hot love to her; and thou above all, one of the hairy-visaged sons of coney-caverned Celtiberia, Egnatius, whose quality is stamped by dense-grown beard, and teeth with Spanish ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... are always liable to break out: the animated comparisons of the degradation of philosophy by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the parricide, who 'beats his father, having first taken away his arms': the dog, who is your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument wandering about without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved, from the Gorgias: the argument personified as veiling her face (Republic), as engaged in a chase, as breaking upon us in a first, second and third wave:—on these figures of speech ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... gone, only reaches a certain point. It is the power which carries the man to the margin of that consciousness which is profound peace and vital activity. It can carry him no further. But if he has reached its margin he is freed from the paltry dominion of his own self. That is the first great release. Look at the sufferings which come upon us from our narrow and limited experience and sympathy. We each stand quite alone, a solitary unit, a pygmy in the world. What good fortune can we expect? The great life of the world rushes by, and ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... other ills, Eurystheus has chosen to insult me with this insult; sending heralds whenever on earth he learns we are settled, he demands us, and drives us out of the land; alleging the city of Argos, one not paltry either to be friends with or to make an enemy, and himself too prospering as he is; but they seeing my weak state, and that these too are little, and bereaved of their sire, respecting the more powerful, drive us from the land. And I am banished, together with ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... But what did King Charles? Abusing French loyalty, he made our Francis his prisoner, would you believe it? and treated him worse than ever badger was treated at the bottom of any paltry stable-yard, putting upon his table beer and Rhenish ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... my forgiveness downright—such as I Should perish if I did not have from thee; I let the wrong go, withered up and dry, Cursed with divine forgetfulness in me. 'Tis but self-pity, pleasant, mean, and sly, Low whispering bids the paltry memory live:— What am I brother for, but ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... eminent adviser of the crown, only two years ago, declared he would not consent to do? Am I, then, to be twitted, taunted, and attacked? I dare them to attack me. I have no speech to eat up. I have no apostasy disgracefully to explain. I have no paltry subterfuge to resort to. I have not to say that a thing is black one day and white another. I have not been in one year a Protestant master of the rolls, and in the next a Catholic lord-chancellor. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... ejaculation in the astonishing first moment. A deep-sea sailor, who had come through what he had come through, to let himself be caught unawares by such a paltry mischance as this! Then, what an unspeakable ass to have been so careless—to have shown himself incapable of protecting his wife, after all his boasts! Would he ever hear the last of it as long as he ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the paper aside with the bill receipt. In the man to whom the bright New Orleans itself almost owed its brightness, it was a paltry act to search and pick for a debtor. Friends had betrayed and deserted him; relatives had forgotten him; merchants had failed with his money; bank presidents had stooped to deceive him; for he was an old man, and had about run the gamut of human disappointments—a ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... Bavaria, in which the league still believed, while it had no quarrel with Ferdinand, who was ostensibly conciliatory. The towns, moreover, wished to keep their captain within hail, for they feared the possibility of attack either from Regensburg or from Ferdinand's paltry forces in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... here often. At least mine do. I did sympathize with this woman of one cow and a large family. Why should any one have power lawfully, to "lift" the only cow from half-starved children. The defence for this woman was that through trouble she did not know what she was doing. It was a mean, paltry defence; she did know that she wanted to keep her cow, and the law should be altered to enable her to do so. The law that enables men of means to strip these poor wretches of everything that stands between them and their little children and starvation, is a monstrous law for Christians to ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... anybody, not even the peers of the realm,—no time for pleasure or relaxation,—being devoted entirely to public interests of the greatest magnitude; for on his shoulders rested the government of the kingdom. What was the paltry dispute of a few hundred pounds in a distant colony to the Prime Minister of England! All that Franklin could secure was an interview with the great man's secretaries, and they did ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... Great Mogul has so little taste, that he has had this divan divided into two parts by a very paltry partition wall. A similar wall adjoins both sides of the saloon, for what purpose I could not learn. In this divan is a great treasure: the largest crystal in the world. It is a block of about four feet ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... away upon two paltry bits of cardboard!" chafed Miss Carlyle. "You always were a noodle in money matters, Archibald, and always will be. I wish I had the ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... was wanting to assure the success of the vast projects that the pope and his son were founding upon the friendship of Louis and an alliance with him—that is,—money. But Alexander was not the man to be troubled about a paltry worry of that kind; true, the sale of benefices was by now exhausted, the ordinary and extraordinary taxes had already been collected for the whole year, and the prospect of inheritance from cardinals and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... because ours is a fight of men, not of children; not one of your European wars of paltry ambition, but a war of principle!' cried Cora, with that intensity of enthusiasm that has shed so much blood in the break-up of the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... placed me, I should have faced her boldly or have fled miles away from that spot, to be forever associated in my mind with the one really discreditable experience of my career. I have always been, I think, an honorable man and such a paltry sin as eavesdropping had always been beneath me, save on the one occasion when my duty as Jerry's guardian prompted me to listen for a few moments at the cabin window last year when Una and Jerry were settling between them the affairs of the world. That was a pardonable ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... knew how to greet each moment as the manifestation of the divine will we could find in it all the heart could desire. Nor what indeed is more reasonable, more perfect, more divine, than the will of God? Can its infinite value be increased by the paltry difference of time, place, or circumstance? The present moment is always filled with infinite treasures; it contains more than one is capable of receiving. Faith is the measure of these blessings; in proportion to your faith ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Honourable Company be swayed by so paltry a consideration in subjecting us to so grievous an inconvenience? Surely not; a body of men so respectable could neither have authorized nor sanctioned such sordid parsimony. The generous proposition originated with Mr. Simpson alone, and to ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... think what havoc you may make in the happiness of a worthy man; look at his character; see his exemplary conduct; and could you, for the paltry gratification of your vanity, condemn him to the pangs of unrequited love. He has now, I fear, the ills of poverty to struggle against; did you notice his emotion when speaking of his mother and sisters? perhaps they ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one's daily bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and, with it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered with a few ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... humbug!' It is true that I continually repeated, 'but then Varia is mine! mine!' ... Yet that 'but'—alas, that but!—and then, too, the words, 'Varia is mine!' aroused in me not a deep, overwhelming rapture, but a sort of paltry, egoistic triumph.... If Varia had refused me point-blank, I should have been burning with furious passion; but having received her consent, I was like a man who has just said to a guest, 'Make yourself at home,' and sees the guest ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Allan M'Aulay," said Montrose, addressing the Highlander, who, leaning his sword-point on the ground, had regarded the ceremony of his antagonist's knighthood with a sneer of sullen scorn,—"you, who are superior to the ordinary men led by the paltry motives of plunder, and pay, and personal distinction,—you, whose deep knowledge renders you so valuable a counsellor,—is it YOU whom I find striving with a man like Dalgetty, for the privilege of trampling the remains of life out of so contemptible an enemy as lies there? Come, my friend, ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... it is even so, just so, and to such tricks, such playing upon words, do the bad habits of London conversation lead;" and Lady Davenant wondered at the courage of his candour, as he went on to speak of the petty jealousies, the paltry envy, the miserable selfish susceptibility generated by the daily competition of London society. Such dissensions, such squabbles—an ignoble but appropriate word—such deplorable, such scandalous squabbles among literary, and even among scientific ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... mean? Surely he hasn't come to Chicago with only this paltry sum!" exclaimed Coleman. "He must be more ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... Solons cursed the Lords, And called the malt-tax sinful, Jack heeded not their angry words, But smiled and drank his skinful. And when men wasted health and life, In search of rank and riches, Jack marked aloof the paltry strife, And wore ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... books. The only copy I ever saw was af an old book stall, and I have regretted that I did not purchase it, and get some stout porter to carry it home. Wm. Churchey was a friend of John Wesley. His prodigious 4to was published by subscription, and given away at the paltry sum of one guinea. I have an autograph letter of John Wesley, to his friend Churchey, in which ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... got into heaven, for I see the angels about me!" says Madam, advancing with a reverence lower than the paltry room demanded. "Forgive an intruder, Madam, and confer a benefit. For being newly come to Dublin, I've lost my way returning from Smock Alley, and while I called up courage to enter and ask it from any other than ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... of mine, in which you may trace a strong desire to heal the wounds inflicted upon me by my disgrace, though I a little while ago declared that I would not ask it, I now do earnestly ask of you: but only on condition that you shall not think my humble services paltry and insignificant, but of such a nature and importance, that many for far less signal successes have obtained the highest honours from the senate. I have, too, I think, noticed this—for you know how attentively I ever listen to you—that in granting or withholding ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... may learn not to flinch from pain, or lose their tempers, or turn cowards, when they have to fight. "And so do I," says St. Paul; "they, poor men, submit to painful and disagreeable things to make them brave in their paltry battles. I submit to painful and disagreeable things, to make me brave in the great battle which I have to fight against sin, and ignorance, and heathendom." "Therefore," he says, in another place, "I take pleasure in afflictions, in persecutions, in necessities, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... said Fairfeather. "Here we are spending our lives in this humdrum place, and Spare making his fortune at court with two or three paltry green leaves! What would they say to our golden ones? Let us make our way to the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... on a slave; not such as, swept along By the full tide of power, the conqueror led To crimson glory and undying fame; But base, ignoble slaves; slaves to a horde Of petty tyrants, feudal despots, lords, Rich in some dozen paltry villages; Strong in some hundred spearmen; only great In that strange ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Lissoy from the account of the inn in the poem.* Some twelve years before its publication, when he was living miserably in Green Arbour Court, Goldsmith had submitted to his brother Henry a sample of a heroi-comic poem describing a Grub Street writer in bed in 'a paltry ale-house.' In this 'the sanded floor,' the 'twelve good rules' and the broken tea-cups all played their parts as accessories, and even the double-dealing chest had its prototype in the poet's night-cap, which was 'a cap by night — a stocking all the day.' A year or two later he expanded these lines ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... have pineapple every day if she chose, but it was not quite the same pineapple. She affected to like it, she did like it, but the difference between the old pineapple and the new was the saddening difference, for Mrs. Maldon's secret heart, between the great days and the paltry, facile convenience of the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... something final and convincing in his companion's measured words. His own protest, when at last he spoke, sounded paltry. ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the greatness to which his capture of Lusigny was to be the first step. He would enjoy that greatness not a whit the less because fortune had hitherto dealt out to him more blows than caresses, and he was still at forty, after a score of years of roughest service, the governor of a paltry ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... however, he seemed ashamed of the paltry booty his followers had obtained, and Denham seized the favourable moment to advise that the Arabs should give everything back, and have a few sheep and an ox for a feast. He gave the order, and the ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... made an earl not long since—you may have heard of the fuss about it. Uncle Sam's only a miserable baron yet. And Uncle Cuthbert is that paltry insect—a baronet. ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... to his little table, wavering, deprecating, humble, and answered his brief impatient questions. And on the spot he made snap diagnoses, such as rheumatism, bronchitis, kicked by a horse, knocked down by despatch rider, dysentery, and so on—a paltry, stupid lot of ailments and minor accidents, demanding a few days' treatment. It was a dull service, this medical service, yet one had to be always on guard against contagion, so the service was a responsible one. But ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... lest our claims to attention are not fully recognized, less our worth be not observed, our proper station accorded to us. How we press our paltry little claims upon others, how we glorify our own insignificant deeds; how large loom up our small and puny acts. The whole universe centers in us; our ego is a most important thing; our work of the highest value and significance; our worth ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... taking long weary walks and giving tedious lessons for the small stipends which her employers had the conscience to offer her; they felt no compunction about bargaining and haggling as to a few pitiful shillings with a music mistress who looked so very poor, and seemed so glad to work for their paltry pay. The girl's chief sorrow was, that her father, who to her mind was calculated to shine in the highest station the world could give, should be a reprobate and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... bleachfield—and so on. The day was bright and beautiful, and the feeling of summer came over our bosoms: the flowers blossomed and the birds sang; and, as the sun looked from the blue sky, the quiet of nature banished from our thoughts all the poor and paltry cares that embitter life, and all the pitiful considerations which are but too apt to be the only concerns of the busy and bustling, from their awaking in the morning to their lying down on the pillow of evening rest. Peter and myself felt this forcibly; he, as he confessed to me, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... believed to have been a history of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains. Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to Hamilton. With an irrational stubbornness, that may well astound us when we think of the noble genius that he thus wished to confine to paltry personal duties, he persisted that Burke should bind himself to his service for life, and to the exclusion of other interests. "To circumscribe my hopes," cried Burke, "to give up even the possibility of liberty, to annihilate myself for ever!" He threw up the pension, which he had held for ...
— Burke • John Morley
... that he never met with encouragement." "But I understood that he was tolerably successful. He painted many things for me at Fonthill. You are surely mistaken." "By no means," I replied. "Latterly he seldom sold a picture, and supported himself on the paltry income of 200 pounds a year, raised by making little designs for booksellers. Yet what a noble painting is Chaucer's pilgrimage to Canterbury." "It is indeed," said Mr. Beckford. "But, sir, there is another painter, Howard, whose conceptions are most poetical. ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "long blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... am going to do; I feel like a man who has been stunned. To be told that the murderer of Arthur Mountjoy had been seen in London—to be prepared to trace him by his paltry assumed name of Carrigeen—to wait vainly for the next discovery which might bring him within reach of retribution at my hands—and then to be overwhelmed by the news of his illness, his recovery, and ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... of my friend Pecksniff, in a situation as tremendous, perhaps, as the social intercourse of the nineteenth century will readily admit of. There is actually at this instant, at the Blue Dragon in this village—an ale-house, observe; a common, paltry, low-minded, clodhopping, pipe-smoking ale-house—an individual, of whom it may be said, in the language of the Poet, that nobody but himself can in any way come up to him; who is detained there for his bill. Ha! ha! For his bill. I repeat it—for his ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... the King's approval for existing canons. These demands were granted. As usual, Henry was able to get what he wanted from the clergy; but from the Commons he could get no more than they were willing to give. They again rejected the bills of Uses and Wills, and would only concede the most paltry supplies. But they passed with alacrity the bills embodying the submission of the clergy. These were the Church's concessions to Henry, but it must bend the knee to the Commons as well, and other measures were passed reforming some of the points in their petition. Ordinaries were prohibited ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... Until the second half of the eighteenth century the British colonies were both weak and divided. They had no navy and very few fortifications to defend their coastline. They had no army except raw and unreliable militia. Even in 1750 their inhabitants numbered but a paltry 1,300,000 as compared with a population in Great Britain of more than 10,000,000; and in wealth and resources they could not dream ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... them than a highway robber has to my purse. What will be the consequence if I put them in possession of the facts. In forty-eight hours, I shall have received perhaps one hundred lashes, and be on my way to the Louisiana cotton fields. Of what service will it be to them. They will get a paltry sum of two hundred dollars. Is not my liberty worth more to me than two ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... decided advance on the History of Morals, and shows honest investigation in original material, much of it manuscript, and an excellent power of generalization widely different from that which exhibits itself in a paltry philosophy. These volumes are a real contribution to historical knowledge. Parts of them which I like often to recur to are the account of the ministry of Walpole, the treatment of "parliamentary corruption," ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... my eyes. Vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea of a great country, when I exchanged Polotzk for America, it was no such enlargement as I now experienced, when in place of the measurable earth, with its paltry tale of historic centuries, I was given the illimitable universe to contemplate, with the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... you that in order to deceive her, not you! But you know better, La Corriveau! It was not for the sake of paltry jewels I desired you to come to the city to see me at ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Bloomery Gap, he found the colonel and made his report. "Why, damn it all!" said the colonel. "We were backing you for the brush. Hunting weather, and a clean run and all the dogs of war to fawn upon you at the end! And here's a paltry three-foot hedge and a bad tumble! Never you mind! You'll pick yourself up. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Christian disciple of Plato: "therefore it is unquiet till it finds repose in God." From this unrest proceed all our miseries. Men do not always succeed in contenting themselves with a petty prosaic happiness, a dull and paltry well-being, and in stifling the while the grand instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its indefinite aspirations attach themselves ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Queen had delighted the captain, and, indeed, all of us on board, with her sailing powers, averaging over two hundred knots a day, which considering her great bilge was as fast as the most famous clippers; but now that she only logged a paltry hundred or so, going but five or six per hour instead of ten to twelve, "Old Jock" began to grumble, snapping and finding fault with ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... had said, Esther was too proud to take help unless it was most tactfully offered. He racked his brains in vain. It was a sickening thought that, with all his wealth, he could give her nothing. Even the few paltry pounds she had unconsciously taken from him would have been indignantly rejected had she known who ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... riviere, and two of the biggest ropes of pearls.... It won't do to go down looking dowdy. Dear me," she added, as she took up the pendant she had bought from Daphne twenty-four hours before, "to think of my giving so much money for this paltry thing! If I had known then what I do now, I should never have—but, of course, I don't mean that I should think ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... advice:—'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... of the needful sporting gear, where he does follow hunting, it is pursued with much-weakened ardor, and often bootless issue. He is moved now to its pursuit, solely with the hope of realizing a paltry gain from the sale of the few ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... not a third full, and the audience probably not including half a dozen persons who would prefer their playing to that of the vilest strollers. In proof of this, I saw them, as managers, give place to paltry third-rate actors from London, who would immediately draw crowded houses, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the pleasures of Lady Mary's intended tour. "It was very distressing—she heartily wished there was no such thing as money in the world—it made people very miserable—they were a much happier couple, she contended, when they were merely Honourables, and lived upon a paltry two thousand and the expectancy—there never was any difficulty then about money transactions, and a proposition for a trip to a watering-place was always hailed with pleasure."—"True, Lady Mary; but then you forget we travelled in a stage coach, with your ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... mince my words, Mr. Narkom. I say plump and plain the thing's an outrage, a disgrace to the police, an indignity upon the community at large; and for Scotland Yard to permit itself to be defied, bamboozled, mocked at in this appalling fashion by a paltry burglar——" ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... nothing more. What times are before us, uncle; what times! My poor boy is growing very delicate in his health, and he won't be able to work—it makes him dizzy now to read a book; he gets a headache and nausea whenever he works at night! He will have to beg a paltry situation; I shall have to take in sewing, and who knows, who knows but we may ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... for action: my heart, Wither'd thing though it be, I should hardly compress 'Twixt the leaves of a treatise on Statics: life's stress Needs scope, not contraction! what rests? to wear out At some dark northern court an existence, no doubt, In wretched and paltry intrigues for a cause As hopeless as is my own life! By the laws Of a fate I can neither control nor dispute, I am ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... not a syllable, if you please; the debt is all on my side, and you do not fancy it can be paid in such a paltry fashion. I am glad you are not offended with me, that is all." And then he proceeded ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the question is have you done so? Could I say yes I would with the greatest of pleasure and have congratulated you upon your decision whatever it might have been but I am sorry to say that I cannot your letter is a paltry evasion, you say 'that it is a great pity that you (Mr. ——) should have attempted this (the quadrature of the circle) for your mathematical knowledge is not sufficient to make you know in what the problem consists,' you don't say in what it does consist according to your ideas, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... paltry gilding here, but massive golden cornice, frieze, plate, stud, and boss ornamenting the massive walls—glistening, sparkling, and flashing back the sun's light, while, as if these were not sufficient, emeralds and other precious stones were ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... unceasing complaints with which he resented what he regarded as the insults offered to him by his jailers. There was, indeed, much that was ignoble in the manner of his treatment by those who had him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his title of Emperor, and to insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "Perish the paltry trash!" said Edward, with the same emotion. "No, father, it was rivalry—it was jealous rage—it was the love of Mary Avenel, that rendered me the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... principal received twelve hundred a year. People in the village considered that a prodigious income. Horace, of course, knew better. He did not think that sum sufficient to risk matrimony. Here, too, he was hampered by another consideration. It was intolerable for him to think of Rose's wealth and his paltry twelve hundred per year. An ambition which had always slumbered within his mind awoke to full strength and activity. He began to sit up late at night and write articles for the papers and magazines. He ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry, beggarly, blind—" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... of economy and commercialism pervaded the entire institution. Its worst manifestation was in the employment of the meanest type of attendant—men willing to work for the paltry wage of eighteen dollars a month. Very seldom did competent attendants consent to work there, and then usually because of a scarcity of profitable employment elsewhere. Providentially for me, such an attendant came upon the scene. This young man, so ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the Incas, and the pacific tendency, indeed, of their domestic institutions, they were constantly at war. It was by war that their paltry territory had been gradually enlarged to a powerful empire. When this was achieved, the capital, safe in its central position, was no longer shaken by these military movements, and the country enjoyed, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... deferring the bother—he is like a man who stays in bed because he doesn't like dressing. But it isn't a solution to stay in bed—it is only suspending the solution. No, we mustn't have any regard for human consistency—it's a very paltry attribute; it's the opposite of anthropomorphism. That makes out God to be in the image of man, but consistency claims for man the privilege of God. And that isn't wholesome, you know, either for a man or ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... intellectual gifts, and these you are intending to abuse in a shameless way, like a bad crafty knave, and so putting your knife at your own mother's throat? You mean to say you are going to traffic in justice as in some cheap paltry ware in the public market, and weigh it out with false scales to the poor peasants and the oppressed burgher, who in vain utter their plaintive cries before the soft-cushioned seat of the inexorable judge, and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... but then how often have we repeated already that on the present occasion there is no reason why brevity should be preferred to length; for who is 'at our heels?' as the saying goes, and it would be paltry and ridiculous to prefer the shorter to the better. It is a matter of no small consequence, in some way or other to prove that there are Gods, and that they are good, and regard justice more than men do. The demonstration of this would be the best and ...
— Laws • Plato
... rare occasions. Her son left home and returned with much regularity, he also seeming to desire privacy above all things. Mrs. Jarmey had at first been disposed to take this reserve somewhat ill. When she knocked at Mrs. Grail's door on some paltry excuse for seeing the inside of the room, and found that the old lady exchanged brief words with her on the threshold, she wondered who these people might be who thought themselves too good for wonted neighbourship. In time, however, her feeling changed, and she gave everybody ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... remain neutral in the great struggle impending, as a relief, however temporary, from the harassing consideration of dangers at which they shuddered. Nine men out of ten, will shrink from making up their minds upon a difficult question, and yet will accept, with joy, a determination of it, however paltry and inconclusive, from any one who has the nerve to urge it. A great many Union men, who would have earnestly opposed a concurrence of Kentucky in the action of the seceding States, if for no other reason ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the door and attempt to stop him, she knows he is already half-way down the street. It is a mean, paltry way of going out, she ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... morning things went ill with the adventure. The savour had gone out of our play. Two were but a paltry company after all. Where was the cabin-boy with his trusty dirk, eager to bleed for the cause? Though we kept our backs rigorously turned to the window, and spoke only in whispers, neither of us could quite ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... out to interest,—and the miser cheated himself. Such portion as was in bank-notes Mrs. Boxer probably had the prudence to destroy; for those numbers which Simon could remember were never traced; the gold, who could swear to? Except the pittance in the savings bank, and whatever might be the paltry worth of the house he rented, the father who had enriched the menial to exile the son was a beggar in his dotage. This news, however, was carefully concealed from him by the advice of the doctor, whom, on his own responsibility, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... much elated by her success; the money she had received for the ring seemed to them in their present circumstances a small fortune. "Little did once I think" said the widow, as she carefully counted the bank-notes, "that a few paltry pounds would ever seem of so much value to me; but perhaps it is well that we should sometimes experience the want of money, that we may learn how to make a proper use of it, and be more helpful to those less favoured ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... indeed sad to see professors, for the sake of paltry pelf, or to escape from persecution, denying the Lord Jesus. It subjects religion to scorn and contempt, and doubles the sorrows and sufferings of real Christians. Bunyan expresses himself here in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Scythian or wild Arab, or indeed any thing but him, to pay her her Portion. To which, however, he seemingly consented, and promis'd to take her to Town with him, and there give her all the Satisfaction she cou'd expect: And having dipp'd some paltry Acres of Land, deeper than ever Heaven dipp'd 'em in Rain, he was as good as his Word, and brought her to Town with him, where he told her he would place her with an ancient Lady, with whom he had contracted a Friendship at his first coming to London; adding, that she ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... and bulldog ants would bite him out of his sleep. I hate the man who's always whining about his mother through his nose, because, as a rule, he never cared a rap for his old mother, nor for anyone else, except his own paltry, selfish ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... pressure of the handsome Major's hand! She had hastened away to her own apartment, as a wounded tigress seeks its cave for a last stand! The concealment of the diamond bracelet was a matter of necessity, and, with a beating heart, she buried it deep under the poor harvest of paltry Delhi trinkets which she had already gathered, with a mere ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... Montmartre one can yet admire Baudin's monument, which has a degree of grandeur; that of Gautier, of Murger, on which I saw the other day a simple, paltry wreath of immortelles, yellow immortelles, brought thither by whom? Possibly by the last grisette, very old and now janitress in the neighborhood. It is a pretty little statue by Millet, but ruined by dirt and neglect. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... who think a paltry wall can save, A narrow ditch can thwart us,—these, so bold, With but a span betwixt them and the grave! Saw they not Troy, which Neptune reared of old, Sink down in ruin, as the flames uprolled? But ye, my chosen, who with me will scale Yon wall, and storm their ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... drawing me aside into the room in which we had supped, where, after rallying me on the whimsical notion of the Grand Master of the Ordnance and Governor of the Bastile being besieged in a paltry inn, he confessed that he had been wrong, and that the adventure was likely to prove serious. "Ten to one this is the very band that Bareilles ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... possession—and then where do I git off? I git off at the same place I got off over at Wunpost; he's trying to freeze me out. So if you want to do me dirt, kid, when I've always been your friend, go to it and sell him your share. Take your paltry twenty thousand and let old Wunpost rustle—serves him ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... the flagstaff at the residence of the American consul. European states had purchased immunity for their commerce by paying tribute to these rapacious pirates; and the United States had followed the custom. The Pasha of Tripoli, however, was dissatisfied with the American tribute, a paltry eighty-three thousand dollars, and demanded more. The other Barbary powers threatened to make common cause with him. Anticipating trouble, Jefferson had sent a small squadron to the Mediterranean even before the dramatic act of the Pasha at the American consulate; and hostilities began ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... it possible for him to persuade himself that so many magnificent palaces, so many splendid temples, so many rich mercantile establishments, had been forsaken by their owners, like the paltry hamlets through which he had recently passed? Daru's mission, however, was fruitless. Not a Muscovite was to be seen; not a particle of smoke arose from a single chimney; not the slightest noise issued from this vast and populous city: ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... me," he said, "but the attack was so violent, the blow so savage, the weapon must have been so keen, that it is almost impossible to connect it with a mere attempt to commit a paltry robbery. I thought, and the police thought, that it was ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... at all in Waco is one of the seven wonders of the literary world. That a magazine so located and written by one man, having but a paltry advertising patronage, no illustrations, no covers, could in three years' time rival the circulation of any magazine then published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red Sea waters or the bountiful ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... me that you have been wasting your time and your gifts most amazingly. Here have you been absent just two years, and with the exception of a paltry marauder you do not seem to have slain a single Frenchman, till you broke ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... an old proverb, 'Shoemaker, stick to thy last;' it seems that thou shouldst stick to thy needle. Thou hast not, indeed, merited much mercy at my hands, but one has supplicated for thee, whom this day I can refuse nothing; therefore give I thee thy paltry life; but, if I may advise, haste thee to leave ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... side of our great reward. Then it looks like earthly objects after we have gazed upon the sun for a while. We are blind to them. When the Italian fruit-seller finds that he is heir to a ducal palace you cannot tempt him any more with the paltry profits of his trade or the company of his old associates. He is above it all. They who know the hope of their calling and the riches of the glory of their inheritance can well despise the world. It is the poor starving ones who go hungering for the husks of earth. We are ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... believe that they are doing their duty to themselves and their families when they move heaven and earth to rise a few steps in the world. The moment we find ambition taking a purely social form, it becomes ridiculous. The aim is so paltry in comparison with the effort, and so out of proportion with the energy- exerted to attain it, that one can only laugh and wonder! Unfortunately, signs of this puerile spirit (peculiar to the last quarter of the ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... spend in viewing The elemental strife, My soul the while subduing With the littleness of life; Of life, with all its paltry plans, Its conflicts and its cares— The feebleness of all that's man's— The ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... he would himself be good, and so make them good; that he would henceforth be their friend, and let them know it. Blessed failure ending in such a victory! Blessed purgatorial pulpit! into which he entered full of self and self-ends; and from which he came down disgusted with that paltry self as well as its deserved defeat. The gates of its evil fortress were now undefended, for Pride had left them open in scorn; and Love, in the form of flower-bearing children, rushed into the citadel. The heart of the master was forced to yield, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... refused to alter my garb, and when one of them stammeringly referred to the Empress's tastes I asked him with plainness if he had got any definite commands on this paltry ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Philip, they do purchase human life cheap, and make a rare profit of it, for without these poor fellows how could they hold their possessions in spite of native and foreign enemies? For what a paltry and cheap annuity do these men sell their lives? For what a miserable pittance do they dare all the horrors of a most deadly climate, without a chance, a hope of return to their native land, where they might haply repair their exhausted energies, and take a new lease of life! Good God! if these ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... matter of a paltry poisoned dagger at stake and a fortune that may be mythical or may be like that of Croesus, for all I care, we could play the game according to rules," he exclaimed. "But when you begin to tamper with a ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... around the sun during the course of each year. But even this last change of place, great as it seems in comparison with terrestrial measurements, is insufficient to show anything more than the tiniest displacements in a paltry forty-three out of the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... He believed himself strong, virile, yet so often it happened that he was constrained to act in what seemed rather a feeble and undignified way. But, after all, it was temporary; the day of his emancipation from paltry necessities would surely come, and all the great qualities latent in him ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... ill-painted flesh-tints showed livid, in the candle-light, against her dark drapery and background. "This is Mrs. Margaret Searle—a sort of Beatrix Esmond—qui se passait ses fantaisies. She married a paltry Frenchman, a penniless fiddler, in the teeth of her whole family. Pretty Mrs. Margaret, you must have been a woman of courage! Upon my word, she looks like Miss Searle! But pray go on. What came ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... she seemingly acquiesces in every thing you propose. You would even fancy she was solicitous to serve you; yet, after a thousand gracious sentiments, and as many implied eulogiums on her liberality and generosity, you find her return, with unrelenting perseverance, to some paltry proposition, by which she is to gain a few livres; and all this so civilly, so sentimentally, and so determinedly, that you find yourself obliged to yield, and are ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... not love that steals the heart from love: 'Tis the hard world, and its perplexing cares; Its petrifying selfishness, its pride, its low ambition, and its paltry aims." ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... and now she wondered at her own cowardice. Even Lady Monogram, her old friend Julia Triplex, had trampled upon her. Was it not the business of her life, in these days, to do the best she could for herself, and would she allow paltry considerations as to the feelings of others to stand in her way and become bugbears to affright her? Who sent her to Melmotte's house? Was it not her own father? Then she sat herself square at the table, and wrote to her mother,—as ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... and attendant. I remember the day when I was ill after one of their rude debauches. Ill!—a sick headache—a fit of the spleen—a spoiled lapdog's illness! Well: they wanted me that night to support one of their paltry measures—their parliamentary measures. And I had a prince feeling my pulse, and a duke mixing my draught, and a dozen earls sending their doctors to me. I was of use to them then! Poor me! Read me that note, Constance—Flamborough's note. Do you ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (now called Tutuila) some successful bargaining was done with glass beads in exchange for pork and fruits. It surprised Laperouse that the natives chose these paltry ornaments rather than hatchets and tools. "They preferred a few beads which could be of no utility, to anything we could offer ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... its forces, even going so far as to urge him to come to New York City, where he could assist and advise in all of its large operations. And, moreover, he had been obliged to pay but ten dollars membership fee, besides buying the blazing star for the paltry sum of three ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... nostrils, challenging any other to a race for Ireland; ay, a Cuchullin you were, Philip, Culann's chain-bound: but she unmanned you. She soaked the woman into you and squeezed the hero out of you. All for Adiante! or a country left to slavery! that's the tale. And what are you now? A paltry captain of hussars on the General's staff! One O'Donnell in a thousand! And what is she?—you needn't frown, Phil; I'm her relative by marriage, and she 's a lady. More than that, she shot a dart or two into my breast in those days, she did, I'll own it: I had the catch ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... offering us these paltry inducements to betray the secrets of our skill. We are—we hope we may say it without undue pride—an All-Round Angler, and we are not going to be squared by a bait of that kind. (2) We have never pretended we were a salmon. If ANDREW LANG says we have, we challenge ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... best advantage the chance circumstances of each enterprise, he was led into an infinity of annoying, embarrassing, and ridiculous situations, to extricate himself from which he was obliged to descend to a series of lies and deceptions, of paltry evasions, ignoble subterfuges and equivocal expedients. All Donna Maria's goodness and faith and single mindedness were powerless to disarm him. As the foundation of his work of seduction with her he had taken ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... at seven o'clock for the reception at the City Hall. She had a new gown for that particular event, which had, amongst others, been bought in New York. It had cost one hundred and thirty dollars, an unthinkable price it had seemed, but dismissed as something too paltry to be considered by the open-handed ranchman whom ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... of that act was proposed. It was much too serious a measure, and attended with too many difficulties upon every side, for the then ministry to have undertaken it, as some paltry writers have asserted, from envy and dislike to their predecessors in office. As little could it be owing to personal cowardice, and dread of consequences to themselves. Ministers, timorous from their attachment to place and power, will fear ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... notice them, and said, "Perhaps you had better not bet, for if you lose it might distress you; but if I lose I will not mind it much, as my father has five plantations." He did not like for me to think that the loss of a paltry $100 would distress him, so he said, "I can afford to bet you $2,000, win or lose." That made me mad, so I said, "I will make it $5,000, if you like." He knew he would win; but he was no hog, and did not want me to ask my old dad for money so soon. My partner wanted him to make it $5,000, and offered ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... in the world, or even the most desirable. But this was only a passing thought. So fascinated was Midas with the glitter of the yellow metal, that he would still have refused to give up the Golden Touch for so paltry a consideration as a breakfast. Just imagine what a price for one meal's victuals! It would have been the same as paying millions and millions of money for some fried trout, an egg, a potato, a hot cake, and a cup ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... me previously, I shall rather go to Bursia than to Russia. I received from Your dear kind amiable amicable goodness recently L4 the same was for me a momental recreateing aid in my actual very indigent paltry miserable calamitous situation wherein I gain now nothing and I only perish here. Even I cannot earn here my daily bread by my perfect scientifick Knowledge of diverse languages, I know the philological ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... applied for a transfer to the Horse Transport Section. Oh! that I had only obeyed the dictates of my own conscience and enlisted in the H.A.C. at the start of the war, instead of staying on at school to get a paltry scholarship which the odds are 10 to 1 on my never being able to use! What I pray for is a job in which the following elements are constantly present: (1) hard work; (2) real brain work, employing, if possible, my knowledge of languages; (3) constant danger, or, at least, the constant chance of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... to the ball as His Majesty's representatives, Frederick Augustus and I, and were obliged to say a few nothingnesses to a hundred paltry persons or more. When the Ambassador introduced Count Bielsk, I said in the most careless voice of the world, "I hear you ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... when I am despised and condemned by one who knows as little of me as the first stranger I pass on the road. Cannot you come forward with a face like a sister's, and leave my faults for my own conscience? You judge me! What do you, with your nun's experiences, your heart chilled, your paltry view of the world through a chapel window, know of a man whose passions boil in him like the fire in yonder mountain? I should subdue my passions. Excellent text for a copy book in a girls' school! I should be another man than I am; I should remould myself; I should cool my brain with doctrine. With ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... is large, and covers a deal of ground, but the houses are in general paltry buildings. Here are large stores, and every thing necessary for the equipment of fleets. The number of inhabitants on the island, exclusive of the military, is about ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... their goods for sale, he saw one of them hending in hand an ivory tube in length about a cubit, which he was offering for sale at the price of thirty thousand Ashrafis. Hearing such demand Prince Ali thought to himself, "Assuredly this fellow is a fool who asketh such a price for so paltry a thing."—And as the morn began to dawn Shahrazad held ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... particulars of quantity, quality, and price. The loads from the seed depots and outworks, come rolling up in the afternoon, and have all to be weighed, checked, noted down, and examined. Every man's hand is against you. You cannot trust your own servants. For a paltry bribe they will try to pass a bad parcel of seed, and even when you have your European assistants to help you, it is hard work to avoid being over-reached in some ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... accidents of the fortune through which it passes, while, in the railway novel, interest is obtained with the vulgar reader for the vilest character, because the author describes carefully to his recognition the blotches, burrs and pimples in which the paltry nature resembles his own. The "Mill on the Floss" is perhaps the most striking instance extant of this study of cutaneous disease. There is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... mean to tell me, Sir Archibald," exclaimed the Captain, now in a furious passion, "that for the sake of a few paltry pounds you will blast my name and my family name in this country?—a name, I venture to say, not unknown in the history of this nation. The Camerons, Sir, have fought and bled for King and country on many a battlefield. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... of the god of her people, the Great Michabou. Nor was that awe and fear diminished, when the angry god spoke in a voice of thunder to the Great Elk, demanding why he had enticed the son whom he loved into a marriage with the daughter of a paltry Elk. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... whispered, "I cannot bear to deceive the girl I love. Permit me to explain the tricks." So he explained them. His eyes sought hers across the bowl of gold-fish, his fingers trembled as he taught her to manipulate the magic canister. One by one, she mastered the paltry secrets. Her respect for him waned with every revelation. He complimented her on her skill. "I could not do it more neatly myself!" he said. "Oh, dear Miss Dobson, will you but accept my hand, all these things shall be yours—the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... off, in comparison with their former state and with the rest of the population. Nevertheless, they are glad to escape when the time of their service expires. The people all dread being made soldiers: so that Government is compelled to resort to the most paltry tricks to get recruits. Men are often unjustly charged with theft or debt, and put in prison, and then let out as a favour to be enlisted, or sometimes are clapped into the ranks at once. Youths have been seized as soldiers for kicking up the dust in front of a sentinel and dirtying his ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that paltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both the good and bad civilization cover us as ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to think of it, the situation is striking. Here are you, Jasper Trenoweth, inheritor of the Great Ruby of Ceylon, besides other treasure too paltry to mention, in danger of starving in a garret. Here am I, Thomas Loveday, author of 'Francesca: a Tragedy,' and other masterpieces too numerous to catalogue, with every prospect of sharing your fate. The situation ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... estates, and the condition of them, better than either my Lord or myself: but Pritchard, like other old men, was diffident and slow; and valued himself upon his skill as a draughts-man; and, for the sake of the paltry reputation, must have all his forms preserved, were an imperial crown ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... may ask: Does not any theory of man which loses sight of the supreme sanity of Darwin, and with him of Aristotle, and Angelo, and Leonardo, and Newton, and Leibnitz, and Shakespeare, seem weak and paltry? Do not delicacy of sentiment, brilliancy of wit, fineness of rhythmical and aesthetic sense, the beautiful contributions of the talented special performer, sink into something like apologies—something even like profanation ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... A very paltry and pitiful intrigue at length settled the question between Townshend and Carteret. A marriage had been arranged between a niece, or so-called niece, of one of George's mistresses and the son of La Vrilliere, the French Secretary of State. Madame La Vrilliere insisted, as a condition of the marriage, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... seized hold of the hand of the mischievous wag, whose grimaces much amused us; as fast as he disengaged one of the insect's claws, the creature—which possessed six—soon found a chance to cling on with others. Annoyed at having to strive with such a paltry enemy, l'Encuerado at last tore the beetle roughly away, but the blood flowed from his bronze-colored skin. Always too ready for revenge, he threatened to exterminate the whole colony of beetles; but, smiling at his ill-humor, I forbade his ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... and jewellery. 'I am looking out for a handsome gig and horse,' said Francis Ardry, at the conclusion of his narration; 'it were a burning shame that so divine a creature should have to go about a place like London on foot, or in a paltry hackney coach.' ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... For it is idle to pretend that the little city democracies of ancient times were comparable to the great essays in practical republicanism that mankind is making to-day. This age of the democratic republics that dawn is a new age. It has not yet lasted for a century, not for a paltry hundred years.... All new things are weak things; a rat can kill a man-child with ease; the greater the destiny, the weaker the immediate self-protection may be. And to me it seems that your complete and perfect imperialism, ruled by Germans for Germans, is in its scope and outlook a more antiquated ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... in his fulfilments. He taught,—so far as we know,—nothing but what the common mind might easily accept; nothing to miss the mark of the intelligence of dull Li or Ching toiling in the rice-field;—nor yet too paltry for the notice of the Hwangti on the Dragon Throne. Laotse had come in the spirit of Plenydd the Light-bringer; in the spirit of Alawn, to raise up presently sweet profusions of song. He illuminated the inner worlds; his was ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... And in spite of all his panting, how brave he must have been, what a runner, and how clever, to escape from all those cowardly coast-riders shooting right and left at him! Such a man steal that paltry skirt that her mother made such a fuss about! She was much more likely to find it in her clothes-press ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... mound. It touched me to think that these poor fellows, who did all that they could to help us escape, and then, when they got safely home, started immediately to find us in order that they might give us some of that paltry twelve thousand dollars—give to us, who are actually millionaires, and who may be richer yet! It would not do to let any of the crew get ahead of their captain in fair dealing, and that was one reason why I determined to tell him. Then, there ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... the light of after recollection, the whole thing seems absurd, even paltry. But as I heard it then, declaimed with hot, earnest fluency by an enthusiast who had spent long, clever years over his case, it appeared to prove itself up to the hilt. Of course his arguments must have been warped, and his premises utterly ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... all this time? Why doesn't he do something himself? Don't listen to his rubbish—wasting his time there with potatoes, it is enough to make one wild! Why doesn't he go in to market and buy and sell cattle, and turn over money in that way? Not he! he'd rather muddle with a few paltry potatoes, as if it mattered an atom how they were stuck in ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... to say that thing in my presence,' said the paltry blusterer, with valor on his tongue and pallor on his lips, 'blood would ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... benchers in the true Junius style. He contrasts Stephen with his persecutors. Stephen might not know Law Latin, but he had read Bracton and Glanville and Coke; he knew French and had read Latin at Aberdeen; he had been educated, it was true, in some 'paltry principles of honour and honesty,' while the benchers had learnt 'more useful lessons;' he had written letters to Wilkes copied in all the papers; he had read Locke, could 'harangue for hours upon social feelings, friendship, and benevolence,' and would trudge miles to save a family from prison, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... great as some of our critics have supposed, it is difficult to believe that the enemy was prepared for such resistance as he has met with. To all appearance, the Germans expected to break through in a few days, and hoped that this success would rehabilitate the credit of the paltry young prince whom we here see entangled in barbed wire, his uniform in rags, and despair depicted on his haggard face. Another confessed failure would finish the career of the Crown Prince; and yet there are limits ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... might be; he was sure it was full of beautiful courage and self-sacrifice. It certainly was outrageous that one so glorious must work for her living, and for such a paltry living—forty dollars a month! It was worth that merely to have her sit in the flat where one could look at her; for already he had decided that, when they were married, they would live in a flat—probably in one overlooking Central Park, on Central Park West. He knew ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... undoubting evidence, she is false to herself. To marry under such circumstances is to take a fearful risk. Alas! how many have repented through a long life of wretchedness. Can a true woman love a man who lacks principle—who will sacrifice honour for a few paltry dollars—who will debase himself for gain—whose gross sensuality suffocates all high, spiritual love? No! no! It is impossible! And she who unites herself with such a man, must either shrink, grovelling, down to his mean ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... to your great content, Calls you to be her guiding star (Only a paltry one per cent Wanted to leave you where you are); And you've agreed to take it on, Jumped at the prospect Fate discloses, And thought, "With VENEZELOS gone, Life will be one long bed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... Otis Pilkington, startled out of his lethargy by this appalling suggestion. Was he, the man who, after planking down thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents for "props" and "frames" and "rehl," had sold out for a paltry ten thousand, to ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... "Well, she's had paltry food for a lover since he went away. He's got certain ideas, and she'll hear direct when—but there, I must shut my mouth, for I swore by fantastic oaths ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the perpendicular line up from between the eyebrows was quite in harmony with the rest of his appearance. He was weary, harassed, and divided against himself. Insincerity made him uncomfortable; it compelled continual exertion, and of a paltry and degrading kind; and it gave neither a sense of security, nor a prospect of future advantage. Five days from now he was to be married; the duties of a parish minister were to be undertaken, and he felt himself neither mentally nor morally ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... son, beginning on that paltry patrimony, already the possessor, in a few short years, of seventy millions in addition. We help Elihu Burritt to say his letters at noon-time in a blacksmith shop, and afterward, lo! he converses in thirty languages. We see Edgar Poe, dying as poor as man ever died, yet leaving to the world a name ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... up of Browning's knaves cannot be better expressed than by Chesterton. 'They are real somewhere. We are talking to a garrulous and peevish sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... string them on,' well may those who knew Coleridge conceive the grief, the grief and pity, he would have felt, at seeing eminent powers and knowledge employed in ministering to the wretched love of gossip—retailing paltry anecdotes in dispraise of others, intermingled with outflowings of self-praise—and creeping into the secret chambers of great men's houses to filch out materials for tattle—at seeing great powers ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... off my own, and picked up Gerald's from the ground, and tied them firmly together. I saw that they were too short. Daisy offered hers. I took it, with an inward fear, if the child should catch cold; it seemed paltry to think of it at such a moment. I stepped out on the ice, and went a few steps, when ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... followed; an indignation meeting was called in the Park, coroners' juries stultified themselves, and a senseless outcry was made generally. Twenty-two were killed and thirty wounded. It was a terrible sacrifice to make for a paltry quarrel between two actors about whom nobody cared; and in this light alone many viewed it, forgetting that when the public peace is broken, it matters not how great or insignificant the cause, it must be preserved; and if the police ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... have in them. They believe themselves to be a kind of natural Holy Sacrament. St Mary the Egyptian was a better judge. Pretty and divinely shaped as she was, she considered that it would be all too proud of her flesh to stop in the course of a holy pilgrimage for a paltry indifferent reason which is no more than a piece of mortification and far from being a precious jewel. She humbled herself, madam, and entered by using so admirable a humility the road of penitence, where she accomplished ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... actively destroying the very sources of that education- -jewellery, metal-work, pottery, calico-printing, brocade-weaving, carpet-making—all the famous and historical arts of the great peninsula have been for long treated as matters of no importance, to be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry scrap of so-called commerce; and matters are now speedily coming to an end there. I daresay some of you saw the presents which the native Princes gave to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his progress through India. I did myself, I will not say with great disappointment, for ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... towards the end of 1770, in the Juno, Captain Stott, which was sent to the Falkland Islands, in consequence of the forcible seizure of them by the Spanish squadron. It is remarkable that this paltry dispute, which might be almost forgotten but for the virulent invective of "Junius," and the masterly defence of the Government by Dr. Johnson, should have given to the navy two such officers as Nelson and Pellew; neither of whom ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... even to argue upon political differences. In a letter to Lord North Burgoyne explained his real purpose in entering into correspondence with a rebel. In the proposed interview he would have cut Lee short in his paltry jargon, and pressed upon him the real facts in the case. Next he would have shown him the glory accruing to a successful mediator, and then, playing upon his pride, his interest, and his ambition, would have suggested a ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... ridiculously out of place, to show off an actress's voice. Let who will, or who can, die away with pleasure at the sight of an eunuch quavering the role of Caesar, or of Cato, and strutting awkwardly upon the stage. For my part I have long since renounced those paltry entertainments which constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are purchased ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... the opposite side to fill up the chasm which separated him since his desertion to the camp of the democracy from his Sullan partisans. His personal quarrel with Metellus and Lucullus transferred itself to their extensive and influential coteries. A paltry opposition of the senate— but, to a character of so paltry a mould, all the more exasperating by reason of its very paltriness—had attended him through his whole career as a general. He felt ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... from the side of our great reward. Then it looks like earthly objects after we have gazed upon the sun for a while. We are blind to them. When the Italian fruit-seller finds that he is heir to a ducal palace you cannot tempt him any more with the paltry profits of his trade or the company of his old associates. He is above it all. They who know the hope of their calling and the riches of the glory of their inheritance can well despise the world. It is the poor starving ones ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... Bossu. People will consent to place themselves at the author's standpoint, to view the subject with his eyes, in order to judge a work intelligently. They will lay aside—and it is M. de Chateaubriand who speaks—"the paltry criticism of defects for the noble and fruitful criticism of beauties." It is time that all acute minds should grasp the thread that frequently connects what we, following our special whim, call "defects" with what we call "beauty." Defects—at all events those which we call by that name—are often ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best taste in the world should now have the worst; that having produced the noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now be given up to the manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic should have no other title to distinction than third-rate genre pictures and catchpenny statues— all this is a frequent perplexity to the observer ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... these facts are simple, and perhaps, uninteresting; but they serve to exhibit a characteristic of the lower classes of Mexicans. Doubtless, such paltry thieving is the result of a want of animal courage, easily discernible by the close observer of the Mexican race. Of course there are ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... great Christian disciple of Plato: "therefore it is unquiet till it finds repose in God." From this unrest proceed all our miseries. Men do not always succeed in contenting themselves with a petty prosaic happiness, a dull and paltry well-being, and in stifling the while the grand instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its indefinite aspirations attach themselves ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... that it is high time for him to come away from there, and learn that an Elector of Brandenburg must adapt himself to his means, and, instead of riding in a coach drawn by four horses, must drive in a miserable rattle-trap pulled by two paltry beasts. It is therefore full time that the Electoral Prince were withdrawn from the scenes of his pomp and pride, and were taught again to live simply and sparingly. He must and shall return home! Finally, I am sick and tired ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... there be any right better founded and stronger than that of conquest, such right belongs unquestionably to the saviors of Rome. They have saved it for the Christian world, for mankind, for the Church. It is no man's property. It cannot be let, like a paltry farm, to those who shall bid the highest, in vain compromises and delusive hopes of liberty. Should the Roman people, of their own free will, pretend to give themselves away,—to sell themselves to a faction ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... their juxtaposition with the natives would be eminently calculated to induce the fever of avarice, and to generate the lust of dominion. It is well known that so eager are the colonists to acquire a rapid accumulation of wealth, by trafficking their paltry beads and poisonous rum and tobacco for ivory, camwood and gold dust, it is with the utmost difficulty any considerable portion of them are persuaded to cultivate the soil and engage in agricultural pursuits. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... effacement of prejudices which never entirely disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In Vanity Fair he still makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form; though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important reform of manners must have supervened ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... themselves a track; and now that it was purchased, and had become private property, it seemed that there were some two or three obstinate, unpleasant people, who would not alter their plans, but took delight in the paltry piece of mischief of destroying what had been so carefully put in order. But Sam had always one complaint string upon which he fiddled or harped; and so sure as anything like mischief was done anywhere, he always declared it was "them ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... that you are buying me, Mr. Canler?" she said finally, and in a cold, level voice. "Buying me for a few paltry dollars? Of course you do, Robert Canler, and the hope of just such a contingency was in your mind when you loaned papa the money for that hair-brained escapade, which but for a most mysterious circumstance would ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Gain of Penny Points, and Some Sigh for the Lovely Prizes yet to come. Oh, take the Prize and let the Pennies go, Nor heed the winning of a Paltry Sum. ...
— The Rubaiyat of Bridge • Carolyn Wells
... sojourning. Is it to be supposed that any minister would give himself the trouble to mix himself up in such affairs? He might address a note to the authorities, when the facts would in all probability be denied, or some paltry excuse made: the minister declares himself satisfied, and the Perotes have the laugh against us and our boasted powerful and energetic government. Now, had it been a Frenchman, a Russian, or even a Prussian, who had ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... very policy that a certain class of politicians in this country would have us imitate. Misled by the selfish and paltry arguments of British statesmen, but unawed by the terrible experience of the British people, they would fasten upon us a system whose only recommendation, in its best form, is that it enriches a few, at the cost of the lives and happiness of many. ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... struggle, but the conflict is over. Ah, He is so different from human creditors! I have been a poor debtor, chased, hunted, oppressed, goaded almost to insanity, and none took pity on me, because I owed them a few paltry dollars, which I had the heart to pay, but, through the robberies of another, and their oppressions, could not. But what a debt I owed my Savior! Yet, without a word of reproach, he has forgiven ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... no Johnson, by slight, prejudice, or deprecation. But to suffer the infliction of a crack-brained old naturalist, repeating an interminable manuscript in my own office, went beyond my best resolve! Still there was little to do. It would be a paltry task to select a poem for illustration, and had not this same Ancient Mariner suggested an ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... acknowledged the rightness of the demand for arbitration. So the danger vanished, but Roosevelt, and every other thoughtful American, said to himself, "Suppose England had taken up the challenge, what had we to defend ourselves with?" And we compared the long roll of the great British Fleet with the paltry list of our own ships, and realized that ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... [6510]Morneus), "their poets make gods," et quos adorant in templis, ludunt in Theatris, as Lactantius scoffs. Saturn, a man, gelded himself, did eat his own children, a cruel tyrant driven out of his kingdom by his son Jupiter, as good a god as himself, a wicked lascivious paltry king of Crete, of whose rapes, lusts, murders, villainies, a whole volume is too little to relate. Venus, a notorious strumpet, as common as a barber's chair, Mars, Adonis, Anchises' whore, is a great she-goddess, as well ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... though the white men called her, Sultana though she was named with fear and submission by the blacks, though her power was second only to that of Red Jabez, and barely less than his, a canker gnawed at the heart of Dolores, the canker of a suspicion that her power was but a paltry power, her freedom ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... shambles—why, having such knowledge, went'st thou with these jolterheaded citizens to consult that Patrick Charteris, whose spurs should be hacked off from his heels for the communion which he holds with paltry burghers, and whom thou brought'st here with the fools to do dishonour to the lifeless hand, which, had it held its wonted place, he was not worthy to have touched in peace or ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Etienne, only half aloud, dropping down on the arm of his chair, overcome to realize the issue that had hung on a paltry handful of pistoles. Then, recovering, ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... the army's efficiency, this Mahdi, like his predecessor, whose paltry tomb you have seen, has done his best to bring the tribes up into as perfect a state of discipline as can be managed with such wild beasts. They have plenty of modern rifles, and they know how to use them, and they have been drilled sufficiently to ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... honest, and a less boyish one. Who doubts that you can fight, you silly fellow? haven't I seen you? I want you to show me a much higher sort of courage: the courage to repair a wrong, not the paltry ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... scale. This man's life and reason had been engaged in a drawn battle with three mortal enemies—solitude, silence and privation of all employment. That little bit of labor and wholesome thought, whose paltry and childish details I half blush to have given you, were yet due to my story, for they took a man out of himself, checked the self-devouring process, and helped elastic nature to recover ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... not obvious, my dear Vivian, that true Fame and true Happiness must rest upon the imperishable social affections? I do not mean that coterie celebrity which paltry minds accept as fame; but that which exists independent of the opinions or the intrigues of individuals: nor do I mean that glittering show of perpetual converse with the world which some miserable wanderers call Happiness; but that which can ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... so strangely lost its head in 1808. I never considered this a good story, but now that I see it in its new type on the fair page of the present volume, I am amazed to think I ever marked it for inclusion at all. It seems to me poverty-stricken in fancy and very paltry in tone, the idea of making beautiful flowers as mean-spirited as trumpery men and women can be being wholly undesirable. It is too late to take it out, especially as Mr. Bedford has drawn a very charming picture for it, but I hope it will remain only as an object-lesson. ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... in its aspect of religion, or of politics, or of society! What essays could I not compose here—the mind elevated by that buoyancy which comes of the consciousness of being free for a great effort! Free from the vulgar interruptions that cling to poverty like a garment, free from the paltry cares of daily subsistence, free from the damaging incidents of a doubtful position and a station that must be continually asserted. That one disparagement, perhaps, worst of all,' cried he aloud: 'how is a man to enjoy ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... from the coast of China, so as to have made something of our voyage: But these rogues, being desperate in minds and fortunes, and hopeless of ever being able to return to their own country in that paltry junk, had resolved among themselves either to gain my ship ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... explained it. "Throwing your paltry ideas at a world which doesn't want them. Writing like Nan's I mean. It's not as if she wrote ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... last obtained the confidence of several chiefs, and soon filled them with all sorts of ideas concerning the alarming want of public spirit in the people of Imeeo. More especially did he dwell upon the humiliating fact of their living in paltry huts of bamboo, when magnificent palaces of boards might so easily ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... you suppose that a man who would be willing even to give up his eternal salvation for the greatest good of the universe could hesitate about a few paltry thousands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... played he must have a finger in the pie, as sure as there must be meal for bread to be made. But it is a new thing to me that on this occasion he should be Euergetes' tool. Old Philammon told me all about it. Just now the messenger came back from Memphis, and brought a paltry scrap of papyrus on which some wretched scribbler had written in the name of Philometer, that nothing was known of Irene at court, and complaining deeply that Asclepiodorus had not hesitated to play an underhand game with the king. So they have no ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... some presuming subjects went to look him up, and after much inquiry and pedestrian exercise they found the sovereign in jail. His Majesty explained that he had been arrested for debt a few days before, and that because of a shortage in the paltry coin of a white man's state—a wretched matter of $4.15—he was doomed to remain behind the bars, perhaps forever. The messengers ran back to the square, made an excited appeal to the populace, scratched the required sum together in ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... embarrassment of demeanour, that perhaps her Majesty would be satisfied with the possession of Calais for her own life-time, and—as this was at once plumply refused—by the suggestion of a pledge of it for the term of one year. But the king only grew the more indignant as the bargaining became more paltry, and he continued to heap bitter reproaches upon the queen, who, without having any children or known inheritor of her possessions, should nevertheless, be so desirous of compassing his eternal disgrace ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which he requireth blind homage to be paid by fools and cowards. Now, the King of Babylon's idol, the prophet tells us, was of solid gold, a metal which the world is, I grieve to say, too prone to worship; but Gessler's paltry Baal is but the empty ducal bonnet of Austria, which he hath exalted on a pole; and he commands the men of Uri to bow down before it, under penalty of death. Wouldst thou wish thy husband to degrade the name of a Swiss, by stooping to ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... imperfectly supplied with cardinal virtues and general ideas. They cost a great deal, but we would sacrifice anything for such a purpose. There is nothing mean about the British public. "What are a few bales of gun-cotton,' it cries—" a few tons of paltry bullets, in comparison with the march of civilisation and humanity and open markets? We do but give them of our best, our finest Bessemer steel, our latest thing in torpedo-boats—nothing is too good for them. What are we, if not magnanimous?' says the British public. I always like that about it—it ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... a somewhat more than usually testy remark of the stranger reaching the ears of the Laird, he burst by Shanty and had already uttered these words, "Let me hear no more of this, I am a gentleman, and abominate the paltry consideration of pounds, shillings, and pence;" when Shanty forcibly seizing his arm, turned him fairly round, whispering, "Go, and for the sake of common sense, hold your tongue, leave the matter to me, let me bargain for you; go and tell Mrs. ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... indolence, the intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into foolish amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and buffoons alike dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always counselling caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything that was enjoyable in the present moment, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... regarded as totally inadequate, and before the War the country even failed to recruit numbers within sixty thousand of this modest standard. Secondly, its yearly training, which provided but a fortnight's life in camp, has been deemed so paltry as to be almost negligible. Thirdly, the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907 provided a legal loophole by which the less patriotic could evade service overseas in however great an emergency. Section 13 specifically lays down that, apart from purely spontaneous offers by officers or men ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... slain, that we the rest Shall 'scape destruction; nay, but we shall fall Before yon terrible Trojans for my sake And shameless Helen's! Think not that I care For her: for you I care, when I behold Good men in battle slain. Away with her— Her and her paltry paramour! The Gods Stole all discretion out of her false heart When she forsook mine home and marriage-bed. Let Priam and the Trojans cherish her! But let us straight return: 'twere better far To flee from ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... and murder. For this is the line of argument pursued by the representative of Athens in the Melian Debate. The substance of what he says may briefly be stated as follows "You are weak—we are strong; Melos is a paltry island, Athens is queen of the Aegaean, and the existence of an independent city in these waters is an insult to her empire. Let us waste no time in discussions about abstract law and right. For the mighty there is but one law—to ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... petty strategy exhausted, and his paltry measure of self-control with it, Matey started to chase Finn with a stick. Now and again he succeeded in getting a blow home, as Finn wheeled and leapt before him within the narrow limits of the yard; and every time the stick touched ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... his mother know how he had reached Twybridge. His arrival corresponded pretty well with that of a train by which he might have come. But when the door opened to him, and the familiar faces smiled their welcome, he felt that he must have nothing to do with paltry deceit; he told of his walk, explaining it by the simple fact that this morning he had found himself short of money. How that came to pass, no one inquired. Mrs. Peak, shocked at such martyrdom, tended him with all motherly care; for once, Godwin felt that it was good to have ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... did he not send for me or for some one else?" said the lawyer to himself. "It must be a young man's frolic, a wager, a bet. He has spirit enough for anything. He never could have been such a mad fool as to wreck his life for a paltry watch." ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... fired by the lovely lady's eloquence. Their spirits mounted simultaneously, and they were flushed with a splendid courage in which death looked a mean and paltry thing compared with vanquishing that cow. She had already stepped into the pool, but the Prophet waded in towards her, moving the alder branch menacingly. She looked up with the familiar roll of the eye that had done her such good ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... impatience was—time out of mind—unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief—and that is the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the verse were sent, and who had not thought that time ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... controversy with Clarke, calling Leibnitz a great man. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, Leibnitz persisted in affirming that Newton called space sensorium numinis, notwithstanding he was corrected, and desired to observe that Newton's words were QUASI sensorium numinis[780]. No, Sir; Leibnitz was as paltry a fellow as I know. Out of respect to Queen Caroline, who patronised him, Clarke treated him too well.[781]' During the time that Dr. Johnson was thus going on, the old minister was standing with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... force as he sees the means before him by which he may escape their power to annoy him. Like Tantalus, dying of thirst with the water at his very lips, this man gazes on the wealth piled up in that safe. Glancing around, he sees his friend slowly counting the paltry hundreds he is to receive; close by lies a heavy weapon, heretofore used for innocent business purposes; another glance into the safe and insanity is upon him; his brain is a perfect hell of contending passions; again the thought flashes into his mind—'Only ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... will be rigid to merit and penurious to service. Their penury is even held out as a blind and cover to their prodigality. The economy of injustice is to furnish resources for the fund of corruption. Then they pay off their protection to great crimes and great criminals by being inexorable to the paltry frailties of little men; and these modern flagellants are sure, with a rigid fidelity, to whip their own enormities on the vicarious back of every ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to think that from the Fall till now man has gone on continually producing and reproducing scenes like this—sometimes, no doubt, unavoidably; but often, too often, because of some trifling error, or insult, on the part of statesmen, or some paltry dispute about a boundary, or, not infrequently, on grounds so shadowy and complex that succeeding historians have found it almost impossible to convey the meaning thereof to the intellects of ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... unimaginative English parson takes upon himself to comment. We listen submissively to much school-book lore as to "Claudius" and the "fourth century" and the "residence of Roman Emperors," but when it rains Bishops and Archbishops and Electors we fly before them. For, after all, what signifies the paltry learning of a dry-as-dust dominie compared with the vivid tales these grand old ruins tell if suffered to speak for themselves? In Treves people need to absorb silently, and then assimilate undisturbed by weary chatter. One looks at the tender turquoise sky, flecked with ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... most weak when most needed. In vain do we invoke his approved maxims, hitherto so glibly dealt out to silence all gainsayers; yet now, they are either found inapt or are forgotten wholly, until, after a paltry show of defence, braggart Philosophy fairly takes to his heels, and leaves us abandoned to the will of old mother Nature. Now, indeed, arrives the tug; and I, for my part, pity the man who, however savagely resolute, does not feel and own her power. The adieus of those one loves are, at best,—that ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... that dear devoted sex in the hearing of their champion, without pricking a lance with him in their behalf. What do you, either of you, who abuse woman in that wholesale style, know of her? Nothing—less than nothing; and yet you venture, upon your paltry experience, to lift up your voices and decry the sex. Now I do know her; and upon my own experience avouch, that, as a sex, woman, compared with man, is as an angel to a devil. As a sex, woman is faithful, loving, self-sacrificing. We 'tis that make her otherwise; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... compassion I have always felt for them. Pity, 'tis said, is akin to love; and who can help experiencing that tender emotion that considers the heavy affliction nature has laid on the spiders in compensation for the paltry drop of venom with which she, unasked, endowed them! And here, of course, I am alluding to the wasps. These insects, with a refinement of cruelty, prefer not to kill their victims outright, but merely maim them, then house them in cells where the grubs can vivisect them at leisure. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... eighteen or twenty years of the period, had access to men in the very highest positions—to ministers, ambassadors, to the sons of a king, and even to the late king himself, it is much to his credit that he has contented himself with a paltry riband and a modest place, as Conservateur de la Bibliotheque Mazarine. M. de Sacy belongs to a Jansenist family. Apropos of this, M. Texier tells a pleasant story concerning him. A Roman Catholic writer addressing him one day in the small gallery reserved ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... than that for which the ticket was taken is, similarly, only a thinly disguised case of theft, and should be treated accordingly. The sale or purchase of pirated editions of books is another case of the same kind, the persons from whom the money is stolen being the authors or publishers. Many paltry acts of pilfering, such as the unauthorised use of government-paper or franks, or purloining novels or letter-paper from a club, or plucking flowers in a public garden, fall under the same head of real, though not always obvious, thefts. ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... could not then employ him; but I foolishly let him know as a secret that I soon intended to begin a newspaper, and might then have work for him. My hopes of success, as I told him, were founded on this, that the then only newspaper, printed by Bradford, was a paltry thing, wretchedly manag'd, no way entertaining, and yet was profitable to him; I therefore thought a good paper would scarcely fail of good encouragement. I requested Webb not to mention it; but he told it to Keimer, who immediately, to be beforehand ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... very common, public debates were of weekly occurrence; and little did Martin Luther realize that this paltry half-sheet of paper was to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the many, both young and old, who were painting at that time, he was considered one of the most excellent who were handling brushes and colours. Wherefore he found himself not only honoured, but even, although he exacted the most paltry prices for his labours, in a condition to do something to help and support his family, and also to shelter himself from the annoyances and anxieties which afflict those of us who live in poverty. But he became enamoured of a young woman, and a little time afterwards, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... "A mean, paltry dog," said Brooke. There had been a little whisky-toddy after the oysters, and Mr. Burgess was perhaps moved to a warmer expression of feeling than he might have displayed had he discussed this branch of ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... wailed Jane, falling into convenient arms. "Why not install a ghost in Madison if you are all so keen on it? I can't see how you expect one paltry spook to ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... I got into heaven, for I see the angels about me!" says Madam, advancing with a reverence lower than the paltry room demanded. "Forgive an intruder, Madam, and confer a benefit. For being newly come to Dublin, I've lost my way returning from Smock Alley, and while I called up courage to enter and ask it from ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... became George II., and the Princess Queen Caroline, Gay's hopes of promotion boiled as high as his hopes of gain had during the South-Sea scheme. But here, too, he was deceived; and having only received the paltry appointment (as he deemed it, though the salary was L200,) of gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa, a girl of two years old, he thought himself insulted. He first sent a message to the Queen that ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... He wished that Gilbert would come. Gilbert would soon rout this paltry little tuppenny-ha'penny Society novelist with his pretty-pretty chatter and his pretty-pretty blue eyes and his air of being a knowing dog. Lady Cecily seemed to have forgotten Henry altogether.... He turned to Lord Jasper who ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... to haunt the Kano gate until impatience or curiosity should fling it wide for him. Then, after having coaxed old Mata into making a purchase, he was to engage her in conversation, and extract all the domestic information he could. Unfortunately for the acquisition of paltry news, it was Ume-ko, not Mata, who came out to purchase. The seller, watching those slim, white fingers as they fluttered among his cages, the delicate ear bent to mark some special chime, forgot the words of Ando ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... saying, "Do what you like with me, mates, but let that young lad go free. How would you like to have one of your own boys or young brothers treated as you threaten to treat him? There's life and work and happiness in him, and you'd just knock it all to pieces for the sake of a paltry revenge. What good can killing the boy do to any of you? Why, I'll tell you— murder will out, and you'll all be hanged, every one ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... and peace in the swamps of the Chickahominy were doomed to years of blood and toil, of victory and defeat, as they marched on, alike through both, to the consummation of a nation's glorious triumph, not over paltry armies of arrogant traitors, but over the incarnation of Evil, over Heaven-defying institutions, whose downfall established forever principles as ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... "Still, through our paltry stir and strife, Glows down the wished ideal, And longing molds in clay what life Carves in ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... the other, "I think that without personal proof I can convince you of your mistake. For I put it to you, is it reasonable to suppose that a man with brains, sufficient to act such a part as you say, would take all that trouble, and run all that hazard, for the mere sake of those few paltry coppers, which, I hear, was all he got for his ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Lagos, in a body, being ten of us, with two trumpets and a hautboy, which he desir'd might play us to church, where our musick did the office of an organ, but separate from the singing, which was by the fathers well perform'd. Our musick played 'Hey, boys, up go we!' and all manner of noisy paltry tunes. And after service, our musicians, who were by that time more than half drunk, march'd at the head of the company; next to them an old father and two fryars carrying lamps of incense, then an image dressed with flowers and wax candles, then about forty priests, fryars, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... that of thus much that return was made; And of the third part of the Persian ships There was the venture summ'd and satisfied. As for those Samnites, [17] and the men of Uz, That bought my Spanish oils and wines of Greece, Here have I purs'd their paltry silverlings. [18] Fie, what a trouble 'tis to count this trash! Well fare the Arabians, who so richly pay The things they traffic for with wedge of gold, Whereof a man may easily in a day Tell [19] that which may maintain ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... matchless hand, sends forth her nobly born, And laughs the paltry attributes of wealth and rank to scorn; She moulds with care a spirit rare, half human, half divine, And cries exulting, "Who can make a gentleman like mine?" ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... satisfaction which brings comfort to all, and amongst these any of hysterical nature probably become far happier and better citizens under her wing than they would otherwise have been. No nets will catch the expanding soul which is rising out of its paltry self ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Pitt had accustomed men, to use Walpole's lively phrase, to come to breakfast with the question, "What new victory is there this morning?" The brilliant letter-writer's correspondence is full of the gossip arising from these usually paltry affairs; and throughout, whether in success or disaster, the name of Howe appears frequently, and always as the subject of praise. "Howe, brother of the lord of that name, was the third on the naval list. He was ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... shillings, and pence, amounting to just eleven dollars a day. Eleven times nine are ninety-nine. It was so near a round hundred, it seemed a bitter mockery not to say a hundred, and have done with it, instead of scrupulously stopping to consider a single paltry dollar. I was reminded of the boy whose father bragged of killing nine hundred and ninety-nine pigeons at one shot. Somebody asked why he didn't say a thousand. 'Thunder!' says the boy, 'do you suppose my father would lie just for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... I repeat it, was too short; you should have given me your opinion of the design of the heroi-comical poem which I sent you. You remember I intended to introduce the hero of the poem as lying in a paltry ale-house. You may take the following specimen of the manner, which I flatter myself is quite original. The room in which he lies may ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... which man ever received; and a mighty blow it was, causing him to remain mortal, from the beginning of the world to its end. Do you imagine that I, who despoiled the whole world, cannot at present give counsel which will serve for a paltry islet? And cannot I, who cheated Eve in Paradise, vanquish Anne in Britain? If no natural craft will avail, and continued experience for more than five thousand years, my counsel to you is, to dress up your daughter Hypocrisy, to deceive Britain and its queen; ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... locked, and to overtake them, even by running, ere they should be lost in that maze of corridors, my uncle's house. As it was, I went with a heart divided; and the thought of my treasure thus left unprotected, save by a paltry lid and lock that any one might break or pick open, put me in a perspiration whenever I had the time to remember it. The lawyer brought us to a room, begged us to be seated while he should hold a consultation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all opportunity was over. Hope had begun to alternate with a fear lest that evasive corner should never be turned, that little crop of interruptions never cease to turn up. And yet it was so foolish. Each obstacle in itself was paltry. It was their number that overcame one, as the tiny arrows ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... bit of advice:—'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and almost illiterate. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tell us about the money which his corporation has so generously handed over to the supervisors. Then the Telephone Company, composed of men high in the social circles of this city (with its franchise bought for a paltry few thousand dollars) will have to show its books, and if we can reach the guilty ones, on the top, indictments will soon be moving their way. I think within the next month we will have indictments from the grand jury ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... with the life they left, of all That makes life paltry and mean and small, In their new dedication charged With something heightened, enriched, enlarged, That lends a light to their lusty brows And a song to the rhythm of their tramping feet, These are the men that have taken vows, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... sad to see professors, for the sake of paltry pelf, or to escape from persecution, denying the Lord Jesus. It subjects religion to scorn and contempt, and doubles the sorrows and sufferings of real Christians. Bunyan expresses himself here in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... enough to spend so much. After dinner altered our design to go to Woolwich, and put it off to to-morrow morning, and so went all to Greenwich (Mrs. Waith excepted, who went thither, but not to the same house with us, but to her father's, that lives there), to the musique-house, where we had paltry musique, till the master organist came, whom by discourse I afterwards knew, having employed him for my Lord Sandwich, to prick out something (his name Arundell), and he did give me a fine voluntary or two, and so home ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... perilous striving with princes; therefore, I wish you somewhat to incline to the king's pleasure, for 'indignatio Principis mors est.'" "And is that all, my lord?" replied this man, so much above all paltry considerations; "then in good faith the difference between your grace and me is but this—that I may die to-day, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... and seemed to hesitate. Suddenly he wheeled his horse and blew a blast upon his bugle. "Back!" he cried somewhat bitterly. "We will not linger here for a paltry doe. Let us leave this cursed wood and this crusty hermit. Back to our own demesne, where we shall find sport enough, I ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... he, "that's a poor game. It means lifting clothes off the bleaching line, or hedges. Needy mizzlers, mumpers, shallow-blokes, and flats may carry it on, but it's too low and paltry for you." ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... had set the blood again coursing warmly in his veins, all that was paltry and depressing passed from his mind and heart, as a mist is rolled away by the wind. The sweet, wild air, that in those regions is an elixir of life to the stranger, making him young if he be old, and if ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... voting on that day," the bishop declared, with grim emphasis. "We must dispose of this fellow's pretensions once for all. It is preposterous that a professional baseball player and street-car conductor should aspire to become mayor of Warwick. An orator? Nonsense! Just a paltry gift of the gab. Balaam's is n't the only ass whose mouth the Lord in his inscrutable wisdom has ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... very large gratuity on his arrival in Barcelona, and even taking the product of the islands at a tenth part of their value as estimated by him, he still had every right to suppose himself one of the richest men in Spain. Yet he accepted this paltry pension of L8. 6s. 8d. in our modern money (of 1900), which, taking the increase in the purchasing power of money at an extreme estimate, would not be more than the equivalent of $4000 now. Now Columbus had not been the first ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... hall, and new party-dresses for insignificant me!" Mabel stopped to say aloud in great amusement. "What would my sage brother have said to such paltry memoranda six months ago? He is an apt scholar, or he has an able teacher. Ah, well! love ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... an obscure Nizzard sheet; an encounter with pistols followed in which no one was hurt, but both sides seemed to have aimed in earnest. There is a tragic absurdity in the possible extinction of such a life as Cavour's on so paltry an occasion; yet, in the surroundings in which he moved, he could not have passed over the worthless attack in the silent contempt it deserved without being called a coward. At the conclusion of the duel he walked away, turning ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... "a man by the name of John M. Williams, of Georgetown, D.C., who was in the wood business, and kept a wharf." As to treatment, he said that he had not been used very hard, but had been worked hard and allowed but few privileges. The paltry sum of twenty-five cents a week, was all that was allowed him out of his hire. With a wife and one child this might seem a small sum, but in reality it was a liberal outlay compared with what many ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... a syllable, if you please; the debt is all on my side, and you do not fancy it can be paid in such a paltry fashion. I am glad you are not offended with me, that is all." And then he proceeded to ask kindly ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... are, would never be believed—never! Such accusations against me, a peeress of the realm, and a lady whose reputation has never been assailed, would but add to the general belief in your own guilt, and the certainty of your fate; such charges would be regarded as a paltry subterfuge, and no one would credit them. Go, fellow—the bat cannot consort with the eagle, nor can such as you aspire to even the most distant familiarity with persons of my rank. Depart, instantly; ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... what I am going to do; I feel like a man who has been stunned. To be told that the murderer of Arthur Mountjoy had been seen in London—to be prepared to trace him by his paltry assumed name of Carrigeen—to wait vainly for the next discovery which might bring him within reach of retribution at my hands—and then to be overwhelmed by the news of his illness, his recovery, and his disappearance: these are the blows which have stupefied ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... foe to all that is mean and paltry in the aspirations of Humanity, I demand that every individual who bears a human countenance shall ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... was now close at hand when the French admiral should feel, even if he did not admit, the consequences of this mistake, by which he had won a paltry island and lost an English fleet. Rodney had sailed from Europe on the 15th of January, with twelve ships-of-the-line. On the 19th of February he anchored at Barbadoes, and the same day Hood reached Antigua from St. Kitt's. On the 25th the squadrons of Rodney ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... consideration, if one had a wish allowed by that kind fairy, without whose assistance it would be quite impossible to send, even for the spirit-level, nobody would throw away the wish upon things so paltry. I would not put the fairy upon any such errand: I would order the good creature to bring no spirit-level, but a stiff glass of spirits for Kate—a palanquin, and relays of fifty stout bearers—all drunk, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... figure painting of that day. He painted in both oil and water-color, with a facility of design I have never known surpassed, making at a single sitting, and without a model, a drawing with many figures. He was at the moment I knew him engaged in illustrating Grimm's stories, for a paltry compensation, but, as it seemed to me, in a spirit the most completely concordant with the stories of all the illustrations I have ever seen ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... and Ferdinand, having stood the test of hard work, is now induced, by an awed and holy mood, produced by art, to keep his good resolutions. Describe the mask, and show its meaning and fitness for Prospero's purposes. Why is Prospero so disturbed at the reminder of so paltry a plot as that of Caliban and his associates? Is it likely that these drunken fellows could frame any plot that would be but as gossamer before his art? Is it natural that so low a creature as Caliban should show more intelligence than Stephano and Trinculo in disregarding ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... impetuously.] Confound the shabby dogs, the paltry scoundrels! Justice and fairness they ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... fight gayly, never doubting for a moment that victory would be on their side. So paltry had been the resistance that the Confederates had heretofore been able to oppose to the Northern arms, by sea, that the blue-jackets felt that they had only to open a fight in order to win it. The officers were more serious. Rumors had reached them ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... philosophy by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the parricide, who 'beats his father, having first taken away his arms': the dog, who is your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument wandering about without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved, from the Gorgias: the argument personified as veiling her face (Republic), as engaged in a chase, as breaking upon us in a first, second and third wave:—on ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... other passions are crushed by it—it absorbs all other feelings, and has closed my heart even against love, Japhet. I could not, I would not debase myself, sink so low in my own estimation, as to allow so paltry a passion to have dominion over me; and, indeed, now that I am so wedded to stimulants, even if I were no longer a prophetess, it ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... Such a paltry sum to make a fuss about! But, as usual, we hide our real feelings behind this flippant mask. Reading between the lines we confess to strange apprehensions. Why has the Princess so gravely exceeded her dress ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... he went homewards by himself, was disturbed by various thoughts. If it really was to be the case that Polly Neefit wouldn't have him, why should he stay in a country so ill-adapted to his manner of thinking as this? Why remain in a paltry island while all the starry west, with its brilliant promises, was open to him? Here he could only quarrel with his father, and become a rebel, and perhaps live to find himself in a jail. And then what could he do of good? He preached and preached, but nothing came of it. Would not the land ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... the Marquis de Prie made a bank of about three hundred sequins. His staking this paltry sum shewed me that I had much to lose and little to win, as it was evident that he would have made a bank of a thousand sequins if he had had them. I put down fifty Portuguese crowns, and said that as soon as I had lost them I should go to bed. In the middle of the third ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and eleven years? O small And paltry period compared with all The tide of centuries that flowed and ebbed ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... One would have thought on general principles that so simple a device as gives us our typewriter and blackbird and hosts of other words would be an all but universal grammatical process. Such is not the case. There are a great many languages, like Eskimo and Nootka and, aside from paltry exceptions, the Semitic languages, that cannot compound radical elements. What is even stranger is the fact that many of these languages are not in the least averse to complex word-formations, but may on the contrary effect a synthesis that far surpasses the utmost that Greek ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that it robbed the poet's memory of some of the reverence that was its due. Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same effect as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... enthusiastic over any view of things which you know to have been partly made by yourself, and which is liable to alter during the next minute? How is any heroic devotion to the ideal of truth possible under such paltry conditions?' ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... that's absurd, you know. No young men, strangers to business, are paid much to speak of. Besides, I don't look to a paltry clerk's pay. Some day, when thoroughly acquainted with the business (I shall learn it in about seven years), I shall go into a good house with my capital ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... collecting Chobei's apprentices, sent them out in all directions to buy the macaroni. Jiurozayemon all this while was thinking of the pleasure he would have in laughing at Chobei for offering him a mean and paltry present; but when, by degrees, the macaroni began to be piled mountain-high around the tea-house, he saw that he could not make a fool of Chobei, and ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
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