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More "Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our author's seems to have been taken upon memory, and is not very exact. Schovten's seamen, or rather the petty officer who commanded his long boat, insulted the natives grossly before they offered any injury to his people; and then, notwithstanding they fired upon them with small arms, the islanders obliged them to ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... without seamen until within the last fortnight, when the officers began to enter men as fast as possible. A lieutenant with a party came to Buffalo, a tolerably large village opposite Fort Erie, and procured several hands, but, not satisfied, a petty officer was sent to our side to inveigle others. The magistrates, hearing of this, sent to apprehend him; but ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... intruding into the private affairs of ducal and princely houses is often a most unthankful business. I have ever found it more satisfactory and less nerve racking to undertake a mission into some foreign country than to become involved with some petty local affair of royalty. For some such affair I judged to be the dilemma of the ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... in. 'Abide in Him' by continual direction of thought, love, desire to Him; by continual and reiterated submission of the will to Him, as commanding and as appointing; by the honest reference to Him of daily life and all petty duties which otherwise distract us and draw us away from Him. Then, dwelling in Him we shall share in His life, and shall bring forth fruit ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... along the deck that narrowed into a passage about three feet wide as they reached the forward house, which apparently contained the petty officers' rooms. In the centre was the door that opened into the engine-room. Only the upper works of the big engines were visible. The boys stopped. A man, evidently the engineer, or one of his assistants, sat on a leather-covered seat facing the levers and indicators. He looked up for ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... their side, or that they purposely sought to quarrel with us; thieving, which gave rise to the whole, they were equally guilty of, in our first and second visits. It was the cause of every misunderstanding that happened between us; their petty thefts were generally overlooked, but sometimes slightly punished; the boat, which they at last ventured to take away, was an object of no small magnitude to people in our situation, who could not possibly replace ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... "I told you so," by either word or look. She was too wise for such a petty triumph. Besides, there was something in that afternoon's Express, which Bruce had handed her that interested her far more than his wrathful recital of Blind Charlie's treachery; and although she was apparently giving Bruce her entire attention, and was in fact mechanically ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... aided with his money and his name popular movements, which would have taken place just the same without him, and which had another object than his elevation. It is still a common error to attribute the greatest of revolutions to some petty private manoeuvring, as if at such an epoch a whole people could be used as the ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... States General gave him the means for carrying on war, by establishing the odious "gabelle" on salt, and other imposts. John hoped with his new army to drive the English completely out of the country. Petty war began again on all the frontiers,—an abortive attack on Calais, a guerilla warfare in Brittany, slight fighting also in Guienne. Edward in 1335 landed at Calais, but was recalled to pacify Scotland; Charles of Navarre and the Duke of Lancaster were on the Breton border; the ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... concrete presentment in space of the soul of a people. If that soul be petty and sordid—"stirred like a child by little things"—no great architecture is possible because great architecture can image only greatness. Before any worthy architecture can arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannons of Europe ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... had had a skirmish with the dragoons, and had lost eight or ten of his men. He bore a complaint straightway to the council concerning the manner in which we had deserted him; but great events were coming fast upon us now, and there was small time to inquire into petty matters of discipline. For myself, I freely confess, looking back on it, that as a soldier he was entirely in the right, and that from a strict military point of view our conduct was not to be excused. Yet I trust, my dears, even ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that was brimming over with love for him. His name came riding on every breath. It was Philip, Philip, Philip! And bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, he heard all the pitiful story of her love, of her petty stratagems, of the wicked little plot she had made, of the traps from which he had extricated himself, of the pretended sprain in her ankle, of her watching and waiting, of the anguish he had caused her, of her solitary communion with the stars on Mount Avalanche, ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the other physicians were mentioned in different terms, where the terms themselves were equivalent, or where in effect that which was applied to him was the most honourable, perhaps they who wrote the paper cannot now remember. Had they expected a lawsuit to have been the consequence of such petty variation, I hope they would have avoided it[1113]. But, probably, as they meant no ill, they suspected no danger, and, therefore, consulted only what appeared to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... is decidedly the aristocratical part of the establishment. The second floor is scarcely less aristocratical and magnificent; the other floors go on lessening in splendor as they gain in altitude, and end with the attics, the region of petty tailors, clerks, and sewing-girls. To make the filling up of the mansion complete, every odd nook and corner is fitted up as a joli petit appartement a garcon (a pretty little bachelor's apartment), that is to say, some little dark inconvenient nestling-place for a poor devil ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... pictures that pursue the visual aspect of objects to a sufficient completion to contain the suggestion of these other associations, that they understand at all. Other pictures, they say, are not finished enough. And it is so seldom that a picture can have this petty realisation and at the same time be an expression of those larger emotional qualities that ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... matters of taste; but it is certain that a very large number of people, who, like myself, are neither rich nor in a position which justifies them in giving themselves airs, consider quiet, comfort, and the absence of petty cares the most essential conditions of a holiday. These views necessitate some expense and generally limit the excursions of those who entertain them to their native land; but, on the other hand, they have ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... an Act of Parliament was passed making it necessary for a company of players who wished to exercise their profession without unnecessary interference from petty officials and municipal authorities, to secure a licence as the players, or servants, of a nobleman; lacking such licences members of their calling were classed before the law, and liable to be treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... though in peaceful garb arrayed, And weaponless except his blade, His stately mien as well implied A high-born heart, a martial pride, As if a baron's crest he wore, And sheathed in armor bode the shore. Slighting the petty need he showed, He told of his benighted road; His ready speech flowed fair and free, In phrase of gentlest courtesy, Yet seemed that tone and gesture bland Less used to sue than ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... traits of Goethe's parents, and possibly something of his wife is in Dorothea. Hermann's mother bears the name of the poet's and reveals many of her qualities. But some of these are given to the landlord-father, while the elder Goethe's pedantry and petty weaknesses are shown in the apothecary. The poet's experiences in the field are realistically reproduced in many particulars of character and incident, as are doubtless also his mother's vivid reports of events in Frankfurt during July and August, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... too timid, and, let me hope, too girlishly modest, to wish to attract in any way his attention—but because the sun shone there, and I was just chilly enough to enjoy its mingled light and heat. Thus it was I came to notice the following petty occurrence. In the yard of the house next to that occupied by Mr. Allison was kept a tame rabbit, which often took advantage of a hole it had made for itself under the dividing fence to roam over the ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... of the people" he thought great. "I do not love," he says, "the word people." But he had a high idea of what was worthy of a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of which James could not resist. In his new office he once more urged on, and urged in vain, his favourite project for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law. This was a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd of lawyers ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... inferior, writers it is most fortunate that our design has taken so wide a scope. These can go on with their perennial wrangle over the petty question of penal and educational flagellation, while we grapple with the higher problem, and unfold the broader philosophy of an universal walloping. Reflections upon the Beneficent ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... a mean desire to retaliate, a petty and ignoble spite, that prompted me thus to poison Brutus's confidence, and I regretted the words as soon as ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... own counsel than if we take the officers of the law, or, for that matter, anyone else, into our confidence. You undoubtedly noticed how carefully M. Godin kept his own counsel. Official methods, and the hasty generalisations which form a part thereof—to say nothing of the petty rivalries and the passion for notoriety—can do much to hinder our own work, and, I believe, nothing to help it. What say you?" "That we keep our work to ourselves," Gwen quickly rejoined, and I signified that I was of the same opinion. "Then," ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... his father had become great by thinking, not for his own clan alone, but for all the people—it was because of the long reach of his power that they called him Long-Hand. Now that he was gone there would be nothing but quarrels and petty jealousies. 'They will hunt the same grounds twice over,' said Taku-Wakin; 'they will kill one another when they should be killing their enemies, and in the end the ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... advantages necessary to produce and perpetuate such a combination—that is the Greek conception of well-being; and it is because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert the soul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labour and trade. "The arts that are called mechanical," says Xenophon, "are also, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... elements of discord, it was impossible for good order long to be maintained. The nobles quarrelled, and their retainers were not backward in taking up the quarrel. The feudatory knights had disagreements among themselves, and carried on petty war against each other. Confederated bands of lawless men traversed the country, seizing property wherever it could be found, outraging women, taking prisoners and ransoming them, and making war against all who opposed their progress or were personally obnoxious to them. Castles and estates ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... how sudden commotion flashed up like gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women old and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if they started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... went away to better herself after a few weeks residence), assembled simultaneously at the hall door, and drew their visitor from the bitter blast into the stove lit parlour. One yet more humble welcomer was there of the vagabond tribe—petty larceny in every curve of his ungainly form, and his spirit so broken by adversity that he only ventured to wag his shabby tail in recognition of ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... for their reception. The ambassador vaunted the power and the triumphs of Atahuallpa; but Pizarro was not to be outdone, and did not hesitate to declare that the Inca was as much inferior to the King of Spain as the petty chiefs of the country were to the Inca. After another march of two days the Spaniards began the descent of the eastern side of the Cordillera, meeting by the way another and more important envoy, and seven days later the valley of Caxamalca ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... topic, I am sure of recovering their natural expression; sure of seeing all the little precious every-day peculiarities of the man or woman peep out, one after another, quite unawares. The long maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome recitals of petty grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the faintest suspicion of anything like general interest, which I have been condemned to hear, as a consequence of thawing the ice off the features of formal sitters by ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... near the Falls was a son of the "Emperor." It was partly the exaggeration of the times to magnify discoveries, and partly English love of high titles, that attributed such titles as princes, emperors, and kings to the half-naked barbarians and petty chiefs of Virginia. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... prosecute his business unmolested; shielded by the same laws which protect them from the attacks of malicious libellers out of the theatre, and the insults of capricious Ignorance or stupid Malevolence within. "Reproof," says Dr. Johnson, "should not exhaust its power upon petty failings;" and "the care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature. On this principle the editors will unalterably act. And, since they have cited the great moralist's maxim as a direction for critics, they, even in this ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... become aggressive and mutinous. He disliked the presence of Adrian Gilbert, Raleigh's brother, who had been made Constable of Sherborne Castle, and who overlooked Meeres on all occasions. There began to be constant petty quarrels between the bailiff of the manor and the constable of the castle, and when Raleigh at last dismissed the former bailiff and appointed another, Meeres put himself under the protection of an old enemy of Raleigh's, Lord Thomas Howard, now Lord Howard ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... fellow, and did owe his crowne he got to himself as much as any man that ever got one. Thence to the office, and there begun the account which Sir W. Pen by his late employment hath examined, but begun to examine it in the old manner, a clerk to read the Petty warrants, my Lord Bruncker upon very good ground did except against it, and would not suffer him to go on. This being Sir W. Pen's clerk he took it in snuff, and so hot they grew upon it that my Lord Bruncker left the office. He gone (Sir) W. Pen ranted ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... mouth, knowing that it was she and nobody else whose economies would provide for the due celebration of the Sabbath. Only by a constant course of vigilance, mendacity and petty peculation at her husband's expense could she manage to support the family of four comfortably on his pretty considerable salary. Reb Shemuel went and kissed her on the sceptical mouth, because in another instant she would have ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure of feeling, the first treachery of the heart. Wishart's hopes and hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty faculties, had aroused in him no echo, no response. His soul ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... personal vanity, the borders of which meanness she had just touched, but never crossed. Perhaps, also, she was too conscious of her own loveliness, and admired herself too ardently to care for attracting the petty admiration of others. She took it quite as a matter of course; and was no more surprised at being worshipped than if she had been ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... first boats that came alongside sat Bailie Duke wrapped in a great gray plaid. He hailed one of the petty officers of the cutter, and Mr. Fox came forward and asked ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... regards his petty affairs as of prime importance to the world, and he shows with great care, and not a single flash of wit, how all of Thomas Gainsborough's success in life was brought about by Thicknesse. And then, behold! after Thicknesse had made the man by hand, all he received for pay was ingratitude and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa, the original form of government was a family republic, but the enormous power of the sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle they possessed came to them almost wholly in the shape of presents bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their principal art was that of rain-making. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... formal gardening requires stately proportions. Without these it is almost certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny gardens of British and European peasants, it is true, a certain formality of design is often practised with pleasing success; but these gardens are a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we have no joy in contemplating an American ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... decisively determining their reciprocal relations and circumstances. The art of the poet accordingly consists in separating from the fable whatever does not essentially belong to it, whatever, in the daily necessities of real life, and the petty occupations to which they give rise, interrupts the progress of important actions, and concentrating within a narrow space a number of events calculated to attract the minds of the hearers and to fill them with attention and expectation. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... petty tale of this day's ride I shall not dwell upon. Indeed, I scarcely noted the miles as they pass'd. For all the way we were chattering, Delia telling me how Captain Settle and his gang had hurried ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both Flanders ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... AJMER, a city of British India in Ra)putana. which gives its name to a district and also,to a petty province called Ajmere-Meirwara. It is situated in 26 deg. 27, N. lat. and 74 deg. 44, E. long., on the lower slopes of Taragarh hill, in the Aravalli mountains. To the north of the city is a large artificial lake called the Anasagar, whence the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... delight which only a philosopher in search of facts to fit his theory can know, has delved in a stratum of theological literature now covered from the common eye by more important deposits, in order to prove that in the seventeenth century the people of Scotland were ruled by a set of petty theological tyrants, as ignorant and as inhuman as ever disgraced a civilized society, and that their ignorance and inhumanity were all the more influential from being called by the name and acting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... fury upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the Alps, though comparable, was not equal to this in force. The whole of a Pyramid, shot from a colossal catapult, would not have been the petty charge of a pea shooter to it. Imagine Niagara, or a greater even than Niagara, falling upon an ordinary collection of ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... bottle, was to carry off the whistle as a trophy of victory. The Dane produced credentials of his victories, without a single defeat, at the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Warsaw, and several of the petty courts in Germany; and challenged the Scotch Bacchanalians to the alternative of trying his prowess, or else of acknowledging their inferiority. After man overthrows on the part of the Scots, the Dane was encountered by Sir Robert Lawrie, of Maxwelton, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... up. "Gentlemen and brothers of the syndicate," he began, "I'm satisfied that the back-bitin', the scrappin', the petty jealousies and general cussedness that characterized our lives on the old Maggie will not be duplicated on the Maggie II. Them vicious days is gone forever, I hope, an' from now on the motto of ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... think so!" broke in the explosive Wheatcroft. "The Major has been with us for thirty years now. I'd suspect myself of petty larceny as ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the delicate carpet with their heavy boots. Maurice trembled in thinking of the liberties which they, in their insolent familiarity, might venture upon. He fancied he could see them examining and handling the thousand petty trifles with which young girls love to surround themselves; they opened the presses, perhaps they were reading an unfinished letter lying ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Canaanites, recovering from the terror which had fallen upon them in the commencement of the Hebrew invasion, attempted, not only to regain possession of their ancient territory, but even to obliterate all traces of their defeat and subjection. What movements were made by the petty sovereigns of the country, in order to effect their object, we are nowhere expressly told; but we find, from a consultation held by the southern tribes of Israel, soon after the death of Joshua, that the necessity ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... Texan, who would have cursed the petty mishap of an ill-thrown loop to the imminent damnation of his soul, enduring the physical torture in stoic silence. Once or twice he smiled grimly, the cynical smile that added years to the boyish face. "When I see her safe at some ranch, I'll beat it," he muttered thickly. ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... School! Consider the horror of it! I expect her brother must be a very low sort of person. If she can read and write it is as much as we need hope for. That is the worst of living in one of those petty villages, completely out ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman. Although Shakespeare knew the Homeric version of the Trojan war, he worked in 'Troilus and ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... reflect that it is seldom a great fault which destroys liking for a person. A great fault can be forgiven. It is small personal offences constantly repeated; little acts of meanness, and, above all, the petty plans and provisions of a selfish nature. Besides which, the soul has often marvellous intuitions, unmasking men and things; premonitions, warnings, intelligences, that it cannot doubt and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... not bitter, but expressed his quiet contempt for the systematic petty insults which his jailer was now heaping on him daily. His physician had demanded that he take exercise in the open air. Miles always walked with him and never permitted an occasion of this kind to ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Regent of Portugal—was the first to act on this information. Portugal was then very far from being a petty state. It had wealth at home and rich colonies abroad, while its flag was seen on every sea. The queen regent, being at odds with Spain, and wishing to secure an ally against that power, made overtures to Charles, asking him ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... matters when we are near at hand? Etretat is, moreover, the country of gossip and scandal. From five to seven o'clock you can see people wandering about in quest of nasty stories about others, which they retail from group to group. As you remarked to me, my dear Aunt, tittle-tattle is the mark of petty individuals and petty minds. It is also the consolation of women who are no longer loved or sought after. It is enough for me to observe the women who are fondest of gossiping to be persuaded that you are ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... merchant-ship, he sailed for Cornwall, and there was taken to the court of King Alef, a petty British chief, who, on true patriarchal lines, disposed of his children as he would, and had betrothed his fair daughter to a terrible Pictish giant, breaking off, in order to do it, her troth-plight with Prince ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... is placed in the chair of criticism, he declares loudly for the noble simplicity of our ancestors, in opposition to the petty refinements, and ornamental luxuriance. Sometimes he is sunk in despair, and perceives false delicacy daily gaining ground, and sometimes brightens his countenance with a gleam of hope, and predicts the revival of the true sublime. He then fulminates ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... perfectly," answered Vane. "The one is big—the other is petty. And when we live through an age of big things ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... the verge of the great beyond,—her body "struck" and no longer under control of her iron will,—no divine visions floated across her tired brain; nothing but petty cares and sordid anxieties. Not all at once can the soul talk with God, be He ever so near. If the heavenly language never has been learned, quick as is the spiritual sense in seizing the facts it needs, then the poor soul must ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... it. At home he was the slave of his own incapacity; now he was the slave of memories. He had come out on an errand, with a chance to recover his lost self-respect, and lo! he was as far as ever from attainment. His lost capacity for action was not to be found here, in the midst of this petty diplomacy and ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... God; you do not even fear him but with a slave's fear; it is hell and not God whom you fear. Your religion consists but in superstitions, in petty superficialities. You are like the Jews, of whom God said: 'Whilst they honor me with their lips, their hearts are far from me.' You are scrupulous upon trifles and hardened upon terrible evils. You love only your own glory and comfort. You refer everything to yourself as if you ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... immediate executive officer. We all have to work together. Let's see if we can't do it a little more smoothly, eh?" Hardy smiled and turned back to his chair. "But one thing more, Sykes. If there are any more petty disagreements, please settle them with Vidac. Don't come up here again, unless I ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... pillaged their houses, loudly praying for a new and just assessment of the land; while, throughout the country, the farmers have hailed with acclamations the resumption of the sovereign power by the Mikado, and the abolition of the petty nobility who exalted themselves upon the misery of their dependants. Warming themselves in the sunshine of the court at Yedo, the Hatamotos waxed fat and held high revel, and little cared they who groaned or who starved. Money must be ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... society, personal merit will not serve you so much as money will. Sir, you may make the experiment. Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most. If you wish only to support nature, Sir William Petty fixes your allowance at three pounds a year; but as times are much altered, let us call it six pounds. This sum will fill your belly, shelter you from the weather, and even get you a strong lasting coat, supposing it to be made of good bull's hide. Now, Sir, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... as that of many others of more or less national and local prominence, such as Thomas Dixon, Jr., of the Clansman fame; Hon. E. Yates Webb, Congressman Ninth District; Col. A. M. Lattimore, of Lattimore; Capt. O. D. Price, the old-time singer; Capt. Pink Petty, the famous fox-hunter with the silver-mounted horn; Capt. Nim Champion, the standing candidate for the Legislature on the one-plank platform—the restoration of the whipping-post. Then we have Frank Barrett, the old ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... have many worries. He does not have notes to meet at the bank. He does not have to face the ingratitude of employes and petty jealousies, for he has no employes ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... seaport groggery, or Germans over a keg of lager. Jolly, happy-go-lucky fellows though they outwardly appear, they prove no exception, however, to the general run of their countrymen in the matter of petty dishonesty; although I gave them money enough to purchase twice the quantity of provisions they brought back, besides promising them the customary small present before leaving, in the morning they make a further attempt on my purse under pretence of purchasing more butter to ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... if he is caught he is taken from his occupation for a longer time. The great hazard involved in this trade and also the physical strength and fitness of those who follow it lead to its abandonment more frequently than is the case with a pickpocket or a petty thief. Robbery is seldom a profession. It is usually the crime of the young and venturesome and almost surely leads to early disaster. Murder, of course, is never a profession. In a broad way it is the ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. "Woman is a stumbling-block in a man's career," remarks a philosophical husband in "Anna ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... got warm he thought how remote all this—the storm, and the hut, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room—how remote it all was from the life he desired for himself, and how alien it all was to him, how petty, how uninteresting. If this man had killed himself in Moscow or somewhere in the neighborhood, and he had had to hold an inquest on him there, it would have been interesting, important, and perhaps he might even have been afraid to sleep in the next room to the corpse. Here, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... us that anything that interests us is not without interest to Christ. Anything that is big enough to occupy our thoughts and our efforts is large enough to be taken into His. All our ignoble toils, and all our petty anxieties, touch a chord that vibrates in that deep and tender heart. Though other sympathy may be unable to come down to the minutenesses of our little lives, and to wind itself into the narrow room in which our histories are prisoned, Christ's sympathy can steal into the narrowest cranny. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... under his care. At length he fell a victim to his own conduct. It may be a question whether it would not have been better to hang a man at once than to transport him to Van Dieman's Land; but there can be no question whatever that to class one who had been guilty of some petty theft, with the abandoned wretches that convicts speedily become, is a deed of which the wickedness can hardly be exaggerated. The system, too, had a bad effect upon the free inhabitants. While the convicts were no better than slaves, in the masters were engendered some of the autocratic ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.' The spirit of Christianity is a spirit of universal love and philanthropy. She looks down with pity, and, if she could, she would look with scorn upon all the petty distinctions that exist among men. She casts her benignant eye abroad over the earth, and, wherever she sees man, she sees him as man, as a being made in the image of God, whether an Indian, an African, or a Caucasian sun may shine upon him. She stoops from heaven to raise ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... to be such powerful instruments of his grace, as, by the miraculous change of so many hearts, to plant in entire barbarous nations not only the faith, but also the spirit of Christ. Preachers, who have not attained to a disengagement and purity of heart, suffer the petty interests of self-love secretly to mingle themselves in their zeal and charity, and have reason to suspect that they inflict deeper wounds in their own souls than they are aware, and produce not in others the good ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... are really too great to be possessed by petty weaknesses. If I ever did excel you, which is most unlikely, I know you would be glad both for me and for yourself. No, it is not that; I am ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... his eyes, 'grey and slightly bloodshot, as though their surfaces concealed passions violently struggling for expression. At the turning platform of the stair he paused. In darkness above and in darkness below the country house was still; all the little life of its day, its petty sounds, movements, comings, goings, its very breathing, seemed to have fallen into sleep. The forces of its life had gathered into that pool of light where George stood listening. The beating of his heart was the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... perceived that he had been rude, and would have tendered an apology, but his customer had already shaken the dust of the bank off his feet and taken his departure, so that there was no present opportunity of accommodating the petty quarrel. As events subsequently turned out it was destined never to be accommodated in this world, for the two never met again ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... long boots had pinched my leg in several places, that I had eaten nothing since the day before, and that I was too weak to walk further. My whole body was aching in every limb. At a little distance I saw petty traders with country ponies, carrying burdens. I hired one of these animals. In the afternoon I came to the Rungit River and crossed it. A bath in its cool waters revived me. I purchased some fruit ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a cup of tea, a boiled egg, bread and butter; and in the evening. There is no law of trespass in India, and it is delightful to canter for miles while sharing the freedom of the Son of the Desert who is carrying you. There is nothing like these lonely scampers as a cure for petty worries, for you can put them so far behind you, that on your return you have forgotten their existence. Calcutta is an ideal riding city, with its beautiful maidan (plain), where there are miles of springy turf for galloping, a large race-course with ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... let me speak for myself! Of course, so far as truck is concerned, I'm not in it with you and Will. But as for the USE I put my rooms to—! Besides, I already have Pete there, and would have Dong Ling probably, if he slept here. However, if you want any of my rooms, don't let my petty wants and ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... it would appear that the coming of the Wise Men—the Magi—was in accordance with the astrological signs, of the interpretation of which they were adepts and masters. When this truth is known, how puerile and petty seems the myth of the "traveling star" of the commonly accepted exoteric version? And the pictures of the Wise Men being led by a moving heavenly body, traveling across the skies and at last standing still ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... peculiar treatment, and nobody treated him in a way that did not grate on the finer nerves of his feelings. He had higher notions of existence than could be bounded by that old rotten hole in a hollow tree; he had thoughts that soared far above the miserable, petty details of every-day life, and he could not and would not bring down these soaring aspirations to the contemptible toil of laying up a few chestnuts ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... noxious weed, once lived and loved." We busy ourselves about the style of a coat or the cut of a corsage; we dispute anent our faiths and plan new follies; we struggle for wealth that we may flaunt a petty opulence in our fellows' faces and win the envy of fools—and the span of Life but three score and ten, while a thousand years are but as one tick of the horologe of Time! We quarrel about our political creeds and religious cults, as though it ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... unimportant people trying to make themselves of importance. Of course they make a great point about what is called "official rank" in India, and the women squabble terribly over their warrants of precedence: the gradations thereof would puzzle even the chamberlain of some petty German court. The Anglo-Indian ladies of Bombay struck me for the most part as spiritless. They had a faded, washed-out look; and I do not wonder at it, considering the life they lead. They get up about nine, breakfast and pay or receive visits, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... the inhabitants of that great empire. The government also of Japan is perfectly uniform and well settled, so that there cannot be any diversity of interests; for, though several of its provinces are denominated kingdoms, yet all these petty kings are under the strictest subjection to the emperor, and the laws of the country extend over all. These laws pay the strictest regard to private property, the father transmitting to his children not only the patrimonial estate, but all the acquisitions of his own industry; and this is certainly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... at twenty years of age, and passed the next eight years of his life in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, where he held some petty office under government; and took to himselfmany bad habits and a Polish wife. After this he was Music-Director at various German theatres, and led a wandering, wretched life for ten years. He then went to Berlin as Clerk of the Exchange, and there remained till ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... once a conglomeration of petty rival states is now one constitutionally governed kingdom. Italy has ceased to be only a geographical name; she is now a nation whose voice is listened to at the council ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... contains a proclamation by the Queen for putting into execution an Act of Parliament for the encouragement and increase of seamen, and for the better and speedier manning of Her Majesty's fleet, which authorises all justices to issue warrants to constables, petty constables, headboroughs, and tything-men, to enter and, if need be, to break open the doors of any houses where they shall believe deserting seamen to be; and for the further increase and encouragement of the navy, to take able-bodied ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conceived to make a wholesome social life possible. Greater cooperation is necessary if rural people are to make progress, and this cooperation is impossible when families are jealous and suspicious. This obstacle in the way of wholesome rural culture, made by selfish and petty family motives, it is useless to ignore. Unless the obstacle can be pushed aside, other efforts to inspire country people to a realization of their social opportunities must surely fail. Family life in the country can be saved from its besetting sin when rural ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... follow her into the adjoining gallery, at that time occupied by Sir Peter Lely for the completion of his exquisite series of portraits of the beauties of Charles's court. In their own idle comments and petty jealousies arising from the resemblances before them, Lady ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... extraordinary resemblance in their modes and habits of thought, between Lyell and Darwin; and this likeness was also seen in their modesty, their deference to the opinion of younger men, their enthusiasm for science, their freedom from petty jealousies and their righteous indignation for what was mean and unworthy in others. But yet there was a difference. Both Lyell and Darwin were cautious, but perhaps Lyell carried his caution to the verge ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... and State interests. It could not be sin in the man of the North, if God and his country ever clashed, to say, that well as he loved his country, he loved his God yet more. But what plea shall shield the sin which claims to love one's own petty State better than either country or God? They have virtually tunneled and honey-combed into ruin the fundamental obligations of the citizen. Jesuitism had made itself a name of reproach by the doctrine of mental reservation, under which the Jesuit held himself ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... steppe-land to the northeast, or from the forest-land to the north-west, would thunder on the long mountain barrier, only to trickle across in rivulets and form little pools of humanity here and there. Petty feuds between plain, shore, and mountain, as in ancient Attica, would but accentuate the prevailing division. Contrariwise, on the southern side of the Mediterranean, where there was open, if largely desert, country, there would be room under primitive conditions for a homogeneous race ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... officer had arrived, and it was agreed, at the suggestion of the Duke of Shoreditch, to take the offender to the Curfew Tower. Accordingly they crossed the lower ward, and passing beneath an archway near the semicircular range of habitations allotted to the petty canons, traversed the space before the west end of Saint George's Chapel, and descending a short flight of stone steps at the left, and threading a narrow passage, presently arrived at the arched entrance in the Curfew, whose hoary ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... highest universality, they can only be understood in their setting. It adds but little to our knowledge of Shakespeare's work to regard him as the great Elizabethan; there is nothing temporary in his dramas, except petty incidents and external trappings—so truly did he dwell amidst the elements constituting man in every age and clime. But this cannot be said of any other poet, not even of Chaucer or Spenser, far less of Milton, or Pope or Wordsworth. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... at Rome. If the Italians are excusably envious, their envy is at least accompanied with admiration.' The gratified sculptor bowed and slightly blushed. Walstein loved art and artists. He was not one of those frigid, petty souls who are ashamed to evince feeling in society. He felt keenly and expressed himself without reserve. But nature had invested him with a true nobility of manner as well as of mind. He was ever graceful, even ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... system of espionage to which all were subjected. In Paris and the large towns, the reaction itself carries the physiognomy of its own epoch; it irritates more than it cows; in the country, it becomes low, moan, petty, tiresome, vexatious,—in a word, it becomes "gensdarme." It is easily understood how three years of the gensdarme regime, sanctified by the regime of the clergyman, was bound ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... she had gone to sleep the night before, and waked again upon this scene unchanged, brilliant, full of colour, a chaos of decoration—confluences of noisy, garish streams of life, eddies of petty labour. Craftsmen crowded one upon the other in dark bazaars; merchants chattered and haggled on their benches; hawkers clattered and cried their wares. It was a people that lived upon the streets, for all the houses seemed empty and forsaken. The sais ran before the Pasha's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... equally harmful to themselves and others. 'Laws of labour,' says an African writer, [Footnote: Sierra Leone Weekly Times, July 30, 1862.] 'may be out of place (date?) in England, but in Sierra Leone they would have saved an entire population from trusting to the allurements of a petty, demoralising trade; they would have saved us the sight of decayed villages and a people becoming daily less capable of bearing the laborious toil of agricultural industry. To handle the hoe has now become a disgrace, and men have lost their manhood by becoming gentlemen.' I shall presently ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art was a personal ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... with an outburst of indignant impatience from the petty arguments into which his love for the exhibition of the whole truth in all its details had led him, "what are you told by the most respectable and conscientious witness who has appeared here to-day? What is the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... make none of the men understand me. Most of them were Finns—big broad-shouldered, ruddy, light-haired, bearded fellows; very good-natured and merry, notwithstanding the harsh treatment they often received. Big as they were, they were knocked about like so many boys by the petty officers, and I began to feel rather uncomfortable lest I should come in for share of the same treatment, of which I had had enough from the hands of old Growl. I determined, however, to grin and bear it, and do, as well as I could, ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... shall leave with you on quitting England, which I shall do the day Lionel is married; and then, dear old friend, calm days, clear consciences:—In climes where whole races have passed away—proud cities themselves sunk in graves—where our petty grief for a squirearch's lost house we shall both grow ashamed to indulge—there we will moralise, rail against vain dreams and idle pride, cultivate vines and orange trees, with Horace—nay, nay, Dick—with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Crystal Lake ever became a member of the Royal Flying Corps. Already, from among the hundreds of strangers, half-a-dozen stood out as men he was determined to know better. Taking them altogether the men were a fine sight as they lounged about the decks in the sunlight, the petty rivalries and jealousies of camp days forgotten. Their youth seemed to flow together, like their brown uniforms. Seen in the mass like this, Claude thought, they were rather noble looking fellows. In so many of the faces there was a look of fine candour, an expression ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... every other language known since the Tower of Babel. Arab guides lit up the Sphinx with flaring magnesium, an impertinence that should have made hideous with hate the insulted features, but instead turned them for a thrilling instant of suspense into marble. Indeed, none of our petty vulgarities could jar or even fret the majestic calm of the desert and the stone Mystery among its billows. The Sphinx gazed above and past us all. She was like some royal captive surrounded by a rabble mob, yet as undisturbed in soul as though her puny, hooting tormentors ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... game laws, eliminating prosecutions on petty technicalities, educate the public to co-operate in fish and game protection, enact legislation to encourage rather than handicap the propagation of fish ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... would be out of place, though it would be not uninteresting, to tell how this great resident power—this strong will and authority, this capacious, clear, and beneficent intellect—dwelt in its petty sphere, like an oak in a flower-pot; but I cannot help recalling that signal act of friendship and of power in the matter of my father's translation from Rose Street to Broughton Place, to which ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fulness thereof. But if, on the other hand, it is petty self-complacency in your own skill, trust in precepts and laws, hope for academical or popular approbation, or avarice of wealth,—it is quite possible that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance, you may win the applause, the position, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... on board ship," continued the Admiral, with a twinkle in his eye, watching to see how Tom took his remark. "Not only are they inferior in rank to all the commissioned officers, but to the three warrant officers who have risen from before the mast, and even the petty officers and men are inclined to treat them as nurses do the babies under their charge; so you must not be disappointed if you do not meet with the respect you may possibly expect from those whom you may look upon as your inferiors, though they'll obey you readily when you repeat the orders you ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... of domestic warmth and comfort. And yet—sorry for Elinor! That was not the word. His heart was sore for her, torn away from all her moorings, drifting back a wreck to the little youthful home, where all had been so tranquil and so sweet. John had nothing in him of that petty sentiment which derives satisfaction from a calamity it has foreseen, nor had he even an old lover's thrill of almost pleasure in the downfall of the clay idol that has been preferred to his gold. His pain for Elinor, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... and dutiful spirit. But now it dawned upon them all at once how the little they as soldiers had been obliged to learn had been made quite unnecessarily difficult for them. They stripped off, like a troublesome strait-waistcoat, the superfluity of petty rules to which they had been subjected; and the recognition of the needless compulsion they had so long endured produced, as its inevitable consequence, a violent reaction, which quite naturally manifested itself in a hasty change of opinion. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... wrote you an answer to your last, which, on reflection, pleases me as little as it probably has pleased yourself. I will not wait for your rejoinder; but proceed to tell you, that I had just then been greeted with an epistle of * *'s, full of his petty grievances, and this at the moment when (from circumstances it is not necessary to enter upon) I was bearing up against recollections to which his imaginary sufferings are as a scratch to a cancer. These things ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy in the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the riverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care not for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on brown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulated to-morrow, next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers would bloom, fruit-tree ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... not a bad one. I had soup, veal, eggs, and a fair wine. I had also a companion, but would rather have been without him. He was a young man, whose appearance gained by the contrast of a dusty wayfarer's, and he gave himself airs accordingly. I set him down as a petty functionary of the place, and a pensionnaire of the auberge. All the time I was with him his mind was exceedingly restless as to my intentions and business in those parts, and such explanations as I gave him to appease his insatiable curiosity ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... have given the petty officer a quick briefing on courtroom phraseology. He stood up, holding Baby Fuzzy, while the three judges filed in and took their seats. As soon as they sat down, the Chief Justice rapped briskly with ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... crisp clear air held an intoxicating quality unknown in the East; where the eye foamed on and on over limitless expanses of waving green, till the mind was staggered at the vastness of the prospect; where the very largeness of nature seemed to enter into a man and to {35} crush out things petty and selfish? In doing this he would be beating the air. They were incapable of understanding him. They ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... a question I want to ask. I refer to Lesson Seven, 'Petty Thievery, Detecting Same, Charges Therefor.' I have had some trouble with ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... believe you guilty, although appearances look very black. You have many faults, but I feel sure that I cannot be mistaken in supposing you too noble-minded for a revenge so petty and so mean. Come to me, dear boy, if I can help you in any way. I trust you, Eric, and will use every endeavor to right you in the general estimation. You are innocent; pray to God for help under this cruel trial, and be sure that your character will ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the boat finally drew up alongside. Willing hands helped Ted and Bill up the steep side of the Dewey and they were tendered such a reception as they had never known before. Then ensued a parley between the petty officer of the sunken gunboat Strassburg and the ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... Woman o' Fortune remains unmarry'd, she's a Petty-Queen; Lovers innumerable trace her Steps; each Coxcomb thinks to be the happy Man, and ev'ry were her Presence makes a Court—but when her Reason's once subdu'd by Love, and the fond, foolish Nymph resigns her Pow'r, she's but a ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... the Cat must stay at home, Yet that is but a crush'd necessity, Since we haue lockes to safegard necessaries, And pretty traps to catch the petty theeues. While that the Armed hand doth fight abroad, Th' aduised head defends it selfe at home: For Gouernment, though high, and low, and lower, Put into parts, doth keepe in one consent, Congreeing in a full ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... could find it in secular moralisers. Defoe, always keenly alive to the general taste, had tried to supply the demand not only by his queer History of the Devil but by appending a set of moral reflections to Robinson Crusoe and other edifying works, which disgusted Charles Lamb by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the Rambler to recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... as has already been pointed out, was by nature restive, impulsive, and quarrelsome. That he did not make every seigneury a hotbed of petty strife was due largely to the stern hand held over him by priest and seigneur alike, but by his priest particularly. The Church in the colony never lost, as in France, the full confidence of the ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... him to forego the prosecution of his ambitious designs, the influence of the monarchy had been extended over eastern and central France—from Flanders, on the north, to the volcanic mountains of Auvergne, on the south. Meanwhile the oppressed subjects of the petty tyrants, whether within or around his domains, had learned to look for redress to the sovereign lord who prided himself upon his ability and readiness to succor the defenceless. His grandson, the more illustrious Philip Augustus (1180-1223), by marriage, inheritance, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... newsboys, zig-zagging among the crowds like bats in the dusk. "Extry! All about the horrable acciDENT! Extry!" It struck Sheridan that the papers sent out too many "Extras"; they printed "Extras" for all sorts of petty crimes and casualties. It was a mistake, he decided, critically. Crying "Wolf!" too often wouldn't sell the goods; it was bad business. The papers would "make more in the long run," he was sure, ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... should not be. Douglas had said: "I would blot out the lines of the map which now mark our national boundaries on this continent and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself. I would not suffer petty rival republics to grow up here, engendering jealousy of each other, and interfering with each other's domestic affairs, and continually endangering their peace. I do not wish to go beyond the great ocean—beyond those boundaries which the God of nature has ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... these, passing from chief to chief, descended to the minor chieftains, who held lands in fee of those more sovereign lords. Petty interests extinguished gratitude for general benefits; and by secret meetings, at the heads of which were Athol, Buchan, and March, a conspiracy was formed to overset the power of Wallace. They were to invite Edward once more to take ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... bully, or group of bullies; so this is merely a forecastle matter and no concern of the afterguard. The ship's work goes on. The only effect I can conjecture is an increase in the woes of the unfortunates who must bow to this petty ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... and smiled. "You may be quite correct. Historically speaking, perhaps, the Earth government has usurped the functions that rightfully belong to kings, dictators, and warlords. To say nothing of local satraps and petty chieftains. Hm-m-m. Perhaps we should return to that? Perhaps we should return to the human suffering that was ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... quickness of his race de Vasselot noted everything—the trend of the watersheds, the colour of the water, the prevailing wind as indicated by the growth of the trees—a hundred petty details of Nature which would escape any but a trained comprehension, or that wonderful eye with which some men are born, who cannot but be gipsies all their lives, whether fate has made them rich or poor; who cannot live in towns, but must breathe the air of open heaven, and deal by sea ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the community has always attributed many criminal acts to intoxicating drinks. I am convinced that with such crimes as murder, burglary, robbery, forgery and the like, alcohol has had little to do. Petty things, like disorderly conduct, are often caused by intoxicating liquor, and these land a great many temporarily in jail, but these acts are really not criminal. Men have been temporarily locked up for over-drinking. If over-eating had been treated the same as over-drinking, ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but God for us all—then indeed we might despair. But ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... times of strike. The moral effect of the victory in Newcastle, like that in Schenectady, after the bitter labor struggles of recent years, cannot be questioned, and this, together with temporary relief from petty persecution by local authorities, is doubtless worth all the efforts that have been put forth—provided the Socialists have not promised themselves and their supporters any larger ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... known that we were preparing to sail a number of the natives from other parts of the island were constantly with us, and petty thefts were committed whenever the negligence of our people afforded an opportunity: but no attempt of any ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... or senates, or demagogues, is generally so hateful, and at the same time so contemptible, so grasping, so irritable, so unscrupulous, and so oppressive—so much dictated by ambition, by antipathy and by vanity, so selfish, often so petty in its objects, and so regardless of human misery in its means, that a sovereign who behaves to other nations with merely the honesty and justice and forbearance which are usual between man and ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... started by Express Drivers' Union No. 927 over the handling of a small heap of baggage at the Ferry Building. A few heads were broken, a score of arrests made, and the baggage was delivered. No one would have guessed that behind this petty wrangle was the fine Irish hand of Hegan, made potent by the Klondike gold of Burning Daylight. It was an insignificant affair at best—or so it seemed. But the Teamsters' Union took up the quarrel, backed by the whole Water Front Federation. Step by ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... so doing, General Hood had marched into Tennessee, and after various petty successes, was defeated, after two days' hard fighting, near Nashville. In the third week in January, 1865, Sherman set out with 60,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry from Savannah, laying waste the whole country—burning, pillaging, and destroying. The town of Columbia was ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... and the curved hull, or glued to their special gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether—but one will never forget the eyes or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in particular. On deck his was no more than a grave, rather striking countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as I saw him in profile handling a vital control, he looked like the Doge of Venice, the Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order, an old-time Pope—anything that signifies trained and stored intellectual power utterly and ascetically devoted to some vast impersonal ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... appetites make him luxurious. He was incessantly active and vigilant, his prejudices were few, and his views tolerant and enlightened. He was only cruel when his authority was impeached. His best portraiture is in his acts. He found a country semi-barbarous, convulsed by disorders, a prey to petty tyrannies, weak from disunion, and trembling before powerful neighbors. He left it a first-class power, freed in a measure from its barbarous customs, improved in social life, in arts, in science, and, perhaps, in morals. He ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... in educational matters is the most wasteful of all misplaced thrift. Let the reformers be dealt with wisely and generously, and the harvest will exceed even the expectations of those who are working most hopefully upon the problem. Withhold the funds on some niggardly and mistaken principle of petty economy, and the present progress will be discouraged and the educational tree become stunted in its growth. From an administrative point of view, nothing, finance apart, would contribute more to the efficiency of Irish Education than the amalgamation ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... Squire had sat prosing over their port or Chateau Lafitte, and felt as if he were living in a new world—a world in which full-blooded friendship and boisterous hospitality were out of fashion. People whose talk had hitherto been intensely local—confined, for the most part to petty sessions, commoners' rights, hunting, and the parish church and schools—found themselves discussing the widest range of topics, from the prospect of a European war—that European war which has been impending more or less distinctly for the last twenty years—to ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... man who has failed. All men strive—who succeeds? His enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe—everywhere the done is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... to help you to do anything you wish," answered Green, "provided it doesn't amount to treason or petty larceny." ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; or if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"—then Simmons was in a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less any petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame. He hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him want to hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which most of us have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind attention to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been married herself, but it was so long ago that the human interest of it all was lost in a pottle of petty detail which was all she could recall. Before the story was half finished, Sebastian's attention had strayed elsewhere, though his spare figure remained in its attitude of attention and polite forbearance. His mind had, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and self-interest, that allows you to avoid it. Is it not better and more worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty bargainings of diplomacy? ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a great while before the mothers began to come in with their petty savings, also, and after a long talk with Mr. Barrington, one day, a real banking institution was incorporated, with the stock issued in dollar shares. Mr. Barrington, as president, headed the list of stockholders with a hundred, Miss Lavillotte following with seventy-five, while ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Her long gaze, now, told him that. It seemed to give him time, as it were, to take her in and to arrange with himself how best to adjust himself to a changed life. It was not the glance of a flirt; it held no petty consciousness; it was the gaze of an enchantress aware of her own inevitable power. Gregory met the cold, sweet, melancholy eyes. But as she gazed, as she slowly smiled, he was aware, with a perverse pleasure, that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... great judgment in setting up as a dairy-woman. One of the most provoking of the petty difficulties which beset a small establishment in this neighbourhood is the trouble, almost the impossibility, of procuring the pastoral luxuries of milk, eggs, and butter. Hannah's Alderney restored us to our rural privilege. Speedily she established ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... must have strangely altered, then, in five years. Our New York population has hitherto had very little of the assassin-like character. Tar and feathers are the blackguards', and have been the petty tyrants' weapons, from time immemorial, in this country; but not ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions and by actual use of the fist on the Head Instructor and ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... in the world to be perfectly satisfied with the choice of the officers. The second and third lieutenants, the lieutenant of marines, two of the warrant officers, and several of the petty officers, had been with me during the former voyage. The others were men of known abilities; and all of them, on every occasion, shewed their zeal for the service in which they were employed, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... burials were not sufficient to prevent haunting. The conclusion of the work of Thyraeus is devoted to exorcisms, and orthodox methods of expelling spirits. The knockings which herald a death are attributed to the Lares, a kind of petty mischievous demons unattached. Such is the essence of the learned Jesuit's work, and the strange thing is that, in an age of science, people are still discussing his problems, and, stranger still, that the reported phenomena ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... are yours, Lady Davers, they must be so. One is, That every condescension (to speak in a proud lady's dialect) comes with as much difficulty from her, as a favour from the House of Austria to the petty princes of Germany. The second, Because those of your sex—(Excuse me, Madam," to the countess) "who have once made scruples, think it inconsistent with themselves to be over hasty to alter their own conduct, choosing rather to persist in an error, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... The daughter of a petty clerk in one of the government departments, and merely dowered with a modest portion of three thousand francs, she had married a young man as poor as herself, but intelligent and industrious, whom ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... like! How do young ladies generally occupy their time? Don't let us talk about such petty details as this. I want to tell you about my new house. You all know Gilsbank? Well, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... confirmation of the reasonless dogmatism preceding, it is not made with fairness, because my opinion of the construction is omitted by the quoter. See Institutes of English Gram., p. 162. In an other late grammar,—a shameful work, because it is in great measure a tissue of petty larcenies from my Institutes, with alterations for the worse,—I find the following absurd "Note," or Rule: "An infinitive or participle is often followed by a substantive explanatory of an indefinite person or thing. The substantive is then in the objective case, and may be ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... affecting to despise. Yet prizing Bentley's[6] Brunck's[6] or Porson's[7] note, More than the verse, on which the critic wrote; With eager haste, they court the tool of power, (Whether 'tis PITT or PETTY rules the hour:) To him, with suppliant smiles they bend the head, Whilst mitres, prebends, to their eyes are spread. But should a storm o'erwhelm him with disgrace, They'd fly to seek the next, who fill'd his place; Such are the ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... sure it will be pleasant at last, if not at first. Keep God always before your eyes. Ask yourself in every action, 'What is right, what is my duty, what would God have me do?' And so far from finding it unpleasant, you will find that you are saving yourself a thousand troubles, and sorrows, and petty anxieties which now torment you; you will find that in God's presence is life, the only life worth having, and that at His right hand are pleasures for evermore. Oh, be sure, my friends, that in real happiness you will not lose, but gain without end. ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... officers, rendered valuable service throughout the campaign, and fought on all occasions with most dashing courage. Though only one was killed, 63 were wounded in action, while several others were killed and wounded during the operations which took place along the coast, to punish several of the petty chiefs who had sided ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... yet remains, And human frailties do attend the best; To bear and forbear here, will tend to rest. Vain jangling, jars, and strifes will there abound, Where moles are mountains made, or fault is found, With every little, trivial, petty thing; This spirit snib, or 'twill much mischief bring Into this house, and 'tis for want of love, 'Tis entertain'd: it is not ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... legalized beverages should remain in the Treasury. Second, provision should be made for relief of congestion in the Federal courts by modifying and simplifying the procedure for dealing with the large volume of petty prosecutions under various Federal acts. Third, there should be a codification of the laws relating to prohibition to avoid the necessity which now exists of resorting to more than 25 statutes ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... generally imposed by a third party on both contestants alike, in this game the rules with which he was acquainted had been made by his side; that perhaps the other fellow might have another set of rules. All he saw was that the antagonists were perpetrating a series of contemptible, petty, mean tricks or a succession of dastardly outrages. His loyalty and anger were both thoroughly aroused, and he plunged into his little fights with entire whole-heartedness. As his side of the question meant getting out the logs, the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... we were right if I could talk with you. If George Francis Train had done for the negro all that he has done for woman the last three months, the Abolitionists would enshrine him as a saint. The attacks on Susan and me by a few persons have been petty and narrow, but we are right and this nine days' wonder will soon settle itself. Of course, people turn up the whites of their eyes, but time will bring them all down again. We have reason to congratulate ourselves that we have shocked more friends of the cause into life than we ever dreamed we ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Surely, few things in the course of a misspent life are less profitable than such over-strained efforts at showy entertainment. The "banquet hall deserted" presents on the following day a grim reminder of the petty economies that for weeks hence must secretly be contrived in order to restore the balance of an overdrawn bank account. The folly of living beyond one's means may have this extenuating feature, that it is often an error due to generous, though indiscreet ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the Alhambra rises from the very midst of the city of Granada, being, as it were, an excrescence of the capital, it must at all times be somewhat irksome to the captain-general, who commands the province, to have thus an imperium in imperio,[21-3] a petty, independent post in the very core of his domains. It was rendered the more galling in the present instance, from the irritable jealousy of the old governor, that took fire on the least question of authority and jurisdiction, and from the loose, vagrant character ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... speaks for itself. The State is at this moment subjected to a military despotism more irritating and oppressive than was ever exercised by Austria in her Italian dependencies; more irritating, because domestic interference and all sorts of petty annoyances are more frequent here; more oppressive, because it is considered unnecessary to indulge a political prisoner with even the mockery of a trial. Nothing is too small for the gripe of the Provost Marshal's myrmidons. There ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... before the volunteers of Ireland. We shall live to hear the Hampstead Protestant pronouncing such extravagant panegyrics upon holy water, and paying such fulsome compliments to the thumbs and offals of departed saints, that parties will change sentiments, and Lord Henry Petty and Sam Whitbread take a spell at No Popery. The wisdom of Mr. Fox was alike employed in teaching his country justice when Ireland was weak, and dignity when Ireland was strong. We are fast pacing round the same miserable ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... not only demands consecration, but it ensures safety. Remember that great word, 'No man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand.' God is not a careless owner who leaves His treasures to be blown by every wind, or filched by every petty robber. He is not like the king of some decrepit monarchy, slices of whose territory his neighbours are for ever paring off and annexing. What God has God preserves. 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.' 'They are Mine, saith ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... an awakening for Swithin. To altered circumstances inevitably followed altered views. That such changes should have a marked effect upon a young man who had made neither grand tour nor petty one—who had, in short, scarcely been away from home in his life—was nothing more than natural. New ideas struggled to disclose themselves and with the addition of strange twinklers to his southern horizon came an absorbed attention that way, and a corresponding forgetfulness ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly so afraid of them as they are ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... deprives itself of all that almighty and essential glory and goodness which shines round about it, which spreads itself throughout the whole universe; I say, it deprives itself of all this, for the enjoying of such a poor, petty, and diminutive thing as itself is, which yet it can never enjoy truly in ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... failed in revealing the method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist on the unity of knowledge and enquiry throughout the physical world, to give dignity by the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to claim for it its true rank and value, and to point to the enormous results which its ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... but themselves, for they only knew the law of God. So, right with them had no absolute or universal ground, but was reduced in their minds to the performance of certain acts commanded exclusively to them—a form of ethics which rapidly sank into the most petty and frivolous casuistry as to the outward performance of those acts. The sequel of those ethics is known to all the world, in the spectacle of the most unrivalled religiosity, and scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter absence of moral sense, in their most cultivated ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... desert lay listening, the Garden of Allah attentive to the voices of man's garden. She could hardly believe that but a few minutes before she had been full of irritation and bitterness, not free even from a touch of pride that was almost petty. But when she remembered that it was so she realised the abysses and the heights of which the heart is mingled, and an intense desire came to her to be always upon the heights of her own heart. For there only was the light of happiness. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... rule the law; The wealth of climes, where savage nations roam, Pillag'd from slaves to purchase slaves at home; Fear, pity, justice, indignation start, Tear off reserve, and bare my swelling heart; 390 Till half a patriot, half a coward grown, I fly from petty ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... XLI HOME AGAIN XLII "Strange that we creatures of the petty ways, Poor prisoners behind these fleshly bars, Can sometimes think us thoughts with God ablaze, Touching the fringes of the outer stars" XLIII "Call now; is there any that will answer thee?" XLIV "A bruised reed will He not break, and a dimly burning wick will He not quench" ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... reserve the better angels only for natural disasters, leaving our deepest and most profound problems to petty ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself. There was an intrenchment on the summit, and going down into the fosse I walked round it slowly to recover breath. On the ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... playing meant many things to her. It meant a journey into another country where all good and noble things were possible; where vexations and petty cares could not enter, nor anything that thwarted and baffled. It meant a sure refuge for a while from the small details of her life in Dornton, which she sometimes found so wearisome. The warning tones of the church clock checked her flight through these happy regions, and brought her ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... have translated the letters. The dead girl's name was evidently Tatyana, one of several children of some Cossack chief or petty prince, and on the eve of her marriage to a young officer named Mitya the Kurds raided the town. They carried poor Tatyana off along with her wedding chest—the chest fished up ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... stops just long enough to whisper in your ear that "So-and-so, the famous critic, doesn't seem to be satisfied." Felicia listened to it all with the utmost tranquillity, being raised by her triumph above the petty slurs of envy, and glowed with pride when a renowned veteran, some old associate of her father's, tossed her a "Well done, little one!" which carried her back to the past, to the little corner that was always reserved ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... were, were laid to rest. The Spaniards left the Scottish coast and sailed away for Norway; and the game was played out, and the end was come, as the end of such matters generally comes, by gradual decay, petty disaster, and mistake; till the snow-mountain, instead of being blown tragically and heroically to atoms, melts helplessly ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawlers way?—how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house—and that one or ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for the scientific parts of the Government of the United States, and it has amazed me that so few men have discovered them. Here in these departments are quiet men, trained to the highest degree of skill, serving for a petty remuneration along lines that are infinitely useful to mankind; and yet in some cases they waited to be discovered until this Chamber of Commerce of the United States was established. Coming to this city, officers of that association found that there were ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... with my purchases. I gave him six francs to hand over to his servant, but he hinted that he was not too proud to keep them himself. I was disgusted at this petty greed, and at his meanness in depriving his maid of the six francs after having made a good profit in what he had sold me; but I wanted to stand well with him, and I was not sorry to find so simple a way ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and lay on the top as close as possible; put it into the middle of your dish, and pour a ladleful of your soup over it; put in your bread first, then pour in your soup, till your dish is full. Garnish with petty patties; or make a rim for your dish, and garnish with lemon raced. If you please, you may send a chicken boned in the middle, instead of your roll; or you may send it to table ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... to the two Houses of Assembly, whether the safety of the citizens of this Commonwealth, in their persons, their property, their laws and government, does not require that the capacity to act in the important office of Juror, Grand or Petty, civil or criminal, should not be restrained in future to native citizens, or such as were citizens at the date of the Treaty of Peace which closed our revolutionary war; and whether ignorance of our ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... corresponding increase in the difficulty of making the employees retain and develop this feeling of independent and creative responsibility. Business has become so specialized and the work of the individual seems so petty that he is not likely to feel that he is expressing himself through his work or to retain a feeling of independence. Properly conceived, there is no position in trade or industry which does not warrant such an attitude. To promote ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... enormous and universal interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take their social exercises ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have little petty jealousies, social, local, and individual, on war committees or any other for that matter, but in this big struggle, they are ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... de Gramont, must be remarkably strong, if you weigh it against your petty, selfish interests,—your professional engagements. But, do as you please,—I ask nothing, expect nothing from you,—not even the protection of your presence, though I have no longer a son who is ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... unfortunate, even almost disagreeable, but, for him, there could be no question as to whether he wished Rosamund's or Mrs. Clarke's will to prevail. Whatever Rosamund's reason was for not choosing to be friends with Mrs. Clark he knew it was not malicious or petty. Perhaps she had made a mistake about Mrs. Clarke. If so it was certainly an honest mistake. It was when he thought of his promise to Jimmy that he felt most uncomfortable about Rosamund's never expressed ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of conflict grow up different educational sects. One school fixes its attention upon the importance of the subject-matter of the curriculum as compared with the contents of the child's own experience. It is as if they said: Is life petty, narrow, and crude? Then studies reveal the great, wide universe with all its fulness and complexity of meaning. Is the life of the child egoistic, self-centered, impulsive? Then in these studies is found an objective universe of truth, law, and order. Is his experience ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... turn a crooked trick—and you wouldn't have it. You persuaded me to keep straight, Matt. I've never forgotten it. You kept me straight—showed me what a damn fool a man was to load himself down with a petty larceny record. You made a man of me, Matt. And then those good looks of yours caught the eye of that bookmaker's girl, and he gave you a job at writing sheet—and you worked ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... execute to the letter the instructions I shall leave with you on quitting England, which I shall do the day Lionel is married; and then, dear old friend, calm days, clear consciences:—In climes where whole races have passed away—proud cities themselves sunk in graves—where our petty grief for a squirearch's lost house we shall both grow ashamed to indulge—there we will moralise, rail against vain dreams and idle pride, cultivate vines and orange trees, with Horace—nay, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... advantages. Adams, however, had the sense and courage to turn his back on it, and to go home to the meagre shores and small society of New England, there to become a boy again, to enter Harvard College, and come under all its at that time rigid and petty regulations. It almost seems a mistake, but it was not. Already he was too ripe and too wise to blunder. He himself gives us his characteristic ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... he despised, as a thinker, a politician, and a courtier; the "malignity of the people" he thought great. "I do not love," he says, "the word people." But he had a high idea of what was worthy of a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of which James could not resist. In his new office he once more urged on, and urged in vain, his favourite project for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law. This was a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... craft rose to being a sovereign, and with his son Tippoo Sahib. Our longest and most severe contests were with the Mahrattas, a warlike tribe of Hindus in Western India, who came first into prominence in the seventeenth century under Sivajee, a petty chieftain, and gradually advanced under various leaders till they became for a time the paramount power. Their hordes of horsemen scoured the country in all directions, north and south, east and west, demanding ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... with all the petty foresights that can mean the shaving of clearance in a tight squeeze, and got off with all the margin of time he could muster. In the apartment court, he had a parking space by the basement exit and, for a wonder, no free-wheeling nincompoop had done him out of it last night. Even so, getting ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... Negroes' cattle, and even on the inhabitants themselves. The Negroes very seldom retaliate. The enterprising boldness of the Moors, their knowledge of the country, and, above all, the superior fleetness of their horses, make them such formidable enemies, that the petty Negro states which border upon the Desert are in continual terror while the Moorish tribes are in the vicinity, and are too much awed ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... 'Laws of labour,' says an African writer, [Footnote: Sierra Leone Weekly Times, July 30, 1862.] 'may be out of place (date?) in England, but in Sierra Leone they would have saved an entire population from trusting to the allurements of a petty, demoralising trade; they would have saved us the sight of decayed villages and a people becoming daily less capable of bearing the laborious toil of agricultural industry. To handle the hoe has now become a disgrace, and men have lost their ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... great nations of history we have got rid of religion as a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Mrs. Grundy and King Canute rolled into one. What gross ignorance, what narrow conservatism, what petty and futile resistance to progress, as well as a low coarseness, prompts this objection! If our system of education allows children to grow up in such neglect that they neither know nor reverence motherhood, it is high time that the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... allurement of the Sauages, we were prouided of Musike in good variety: not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horsse, and Maylike conceits to delight the Sauage people, whom we intended to winne by all faire meanes possible. And to that end we were indifferently furnished of all petty haberdasherie wares to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... Gernois for the trick he had played upon him. A mean little revenge, thought Tarzan, and then suddenly it occurred to him that the man would not be such a fool as to antagonize him through a trivial annoyance of so petty a description. There must be something deeper than this behind it. With the thought he arose and removed his rifle from its boot. He looked to its loads and saw that the magazine was full. Then he inspected his revolver. After this preliminary ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my business to know a little of everything, and as much as possible of human life, not excepting the petty chronicles of the rustics around me. It is my chief pleasure. I earn my living by teaching boys. I find my satisfaction in studying men. But you are on a journey, sir, and night is falling. I must not detain you. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... subject to the Ecuadorian government, which is represented by three or four petty alcaldes; but the Jesuit missionaries, who have established a bishopric and three curacies, generally control affairs—spiritual, political, and commercial. The Indians of each village annually elect one of their number ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... presents sent in recompense for his marvellous playing (he tells one day of his chagrin in receiving from a certain prince a gold watch, instead of money that he sorely wanted—and, besides, he had five watches already!); but rebuffs, intrigues, and all sorts of petty machinations against him, make the tale a sadder one; and so it continued to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... England, the curate is sometimes called the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in theory, a century hence may find him in fact. "It would be difficult, even now, to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the pulpit, the becoming vestment, and the embroidered stole, which we are learning gradually to look upon as attributes ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... commander himself was standing near the companion-hatch— intended only for his own and the gun-room officers' use. Our tall, thin commander had just turned round to take his spy-glass from the beckets in which it hung, when a petty officer,—a knowing fellow, who had slipped through the gun-room passage in order to take advantage of the other men,—springing on deck, butted right into the pit of his stomach. The blow, doubling him up, sent him sprawling ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... astern. They were one of our midshipmen, just 16 years of age, shot through the stomach, but regarding his injury more as a fitting consummation to a glorious holiday ashore than a wound, and a chief stoker and petty officer, all three wounded by that first burst of musketry which caused many casualties in the boats just as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... laughed with the happy heedlessness of an impassioned amorosa. It was not that the jurisdiction of the Congregations was in itself ruinous; indeed, in principle, it was gratuitous. Still there were a multitude of petty expenses, payments to subaltern employees, payments for medical consultations and certificates, copies of documents, and the memoirs and addresses of counsel. And although the votes of the cardinals ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... were other girls with a Spanish strain in them—girls with a drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd lovers ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... as usual, the first day or so after coming off leave, appeared preoccupied and reserved. Still there was no one like our colonel; and, in the serene atmosphere of his wise unquestioned leadership, petty bickerings, minor personal troubles, and the half-jesting, half-bitter railings against higher authority, had faded away. He brought the news that the medical board in England would not permit the C.R.A. to return to France; ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... forgot her skirt. The solemn beauty that his words conjured up called her from her petty irritation. She looked at the mountains, her face full of a ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... on the opposite bank;—but the possessions of the chief of Bhawulpoor, extending on the left bank nearly from Loodeana to the confluence of the Sutlej with the Indus, have hitherto been almost exempt from British interference;[35] as have also the petty Rajpoot states of Bikaneer, Jesulmeer, &c., which form oases in the desert intervening between Scinde and the provinces more immediately under British control. These, it is to be presumed, will now be summarily taken under the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... organization which will result in all performing service for the nation with singleness of purpose in a common cause—preparedness for defense: preparedness to discharge our plain duty whatever it may be. Such service will make for national solidarity, the doing away with petty distinctions of class and creed, and fuse the various elements of this people into one homogeneous mass of real Americans, and leave us a better ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... coaches full libations pour, See they not this? Or when thy thunder rolls Do causeless fears, O Father, shake our souls? Is there no vengeance in the bolt you poise? Is all but fancied horror, empty noise? 265 A woman, wand'ring outcast on our shore, Bargains a petty spot and owns no more, Accepts a portion of our coast to till, Ev'n from our pity; from our royal will; And she—the offer of our hand disdains, 270 And she—AEneas in her ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... been at Oatlands for years; for consider I cannot walk, much less climb a precipice; and the Duke of Newcastle has none of the magnificence of petty princes in a romance or in Germany, of furnishing calashes to those who visit his domains. He is not undetermined about selling the place; but besides that nobody is determined to buy it, he must have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... pleasant side. Three men, great both in character and in intellect, were concerned in pressing its claims—Young, Fresnel, and Arago—and the relations of these men form a picture unmarred by any of those petty jealousies that so often dim the lustre of great names. Fresnel freely acknowledged Young's priority so soon as his attention was called to it; and Young applauded the work of the Frenchman, and aided with his counsel in the application of the undulatory theory to the problems of polarization ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... advantage of the Governor's false move. While in reality intending peace, if it were possible, Don John had thrown down the gauntlet; while affecting to deal openly and manfully, like a warrior and an emperor's son, he had involved himself in petty stratagems and transparent intrigues, by all which he had gained nothing but the character of a plotter, whose word could not be trusted. Saint Aldegonde expressed the hope that the seizure of Namur Castle would ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... In this manner an hour was consumed, when Cecilia and Katherine appearing in succession attired in a suitable manner for their departure, and the baggage of the whole party having been already entrusted to a petty officer and a party of his men, Griffith gave forth the customary order to put the whole in motion. The shrill, piercing whistle of the boatswain once more rang among the galleries and ceilings of the abbey, and was followed by ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... le Comte, with all his cleverness, is a plaything in the hands of mean creatures, petty natures on the lookout for a crushing revenge. They want to ruin us and bring us low! There is the President of the Tribunal, M. de Ronceret; he has, as you know, a very great notion ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... turnin' 19, an' my wife, 15. I mar'ied at big Methodist Chu'ch in Needmore. Same old chu'ch is dere now. I hope build it in 1865. Aunt Emaline Robertson an' Vincent Petty an' Van McCanley started a school in de northeast part of town ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... husband loved would somehow take him from her—to merge his life in theirs—even to kill him on some mysterious way. This time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy of animals or humans. They wanted him because they loved him, but they did not want him dead. Full charged with his splendid life and enthusiasm they ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... more than a man of letters. He is a prophet of the age to come, when the execrable superstitions of narrow minds shall no longer darken the sunlight, and the infamous compulsion of human manners, human intellects, human tastes, into the petty mould of oppressive public opinion ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... my sailors being on the fore part of the deck, trading with the natives, (a considerable number of whom were on board, but who all drew their cresses upon the alarm given by their countrymen) armed themselves with handspikes, billets of wood, or whatever lay in their way, while the petty officers of the Sirius got up the small arms, and kept up a smart fire on the natives, who were in a short time driven overboard; some into their boats, and others were obliged to take to the water; the ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... surly old man would have to submit to this penance without cavil, by reason that Pernhart had, since Saint Walpurgis' day, been a member of the council, and he and his family had part and share in the patrician festival. For, albeit craftsmen and petty merchants were excluded, the worshipful councillors chosen by the guilds enjoyed the same rights as those born to that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of human labor—the labor of adapting the materials furnished by Nature to human needs; the telegraph and the steam-engine, the constantly overflowing torrent of human migrations—all these bind, with invisible but infrangible threads, the existence of a family of peasants, work-people or petty trades-people to the life of the whole world. And the harvest of coffee, cotton or wheat in the most distant countries makes its effects felt in all parts of the civilized world, just as the decrease or increase of the sun-spots are phenomena co-incident with the periodical ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... men could have been treated worse, so far as food is concerned than were the men of this boat. I am going to be just as frank as I know how in describing food conditions with the hope that by calling public attention to this petty graft, such practices will be stopped, so far as American fighting men are concerned. To any who have weak stomachs, I suggest that they skip over the next two or three pages, as the details ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... above was faint with mid-day heat. And there in strife no burning thoughts to heed, 880 I'd bubble up the water through a reed; So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be Of their petty ocean. Oftener, heavily, When love-lorn hours had left me less a child, I sat contemplating the figures wild Of o'er-head clouds melting the mirror through. Upon a day, while thus I watch'd, by flew A cloudy Cupid, with his bow and quiver; 890 So plainly character'd, no breeze ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... but at the announcement of the renewal of hostilities volunteers flowed in on all sides, whether of young men full of ardor and excitement, or, as in many instances, of old soldiers who had already served their time. After a winter of petty skirmishing and reestablishing in Algeria the semblance of security, the Duke of Orleans led the army, considerably reinforced, in a raid against the Arabs under Abd-el-Kader in their own territory. The Zouaves accompanied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... that she had left her chair and was ranging wildly to and fro between the door and window. She halted, and the mirror of her dressing-table mocked her with the counterfeit presentment of herself, pallid and distraught in all the petty prettiness of her ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... to observe, that, although the people of England have been in the habit of talking about kings, it is always a foreign house of kings,—hating foreigners, yet governed by them. It is now the House of Brunswick, one of the petty tribes of Germany." ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Gookin, who wrote in 1674, speaks of the following subdivisions among the Massachusetts Indians: "Their chief sachem held dominion over many other petty governours; as those of Weechagafkas, Neponsitt, Punkapaog, Nonantam, Nashaway, and some of the Nipmuck people."—Vide Gookin's ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... Calverts, notwithstanding every concession on their part, was ended for the time by the efforts of an "Association for the Defense of the Protestant Religion," and Maryland became a royal colony. Under the new regime it was easier to inflict annoyances and disabilities on the petty minority of the Roman Catholics than to confer the privileges of an established church on the hardly more considerable minority of Episcopalians. The Church of England became in name the official church of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy—holding an olive branch—emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... home a smile; forget the petty cares, The dull, grim grind of all the day's affairs; The day is done, come be yourself awhile: To-night, to those who wait, take home ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... respectfully." Still it is with some such definite decision that he enters the kingdom of Ananke, the goddess of Necessity. Readers of "The Little Demon" have seen a practical illustration of the two forces in Peredonov and Liudmilla. Peredonov was petty and pitiful, "a little demon"—nevertheless he too "strove towards the truth in common with all conscious life, and this striving tormented him. He himself did not understand that he, like all men, was striving towards the truth, and that was why ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... bells in the first watch, when every man turned out of his hammock. The watch on deck came springing down below and immediately unshipped the ladders. While some were engaged in lashing up the hammocks, others rushed aft and secured the warrant and petty officers. ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Reverend Mr. Grey tried hard to mould himself to his new work. He went with anxious fidelity through all the labors of the country pastorate. He visited and prayed with the sick, he read the Bible to the old and dim-sighted, he tried to reconcile petty quarrels, he wrestled with his own discontent, and strove hard to grind down all the aspirations of his nature and shut out ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... lately been shewn, that society has a strong interest of a pecuniary nature in the reformation of juvenile delinquents. A boy or youth continually going about as a pickpocket or petty larcenist, is a destructive animal of somewhat formidable character. To get quit of him at last by transportation, costs at the least calculation L.150. Now, he can be put through the twelvemonth's course of reformation in such a school as that which we have described, and deported as ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... comparison of small things with great; for does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... dinner was not a bad one. I had soup, veal, eggs, and a fair wine. I had also a companion, but would rather have been without him. He was a young man, whose appearance gained by the contrast of a dusty wayfarer's, and he gave himself airs accordingly. I set him down as a petty functionary of the place, and a pensionnaire of the auberge. All the time I was with him his mind was exceedingly restless as to my intentions and business in those parts, and such explanations as I gave him to appease his insatiable curiosity and awkwardly-veiled ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Alemanni, crossed his right cheek and one side of his nose, giving him an expression more curious than pleasing. His general appearance was after the common type of an old, war-worn soldier, rough and unscrupulous by nature, hardened by camp life and dissipation, grown cruel by excess of petty authority, overbearing with his inferiors, jovial and complaisant with his equals, cringing to his superiors, and with an air of discontent overlaying every other expression, as though he was continually tortured with the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Trapp I was bound, early next week, before the magistrates sitting in petty sessional division, to serve him and to receive from him proper sustenance and clothing until the age of twenty-one. And I (as nearly as could be guessed, for I had no birthday) had barely turned ten. Mr. Scougall arrived in time to pilot me through these formalities and hand me over to Mr. Trapp: ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... purpose left? Then remember that there is One walking to and fro in this world unseen, but ever present, whose form is as the form of the Son of Man. And He has time, as He has will, to turn aside and minister to such as thee! No human being so mean, no human sorrow so petty, but that He has the time and the will and the power to have mercy on it, because He is the Son of Man. Therefore He will turn aside even to thee, whoever thou art, who art weary and heavy laden, and can find no rest for thy soul, at the very moment, and in the very manner which is ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... won't talk of that. Perhaps it isn't a great matter. No—from a philosophical point of view, such things are unspeakably petty. But I am not much of a philosopher.' He laughed, with a break in his voice. 'Defeat in life is defeat, after all; and unmerited failure is a bitter curse. You see, I am not too old to do something yet. My sight is failing, but I can take care of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... families are married, and their sons are too young for Elizabeth and Amelia. I cannot marry my grown-up daughters to boys; nor can I bring a set of insignificant sons-in-law to hang about the court. My husband the emperor would never consent to bestow his daughters upon petty princes, who, instead of bringing influence with them, would derive their reflected consequence from an alliance with us. If we cannot find them husbands worthy of their station, my daughters must remain single, or devote their lives ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... guise of a mysterious gnome, let me give you a word of warning. You are a stranger in Richmond; pray take care not to get into a clique. They are so numerous and unhealthy, so full of civil wars and petty strife, that existence becomes poisoned, and all the romance of life is swept aside, ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... unparalleled civilization and refinement, society, with its artificial habits and its jealous class distinctions on its back, took a sudden unprepared leap from the heights it had been centuries constructing—into a gold mine; it emerged, its delicate fabric crushed out of all recognizable shape, its petty prides annihilated, and even its just distinctions turned topsy-turvey. For mind is really more honorable than muscle, yet when these two met in a gold mine it fared ill with mind. Classical and mathematical ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... go free and untrammelled there was a case to be made, that after all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the women and children at home have been repeatedly referred to in general, but seldom do we see mention made of their daily privations, the petty but continual annoyances to which they were subjected, and the struggle they made to sow and reap, as well as the difficulties they met in ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... deprecatory; I think he didn't quite give us credit for our father's affability. Of course we acquiesced, and were afterwards edified by our brief acquaintance with the strangers, a mother and son, who had come up from the petty cares of city life for a quiet ramble among ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the Corsair and Giaour—haunted by a secret and sleepless dread. It seems as if they were doomed to drag the broken links of the chain they have burst asunder, riveted to their feet. Not only in the petty society against which they rebel does their soul feel fettered and restrained; but even in the world of the spirit. Neither is it to the enmity of society that they succumb; but under the assaults of this nameless anguish; under the corroding action of potent faculties "inferior ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... noblemen and gentlemen lived like petty princes, and in the arrangement of their households copied their sovereign, having officers of the same import, and even heralds wearing their coat of arms at Christmas, and other solemn feasts, crying largesse thrice at the proper times. They feasted in their halls where many of the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... game of whist. The comparison is just, and condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the most divine advantage. Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously leave youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will tell you. The serf persecutes the Jew because he is himself persecuted by the nobility. There is no real animosity between the peasant and his Jewish neighbors. Our wretched state is the outgrowth of a petty tyranny, in which the serf desires to imitate his superiors. Let the people once enjoy freedom and they will cease to persecute the Hebrews, without whom ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... colors of the deepest dye. I wonder whether my friends have any suspicion of the real state of the case. How should they? I fancy, that, on the whole, I play my part pretty well. I am delighted to find it come so easy. I do not mean that I experience little difficulty in foregoing my hundred petty elegancies and luxuries,—for to these, thank Heaven, I was not so indissolubly wedded that one wholesome shock could not loosen my bonds,—but that I manage more cleverly than I expected to stifle those innumerable tacit allusions which might serve ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... common drama, which we see re-enacted in every family and in which every one of us has been and will be an actor—to-day as a young radical who innovates customs, to-morrow as an old conservative, out-of-date and malcontent in the eyes of the young; a drama, petty and common, which no one longer regards, so frequent is it and so frivolous it seems, but which, instead, is one of the greatest motive forces in human history—in greater or less degree, under different forms, active in all times and operating ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... of the supreme and eternal value of their place in the world. They dare not tamper with it. Their opposition to the militant program badly and even cruelly expressed at times has at bottom, as an opposition always has, the principle of preservation. It is not bigotry or vanity or a petty notion of their own spheres which has kept the majority of women from lending themselves to the radical wing of the woman's movement. It is fear to destroy a greater thing which they possess. The fear of change is not an irrational ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... Austria prepared herself to listen, with that love of gossip which the best woman living and the best mother, were she a queen even, always finds in being mixed up with the petty squabbles ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... had discovered her in the part of a petty, spiteful lawbreaker, dressed in an outlandish and unbecoming garb, did not trouble him. If he was conscious of it at all, indeed, the hurrying turmoil of his thoughts pushed it aside like drifted leaves by the way. The wonderful thing was that he had found her, and at the end of a pursuit ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... but little effect. Dinwiddie was evidently actuated by the petty pique of a narrow and illiberal mind, impatient of contradiction, even when in error. He took advantage of his official station to vent his spleen and gratify his petulance in a variety of ways incompatible with the courtesy of a gentleman. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... I was ordered here by the quartermaster-general. Instead of attempting to decide who had the best tender of cattle, the one with the legal right alone should have been considered. Our department is perfectly familiar with these petty jealousies, which usually accompany awards of this class, and generally emanate from disappointed and disgruntled competitors. The point is well taken by counsel that the government does not anticipate the unforeseen, and it matters not what the loss ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... drama in the Middle Ages is one of the strikingly significant deficiencies of the period. The illiterate condition of the people, and even of the nobility, the fragmentary state of governments, the centralizing of small and dependent communities around the feet of petty tyrants, the frequency of wars large and small, and the devotion of men to skill in the use of arms, made it impossible that attention should be bestowed upon so polite and sedentary a form of amusement as ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... PETTY, SIR WILLIAM, political economist, born in Hampshire; was a man of versatile genius, varied attainments, and untiring energy; was skilled in medicine, in music, in mechanics, and in engineering, as well ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... all these contending interests, this vast alternative in the future, swayed and trembled. Out, then, upon that vulgar craving of those who comprehend neither the vast truths of life nor the grandeur of ideal art, and who ask from poet or narrator the poor and petty morality of "Poetical Justice,"—a justice existing not in our work-day world; a justice existing not in the sombre page of history; a justice existing not in the loftier conceptions of men whose genius has grappled with the enigmas which art and poetry only can foreshadow ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a still wider view of this question. If I quote the right hon. gentleman the Member for West Birmingham, let me assure the House that I do not do so for the purpose of making any petty charge of inconsistency, but because the words which I am going to read are wise and true words, and stand the test of time. When the right hon. gentleman spoke at Manchester in 1897, not in the distant days before the great Home Rule ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly garnered largesse of great cities—these formed the chapters ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... healthy economy is freedom from the petty tyranny of massive government regulation. We are wasting literally millions of working hours costing billions of taxpayers' and consumers' dollars because of bureaucratic redtape. The American farmer, who ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... other names and titles that are always in the mouth of the boys and common people! It would be a nice business indeed if all these illustrious cities were to take huff and revenge themselves and go about perpetually making trombones of their swords in every petty quarrel! No, no; God forbid! There are four things for which sensible men and well-ordered States ought to take up arms, draw their swords, and risk their persons, lives, and properties. The first is to defend the Catholic faith; the second, to defend one's life, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... it is now hard to understand. Political supremacy had been cast off, but the supremacy of opinion remained absolutely unshaken. Of creative literature there was then very little of any value produced: and to that little a foreign stamp was necessary, to give currency outside of the petty circle in which it originated. There was slight encouragement for the author to write; there was still less for the publisher to print. It was indeed a positive injury ordinarily to the commercial ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... into the room. There were about a dozen men in it. Two were Coast Guardsmen, one a lieutenant and the other a chief petty officer. Two others were state highway patrolmen. Another, in a blue uniform, was evidently the local policeman. The rest were in civilian clothes. All of them were watching a lean, youthful man who sat ramrod ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... present so much engaged. In Russia corporal punishment is much in use; but criminals are seldom put to death. They are marched off to Siberia for every kind of offence, from the highest political crime to petty larceny. The most heinous offenders are sent to the mines; those guilty of minor delinquencies are settled in villages, or on farms; and those guilty of having opinions different from those of the government—statesmen, authors, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... romance; they are gone too: you may have a faint hope left that the thick bank of lilac next your house may be spared, since the newcomers may like lilac; but 'tis gone in the afternoon, and the next day when you look in with a sore heart, you see that once fair great garden turned into a petty miserable clay- trampled yard, and everything is ready for the latest development of Victorian architecture—which in due time (two months) arises from ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... could have the least opportunity of acquainting her son with what had passed, resolved too that she would talk with her son immediately, and to that purpose sent for him, for he was gone but to a lawyer's house in the town, upon some petty business of his own, and upon her sending he ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... prophets and again from Christ and the Apostles. With regard to the Old Testament the watchword is: "Seek the type" ("Typum quaeras").[630] But they went a step further still. In opposition to Marcion's antitheses and his demonstration that the God of the Old Testament is a petty being and has enjoined petty, external observances, they seek to show in syntheses that the same may be said of the New. (See Irenaeus IV. 21-36). The effort of the older teachers to exclude everything outward and ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... herself again, but her mind was an entire blank as to what she had done, and she could not doubt her father's statement, for it was a man's handkerchief and the bag was in his hands. The draper was inexorable, and as he had suffered much from petty thefts of late, had determined to make an example of the first offender whom he could catch. The father was accordingly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. When his term had expired, his daughter, who, I am glad to say, never for an instant ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... all deep qualities of the spirit, can be neither specified nor defined; only felt, and seen in the outcome. The Seacombe fishermen are more or less amphibious; ocean-going seamen look down on them. They are petty in some small things, notably in jealousy lest one man do more work, or make more money, than another: to say a man is doing well is to throw out a slur against him. Nevertheless in the larger, the essential things of life, their sea-largeness nearly always shows itself. They ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... England, and hence able to exercise like personal interest in his two children and his considerable property left there? Such a suggestion points to a returning and competent officer of the ship. That "Master Williamson" was above the grade of "petty officer," and ranked at least with the mates or "pilots," is clear from the fact that he is invariably styled "Master" (equivalent to Mister), and we know with certainty that he was neither captain nor mate. That he was a man of address and courage follows the fact that ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... Europe from the seventh century, at which period they migrated from the Carpathians to the Danube, were in the twelfth century divided into petty states. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... happiness, which comes indeed from on high because he delights in what he has, and desires no greater pleasures than those which his home affords. Is he not right in allowing these to turn the scale against petty, ridiculous, and short-lived movements of his wretched body? on the day on which he becomes proof against pleasure he also becomes proof against pain. See, on the other hand, how evil and guilty a slavery a man is forced ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... than Springfield, Lincoln was often employed to act the part of advocate before the village squire, at that time Bowling Green. He realized that this experience was valuable, and never, so far as known, demanded or accepted a fee for his services in these petty cases. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... part of our present prison system is probably our county jails. It is supposed about 8,000 persons pass through our county jails each year. They are generally persons charged with crimes and awaiting trial. But lunatics and petty offenders in considerable numbers are also confined in these places. The young and the old, the innocent and the guilty, hardened offenders and beginners in crime, are commonly mingled together in the jails, under few restraints, without useful occupation and with abundant leisure ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... precise period Cinq-Mars—who, had he not been brought into close contact with a more matured and stronger mind than his own, would in all probability have frittered away his vengeance in petty and puerile annoyances which would rather have worried than alarmed the Cardinal—formed a fast friendship with Francois Auguste de Thou, who had long ceased to conceal his hatred of the minister. In the study of his father, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... which had long been a subject of inquiry on the part of political students. Chinese society, being essentially a society organized on a credit-co-operative system, so nicely adjusted that money, either coined or fiduciary, was not wanted save for the petty daily purchases of the people, any system which boldly clutched the financial establishments undertaking the movement of sycee (silver) from province to province for the settlement of trade-balances, was bound to be effective so long as those ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... knew that silently and persistently John Baronet was trailing him. And I knew the cause was a righteous one. I had lived too long in the Baronet family to think the head of it would take time to follow after a personal dislike, or pursue a petty purpose. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy—holding an olive branch—emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... its operation, that we have little conception how mighty a lever it may be made, or to what new exercise it may be directed; and yet we are all conscious of periods in our lives when, like a vast rock in ocean, it has suddenly loomed up firm and defiant amid our petty purposes and fretful indecisions, waxing grander and stronger under opposition, a something apart from, yet a conscious portion of ourselves,—a master, though a slave,—another revelation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... morning of the 5th, the enemy commenced a petty war upon our pickets, and, as he was indulged, his presumption increased; by noon he showed himself on the left of our extensive line, and attacked one of our pickets as it was returning to camp. Captain Treat, who commanded it, retired disgracefully, leaving a wounded man on the ground. Captain ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... head might be included all that petty species of deceit used towards children, whether to mislead their apprehension, or to divert their attention. If any thing be improper for a child to know or do, better tell him so at once, than resort to an underhand expedient. If a reason can be given for requiring ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... you to confess that I shall have more than balanced it. A ball-room is an epitome of all that is most worthless and unamiable in the great sphere of human life. Every petty and malignant passion is called into play. Coquetry is perpetually on the alert to captivate, caprice to mortify, and vanity to take offence. One amiable female is rendered miserable for the evening by seeing another, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... distribution of large subscriptions. He regards himself as a being of great importance and capacity, and endowed with the power of acting as he likes, whilst the local wirepullers look upon him as a convenient mask, behind which they may the more effectively carry on their own petty ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... various species of crime into one view; assigning to each its plain description, with its punishment; and removing distinctions which had frequently given rise to subtile and embarrassing doubts. It abolished the distinction between grand and petty larceny; defined the true nature of burglary; and removed many subtilties regarding possession, and the conversion of possession in the law of embezzlement, as well as in the distinctions of larceny and fraud. It also mitigated the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... am describing, Kandurin was for some reason living in Cairo, and writing thence to his friend, the marshal of the district, "Notes of Travel," while she sat languishing behind lowered blinds, surrounded by idle parasites, and whiled away her dreary days in petty philanthropy. ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of the departed statesman may fall; one who while we now write is doubtless pouring his tears over the bier of his brother and friend brother, friend, ever, yet in political sentiment as far apart as party could make them. Ah, it is at times like these that the petty distinctions of mere party disappear. We see only the great, the grand, the noble features of the departed statesman; and we do not even beg permission to bow at his feet and mingle our tears with those who have ever been his political adherents—we do [not] beg this permission, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Newman, unaided and ignored, struggled desperately, like a man in a bog, with the overmastering difficulties of his task. His mind, whose native haunt was among the far aerial boundaries of fancy and philosophy, was now clamped down under the fetters of petty detail and fed upon the mean diet of compromise and routine. He had to force himself to scrape together money, to write articles for the students' Gazette, to make plans for medical laboratories, to be ingratiating with the City Council; ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... is there to speak! How small, how cramped, how poor, how miserable in its petty meanness, is our best! How beneath the mark of attack and the level of contempt, that which ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... nasty mean temper to have. It isn't manly. It's like a spiteful boarding-school girl. Well, I'm not going down on my knees to him. I can get on without Distin if he can get on without me. But it is so petty and mean to go on about one liking to do a bit of mechanical work. One can read classics and stick to one's mathematics all the same, and if I can't write a better paper than he can it's ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... old man! Forgive him, however, for what he has done when truly the poet. He was noble then and didn't know it; now he is a sham noble and knows it. Punishment enough that he stands no more upon the mountain heights o'ertopping the petty ambitions of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... British territories, were harboured; despatches were detained; and the Vakeels, or Rajah's representatives, were chosen for their insolence and incapacity. The conduct of the Dewan throughout was Indo-Chinese; assuming, insolent, aggressive, never perpetrating open violence, but by petty insults effectually preventing all good understanding. He was met by neglect or forbearance on the part of the Calcutta government; and by patience and passive resistance at Dorjiling. Our inaction and long-suffering were taken for weakness, and our concessions for timidity. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... of opinion, that if the most fortunate generals of the Roman commonwealth were again placed at the head of the very armies they once commanded, instead of extending their conquests over all Europe and Asia, they would hardly be able to subdue, and retain under their dominion, all the petty republics that ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... artificial character of their institutions,—as artificial as those of ancient Sparta, and, though in a different way, quite as repugnant to the essential principles of our nature. The institutions of Lycurgus, however, were designed for a petty state, while those of Peru, although originally intended for such, seemed, like the magic tent in the Arabian tale, to have an indefinite power of expansion, and were as well suited to the most flourishing condition of the empire as to its infant fortunes. In ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Hereward's adventures as a youth will serve as illustration of the stories told of his prowess. On an enforced visit to Cornwall, he found that King Alef, a petty British chief, had betrothed his fair daughter to a terrible Pictish giant, breaking off, in order to do it, her troth-plight with Prince Sigtryg of Waterford, son of a Danish king in Ireland. Hereward, ever ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... to be always in company with these, with earth, and sun, and sea, and stars by night. The pettiness of house-life—chairs and tables—and the pettiness of observances, the petty necessity of useless labour, useless because productive of nothing, chafe me the year through. I want to be always in company with the sun, and sea, and earth. These, and the stars by night, are my natural companions.My heart looks back and sympathises with all the joy and life of ancient ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... American army to victory, not the securing of independence, but the establishment of this Republic. More than of any other man was this the work of Washington. He saw the feeble Confederation breaking to pieces, now that the stress of danger was removed; he beheld the warring interests and petty jealousies of statesmen who yet remained colonial; but he was determined that out of these thirteen jarring colonies should come a nation; and when the convention to form a constitution met at Philadelphia, he presided over it, and it was his commanding will which brought a constitution ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... like ours. It went hard with the poor then; for then it had not come to pass that peasants found their way up to lordly mansions, and that from these regiments coachmen and other servants became judges in the petty courts, which were invested with the power to condemn, for perhaps a trifling fault, the poor man to be deprived of all his goods and chattels, or to be flogged at the whipping-post. A few of these courts still remain; and in Jutland, far from "the ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... Dr. Knapp calls "the broken jargon" then current in England as gypsy. From a misshapen Welsh groom this queer lawyer's clerk learned Welsh pronunciation, and to the consternation of his employer, "turned Sir Edward from the door," and gladly admitted the petty versifier Parkerson who sold his sheets to the highest bidder in the streets; worse even than this was his audacity in contending against a wealthy archdeacon that Ab Gwilym was the superior of Ovid. This gentleman was probably the Rev. John Oldershaw, Archdeacon of ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... it would have told her that she had never been loved as she was at that moment. All that she had been in her loyalty, her nobility, was so much a part of this man's life. What, compared to that, were petty sins, or big ones? He saw the past as a drowning man sees the panorama of his existence. Yet he knew that everything he could say would ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... unfamiliar and wild is that which arouses our enthusiastic admiration. As we stand in the calm genial atmosphere of a summer day, surveying the land and sea-scape from a commanding height that seems to have raised us above the petty cares of life, the eye and mind pass like the lightning-flash from the contemplation of the purple heather and purple plants around—and from the home-feelings thereby engendered—to the grand, apparently illimitable ocean, and the imagination is set free to revel in the unfamiliar and romantic ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... In an instant his conversation with the Irishman flashed up before him with new force and meaning. A thousand petty incidents, which he had driven contemptuously from his mind, returned as triumphant evidences; and, with an impetuous determination, he ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... was of long standing there, but had for some generations been going down in the world. Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, as we learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation of a "petty chapman," or small retail dealer, in his own freehold cottage, which he bequeathed, "with its appurtenances," to his second wife, Ann, to descend, after her death, to her stepson, his namesake, Thomas, and her own son Edward, in equal shares. This cottage, which was ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... interests us by suggesting a comparison between Medival Moslem superstitions and those of our xixth Century, which to our descendants will appear as wild, if not as picturesque, as those of The Nights. The "inspired British inch" and the building by Melchisedek (the Shaykh of some petty Syrian village) will compare not unaptly with the enchanted swords, flexible glass and guardian spirits. But the Pyramidennarren is a race which will not speedily die out: it is based on Nature, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... gradually gaining upon him and growing in force, and which was destined to hasten the course of the events which he had planned for himself. It is an extraordinary peculiarity in unbelievers that they are often more subject to petty superstitions than other men; and similarly, it often happens that the most cynical and coldly calculating of conspirators, who believe themselves proof against all outward influences, yield to some feeling of nervous dislike for an individual who has never harmed ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of the commander's uncertainty, they knew that he hesitated before the unknown aim and destination. In spite of the energy of his character, his uncertainty was clearly to be seen by his uncertain orders, incomplete manoeuvres, his sudden outbursts, and a thousand petty details which could not escape the sharp eyes ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... water surged around us. We had our moments of laughter—rare, it is true, but hearty enough. Even when cracked lips and swollen mouths checked the outward and visible signs of amusement we could see a joke of the primitive kind. Man's sense of humour is always most easily stirred by the petty misfortunes of his neighbours, and I shall never forget Worsley's efforts on one occasion to place the hot aluminium stand on top of the Primus stove after it had fallen off in an extra heavy roll. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... quarters of the world. I frequented also the society of the learned Indians, and took delight to hear them converse; but withal, I took care to make my court regularly to the maharaja, and conversed with the governors and petty kings, his tributaries, that were about him. They put a thousand questions respecting my country; and I, being willing to inform myself as to their laws and customs, asked them concerning everything which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... human creature, old and young, dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... law to keep a self-respect they had already lost, and have the insufficiency of things he could not eat. For he had as yet no knowledge of political economy. He evidently did not view his case in any petty, or in any party, spirit; he did not seem to look on himself as just a half-starved child that should have cried its eyes out till it was fed at least as well as the dogs that passed him; he seemed to ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... when the day is done, And the petty battles are lost or won, When the gold is made and the ink is dried, To quit the struggle and turn aside To spend an hour with your boy in play, And let him race all of your ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... boys, alas! who are made muffs by injudicious training, who would have grown up to be bold, manly fellows had they been otherwise treated. There are also many kinds of muffs. Some are good-hearted, amiable muffs; others are petty, sneaking muffs. ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... secretly fretting himself and murmuring against others, for causes which, compared with any real evil in life, must weigh like dust in the balance. But such is the equal distribution of Providence. To those who lie out of the road of great afflictions, are assigned petty vexations, which answer all the purpose of disturbing their serenity; and every reader must have observed, that neither natural apathy nor acquired philosophy can render country gentlemen insensible to the grievances which occur ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... set off or chattel sold on execution, no legal meeting of the voters or freemen holden, without previous notice on the sign-post. It used to be known by another name, and marks the spot, where, whilom, petty thieves, shiftless vagrants, and other small offenders against the majesty of the law, were wont to suffer a shameful penalty for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... don't see how a man can wholly devote himself to a work he thinks so great, and yet have patience to struggle with the thousand petty cares of life. The shifts and turnings to which insufficient means must reduce one, cannot but vex and hurt such a nature, if it does not change it at last. But I see I fail to make myself understood by you; let me try again. I don't know ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... had it not been for the peculiar political weakness of most of the states with which he had to deal. There was no strong German empire in his day, no united Italy, no Belgium whose neutrality was guaranteed—as it now is—by the other powers of Europe. The French republic was surrounded by petty independent, or practically independent, principalities which were defenseless against an unscrupulous invader. Prussia, much smaller than it now is, offered, as we shall see, no efficient opposition to the extension of French control. Austria had been forced to capitulate, after ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... inconsiderate. Such cases are in the great majority. Many husbands who like or love their wives and who believe themselves secure in their love think it is quite proper for them to hunt for new conquests and to carry on petty love affairs with as many girls or women as they comfortably can. There is no question here about love—it is just flirtation or sexual relations. When this is the case the wife should have a frank and firm talk with her husband; she should tell him that she does not like his behavior and ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... job for us that our old coxswain had got wounded, and that Draper had taken his place just then temporarily while Hoskins was on the sick-list; for, though Draper was the oldest petty officer on board the ship—his promotion to a higher grade having been delayed, I believe, through his natural crustiness of temper, which he really could not help—there was no doubt that he knew the East Coast of Africa well, and the management of a boat the ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... utterly insignificant seemed that petty disagreement now! Had she but known the bitter separation that must come, she would have let no trifling difference, such as this had been, rob her of a single ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... mammoth pile, for the petty rental of ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year, many tribes of the invaders have found shelter and entertainment in apartments of many rooms. Outwardly, in details of ornamentation, the building is ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... account—in good time!—thinking it a temporary illumination made to receive him with distinguished splendour. These anecdotes are very pretty now, if they are strictly true; because they shew the mind's petty but natural disposition, of reducing and attributing all to self: but if they are only inventions, to raise the reputation of London lamps, or Roman cascades, one scorns them;—I really do hope, and half believe, that ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... den it was! How cheap, bald, and petty the whole town seemed of a sudden. Lee Virginia halted and turned. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to make herself known. She retraced her steps, pulled open the broken screen door, and entered the cafe. It was a low, dingy dining-room filled ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... minutes after this when he again saw her, and then she was seated on a cane bench in the gallery, and an old woman was standing close to her, talking to her. It was Mrs Marsham cautioning her against some petty imprudence, and Lady Glencora was telling that lady that she needed no such advice, in words almost as curt as those I have used. Lord Hartletop had left her, feeling that, as far as that was concerned, he had done his ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... they had been accustomed to be crammed at home by their fond mothers. Besides eatables, everything necessary for a student was there sold, and articles used in the play-grounds, as bats, balls, &c.; and, in general, a petty trade with small profits was carried on in stationery and other matters, —in things innocent or suitable for the young customers, and in some things, perhaps, which were not. The Butler had a small salary, and was allowed the service of a Freshman in the Buttery, who was also employed ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... almost bored air rested upon the men's faces. The appalling experiences of the past thirteen days seemed to dwarf all other things in comparison. They had been in the presence of the Big Thing; all else seemed petty; they had been looking into death's cold eyes; after that other sights seemed trivial. Many of them carried sore hearts for their comrades with whom they had at other times foregathered in just such circumstances as these, but ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... in as many differing notions of heaven, but all and each appear agreed upon the point that up into the stars alone their hoped-for heaven is to be found; and if all do not, in this agree, still there are some aspiring minds high soaring above sublunary things, above the petty disputes of differing creeds, and the vague promises they hold out to their votaries, who behold, in the firmament above, mighty and mysterious objects ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... of Croesus he fixed his residence at Sardis, and was employed by that monarch in various difficult and delicate affairs of state. In his discharge of these commissions he visited the different petty republics of Greece. At one time he is found in Corinth, and at another in Athens, endeavoring, by the narration of some of his wise fables, to reconcile the inhabitants of those cities to the administration of their respective rulers, Pariander and Pisistratus. ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... of the factory owners in the race for wealth, the railroad owners sprang at once into the lists of mighty wealth-possessers, armed with the most comprehensive and puissant powers and privileges, and vested with a sweep of properties beside which those of the petty industrial bosses were puny. Railroad owners, we say; the distinction is necessary between the builders of the railroads and the owners. The one might construct, but it often happened that by means of cunning, fraud and corruption, the builders were superseded by ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... interest. The lawyer, who had been introduced as Mr. Ashe, was one of those people who are more worth looking at than most people realize when they look. If Napoleon had been red-haired, and had bent all his powers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a province, he might have looked much the same; the head with the red hair was heavy and powerful; the figure in its dark, quiet clothes was comparatively insignificant, as was Napoleon's. ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... Scott was, he had to economize time somewhere, and the hours saved from papers could be given to books. We do find one or two references to these men as political writers. Scott hoped Lockhart would learn, as editor of the Quarterly, to despise petty adversaries, for "to take notice of such men as Hazlitt and Hunt in the Quarterly would be to introduce them into a world which is scarce conscious of ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... on or near the sea-beach, but it is now about a mile and a half inland, the sand carried down by the river having silted up the ancient harbour, and formed a waste sandy tract between the sea and the town. It has now shrunk into a petty village, inhabited partly by Mahommedans and partly by Roman Catholic fishermen of the Parava caste, with a still smaller hamlet adjoining inhabited by Brahmans and Vellalars; but unlikely as the place may now seem to have been identical with 'the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... worry of citizens complaining of every petty delinquency of a soldier, and forcing themselves forward to discuss politics, made the position of a commanding general no sinecure. I continued to strengthen the two corps forward and their routes of supply; all the time expecting that Sidney Johnston, who was a real general, and who had as correct ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of the most eminent champions of liberty had been shed upon the scaffold; and such as by a timely flight avoided that fate, were wandering in misery far from their native land, while the obsequious slaves of despotism enjoyed their patrimony. Still more insupportable than the oppression of these petty tyrants, was the restraint of conscience which was imposed without distinction on all the Protestants of that kingdom. No external danger, no opposition on the part of the nation, however steadfast, not even the fearful lessons of past experience, could check in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... the pleasant position of being able to retain an historian of the eminence of Macaulay to write a large portion of his introduction, it would ill become him to alter and correct his statements wherever there was a petty inaccuracy; still it is necessary to say, once for all, that there are occasional errors in the passage,—as where Macaulay mentions that Chicksands is no longer the property of the Osbornes,—though happily not one of these errors is ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... suggested and practised by curiosity or idleness; but in all these I found no sensation equal to a long quiet contemplation of the mass entire, not as viewed from the balconies of the hotel, but from some rocky point or wooded shade, where house and fence and man and all his petty doings were shut out, and the eye left calmly to gaze upon the awful scene, and the rapt mind to raise its thoughts to Him who loosed this eternal flood and guides it harmless as ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes. He kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint of life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at a girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the next day, passing the same girl, a line ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... would have had but little sleep that night. The first lieutenant related the circumstances to the other lieutenants; the second lieutenant, whose watch it was, told the gunner, who related it to the petty officers; the doctor told his mates, who retailed the story to the midshipmen; and so gradually it went over the whole ship, and officers and men agreed that it was one of the pluckiest and coolest ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... years painting saints and miracles was not because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into obscure regions. For it is only as language that the picture or the statue avails anything, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... memorandum-book in his pocket, in which he notes every particular relative to appointments, addresses, and petty cash matters. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... the place, and could only get out of them "good health and good conduct." I do not expect even his conduct makes much impression as to his innocence, for I saw it stated the other day that the worst prisoners are those that are always getting convicted for petty offences; those that have committed one great crime are not so depraved, and are much more amenable. However, he has only three months more at Pentonville, and then he will go ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... roughness go a long way in the assertion of authority. In the task of policing a big city, the rights of the individual must indubitably suffer to a certain extent if the rights of the multitude are to be properly protected. We can make too much of small injustices and petty incivilities. Police business is not gentle business. The officers are trying to prevent you and me from being knocked on the head some dark night or from being chloroformed in our beds. Ten thousand men are trying to do ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... Among dangerous occupations must also be included those in which there are numerous accidents, such as mining and railway occupations. The accidents in mines and on railways in the United States each year cause as many deaths and serious injuries as have often resulted in many a petty war. Thus, on the railways of the United States in 1904 there was a total of 10,046 persons killed and 84,155 injured, about three fourths of those injured being employees,—one employee being killed in every three hundred and fifty-seven and one injured in ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... corroboration see Whitgift's circular to his suffragans in May, 1601, and also his address to his bishops a few months later in Strype, Whitgift, ii, 447 ff. Among many other and grave abuses he refers to "the infinite number" of apparitors and "petty Sumners" hanging upon every court, "two or three of them at once most commonly seizing upon the subject for every trifling offence to make work to their courts." Cf. Canons of 1597, can. xi (Multitude of apparitors and their excesses) in Cardwell, ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... went against us at this time. The Wompatuck was sent by Captain Goodrich into the mouth of the harbor at Guantanamo to attempt to grapple the cable there. The tug and the St. Louis were both forced to retire, not by the weight of fire from the coast, but by a petty Spanish gunboat, aided by "a small gun on shore." Could this fact have been communicated to Commodore Schley when he decided to return to Key West on the 26th, on account of the difficulty of coaling, he might have seen the facility with which the place could be secured and utilized ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... afterward strengthened by the light hand of laws that conserved what they most desired; whose personal relations with their rulers were of such primitive character as to make the Government in every sense paternal; the petty tax on imports attending its ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... certain sacrifices which the Romans believed could only be offered by a king; after the abolition of royalty, a priest, named the petty sacrificing king, (rex sacrificulus,) was elected to perform ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... by no means a public reader; this was his offering to the general good. If those fellows, by reason of his mistakes, could be induced to climb, he was willing to offer his pride on the altar. No matter by what petty trials they were caught so that they ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... in expectation of preferment, I was not altogether without mortifications, which I not only suffered from the rude insults of the sailors and petty officers, among whom I was known by the name of Loblolly Boy, but also from the disposition of Morgan, who, though friendly in the main, was often very troublesome with his pride, which expected a good deal of submission from me, and delighted in recapitulating the favours ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... Having accomplished that object with complete success, he decided to put an end to the Sung dynasty. The Chinese emperor, acting with strange fatuity, had given fresh cause of umbrage, and had provoked a war by many petty acts of discourtesy, culminating in the murder of the envoys of Kublai, sent to notify him of his proclamation as Great Khan of the Mongols. Probably the Sung ruler could not have averted war if he had shown the greatest forbearance and ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Greek art, classical; Christian art is romantic, bringing into art entirely new sentiments of a knightly and a religious sort—love, loyalty and honor, grief and repentance—and understanding how by careful treatment to ennoble even the petty and contingent. The sublime belongs to symbolic art; the Roman satire is the dissolution of the classical, and humor the dissolution ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... or swim by itself. But unfortunately, in a minority of cases, by a wretched sort of "senatorial courtesy" which exists in the body, the appendix is given its ancestral or traditional rights and allowed to inflict its petty troubles upon the entire abdominal cavity, and include ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... admiring her son's learning, and so stubborn was her faith in him that she was convinced that he would this time secure a good position in the capital. Thus the father had been obliged to give way, and Antonin was now finally wrecking his life while filling some petty employment at a merchant's in the Rue du Mail. But, on the other hand, the quarrelling increased in the home, particularly whenever Lepailleur suspected his wife of robbing him in order to send money to that big lazybones, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... time my grandfather, along with his eight sons, formed the last relic in our province of that race of petty feudal tyrants by which France had been overrun and harassed for so many centuries. Civilization, already advancing rapidly towards the great convulsion of the Revolution, was gradually stamping out the systematic extortions of these ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... but he loved freedom. To be alone, to live with nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty interests of men—this had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys, riders, sheep-herders, farmers—these toiled on from one place and one job to another for the little money doled out to them. Nothing beautiful, ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... And her dress, too, was subdued; brown, with little spots on it. She came up to me, asked me whether I knew her. She obviously felt no embarrassment, and not because she had lost a sense of shame or memory of the past, but simply because all petty self-consciousness ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... said that barbarous nations, both those engaged in intestine wars, and those in hostilities against us, all agreed to a cessation of arms, as if they had been mourning for some very near and common friend; that some petty kings shaved their beards and their wives' heads, in token of their extreme sorrow; and that the king of kings [383] forbore his exercise of hunting and feasting with his nobles, which, amongst the Parthians, is equivalent to a cessation ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... forgotten that he had once been so unfortunate as to offend a man who never forgave, and who, from being merely the prior of Coussay, had risen to a high rank in the church, and was now all-powerful, and able to take revenge for any petty injury long past, but carefully treasured, to be repaid with interest ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... was a small stone structure something like a sentry-box, only with an iron door and grated windows. In this negroes, petty criminals, vagrants, and drunkards were confined. It stood at the junction of the two most important streets ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... was named Rocca, and he was happily asleep when we arrived. But not for long. The parade of uniforms and guns in the middle of the night had him frightened into a state where he could hardly walk. I imagine he was as full of petty larceny as Ferraro. No innocent man could have looked so terror stricken. Taking advantage of the situation, I latched my motorized lie detector onto him and began ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... we reach "the Father" through "the Son," and that He is able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before the presence of the Divine glory with exceeding joy (Jude 24). The Gospel of "the Word made flesh" is not the meaningless cant of some petty sect nor yet the cunning device of priestcraft, though it has been distorted in both these directions; but it can give a reason for itself, and is founded upon the deepest laws of the threefold constitution of man, embracing ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... him was that air of culture and refinement so conspicuously lacked by the men who had hitherto approached her. He had seemed to her the first gentleman who sought her favour. To countenance him, moreover, was to defy her mother's petty rule. But, no, she did not love him—did ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... knowledge, while other teachers with exactly the same task before them are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of life in the classroom. We find physicians who complain that one case in their practice is like another, and judges who despair because they always have to deal with the same petty cases, while other judges and physicians feel clearly that every case offers something new and that the repetition as such is neither conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who feel it a ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... most petty and most annoying experiences to which the traveler is subjected is the arbitrary tax of time and money put upon him by the small officials, of every rank, in the employment of the government. By this system of small taxes upon travelers, a considerable revenue is realized. Where this is known, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... jerked around instantly, and Jack's eyes followed his. The court crier was a Space Navy petty officer. ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... the first word of the trade; and the other good fellow, full of business, who stops just long enough to whisper in your ear that "So-and-so, the famous critic, doesn't seem to be satisfied." Felicia listened to it all with the utmost tranquillity, being raised by her triumph above the petty slurs of envy, and glowed with pride when a renowned veteran, some old associate of her father's, tossed her a "Well done, little one!" which carried her back to the past, to the little corner that was always reserved for her in the paternal studio in the days when ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... a larger parchment register was provided, and every two years it appears to have been shown up to the magistrates at the Petty Sessions, and signed by two ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the Holy Scriptures. It was not from the Jews in exile and captivity, but from the Jews of Solomon's glory came the only dissatisfied, hopeless words in the Bible. Yes, indeed! it is the souls that have too much, who cry out vanity, vanity, all is vanity! For myself, I like not the petty prudencies of Solomon. There is better reading in Isaiah, and in the Psalms, and in ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... they only knew the law of God. So, right with them had no absolute or universal ground, but was reduced in their minds to the performance of certain acts commanded exclusively to them—a form of ethics which rapidly sank into the most petty and frivolous casuistry as to the outward performance of those acts. The sequel of those ethics is known to all the world, in the spectacle of the most unrivalled religiosity, and scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter absence of moral sense, in ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... extraordinary and quite out of the common beaten track of life, was probably engendered in the following way. Not finding the sympathy he needed in his efforts after a better life, he turned in upon himself and began to despise the petty details of everyday existence; and several passages in his letters clearly go to show that his unhappiness and discontent were largely due to the fact of his overlooking the real enjoyment to be derived from the small ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Russia, Austria, Belgium, there was no central authority to which these questions could be referred for decision when the threads of mutual interest became tangled. Instead, secret and competitive statecraft made the tangle worse. The mass of conflicting jurisdictions and of petty jealousies that have grown up among the two score of independent and sovereign states of Europe ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... all respects the superior of the patroniser—may tickle your sense of humour for a while, but in the long run it is distinctly dispiriting. The philosopher, no doubt, is or should be able to disregard the petty annoyances arising from an ever-present consciousness of social limitation, but society is not entirely composed of philosophers, even in America; and the sense of freedom and space is unqualifiedly welcome to its members. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... It is hardly possible that the lord of a petty state on the coast of Sumatra should have so large a number of elephants, more perhaps than the Great Mogul in the height of the sovereignty of Hindustan. Probably Capt. Stevens may have mistaken the original, and we ought to read "With above ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... Some of the petty officers and seamen, after the action, got liquor and were intoxicated; and what with the groans of the wounded, the noise and confusion of the enraged survivors of the ill-fated ship rendered the whole ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... said the Indian, looking his captive in the eye, and hesitating whether to practice his petty annoyances any further. At length they turned ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... often composed, like the largest ropes, of a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take all the petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after the other, and you say, "That is all there is of it!" Braid them, twist them together; the result is enormous: it is Attila hesitating between Marcian on the east and Valentinian on the west; it is Hannibal tarrying at Capua; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to one of the best men of the century, "wouldst not be saved alone." To enlighten the ignorant, to raise the weak, to pity the frail, to disregard the meanness, ingratitude, misapprehension, dulness, and petty malice of the lower orders of humanity—that is the wisdom of the wise; and that is accordant with the moral law of the universe, from the operation of which no man escapes. To study, in Shakespeare, the story of Coriolanus is to observe the violation of that law ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... distinguish between us, but utterly unlike in disposition, except that we both possessed a fiery temper and an indomitable will. He was the soul of honor, generous to a fault, loyal-hearted and brave, and he exacted honor and loyalty from others. He had no petty ambitions; he cared little for wealth for its own sake, still less for its votaries. I was ambitious; I loved wealth for the power which it bestowed; I would sacrifice anything for the attainment of that power, and even my boyish years were tainted with secret envy of my brother, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... more, however, Alain met his difficulties with prudence and vigour; he retrenched the establishment hitherto kept at the chateau, resigned such rural pleasures as he had been accustomed to indulge, and lived like one of his petty farmers. But the risks of the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... now. The King of Spain, whose good fortune it is to bear sway over these provinces, has no right to govern them otherwise than the petty princes who formerly possessed them separately. Do you ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... were not striking sporadic blows now, as they had done at first, in petty "regulatings." They were looking to a time when there was to be one ride such as the mountains had never seen; a ride at whose end a leader living by the river bend, a judge, a Commonwealth's attorney living in town and the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Even in small societies you find, that some will naturally take the lead and assume domination. We commence the system at school, when we are first thrown into society, and there we are taught systems of petty tyranny. There are some few points in which we obtain equality in this world, and that equality can only be obtained under a well-regulated form of society, and consists in an equal administration of justice and of laws, to which we ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... charities; not that she may indemnify an early deprivation and clothe herself in a blaze of North Adams gauds; not that she may have nine breeds of pie for breakfast, as only the rich New-Englander can; not that she may indulge any petty material vanity or appetite that once was hers and prized and nursed, but that she may apply that Dollar to statelier uses, and place it where it may cast the metallic sheen of her glory farthest across the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the wise and the criminal audacity of the coward, had a train been laid for the destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom. All the petty pretexts for war, the affair of Lilybaeum, the Hunnish deserters, the sack of Gratiana, faded into insignificance before this new and most righteous cause of quarrel. If Hilderic's deposition had been avenged by the capture of Carthage, with far more justice might the death of the noble Amalasuentha ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired. "Yes," said the owner of the spectacles, at length. "You vait. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... houses in "the village by the sea." But most of these men had left their happy homes under the inspiration of the highest and truest motives. They were going forth to fight the battles of their imperilled country, and this reflection filled them with a heroism which the petty trials and discomforts of the camp could ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... that we are savage,' cried Atlee. 'I contend for it that all our civilisation is higher, and that class for class we are in a more advanced culture than the English; that your chawbacon is not as intelligent a being as our bogtrotter; that your petty shopkeeper is inferior to ours; that throughout our middle classes there is not only a higher morality but a higher ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... aught to say, woman? Thou silly straw, thou feather, who didst think to float towards thy passion's petty ends, even against the great wind of my will! Tell me, for I fain would understand. Why ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
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