Petty Quotes - Page 13

Jealousy can’t sour someone to this extreme, can it? (Aiden) It can and it does. Believe me. I’ve seen a lot worse than this in my billion or so years of existence – the first murder man committed was one brother against the other for no other reason than that one petty emotion. Jealousy turns to hatred which then turns to poison. It infects and it destroys until it eats someone alive. (Deimos)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Brother, Believe, Men

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You can't be stylish and petty at the same time.

Lionel Shriver

Stylish

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life Is, Fame, Boundaries

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Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune.

Plutarch

Greatness, Giving, Mind

Plutarch (2000). “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Volume II: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.64, Modern Library

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Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Howard Zinn

Inspirational, Death, Running

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I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to temp us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.

Tom Robbins

Fashion, Believe, Men

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As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish--about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.

Robertson Davies

Blessed, Tragedy, Half

Robertson Davies (1961). “The Personal Art: Reading to Good Purpose”, London : Secker & Warburg

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At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

Doris Lessing

Growing Up, Pain, Writing

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There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.

Walter Bagehot

Shoes, Ties, Hands

Walter Bagehot, Norman St. John-Stevas (1959). “Walter Bagehot: A Study of His Life and Thought, Together with a Selection from His Political Writings”, London : Eyre & Spottiswoode

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... women feel the humiliation of their petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are not socially ostracized, so long as we are politically ostracized as he is not.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Sex, Men, Color

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Gage, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Ida H. Harper (2017). “THE HISTORY OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE - Complete 6 Volumes (Illustrated): Everything You Need to Know about the Biggest Victory of Women’s Rights and Equality in the United States – Written By the Greatest Social Activists, Abolitionists & Suffragists”, p.4188, e-artnow

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There be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance.

Thomas Hobbes

Kings, Identity, Substance

Thomas Hobbes (2010). “Leviathan, Parts I and II - Revised Edition”, p.393, Broadview Press

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Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.

Soren Kierkegaard

Faith, Crime, Absurdity

Soren Kierkegaard (2017). “Philosophical Fragments”, p.67, Jovian Press

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The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free.

Angelina Grimke

War, Struggle, Land

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The end of despots is always odd?exhilarating to those who suffered their tyrannies, and to those who hold despotism in contempt, and anti-climatic at the same time, the discovery that these tyrants were petty, frightened men after all.

Fouad Ajami

Spring, Men, Discovery

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... it is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it.

Frances Trollope

Girl, Believe, Thinking

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Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Gnats, Criminals, Thieves

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The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence.

Samuel Johnson

Life, Disappointment, Grief

Samuel Johnson (1819). “The Beauties of Samuel Johnson: Consisting of Maxims and Observations, Moral, Critical, and Miscellaneous”, p.165

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The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

James Russell Lowell

Life Lesson, Thinking, Sorrow

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One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace.

Yoshida Shoin

Greatness, Way, Study

"Yoshida Shoin Zenshu" by Yoshida Shoin, vol. II, 1938.

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In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

Bertrand Russell

Desire, Body, Action

Bertrand Russell (2016). “Why I Am Not a Christian”, p.35, Lulu Press, Inc

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I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays.

Richard Meale

Spiritual, Hate, Believe

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Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.

Dan Ariely

Cheating, People, Cash

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You must realize that if you are going to reach the heights you have been called to reach, you may elicit some criticism from those who are jealous, petty or angry because they were left behind.

T. D. Jakes

Jealous, Criticism, May

T. D. Jakes (1999). “Maximize the Moment: God's Action Plan for Your Life”, Putnam Publishing Group

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Divorce is a 50-50 thing, and it can be a number of petty things that finally drive you out of your mind.

Lee Radziwill

Divorce, Numbers, Mind

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To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.

Samuel Johnson

Friendship, Years, Long

James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1888). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Together with A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”

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