Petty Quotes - Page 17

• My secrets are petty but humiliating.

  Mason Cooley

  Secret, Humiliating

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• In fiction, it's as if you enter a dream world that you created, but your characters have their own free will. They don't do what you want them to do - they get into trouble, do drugs, fight over petty things, and do outrageous things that you wouldn't want your children to do. In other words, you can only provide the background, the seeds - in my case the background of the Vietnamese refugee.

  Andrew Lam

  Dream, Children, Character

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• I have never in my life seen a more petty, childish, bitter, soon-to-be ex-president of the United States. Barack Obama is in fact participating in this effort to undermine the Trump transition, the Trump election, and the Trump presidency. And it's unprecedented in U.S. history. Ex-presidents have never engaged in the kind of behavior Obama is engaging in.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Effort, President, United States

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Only in love can I find you, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breathe a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and anxious self-assertion, which make me a prisoner of my own poverty emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out toward you, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in you, since by your love you are the inmost center of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself.

  Karl Rahner

  Spring, Love You, Heart

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• Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh- I really think that requires spirit!

  Jean Webster

  Crush, Thinking, Laughing

  Jean Webster (2016). “Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy: Illustrated”, p.34, Jester House Publishing

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• They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.

  James Allen

  Fall, Loss, Self

  James Allen (2008). “As a Man Thinketh”, p.19, Penguin

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• I am aware that the battle I am fighting is a petty one, but I am also aware that in order to win that which is great, you must first win that which is small.

  James Frey

  Fighting, Winning, Order

  James Frey (2003). “A Million Little Pieces”, p.210, Rutgers University Press

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• She wasn't speaking to me - in the juvenile, petty sense of the phrase.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Phrases, Juvenile

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• The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

  David Foster

  Real, Sacrifice, Thinking

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• You've got a lot to look forward to in Heaven. Compared to what's in store for you in Heaven, your current pain and problems are petty.

  Rick Warren

  Christian, Pain, Heaven

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• The soul, cramped among the petty vexations of Earth, needs to keep its windows constantly open to the invigorating air of large and free ideas: and what thought is so grand as that of an ever-present God, in whom all that is vital in humanity breathes and grows?

  Lucy Larcom

  Air, Ideas, Soul

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• If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

  Aleister Crowley

  Men, Ideas, Worry

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• Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

  Ivan Turgenev

  Feelings, Pity, Good Feeling

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• Alas! fond child, How are thy thoughts beguil'd To hope for honey from a nest of wasps? Thou may'st as well Go seek for ease in hell, Or sprightly nectar from the mouths of asps. The world's a hive, From whence thou canst derive No good, but what thy soul's vexation brings: But case thou meet Some petty-petty sweet, Each drop is guarded with a thousand stings.

  Francis Quarles

  Sweet, Children, Soul

  Francis Quarles, Robert Wilson (A. M.) (1839). “Emblems divine and moral”, p.17

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• Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.

  George Eliot

  Violin, Kind, Fame

  George Eliot (1885). “Poems: Together with Brother Jacob and The Lifted Veil”

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• Ladies are always of great use to the party they espouse, and never fail to win over numbers to it. Lovers, according to Sir William Petty's computation, make at least the third part of sensible men of the British nation; and it has been an uncontroverted maxim in all ages, that though a husband is sometimes a stubborn sort of a creature, a lover is always at the devotion of his mistress. By this means, it lies in the power of every fine woman, to secure at least half a dozen able-bodied men to his Majesty's service.

  Joseph Addison

  Husband, Lying, Party

  Joseph Addison (1860). “The Freeholder. Swift's notes on the Free-holder. The Plebian, by Sir Richard Steele, with The Old whig, by Mr. Addison. The Lover”, p.17

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• You know, we're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God -- and I believe there is -- that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.

  Anne Lamott

  Jobs, Selfish, Believe

  "Anne Lamott Distills Prayer Into 'Help, Thanks, Wow'". "Morning Edition" with Renee Montagne, www.npr.org. November 19, 2012.

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• One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Age, Ugly, Way

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 98e), 1980.

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• Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world. And if you do the latter, you're not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Everyday, World, Way

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• There's a romance to danger. There's a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the story of our lives better.

  Joey Comeau

  Loneliness, Drinking, Romance

  Interview with Adrian Comeau, "I Am Other People" series, www.asofterworld.com.

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• Spinoza , for example, thought that insight into the essence of reality, into the harmonious structure of the eternal universe, necessarily awakens love for this universe. For him, ethical conduct is entirely determined by such insight into nature, just as our devotion to a person may be determined by insight into his greatness or genius. Fears and petty passions, alien to the great love of the universe, which is logos itself, will vanish, according to Spinoza, once our understanding of reality is deep enough.

  Max Horkheimer

  Passion, Reality, Greatness

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.9, A&C Black

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• The worst of misery
  Is when a nature framed for noblest things
  Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
  And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
  Gasping from out the shallows.

  George Eliot

  Air, Joy, Misery

  George Eliot (1839). “Theophrastus Such, Jubal and other poems and The Spanish gypsy”, p.444

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• To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft.

  Samuel Johnson

  Return, Forget, Theft

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• Each petty hand
  Can steer a ship becalm'd; but he that will
  Govern and carry her to her ends, must know
  His tides, his currents, how to shift his sails;
  What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers;
  Where her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop 'em;
  What strands, what shelves, what rocks do threaten her.

  Ben Jonson

  Spring, Hands, Weather

  Ben Jonson (1756). “The alchemist. Catiline, his conspiracy. Bartholomew Fair”, p.188

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• it is a mistake to talk of the twilight of age, or the blurred sight of old people. The long day grows clearer at its close, and the petty fogs of prejudice which rose between us and our fellows in youth melt away as the sun goes down. At last we see God's creatures as they are.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  Mistake, Twilight, Sight

  Rebecca Harding Davis (1904). “Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography”, p.129, Vanderbilt University Press

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