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More "Littleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... birthright; a purity that could not for an instant be doubted. If the libertine gazed on her features, it awoke in him recollections that had long slumbered; of the time when his heart beat but for one. If, in her immediate sphere, any littleness of feeling was brought to her notice, it was met with an intuitive doubt, followed by painful surprise, that such feeling, foreign as she felt it to be to her own nature, could really have ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... system is presented to me as an Orrery of the apparent size of the area of landscape seen from the hill-top; but dimness and darkness prevent the diminution from communicating that appearance of littleness to the whole which would attach to it, were it, like an actual Orrery, sharply defined and clear. As the picture rises before me, the entire system seems to possess, what I suspect it wants, its atmosphere like that of the earth, which ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... with your heart, in your mind you can be one with me. You feel the great and the beautiful things of life. There is no littleness in your nature. In reading with you just now I saw that your delight in poetry was as spirit-deep as my own; your voice had the true music, and your cheeks warmed with sympathy. You do not deny me the right to claim so much kinship ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Yet Boswell presumes to pronounce Goldsmith's inattention affected and attributes it to jealousy. "It was strongly suspected," says he, "that he was fretting with chagrin and envy at the singular honor Dr. Johnson had lately enjoyed." It needed the littleness of mind of Boswell to ascribe such pitiful motives to Goldsmith, and to entertain such exaggerated notions of the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... that the conduct of Francis was maintained with an equality of fervor, and they found a high degree of wisdom in what appeared to the generality of the world to be littleness of mind and folly. These opinions gradually spread and brought over many to esteem and venerate him; even those who had despised and insulted him, came forward to solicit his forgiveness. The prior of the monastery where he had served in the kitchen, who was then at Assisi, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... short straight grooves of Lord Fawn's intellect the remembrance of this supposed wrong was always running up and down, renewing its own soreness. He regarded Greystock as an enemy who would lose no opportunity of injuring him. In his weakness and littleness he was quite unable to judge of other men by himself. He would not go a hair's breadth astray, if he knew it; but because Greystock had, in debate, called him timid and tyrannical, he believed that Greystock would stop short of nothing that ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... not to forgetfulness the soul of the poor man, which cleaves to thee with the bonds of charity, and forget not the soul of thy poor man for ever.[963] For neither, as it were anew, do we commend ourselves unto you[964] when now for a long time we glory in the Lord[965] that our littleness has been worthy to find grace in the sight of your holiness;[966] but we pray that our affection, no longer new, may advance with new accessions day by day. We commend to you our sons, yea also yours, and the more earnestly because they are ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... admiration. They do their very best to induce us to join in their hymns of praise. 'Grandison,' says a Roman Catholic bishop, 'were he one of us, might expect canonisation.' 'How,' exclaims his uncle, after a conversation with his paragon of a nephew, 'how shall I bear my own littleness?' A party of reprobates about town have a long dispute with him, endeavouring to force him into a duel. At the end of it one of them exclaims admiringly, 'Curse me, if I believe there is such another man in the world!' 'I never saw a hero till now,' says another. 'I had rather ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... rather scandalized his father who had grown up in the conventional school of unbounded, unreasoning reverence for the Hebrew, Greek and Keltic classics. From that they passed to the great problems, the undeterminable problems of the Universe; the awful littleness of men—mere lice, perhaps, on the scurfy body of a shrinking, dying planet of a fifth-rate sun, one of a billion other suns. The Revd. Howel like most of the Christian clergy of all times of course never looked at the midnight sky or gave any thought to the terrors ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... is such open-work, that these infinitesimal billows are not much, though somewhat, broken by it; but when they reach the terraqueous globe itself, they dash into foam which goes whirling and eddying down into solids and liquids, among their wild caverns of ultra-microscopic littleness, and this foam or whirl-storm of ethereal substance is heat, if we are not much mistaken. According to its intensity, it expands by its own mere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... not far to seek. Persons of the social grade of Mackenzie were inconceivably odious to this "diner-out of the first water;" while men like Bidwell and Baldwin made him painfully conscious of his own littleness and insufficiency for the task which he had undertaken. Yet he could not venture to call to his Council any of the remnant of the Tory Compact, and thereby utterly ignore the Liberal principles which were presumed to have dictated his appointment. The Tories, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... entreaties. Mrs. Rose was delighted with the success of Lady Acacia and Mrs. Larch in their solicitations with the Forest and Fir Trees, whose majestic appearance and respectable characters she imagined would dignify her fete, never considering her own littleness might appear to them despicable; but from them she had nothing to fear, as they were too well bred to attend any meeting to ridicule it. 'Tis true when they did grace a public entertainment they kept chiefly together, and ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... settlement of Connecticut, of New Haven, as well as of Rhode Island. The noble minds of the younger Winthrop, of Eaton, no more than that of Roger Williams, could shrivel themselves into the nutshell littleness of the Massachusetts Bay Government—so called, indeed, by courtesy, or by way of accommodation, rather than as conveying a proper idea of a Government, as it consisted solely of Congregationalists, who alone were eligible to office and eligible as electors to office, and was therefore more properly ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Samaritan littleness raised a terrible barrier between the two nations, which grew ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... hast thou outraged my honour and entered my house and played the traitor with me and tookest no thought unto that which I have done thee of benefits?" "O king," answered the youth, "I did this not of my choice and freewill and I had no [evil] intent in being there; but, of the littleness of my luck, I was driven thither, for that fate was contrary and fair fortune lacking. Indeed, I had striven with all endeavour that nought of foul should proceed from me and kept watch over myself, lest default ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... on Versailles, it is a dismal habitation. The apartments are dark, ill-furnished, dirty, and unprincely. Take the castle, chapel, and garden all together, they make a most fantastic composition of magnificence and littleness, taste, and foppery. After all, it is in England only, where we must look for cheerful apartments, gay furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a strange incongruity in the French genius. With all their volatility, prattle, and ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... single section of society, which included every one of note and every one in it knew their faults and their failings; they were not afraid of offending constituents or of being lectured in leading articles. Thus their littleness, rather than their greatness, was apt to impress a daily observer like Selwyn, and to give to his remarks an aspect of depreciation ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the folk saw him, and how slim and light and small he looked beside their champion, and they beheld the Raven painted on his white shield, they hooted and laughed for scorn of him and his littleness. But he tossed his sword up lightly and caught it by the hilts as it fell, and drew nigher to the champion of the sea and stood facing him within reach of his sword. Then the chieftain on the high-seat put his two hands to his mouth ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... them; whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the grave of another must work sadness in God. Yet Sainte-Helene did not know any young supplanter was there. He did not miss or care for the fickle vanity of applause; he did not torment himself with the spectres of the mind, or feel himself shrinking with the littleness of jealousy; he did not hunger for a love that was not in the world, or waste a Titan's passion on a human ewe any more. For him, the aching and bewilderment, exaltations and self-distrusts, animal gladness and subjection to the ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... whether it is littleness or greatness, Robert, that must escape minutiae," said his companion, apparently his wife. "If we could reach to the particles, perhaps we ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... don't. I reckon you can. But I believe you're still as blind as I've been about Main Street, just the same. I know Chicago pretty well and I doubt if there's as big a percentage of graft and littleness and dollar-pinching and going to the devil generally on State Street or Wabash Avenue as there ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... own, with its young curves and sharpnesses made wistful by the moonlight. She did not know why, but was suddenly filled with a sort of aching, protective pity when she heard those words mingling with the sound of the sea. It was Wilf's youngness and littleness in the face of that immensity. "Five thousand pounds before I die!" And the sea beating on the ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... values not it, but the exercise of getting it; viewing his actual achievement, he is apt to reflect, "Is this pitiful thing, then, all that I toiled for?" Finer natures often experience a keen depression and sense of littleness in the pause that follows a success. But the fool is so swollen by thought of his victory that he is unfit for all healthy work till somebody jags him and lets the gas out. He never forgets the great thing he fancies he did thirty years ago, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... replied Rose: "I have always a strong wish where you are concerned, and your happiness. I hesitated whilst I was in doubt, but I doubt no longer: I have had a long talk with him. He has shown me his whole heart: he is the best, the noblest of creatures: he has no littleness or meanness. And then he is a thorough man; I know that by his being the very opposite of a woman in his ways. Now you are a thorough woman, and so you will suit one another to a T. I have decided: so no more ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... said, with a smile, "the world cares little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and true. What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in river or washbowl, or not at all? Let's leave all that littleness, and look higher." Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down. A painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue, save the last word about baptism; ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... here far from being at home. Jerusalem was then nearly what it is to-day, a city of pedantry, acrimony, disputes, hatreds, and littleness of mind. Its fanaticism was extreme, and religious seditions very frequent. The Pharisees were dominant; the study of the Law, pushed to the most insignificant minutiae, and reduced to questions of casuistry, was the only study. This exclusively theological and canonical culture contributed in ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... years it might be truly said "clarum et venerabile nomen"—exercised on all with whom he was connected. If indeed he had a fault, it was that his standard of action was so high, his nature so absolutely above the littleness of ordinary life, that he attributed to inferior men far purer and more unselfish objects than those that really moved them. "Vixit enim tanquam in Platonis politeia, non tanquam ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... stewed since George III. The worst of it is, as the House gets more and more divided (like the French Chambers) into sets, it also becomes more and more incapable of getting through its business, and the littleness of the individual members becomes daily ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... transparent air. Such a sky!—of such etherealized purity as if made for spirits to travel in and tempting them to rise and free themselves from the soil; and the stillness,—like nature's hand laid upon the soul, bidding it think. In view of all that vastness and grandeur, man's littleness does bespeak itself. And yet, for every one, the voice of the scene is not more humbling to pride than rousing to all that is really noble and strong in character. Not only "What thou art,"—but "What thou mayest be!" What place thou oughtest to fill,—what ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... from the littleness of their surroundings; but he only is great who is great amid greatness. Lincoln had great associates,—Seward, the sagacious diplomatist; Chase, the eminent financier; Stanton, the incomparable Secretary of War; with illustrious Senators and soldiers. Neither could take his part nor fill his position. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... sprinkled with thin ashes; here the hearth had no doubt been, and the chimney in falling had covered it with rubbish. I stood for some time in silent admiration of the exuberance of Nature and the littleness of man: and when I was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, I exclaimed with melancholy, "Are ruins, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... injustice. He would cheerfully have watched the whole world depart from him, if he had had the consciousness of righting in a good cause. He had thought scornfully of the people who had betrayed their littleness by ignoring him. But what if they had been right, and his had been ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... might be known among the initiated as single Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical jokes ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and general prosperity;—at the same time, strange retardations in things of social concern; a singular want of earnestness in carrying out objects of undeniable utility. Much grandeur, but also much meanness of conception; much wealth, but also much poverty. A struggle between greatness and littleness; intelligence and ignorance; light and darkness. Sometimes we feel as if going forward, sometimes as if backward. One day, we seem as if about to start a hundred years in advance; on the next, all is wrong somewhere, and we feel as if hurriedly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of life are embittered! My father-in-law was perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... in no way elated by his change of fortune, and showed himself free from a very common littleness of mind, for he spent the rest of the day among us forward, talking and chatting with all hands as freely as before; and while he was packing his chests, he managed to find some little present as a keepsake for each of us. Then ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... inspiration on the subject which Marcus Aurelius in his coldness had denied to her. "From you, who have so nobly claimed for mankind the divine attributes of free action! From you, who have taught my mind to soar above the petty bonds which one man in his littleness contrives for the subjection of his brother. Mackinnon! you who are so great!" And she now looked up into his ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... its object on account of a comparison with others. The question then is, how from the same impression and the same idea we can form such different judgments concerning the same object, and at one time admire its bulk, and at another despise its littleness. This variation in our judgments must certainly proceed from a variation in some perception; but as the variation lies not in the immediate impression or idea of the object, it must lie in some ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the "common rights of mankind," the virulence of party may be suspected. It is, perhaps, true, that in the clamour, raised throughout the kingdom, Johnson overheated his mind; but he was a friend to the rights of man, and he was greatly superior to the littleness of spirit, that might incline him to advance what he did not think and firmly believe. In the False Alarm, though many of the most eminent men in the kingdom concurred in petitions to the throne, yet Johnson, having well surveyed the mass ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... the expedition. I was one of the witnesses who signed this instrument, in which Pedrarias released and assigned over all his interest in Peru to Almagro and his associates, - by this act deserting the enterprise, and, by his littleness of soul, for feiting the rich treasures which it is well known he might have acquired from the golden empire ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... that confoundedly careless, devil-may-care countenance of yours. I say with inward satisfaction, because, with my usual candour, I don't mind admitting that I am shivering in my shoes. The shadow of the august presence is already falling on me, and as the hour draws near I feel my littleness, my utter insignificance, with an acuteness which almost compels me to ask you to let me get down and make my way back to ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient, phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the other hand there ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... operation around, that the feelings are irritated at the imagined audacity of the inanimate object, with the self-conceit of its impotence; and, finally, the eye is offended at its want of size. It does not, as might be at first supposed, enhance the sublimity of surrounding scenery by its littleness, for it provokes no comparison; and there must be proportion between objects, or they cannot be compared. If the Parthenon, or the Pyramid of Cheops, or St. Peter's, were placed in the same situation, the mind would first ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... for the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... wastes. And I am not at all angry because you sing us the same old song about the English ploughs and arboriculture and silviculture. Not in the least. Men of such great, such very great merit, may be excused for the contempt which they manifest for our littleness. No, no, my friend; no, no, Senor Don Jose! you are entitled to say any thing you please, even to tell us that we are not ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... uniform, enabled him with very peculiar dignity to declare that his present degradation, from the General's point of view, was a just punishment, and he did not crave to have it abated. She remarked that it must end soon. He made a dim allusion to the littleness of humanity. She laughed. "It's the language of an unfortunate lover," she said, and straightway, in some undistinguished sentence, brought the name of Countess Alessandra Ammiani tingling to his ears. She feared that she could not be of service ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of his best and oldest friends, he discovered signs of a highly nervous and fretful temperament. It must be admitted that the dominant qualities of nobility and generosity in his nature were alloyed by suspicion bordering on littleness, and by petulant yieldings to the irritation of the moment which are incompatible with the calm of ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... will never be revealed, through the eternal ages. If men would but search and understand what God has made known of Himself and His purposes, they would obtain such a view of the glory, majesty, and power of Jehovah, that they would realize their own littleness, and would be content with that which has been revealed for themselves ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... in the deepening darkness. Placed as we are at an enormous height, in the wide, free atmosphere, we seem already to have quitted this miniature country, already to be freed from the impression of littleness which it has given us, and from the little links by which it was beginning ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... staying with me during the past few days. It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of his open, generous nature, and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than if he were an ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, as is his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none, except the education of his son, in which ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... vastness, but these are dependent on our own imperfections, and therefore, though they produce sublimity, they are unconnected with beauty. For that which we foolishly call vastness is, rightly considered, not more wonderful, not more impressive, than that which we insolently call littleness, and the infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable, not concealed, but incomprehensible: it is a clear infinity, the darkness of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... with the [Hebrew: wpT iwral]. The Judge of Israel in his deepest abasement, is here contrasted with the Ruler of Israel in His highest divine glory. The connection is seen also in the indication of Bethlehem's natural littleness, as contrasted with the greatness to be bestowed upon it by God. What could have induced the prophet thus strongly to point out this circumstance, had it not been that he considered Bethlehem as the type of the Jewish people in their misery, described in the preceding verse, and the miraculous ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... times mingled, and even that the proportions of the mixture vary less than one would think. Cousin says somewhere, "In a great age all is great." It is just the contrary that is true: there is no age so great that there is not much littleness about it; and if we undertake to study history we should expect this, so as not to reckon without our host. No epoch has been more celebrated, more admired, than the reign of Louis XIV.; there is danger lest the correspondence of Madame de Sevigne may much abate the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... materials, as well as workmen, for ship-building, that the navy of France might speedily retrieve its former importance. In the midst of these truly patriotic schemes, the court of Versailles betrayed a littleness of genius, and spirit of tyranny, joined to fanaticism, in quarreling with their parliament about superstitious forms of religion. The sacraments had been denied to a certain person on his death-bed, because he refused to subscribe to the bull Unigenitus. The nephew of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... veneration, with which he was regarded during his lifetime, has passed away; the violent reaction, which followed, has spent itself; and the world can now, I think, bear to hear the truth, and to see the man exhibited as he was,—a strange mixture of greatness and littleness, virtues and vices. I have all his works, and shall take them in my cabin on the voyage. But my library is not particularly rich in those books which illustrate the literary history of his times. I have Rousseau, and Marmontel's Memoirs, and Madame du Deffand's Letters, and perhaps a few other ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... agreement; (b) or it may itself be agreed upon, while the details are still objects of dispute. But in that case the large thought, having put the details in proper perspective, prevents unpleasant conflict by revealing their comparative littleness. Also, agreement on the large point convinces each disputant of the other's partial sanity, at least, and thus preserves harmony; (c) or, finally, the principle itself may become an object of dispute. Even then the largeness ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... a house at Athens, being asked by one that observed the littleness of the design why a man so eminent would not have an abode more suitable to his dignity, he replied that he should think himself sufficiently accommodated if he could see that narrow ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... Society, a Shelter for Homeless Girls, a library, an Invalid Children's Dinner, a bath-room and lavatory, a Flower Mission, and—hear it, ye who fancy that a penny stands very low in the scale of financial littleness—a Farthing Bank! All this free—conducted by an unpaid band of considerably over a hundred Christian workers, male and female—and leavening the foundations of society, without which, and similar missions, there would be very few leavening ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... cried Benassis. "It was a pleasure to hear you say over again what I have so often said in the midst of this avenue. There is something holy about this place. Here, we are like two mere specks; and the feeling of our own littleness always brings us ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... ruthless and of things so wondrously mean. Upon a bargain so shameless he had built so wondrous a career—a faithfulness of service so magnificent he had closed with a treachery so base. All greatness and all littleness, all heroism and all crimes, seemed to combine themselves in this one strange being. Having shamelessly sold his youth to a King's mistress, he devoted his splendid maturity to a tender, faithful passion for a beauteous virago, whose displeasure was the sole thing on earth ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would be better, Sir, to send the men away,' said he to the Colonel, for he was a much privileged subaltern. He put his arms round the rag-bound horror as he spoke, and dropped him into a chair. It may not have been explained that the littleness of Mildred lay in his being six feet four and big in proportion. The Corporal, seeing that an officer was disposed to look after the capture, and that the Colonel's eye was beginning to blaze, promptly removed himself ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... organization of the girls and women of the community. It is true that the matter may be overdone and we may have such a thing as activity merely for the sake of activity. It was Carlyle who said that some people are noted for "fussy littleness and an infinite deal of nothing." The golden mean should ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... a crowd of his compeers. Hence a certain indocility and rigidness of mind which they only escape who live out of the fashion or have strength to lead it or to live above it. Simple, whether from greatness or littleness, they escape the narrowing influence inseparable from being identified, even in their own mind, with a school or coterie; and can afford to say things ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tell all about it. God knows that I try to be simple enough, to keep to His meaning in me, and not make the worst of His children. Yet often have I been put to shame, and ready to bite my tongue off, after speaking amiss of anybody, and letting out my littleness, when suddenly mine eyes have met the pure ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... peace I realised that in some inexplicable way I was interested in the body of a little boy, whose hands obeyed my unspoken wishes, whose legs sprawled before me on the sofa. I knew that before I met him, this boy, whose littleness surprised me, had suffered ill dreams in a nameless world, and now, worn out with tears and humiliation and dread of life, he slept, and while he slept I watched him dispassionately, as I would have looked at a crippled ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... of Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old dwelling and its princely gardens, I feel like a grasshopper that, chirping about the grounds, escaped the scythe only by my littleness. Even now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe me out, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... i'th' streets on a neet, seem to be druffen. Aw hear some queer tales sometimes, but aw dooant tell all aw know. 'Ale sellers shouldn't be tale tellers.' But aw'm sooary to say at th' mooast ale sellers at' aw know are varry fond o' taletellin. Ther's nowt shows a chap's littleness as mich as to be allus talkin abaat his own or somdy else's private affairs; an' ther's nowt likely to produce moor bother nor that system o' tittle tattlin abaat other fowk's consarns. Ther's a deal o' blame ligg'd ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... believing he understands that which it is impossible for any man to understand. In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He feels more vividly than any others can feel, the utter incomprehensibleness of the simplest fact, considered in itself. He alone truly sees ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... after all—a fitting mausoleum for a Desert Rat. Here I come staggering in, with murder in my heart, stultifying my manhood with the excuse that it would be justice in the abstract, and the Lord shows me an example of the vanity and littleness of life. All right, Boston, old man. You win, I guess, but I've got an ace coppered, and even if you do get through, some ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... Jerusalem shall see A unit for his virtue, for his vices No less a mark than million. He, who guards The isle of fire by old Anchises honour'd Shall find his avarice there and cowardice; And better to denote his littleness, The writing must be letters maim'd, that speak Much in a narrow space. All there shall know His uncle and his brother's filthy doings, Who so renown'd a nation and two crowns Have bastardized. And they, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... remember such marks of friendship with a proper degree of sensibility. I am pleased with your idea of paying whatever we owe to Spain. Their pride, perhaps, might forbid them to receive the money. But our pride has been so hurt by the littleness of their conduct, that I would in that case be for leaving it at the gate of the palace, and quit the country. At present such a step would not be expedient, though the time will come when prudence, instead of restraining, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... clothes. What sort of hostilities did Monohan threaten? Had he let a hopeless love turn to the acid of hate for the man who nominally possessed her? Stella could scarcely credit that. It was too much at variance with her idealistic conception of the man. He would never have recourse to such littleness. Still, the biting contempt in Fyfe's voice when he said to Benton: "You underestimate Monohan. He'll play safe ... he's foxy." That stung her to the quick. That was not said for her benefit; it was Fyfe's ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled, combated, worried, distempered, and he makes a pure loss of immense efforts to surmount miseries unworthy ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... left, by the measure of the clustering dark barges, the teeming trams, the streaming crowds of people, the note of the human process that sounds so loud there. She felt small even to herself, for the touch of beauty saves us from our own personalities, makes Gods of us to our own littleness. She passed under the railway bridge at Charing Cross, watched the square cluster of Westminster's pinnacles rise above her until they were out of sight overhead, ran up the little incline and round into Parliament Square, and was ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... the littleness and spite, The falsehood and the treachery of men, I cried, "Give me but justice!" thinking then I meekly craved a common boon which might Most easily be granted; soon the light Of deeper truth grew on my wondering ken, (Escaping baneful damps of stagnant fen), And then I saw that ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... forgot her troubles in the exceeding majesty and beauty of the place. The power of very exquisite beauty, which always and in all forms testifies to another world where its source and its realization are, came down upon her spirit, and hushed it as with a breath of balm; and the littleness of this life, of any one individual's life, in the midst of the efforts here made to deny it, stood forth in most impressive iteration. Betty was awed and quieted for a minute. Mr. and ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... self-forgetting spirit which has always distinguished this remarkable performer, and which is not the least of her titles to the grand name of artiste. Here seems to be as little as possible of vain show of self; nothing at all of that jealous littleness which tolerates no companions either as composers or interpreters; the maximum of appreciation and reverence for the great authors, and of devotion to the best and worthiest in music. In the concert of last evening Madam Urso carried the higher principle so far that, ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... pleasure, that those pleasures which are very small are often obscured and overwhelmed. But that kind has not so many advantages of body, nor any which last so long, or are so great. Therefore, in those in which obscuration follows because of their littleness, it often happens that we confess that it makes no difference to us whether they exist at all or not; just as when the sun is out, as you yourself said, it is of no consequence to add the light of a candle, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... account to render in the end. There is no more despicable character than a finished "manoeuverer." It implies a meanness, that can pry into the corners of others' affairs, an indolence, that neglects one's own proper business, and a mental vacuity, and a littleness of purpose, which are the dread of every noble mind. Beware of the impertinence of such persons. Be very sure that you give not your hand and heart where they point, instead of following, as you ought, your own good sense, and ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization, he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... "civis sum Romanus" without putting my hand into my pocket, in order that these officers of the Great Queen may not take too ruinously from a revenue of fifty-six millions! Oh the meanness of our magnificence! the littleness of our greatness! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... His absolute immensity solely by Himself," while, "by the little mind of man, He is reduced to littleness that suits man's faculty." In these words, and others that might be quoted, the poet shows that he is profoundly impressed with the distinction between human knowledge, and that knowledge which is adequate to the whole nature and extent of being. And in Christmas-Eve he ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... surely resembled the violence of Africa. There was something terrible about it, yet also something noble, for it suggested a male power, which might make for either good or evil, but which had nothing to do with littleness. For a moment Count Anteoni and the priest were dwarfed, as if they had come into the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... requiems of sadness chanted in the great highways and quiet bypaths of life—the living of bygone ages are slumbering quietly in the dust, and the living of the present are hurrying to the same 'pale realms of shade.' The nations of antiquity have passed off the stage with all their grandeur and littleness, and the nations of more modern times are surging and dashing to and fro, like ships in the wild chaos of ocean's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... was no gradation. For so long a time had he looked at the larger, broader situations of life that his mental vision had become all deformed and confused. He saw things invariably magnified beyond all proportion, or else dwarfed to a littleness that was beneath consideration. Normal vision was denied him. It was as though he studied the world through one or the other ends of a telescope, and when, as at present, his emotions were aroused, matters were only made the ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... title-page. Instead of "a holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable watering-place—and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him as it has ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... to have children educated in the common schools of this country, where a littleness of soul is notorious. The masters are mean spirited wretches, pinching, kicking, and boxing the children upon every turn. There is, besides, a general littleness, arising from the incessant contemplation of stivers and doits, which pervades ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... of his contemporaries, of producing 'scandalous Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own calmer and wiser utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an heroic attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world, his indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and we know from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from the attribution to his pen of writings ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... stolidity or lethargy; far otherwise. Nor does it mean sluggishness, apathy or phlegmatism; quite the contrary. It does mean depth as opposed to shallowness, bigness as opposed to littleness, and vision as opposed to spiritual myopia. It means dignity, poise, aplomb, balance. It means that there is sufficient ballast to hold the ship steady on its way, no matter how much sail it spreads. When we see serenity, we are quite ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... have said: "I must have another continent to keep the earth's balance true." And I must have the personal conscious future, which is to right the wrongs of the ages, if I am to believe and preach the faithfulness of God. But we must guard against an impatience which is our littleness. In the immense times of the Almighty, every dark mystery of human being can move away, and leave the "sky of Providence at last, arching over the soul with not a cloud to dim its stars." For my present faith I hold it true with ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... compared with the great events which are ruled by our heavenly Father's will, how much is involved in them as far as we are concerned! and we need not measure the controlling care of Providence by the abstract greatness or littleness of any event. Compared with His infinity, the fate of an empire would be not more worthy of His care than the least event of our lives; but it is love—the same wonderful love that can comfort and bless the dying-pillow of a little one, in which we want more practical faith for our ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... contemplation of the life from which he came and to which he will return, and—one almost dare say—in communication with which he now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as nothing, so short ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... people's creed, he must have divorced himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile. Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage—a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners, the customs are of all varieties and places—Egypt, with its ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... stands side by side with man, his equal in the eye of the law as well as the Creator, will the high destiny of the race be accomplished. She is the mother of the race, and every stain of littleness or inferiority cast upon her by our institutions will soil the offspring she sends into the world, and clip and curtail to that extent his fair proportions. If we would abrogate that littleness of her character which finds a delight ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... admiration for French literature which has had a refreshing effect upon his style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs—out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes, so long ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... shadeless solar blaze Hath forced my vision toward the sod; 'Tis night alone that helps us raise Our thoughts from littleness to God, And by its darkness sets us free To gaze across what seems to ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... I am sure—this is new since I have known you—that if such a great love as ours be withdrawn it would be an unpardonable wrong for either of us to marry again. That is what puzzles me—confounds the wisdom I used to have, and which in my littleness and pride I thought so sufficient. I didn't believe in God, but now I feel him, through you, though I cannot define him. And one of many reasons why I could not believe in Christ was because I took it for granted that he taught, among other things, a continuation of the marriage relation after love ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Prof. Denslow,[33] does not hesitate to express the opinion very emphatically that "as it is, in no country do the people feel such an overwhelming sense of the littleness of the men in charge of public affairs" as in the United States. And in another place he dwells on the fact that "responsible government educates office-holders into a high and honourable sense of their accountability to the people," and makes "statesmanship a permanent ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... too, with broken legs, which was invaluable—for, as Lady de Brantefield confidently affirmed, King John of France, and the Black Prince, had sat and supped at it. I marvelled much in silence—for I had been sharply reproved for some observation I had unwittingly made on the littleness and crookedness of a dark, corner-chimneyed nook shown us for the banqueting-room; and I had fallen into complete disgrace for having called the winding staircases, leading ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... an irresistible impulse to attempt its removal. I could not turn a deaf ear to the cries of the slaves, nor throw off the obligations which my Creator had fastened upon me. Yet in view of the inequalities of the contest, of the obstacles which towered like mountains in my path, and of my own littleness, I trembled, and exclaimed in the language of Jeremiah,—'Ah, Lord God! behold I cannot speak: for I am a child.' But I was immediately strengthened by these interrogations: 'Is any thing too hard for the Lord?' Is Error, though unwittingly supported by a host of good men, stronger ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... little pivots on which the works of your watch turn are so important that they are actually made of jewels. And so God places a solemn value and responsibility on the humble workers, the people that try to hide behind their insignificance the trifling opportunities and the single talents; and our littleness will not excuse us ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... Their infinite universe, after all, is not an "absolute," but a "relative" infinite; that is, the indefinite. "The universe must extend indefinitely in time and space, in the infinite greatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts—in the infinite variety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of existence. The finite can not express the infinite but by being multiplied infinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in any reasonable relation, or in any ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... had forsaken God, and had not kept His commandments, and were disobedient to our priests, who admonished us for our salvation. And the Lord brought down upon us the anger of His Spirit, and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where now my littleness may be seen amongst strangers. And there the Lord showed me my unbelief, that at length I might remember my iniquities, and strengthen my whole heart towards the Lord my God, who looked down upon my humiliation, and had pity upon my youth and ignorance, and kept me before I ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... say, the powers of nature, which had hitherto slumbered quietly, now came into play. The breeze freshened and a tremendous storm of thunder, lightning, and rain came on, as if to mock the fury of man, and humble him under a sense of his relative littleness. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... aspirations, he argues with a sarcastic smile on his lips, he is ironical with sophisticated sharpness. Satan has unconsciously gigantic ideas, he is ready to wrestle with God for the dominion of heaven. Mephistopheles is perfectly conscious of his littleness as opposed to our better intellectual nature, and does evil for evil's sake. Satan is sublime through the grandeur of his primitive elements, pride and ambition. Mephistopheles is only grave in his pettiness; he does not refuse an orgie with drunken students, indulges in jokes ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... undoubtedly, overwrought at times. There were days when the sight of a book filled me with physical nausea, with contempt for the littleness, the narrow outlook, that seemed to me to characterise every written work. I was fiercely, but quite impotently, eager at such times to demonstrate the futility of all the philosophy ranged on the rough wooden shelves in my gloomy sitting-room. I would walk up and down ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... pointed solemnly to Heaven, and the beauty of the night lay upon them like a cloud. Everywhere was silence—silence in the starred depths, silence on the bosom of the sleeping earth. Now, if ever, great thoughts might rise in a man's mind, and for a space he might forget his littleness in the sense that he partook of the pure ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... For non-commission'd mice to mind) Stick in the entrance as they go, And there are taken by the foe, Who, greedy of the victim, gluts With mouse-flesh his ungodly guts. Each great and national distress Must chiefly mighty men oppress; While folks subordinate and poor Are by their littleness secure. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... of being turn, Where a ne'er-setting sun illumes the year Eternal, and the incessant watch-fires burn Of unspent holiness and goodness clear,— Forget man's littleness, deserve the best, God's mercy in thy thought and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... littleness! It is composed, as it were, of three courts, all open to the eye at once, and gradually diminishing till you come to the royal apartments, which on this side present but half a dozen windows and a balcony. This last is all that can be called a front, for the rest is only great wings. The hue of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... saviour of his country, and assumed the air of one who not only kept the king's conscience but controlled the royal will. The story of this famous tour exhibits alike the greatness of his powers and the littleness of his character.[121] The homage paid to him was not undeserved, for he was assuredly the foremost gladiator of the whig party, and had given proofs of more varied ability than any living politician ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... familiarize myself with the break so I would have a landmark. Like horns and spurs of gold the pinnacles loomed up. Massed closely together, they were not unlike an astounding pipe-organ. I had a feeling of my littleness, that I was lost, and should devote every moment and effort to the saving of my life. It did not seem possible I could be hunting. Though I climbed diagonally, and rested often, my heart pumped so hard I could hear it. A yellow crag, with ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... humility. It proves its integrity by not seeking for anything, but simply trusting His grace. And so it is the very strength of a great faith, and gets a full answer. "Yet the dogs"—let that be your plea as you persevere for someone possibly possessed of the devil. Let not your littleness hinder you ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... neither take away from, nor add to his poetical reputation. There is, occasionally, a littleness of manner, and an unnecessary degree of caution. He appears anxious to say a good thing in every word, as well as every sentence. They, however, give a very favourable idea of his moral character in all respects; and his letters to Atterbury, in his disgrace and exile, do equal honour ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... hours I'd spend in viewing The elemental strife, My soul the while subduing With the littleness of life; Of life, with all its paltry plans, Its conflicts and its cares— The feebleness of all that's man's— The might that's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... hundred around you; but a sense of those myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impression in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman. For the time, one would have been preposterously conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd; you never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling the battle or the storm, in a collective ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Hemans—those lessons in English literature, meant by the authorities to be as innocuous to her as to her sisters, had opened her eyes in a way nothing else could have done to the width of the world and the littleness of Kunitz. With that good teacher, as eager to lead as she to follow, she wandered down the splendid walks of culture, met there the best people of all ages, communed with mighty souls, heard how they talked, saw how they lived, and none, not one, lived and ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... nothing but anger. "It's impotence and weakness on your part, that's all it is!" he cast out at her, hating her savagely as he spoke, "no matter what fine words you've decided to call it to cloak your own feebleness. It's the littleness of the vital spark in you. Or it's cowardly inertia, turning from the real fulfilment that calls for you, back to chips and straw because you are used to them. It's being a small, poor, weak, cowed creature, traditional-minded, instead of the splendid, brave, living woman I thought ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of her eyes, combined with their spirited womanliness: these, while they completed the conquest of the young man, abashed him. He found himself of a sudden endowed with a painful appreciation of his own imperfections, the littleness of his ego, the inherent coarseness of his masculine fiber, the poor futility of his ways, contrasted with her perfections. He felt as if rebuked for some unwarrantable presumption.... For he had looked into eyes that were windows of a soul; and ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... comparison it involuntarily courts with the Prometheus of Aeschylus. Both are examples of fortitude under suffering—of the mind's conflict with its fate. In either play a dreary waste, a savage solitude, constitute the scene. But the towering sublimity of the Prometheus dwarfs into littleness every image of hero or demigod with which we contrast it. What are the chorus of mariners, and the astute Ulysses, and the boyish generosity of Neoptolemus—what is the lonely cave on the shores of Lemnos—what the high-hearted ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of every day, I doubt if even now I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it plain, in terms so plain that I ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... given her a most wonderfully strong and valiant spirit: she was once timid; now she tramples on all the evil spirits. She has put far away from herself all the littleness and silliness of women; she is singularly free from ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... fix'd above; Labor's bold son, his blithe and blooming bride, And lisping innocence, and filial love. To such a scene let proud Ambition turn, Whose aching breast conceals it's secret woe; Then shall his fireful spirit melt, and mourn The mild enjoyments it can never know; Then shall he feel the littleness of state, And sigh that Fortune e'er had made ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... Rochester to the effect that Mr. Roach Smith always felt a little "touchy" about the satire on archaeology in Pickwick, in re "Bill Stumps, his mark." That, however, we took cum grano salis, because this gentleman, from his delightful conversation and frank manner, is evidently above any such littleness. He is, however, free to confess, that Dickens had not much love for ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... to feel his treason. But the point of the cogitation was, that similarly were Clara to see her affianced shining, as shine he could when lighted up by admirers, there was the probability that the sensation of her littleness would animate her to take aim at him once more. And then was the time for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no longer littleness and humility; he had paid, as it were, like a gentleman, for Goldenhorns. "Here you are," he could say. "I've brought along a horse; ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... touched the spring of memory, and conscience showed me what it thought of me. I was ashamed of my littleness and of my unscientific attitude of mind in wilfully ignoring the greatest facts of my experience, and I was also ashamed of my ingratitude. And so, in an unguarded moment, that is, in a moment when my will was off its guard ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... battle with me? For when we were [1]together[1] with Scathach and with Uathach and with Aife, [2]thou wast not a man worthy of me, for[2] thou wast my serving-man, even for arming my spear and dressing my bed." "That was indeed true," answered Cuchulain; "because of my youth and my littleness did I so much for thee, but this is by no means my mood this day. For there is not a warrior in the world I would not drive off this day [3]in the field of battle ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... and spring of the great impulse towards the altar, these little faces had separate wills, separate motions, separate knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of the tide, and laughed in triumph of their own very littleness. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... willingness to please and to be pleased. Some men seem to think it beneath them, and a mark of littleness of mind, to wish or to try to please any body, and wrap themselves up in a cold superciliousness. Others seem determined never to be pleased with any thing or any person, but are always finding fault. They have no eye for, no perception ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of congenial minds, a family-likeness in their genius, however it may take a distinct colour from the specific qualities of the men. True, they detracted from each other's merit. In their letters, which are still extant, we find some strokes of mutual hostility. But this littleness does not impeach their eloquence: their jealousy was the infirmity of human nature. Calvus, Asinius, and Cicero, might have their fits of animosity, and, no doubt, were liable to envy, malice, and other degrading passions: they were great orators, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... rearward shelters. For our eyes the field of death vanishes. To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great anvil of the clouds. The sound of universal destruction is still. The squad surrounds itself with the familiar noises of life, and sinks into the fondling littleness of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... must I be confounded in the crowd? Let me preserve my individuality in the desert! If I were not an insect, it might be different; but as I am no larger than other men, I will not daily measure myself by their standard; I will forget in solitude the littleness of my stature. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... is there who has not revelled in the thought of something new, the eager desire to see something fresh? The country boy to see vast London with all its greatness and littleness, its splendour and its squalor, its many cares and too often false joys—the town boy to plunge into that home of mystery and wonder, the country. And though as a rule the country boy is disappointed, he of the town, when ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... sir, to send the men away,' said he to the colonel, for he was a much privileged subaltern. He put his arms round the ragbound horror as he spoke, and dropped him into a chair. It may not have been explained that the littleness of Mildred lay in his being six feet four and big in proportion. The corporal seeing that an officer was disposed to look after the capture, and that the colonel's eye was beginning to blaze, promptly removed himself and his men. ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... abacus. They are covered with paintings and sculptures, the colors of which are wonderfully fresh and vivid. If, as seems probable, the great design of Egyptian architecture was to impress man with a feeling of his own littleness, to inspire a sense of overwhelming awe in the presence of the Deity, and at the same time to show that the monarch was a being of superhuman greatness, these edifices were well adapted to accomplish their purpose. The Egyptian beholder and worshiper ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... according to his own capacity, caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to himself alone, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization, he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... end. There is no more despicable character than a finished "manoeuverer." It implies a meanness, that can pry into the corners of others' affairs, an indolence, that neglects one's own proper business, and a mental vacuity, and a littleness of purpose, which are the dread of every noble mind. Beware of the impertinence of such persons. Be very sure that you give not your hand and heart where they point, instead of following, as you ought, your own good sense, and the ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... the history of the Carbonari, who troubled by their plots the reign of Louis XVIII., he says:—"This Carbonarism never descended into the depths of society; it never moved the lower strata. How, then, could it be preserved from the vices of the middle class—egoism, littleness of ideas, extreme love of a mere material happiness, gross instincts!"—(P. 115.) So that he finds Carbonarism to have lacked in virtue, because it had not descended, for its disciples, sufficiently low in the scale of society!—to have grown corrupt, by reason of its not having penetrated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... I'd spend in viewing The elemental strife, My soul the while subduing With the littleness of life; Of life, with all its paltry plans, Its conflicts and its cares— The feebleness of all that's man's— The ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... supernatural glamour to the scene. For nearly two hours I sat as one entranced, until the sun gently lifted the clouds from the valleys, and as with a silver-wrought screen shut off from my eyes the most impressive sight they ever beheld. During this marvelous exhibition the "littleness of man" had been made very painfully lucid. Yet, perhaps, there is nothing so calculated to raise the thoughts, enlarge the mind or purify the heart as the contemplation of the sublime and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... that those pleasures which are very small are often obscured and overwhelmed. But that kind has not so many advantages of body, nor any which last so long, or are so great. Therefore, in those in which obscuration follows because of their littleness, it often happens that we confess that it makes no difference to us whether they exist at all or not; just as when the sun is out, as you yourself said, it is of no consequence to add the light of a candle, or to add ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... men to see far or to do brilliantly; but to him it was given, and he must be what he was cut out to be. There was no more escaping the greatness that was inherent in him than there was for so many others the littleness ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... were conceited—and—selfish. We thought about ourselves mostly when we came here last September, but York Hill has made us despise our littleness and long to be bigger and broader; some of us didn't know how to use our bodies or our brains, but the School has taught us how to be true sports and how to think straight; some of us had mighty small ideals about what things really mattered; but York ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of man's incompleteness. A witness more overwhelming is the prayer of the Christian. What a very strange thing, is it not, for man to pray? It is the symbol at once of his littleness and of his greatness. Here the sense of imperfection, controlled and silenced in the narrower reaches of his being, becomes audible. Now he must utter himself. The sense of need is so real, and the sense of Environment, that he calls out to it, addressing it articulately, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... into his arms. In the old days God had been always so merciful toward him. At the least sorrow, the slightest obstacle on the path of life, he had been wont to enter a church, where, kneeling down, he would humble his littleness in the presence of Omnipotence. And he had been used to go forth thence, fortified by prayer, fully prepared to give up the good things of this world, possessed by the single yearning for eternal salvation. But at present he only practiced by fits and starts, when the terror ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Man is not fated to a scant allowance nor a fixed amount, but he is allured forward by an unmeasured possibility. Personality may be enlarged and enriched. It has been said that Cromwell was the best thing England ever produced. And the mission of Jesus Christ is to carry each up from littleness to full-orbed largeness. It has always been true that when some genius, e.g., Watt, invents a model the people have reproduced it times innumerable. So what man asks for is not the increase of birth talent, but a pattern after which this raw material can be fashioned. Carbon makes charcoal, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... nor littleness smallness. Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Judah was, in his eyes, one of the least important of his many victories, but it is the only one of them which survives in the world's memory and keeps his name ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reality very small for her age, and everybody called her "little;" but she got very few privileges on account of her youth and littleness. In those days, and especially in a family like Josiah Thayer's, where there were so many children that each had to scratch for itself at an early age or go without, six years was considered comparatively mature, and the child who had ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... it is littleness or greatness, Robert, that must escape minutiae," said his companion, apparently his wife. "If we could reach to the particles, perhaps ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... attending the establishment of Christianity, is the lowly estate of the apostles who have preached it, and the misery and debasement of the Jewish people, so long the depositaries of the promises that announced the coming of Christ. This contrast between the littleness of the means and the greatness of the result, is in a moral point of view, extremely fine; but in painting, which exhibits the means alone, Christian subjects must be less dazzling than those taken from the heroic and fabulous ages. ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... dear Wife—to whom beside so well?— True Counsellor and tried, at every shift, I bring my "Book of Counsels:" let it tell Largeness of love by littleness of gift; ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... friendship with a proper degree of sensibility. I am pleased with your idea of paying whatever we owe to Spain. Their pride, perhaps, might forbid them to receive the money. But our pride has been so hurt by the littleness of their conduct, that I would in that case be for leaving it at the gate of the palace, and quit the country. At present such a step would not be expedient, though the time will come when prudence, instead of restraining, will urge us to ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... heredity involves the action of more wheels within wheels than our imagination can come near to comprehending, and also that it supposes this complexity of action as going on within a compass which no unaided eye can detect by reason of its littleness, so that we are carried into a fairy land with which sober people should have nothing to do, it may be answered that the case of light affords us an example of our being truly aware of a multitude of minute actions, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... says Thomas Campbell, "a Shakespeare's Cleopatra alone could have entangled Shakespeare's Antony." And Shakespeare alone, as declared by Mrs. Jameson, "has dared to exhibit the Egyptian Queen with all her greatness and all her littleness, all her paltry arts and dissolute passions, yet awakened our pity for fallen grandeur without once beguiling us into ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... bound up the fundamental principles of justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of a personal and righteous God. We see the educational effect upon the religious Hebrew of this clearly personal God. It constantly lifted him out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his imagination the loftiest object. It gave definiteness and impressiveness to his best ideals. And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name it now, was but ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... no repugnance—but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments; that a young ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the real motive for it was dislike to the republican artist, and distaste to an act of national resistance against a great military invader. "A bad subject," said he "after all, Leonidas was turned." He had the littleness to expect to be prominent in every picture of national victories of his time, and was displeased at a painting of an action in Egypt for Madame Murat, in which her wounded husband was the principal figure. Power made him impatient of contradiction,[30] ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... which subject and object are taken up and their distinction forgotten or lost. It is at night-fall, in sight of the awful pathway of the stars which, one would think, should fill man with a sense of his immeasurable littleness, it is then that he realises that this boundless splendour is nothing compared to him, for something more than a million worlds is with him, in the eternal Mind whence all this majestic ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... who observed my limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favourite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high. After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... almighty. I had beheld the immemorial works Of endless beings; skirred extinguished worlds; And, gazing on eternity, methought I had borrowed more by a few drops of ages From its immensity: but now I feel My littleness again. Well said the Spirit, That I ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... grooves of Lord Fawn's intellect the remembrance of this supposed wrong was always running up and down, renewing its own soreness. He regarded Greystock as an enemy who would lose no opportunity of injuring him. In his weakness and littleness he was quite unable to judge of other men by himself. He would not go a hair's breadth astray, if he knew it; but because Greystock had, in debate, called him timid and tyrannical, he believed that Greystock would stop ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... her expression matched the word. She shook her head and gazed solemnly into space, as if overpowered by the littleness of the reflection. "Poor Rob—he is incorrigible! I suppose, then, he doesn't care a bit for dinners, or dances, or standing against a wall at a reception, or riding in a string in the Park, but prefers to pore over his microscope, and roam over the ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... slaves with purses, in each a thousand dinars, and I will give him the thousand dinars of the dowry and make him a present of another thousand dinars so that he may recognize my nobility and generosity and greatness of mind and the littleness of the world in my eyes; and for every ten words he will say to me, I will answer him only two. Then I will return to my house, and if any one come to me on the bride's part, I will make him a present of money and clothe him in a robe of honour; but if he bring ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... diameter, has a clear and positive idea of it in his mind, and so can frame one of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and so on, till he has the idea in his thoughts of something very little; but yet reaches not the idea of that incomprehensible littleness which division can produce. What remains of smallness is as far from his thoughts as when he first began; and therefore he never comes at all to have a clear and positive idea of that smallness which is consequent to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... understand. In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He feels more vividly than any others can feel, the utter incomprehensibleness ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost; and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks through love. And I myself am not free, but am a bondsman in bonds.' And another boasts of 'a love without littleness, without weakness; love from age till death, love from folly growing, love that shall send me close beneath the clay, love without a hope of the world, love without envy of fortune, love that left me outside in captivity, love of ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... In the littleness of things, it so happened that at a time when John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake, serious, solemn, side-by- side, were telling the widow of Jimmy Blair that the Tidewater Southern Railroad, in which her husband had largely ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... remains should be spent upon acquisition of religious merit and the gratification of the desire for pleasure. That king who is acquainted with duties and who is possessed of intelligence should never waste what has been stored. The king should never disregard any wealth for its littleness; he should never disregard foes for their powerlessness; he should, by exercising his own intelligence, examine his own self; he should never repose confidence upon persons destitute of intelligence. Steadiness, cleverness, self-restraint, intelligence, health, patience, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the Energy of Divine Love. She felt at once the fugitive character of its apparent existence, the perdurable Reality within which it was held. "I marvelled," she said, "how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the being by the love of God." To this same apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finite expression with its Origin, this search for the inner significance ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... property, feeling that by his strength in that direction he would be pulled through all his little difficulties; but it was an unconscious reliance. He believed that he was perfectly free from what he himself would have called the dirt and littleness of purse-pride—or acre-pride, and would on some occasions assert that he really thought nothing of himself because he was Newton of Newton. And he meant to be true. Nevertheless, in the bottom of his heart, there was a confidence that he might do this and that because ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... herself now sent out for him regularly. For the first time since her association with him she was tempted to compare him to Dick, and that not very favorably; but at the next instant she was reproaching herself with her littleness of vision. He was too great a man to gauge by the ordinary standards of life. Money meant nothing to him except that it was the insignificant means to the end of that Art, which was ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... dreadful thing to say," was a refrain that would keep her awake for hours, wriggling and giggling in her bed over the dreadfulness of it. She had too little egoism. The lack gave her face a look of littleness. A lack of altruism has the same outward effect. A complete face should be full of something, of gentleness, of vigour, of humour, of wickedness. The admirer's face was only half full of anything. All the same there was charm about her, the fact that she was ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... see the snow-clad hills of eternity, and then you will understand how low is the elevation of the heights in the foreground. The greatness of the future makes the present little, but the little present is great, because its littleness is the parent of the great future. 'The child is father of the man'; and earth's narrow range widens out into the infinitude of eternity and of heaven. The only thing that gives real greatness and sublimity to our mortal life is its being the vestibule to another. Historically ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... respectful devoirs; and there was as much pride and haughtiness in Gabrielle's heart as in theirs. Poor thing! she said truly, that "early shadows had darkened her soul," and what had she left but pride? Not an iota of woman's besetting littleness had my sister—noble, generous, self-denying, devoted where she loved; her sweetness had been poisoned, nor had she sought that fountain of living water which alone can purify such bitterness. Gentle in manner, pure in heart, affectionate in disposition, Gabrielle's pride wrought her misery. Lord ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... interest to the spirit of the warrior; it humbles him, to whom the earth is subject, before those mysterious Powers which weigh the destinies of man in their balance, in whose eyes the greatest and the least of mortals scarcely differ in littleness. Wallenstein's confidence in the friendship of Octavio, his disinterested love for Max Piccolomini, his paternal and brotherly kindness, are feelings which cast an affecting lustre over the harsher, more heroic qualities wherewith they are combined. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... quality of the reading that is done. At the beginning of my work with the children I was delighted with their enthusiasm over the books. To be sure their choice was often determined by the attractiveness of the cover or big type, or the bigness or littleness of the book. I soon found that it was a rare thing for a child to read a book through. They would often say with pride "I read 30 or 60 pages" and were unwilling to take the book again, though claiming to like it. It is a slow process, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... we have one of many examples that, in art as well as in nature, gigantic productions precede those that evince regularity of proportion, which again in their turn decline gradually into littleness and insignificance, and that poetry in her earliest appearance attaches itself closely to the sanctities of religion, whatever may be the form which the latter assumes among the various ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... merry place, this town of Boulogne; the little French fishermen's children are beautiful, and the little French soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge pompons on their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged fishermen; there is the town idiot, mocking ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that I afterwards learned might be known among the initiated as single Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... a willing stranger. The halter of Jerusalem shall see A unit for his virtue, for his vices No less a mark than million. He, who guards The isle of fire by old Anchises honour'd Shall find his avarice there and cowardice; And better to denote his littleness, The writing must be letters maim'd, that speak Much in a narrow space. All there shall know His uncle and his brother's filthy doings, Who so renown'd a nation and two crowns Have bastardized. And they, of Portugal And Norway, there shall be expos'd with ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... all—a fitting mausoleum for a Desert Rat. Here I come staggering in, with murder in my heart, stultifying my manhood with the excuse that it would be justice in the abstract, and the Lord shows me an example of the vanity and littleness of life. All right, Boston, old man. You win, I guess, but I've got an ace coppered, and even if you do get through, some day you'll pay ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... that these infinitesimal billows are not much, though somewhat, broken by it; but when they reach the terraqueous globe itself, they dash into foam which goes whirling and eddying down into solids and liquids, among their wild caverns of ultra-microscopic littleness, and this foam or whirl-storm of ethereal substance is heat, if we are not much mistaken. According to its intensity, it expands by its own mere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... entanglements of every day, I doubt if even now I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it plain, in terms so plain that ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Never any relaxing, never any leaving himself to the great hunger and impersonality of passion; he must be brought back to a deliberate, reflective creature. As if from a swoon of passion she caged him back to the littleness, the personal relationship. He could not bear it. "Leave me alone—leave me alone!" he wanted to cry; but she wanted him to look at her with eyes full of love. His eyes, full of the dark, impersonal fire of desire, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the mighty hills! thy crown of snow Thou rearest in the clouds, as if to mock The littleness of human things below; The tempest cannot harm thee, and the shock Of the deep thunder falls upon thy head As the light footfalls of an ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... infinite, of the order and symmetry of the plan of creation, of the proof of the existence of a God, who controls the sweet influences of Pleiades and makes strong the bands of Orion. The unspeakable thought, the unformulated prayer, the poignant sense of individual littleness, of atomic unimportance, in the midst of the vast scheme of the universe, inform every eye, throb in every breast, whether it be of the savant, with all the appliances of invention to bring to his cheated senses the illusion of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... her own, with its young curves and sharpnesses made wistful by the moonlight. She did not know why, but was suddenly filled with a sort of aching, protective pity when she heard those words mingling with the sound of the sea. It was Wilf's youngness and littleness in the face of that immensity. "Five thousand pounds before I die!" And the sea beating on the shore ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... and fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing savants to classify, this man's mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He had a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has clothed our modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and showed that the dullness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:—"His very flight is presence in disguise:" ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... else but what she was,—a pretty little, selfish woman; undeveloped in her conscience and affections, and strong in her instincts and perceptions; in a blind way using what means were most in her line to carry her purposes. Lillie had always found her prettiness, her littleness, her helplessness, and her tears so very useful in carrying her points in life that she resorted to them as her lawful stock in trade. Neither were her blues entirely shamming. There comes a time after marriage, when a husband, if he be any thing of a man, has something else to do than make direct ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for this reputation in both his principles of conduct and his legal abilities. From the first he avoided the littleness and quibble which are the bane of the bar. He had a high notion of what a lawyer should be and of the method and spirit in which he should conduct his cases. He had as much dignity as audacity, a sense of justice as keen as the purpose was ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... and places before itself a career of advancement, to which time itself can never prescribe bounds. But it is not with these high questions that we are at present engaged. We have thrown open the book of human life; we are to read there of this world and its littleness, of the springs of present action, of the relief ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of regulation undoubtedly very wise with regard to the preservation of peace and order, but equally prejudicial to all improvement in the minds or the fortunes of the people, who, fixed invariably to the spot, were depressed with all the ideas of their original littleness, and by all that envy which is sure to arise in those who see their equals attempting to mount over them. This rigid order deadened by degrees the spirit of the English, and narrowed their conceptions. Everything was new to them, and therefore everything was terrible; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... blushing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which takes place at the apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth of the court of Rome—all these sublimities, and many more, make us not know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the raging littleness of the man. Grievous is it to be forced to bring two such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry, I did not feel compelled to do so. But the swarthy Florentine had not the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... listless. An open spot on a mountain side, where a wide look can be had at the heavens and the 'arth, is a most judicious place for a man to get a just idee of the power of the Manitou, and of his own littleness. At such times, there isn't any great disposition to find fault with little difficulties, in the way of comperhension, as there are so many big ones to hide them. Believin' comes easy enough to me at such times, and if the Lord made man first out of'arth, as they tell me it is written ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... might be successfully dared by another. But now—with one ship growing smaller behind them, and the other, containing they knew not what horror of human agony and human helplessness, lying a burning wreck in the black distance ahead of them—they began to feel their own littleness. The Malabar, that huge sea monster, in whose capacious belly so many human creatures lived and suffered, had dwindled to a walnut-shell, and yet beside her bulk how infinitely small had their own frail ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the time Elizabeth was forced to discontinue. She saw Mary Wilson's eyes beaming upon her. Not another face could she distinguish. When the applause ceased, she began again. It was evident she was thinking of nothing else but the injustice and littleness of the act they had been contemplating. She felt deeply, and talked as she felt. For a moment she was an ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile. Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from the narrow littleness of "the peculiar people." The language, as we said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage, a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners, the customs, are ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of this verse is to show that all persons, led by interest, become attached to particular things. The littleness or greatness of those things cannot aid or bar people's way to Emancipation. 'I may be a king, says Janaka, and thou mayst be a mendicant. Neither thy mendicancy nor my royalty can aid or obstruct our Emancipation. Both of us, by Knowledge, can achieve what we wish, notwithstanding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... such universal reach and import, that the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication of providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... you by admitting that I should have found it very unpleasant to meet Mr. Mutimer. You felt that, and hence your kindness. At the same time, no doubt, you pity me for my littleness.' ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... hast stripped wealth and grandeur, leaving them but a shroud, and hast clothed obscurity and poverty with their eternally suggestive robe; thou hast affirmed, and thou preserved, that grim average of life which greatness refuses, which littleness fears, to realize. Romance and Poetry and Fancy are thy wards, making as thou dost the most holden eyes to overleap time's poor horizon, following departed treasure with wistful and unresigning love, as birds follow their ravaged ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... institution which better reveals the character of the French Emperor, with its singular combination of greatness and littleness, of wide-sweeping aims with official pedantry. The University, as it existed during the First Empire, offers a striking example of that mania for the control of the general will which philosophers had so attractively taught and Napoleon so profitably ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... with the littleness and spite, The falsehood and the treachery of men, I cried, "Give me but justice!" thinking then I meekly craved a common boon which might Most easily be granted; soon the light Of deeper truth ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... off strife) 5 For V—ker and for V—ker's Wife— She large and round beyond belief, A superfluity of beef! Her mind and body of a piece, And both composed of kitchen-grease. 10 In short, Dame Truth might safely dub her Vulgarity enshrin'd in blubber! He, meagre bit of littleness, All snuff, and musk, and politesse; So thin, that strip him of his clothing, 15 He'd totter on the edge of Nothing! In case of foe, he well might hide Snug in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Boswell wrote his life. It is one of the most wonderful lives ever written—perhaps the most wonderful. And when we have read it we seem to know Johnson as well as if we had lived with him. We see and know him in all his greatness and all his littleness, in all his weakness ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... of heaven a region worthy her command, it must have been that pale and holy star, which, splendid and alone in the firmament, heralds the approach of day; so unfitted might she have been deemed to mingle with a world less pure, so completely placed by nature above all the littleness of ordinary life. Her noble and majestic form was the casket of a rich and holy treasure, and her father's conscience had often quailed, when contemplating the severity of her youthful virtue. Dearly as he loved ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... of a strange feeling of elation, which he attributed to his being free, and to the fact that he was his own master again in everything. And with this he confessed to a distinct feeling of littleness, of having acted meanly or unworthily of ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... all men of lofty ambition I would recommend a balloon excursion. The higher you get, the smaller and more insignificant do earthly things appear. A balloon is the best pulpit imaginable from which to preach a sermon upon the littleness of mundane realities, first—because no one can hear you, and your congregation cannot therefore be held responsible for indifference to your teaching; and second—because at that height you are fully impressed with the truth of what ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... corner of the stretcher, a few inches suddenly. This would draw a quick intake of the breath from the hurt man and an "aahh"—but not once a word of blame. I should want to curse the careless hand that wrenched my wound, but these soldiers of France and Belgium whom I carried had passed beyond littleness. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... his escape from the Battle of Worcester, and adventures a Boscobel, and in the "Royal Oak." He kept a very minute and amusing diary, in which he neglected not to enter the most trivial matters, even the purchase of a new wig, or a new riband for his wife. This very littleness of detail has made his Memoirs the most extraordinary picture we possess of the times. He appears to have been a coarse but shrewd man, and fully alive to the faults ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... beauty of stature is the only beauty of men. Where there is a contemptible stature, neither the largeness and roundness of the forehead, nor the whiteness and sweetness of the eyes, nor the moderate proportion of the nose, nor the littleness of the ears and mouth, nor the evenness and whiteness of the teeth, nor the thickness of a well-set brown beard, shining like the husk of a chestnut, nor curled hair, nor the just proportion of the head, nor a fresh complexion, nor a pleasing air of a face, nor a body without any offensive ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... mystical kinsmen who supplied advice, and the kind friends who had given him letters to the Presbyterian clergymen at New York and Princeton, had figured without their host. Young Hamilton knew all that Nevis had in store for him: he knew its littleness, its contumely and disgrace, and in the secret recesses of his own strong heart he had slipped the cable that held him to the past. No more remittances from home; no more solicitous advice; no more kind, loving letters—the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... mind; the one man without avarice, anger, pettiness, littleness; the one man generous and truly great of all history. It is enough to make one despair to think of the mere brutes butting to death the great-minded Caesar. He comes nearest to the ideal of a design-power arranging ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... of such a character as this, in its strange mingling of justice and wrong-doing, of grandeur and littleness, that we must look for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in Edward's conduct and policy. But what none of these anomalies can hide from us is the height of moral temper which shows itself ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... good," cried Benassis. "It was a pleasure to hear you say over again what I have so often said in the midst of this avenue. There is something holy about this place. Here, we are like two mere specks; and the feeling of our own littleness always brings us into ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... irresistible impulse to attempt its removal. I could not turn a deaf ear to the cries of the slaves, nor throw off the obligations which my Creator had fastened upon me. Yet in view of the inequalities of the contest, of the obstacles which towered like mountains in my path, and of my own littleness, I trembled, and exclaimed in the language of Jeremiah,—'Ah, Lord God! behold I cannot speak: for I am a child.' But I was immediately strengthened by these interrogations: 'Is any thing too hard ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... on which the works of your watch turn are so important that they are actually made of jewels. And so God places a solemn value and responsibility on the humble workers, the people that try to hide behind their insignificance the trifling opportunities and the single talents; and our littleness will not excuse ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... big," assented another, "but littleness isn't everything! It won't keep you from growing big and ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... opens for us a volume that no eye but God's and ours can read;—memories of neglect, of sin, of deep secrets that our hearts have hidden in their innermost folds. Such experiences sometimes there are when we muse upon the external universe; when we reflect upon the vastness of creation, the littleness of human effort, the transciency of human relations; when our souls are drawn away from all ordinary communions, and we feel that we are drifting before an almighty will, bound to an inevitable destiny, hemmed in by irresistible forces. Then, with every tie of association ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... drawn to its utmost height, towered above the man he accused. Fenwick sat, struck dumb. Welby's increasing stoop, which of late had marred his natural dignity of gait; the slight touches of affectation, of the petit-maitre, which were now often perceptible; the occasional note of littleness, or malice, such as his youth had never known:—all these defects, physical and moral, had been burnt out of the man, as he spoke these words, by the flame of his only, his inextinguishable passion. For his dear mistress—in the purest, loftiest sense of that word—he stood ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the first boats and the moment it touched the pebbly strand of the side of the inlet I jumped out and walked away, eager to be alone to enjoy the glory of it all away from the rasping voices, the worldly talk of my companions, the perpetual "littleness" of ideas that humanity ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... rather younger than her cousins, was also less of her age. She was pretty and sweet-tempered, but timid and without energy of character. Her timidity and her littleness made her the jest of her companions, and in their play-hours she had often cause to feel and acknowledge their superiority in age and size; but as their teasing of her proceeded more from unchecked liveliness than real ill-nature, and as she was too gentle to retort upon them, ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... indifferent, if not hostile, attitude on William's part made it impossible to break off without animosity, largely and completely. Infinitely preferable was Mary's state, she thought, where there was a simple thing to do and one did it. In fact, she could not help supposing that some littleness of nature had a part in all the refinements, reserves, and subtleties of feeling for which her friends and family were so distinguished. For example, although she liked Cassandra well enough, her fantastic method of life ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... every pleasure quite bereft, Sad but of tranquil mien; A state of perfect littleness, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... 5th.—I feel the hardness of my heart and the littleness of my love, yet I am in a great degree able to deny myself to take up my cross to follow Christ through good and evil report. 7th.—I feel that I am growing in grace and that I have more power over temptation, and over myself than I had some time since, but I want the witness of full sanctification. ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Three-stepped Lord, Vishnu became vamana or the dwarf for robbing the Asura Vali of his dominions. Disguised in that shape he asked of Vali three steps of land. Vali, smiling at the littleness of what was asked, gave it. But when the dwarf expanded his form and covered the heavens and the earth with only two steps of his, no space could be found for the third step. Vali was forthwith seized and bound as a promise-breaker, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... it is, is making over human, nature for the better. It's burning out selfishness and cowardice and a lot of faults from millions of men, and it's holding up the nobility of what some of them do to the entire world. It takes a character, this debacle, and smashes out the littleness. Another thing is curious. If a small character has one good point on which to hang heroism, the battle-spirit searches out that point and plants on it the heroism. There was a stupid young private in my command ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... outlook both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its immeasurable bulks and interspaces. Miss Alicia said something like this to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing eye-plunge ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... me. How will the manager get back. He will have got far beyond the reach of gravitation to restore him, and so ambitious a wing as his should never stoop to a downward flight. Indeed, as he passes through the constellations, the famous question of Carlyle (by which he derides the littleness of human affairs upon the scale of the measure of the heavens,) "What thinks Bootes as he drives his hunting dogs up the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?" will force itself on his notice. What, indeed, will Bootes think of this ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and no sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... more strikingly so from the contrast of the [Hebrew: mvwl biwral] with the [Hebrew: wpT iwral]. The Judge of Israel in his deepest abasement, is here contrasted with the Ruler of Israel in His highest divine glory. The connection is seen also in the indication of Bethlehem's natural littleness, as contrasted with the greatness to be bestowed upon it by God. What could have induced the prophet thus strongly to point out this circumstance, had it not been that he considered Bethlehem as the type of the Jewish people in their misery, described in the preceding verse, and the miraculous ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... of heroic poverty; but we have learnt that poverty is powerless to sadden souls upheld by a great love and nourished by a noble ideal. We shall return with heads erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe, rejuvenated by our magnificent misfortune, purified by victory and cleansed of the littleness that obscured the virtues which slumbered within us and of which we are not aware. We shall have lost all the goods that perish but as readily come to live again. And in their place we shall have acquired those riches which shall not again perish within our hearts. Our eyes were closed to many ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wood browning into rich defiance; only to observe the colour of the hills, and cliffs, and glens, and the glory of the sea underneath the peace of heaven, when the balanced sun was striking level light all over them! And if this were not enough to make a man contented with his littleness and largeness, then to see the freshened Pleiads, after their long dip of night, over the eastern waters twinkling, glad to see us all once more and ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... into the discussion, as one thus employed and trusted by our government. It is true he was falsely presented, for the diplomatic functions of this gentleman were purely accidental, and of very short continuance; but there would have been a littleness in conducting an argument that was so strong in its facts, by stooping to set this matter right, and it was suffered to go uncontradicted by me. He therefore possessed the advantage, the whole time, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of this paper stands for a more or less excusable mistake. A ship may be "driven ashore" by stress of weather. It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be "run ashore" has the littleness, poignancy, and ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... successful opposition to the Moslem rule. But the pope was firm, his holy permission had not been obtained before the marriage had been celebrated, and, piqued at this unintended slight which had been put upon his august authority, he revealed his littleness by this ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... way he stood, and it was easy to behold how white his face was. She made the presentation of us both at the same time, and as the other man came into the light, my mouth dropped open with wonder at the singular chances which the littleness of ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... was a pitiful and debasing weakness in his nature, which made him regard the lowest meanness as the subtlest wit. His mind too was not only degraded, but broken by his habits of life; a strange, idiotic folly, that made him love laughing at his own littleness, ran through his character. Houseman was young; he might amend; but Clarke had grey hairs and dim eyes; was old in constitution, if not years; and every thing in him was hopeless and confirmed; the leprosy was in the system. Time, in this, has ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all sides, stories of other actions so marvellously ruthless and of things so wondrously mean. Upon a bargain so shameless he had built so wondrous a career—a faithfulness of service so magnificent he had closed with a treachery so base. All greatness and all littleness, all heroism and all crimes, seemed to combine themselves in this one strange being. Having shamelessly sold his youth to a King's mistress, he devoted his splendid maturity to a tender, faithful passion for a beauteous virago, whose displeasure was the sole thing ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rights by an overbearing, arbitrary manner, and harsh and unbecoming words, evince a weakness which makes them contemptible, if not in the estimation of the wife and children, at least so in that of others, who plainly discern that littleness, in some shape or other, and not manly dignity and good sense, places them in their unenviable position of ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... and uniform, possessed none of the littleness which may sometimes belong to these descriptions of men. It formed a majestic pile, the effect of which was not inspired, but improved, by order and symmetry. There was nothing in it to dazzle by wildness, and surprise by eccentricity. It ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... now, a step beyond the luminiferous ether—conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it dares appear with assurance in the judgment of some who, trespassing the bounds of their own ignorance, use to condemn with more rigour and less justice the writings of others. It is my earnest hope that Your Excellency's good counsel in regard to my honourable purpose, will not disdain the littleness of so ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... countries, was ever allowed to fall. Philosophy, like art, like literature, like science, arose, shone, grew dim, and passed away, leaving the world in night. Why was so bright a glory followed by so dismal a shame? What a comment is this on the greatness and littleness of man! ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... earth, at whose threats men quailed, at whose vast and intricate schemes men gasped in palefaced awe, has left behind him the record of his interior being. Let us consider whether he was so potent as his fellow mortals believed, or whether his greatness was merely their littleness; whether it was carved out, of the inexhaustible but artificial quarry of human degradation. Let us see whether the execution was consonant with the inordinate plotting; whether the price in money and blood—and certainly few human ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... above our littleness, that watched, fascinated, the struggle of lights and shadows over the soul entangled in the wreck of a man's body, the rocks had a monumental indifference. And between their great, stony faces, turning pale in the gloom, with the amazed peon as if standing guard, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... all. With this was united an innate purity, that seemed her birthright; a purity that could not for an instant be doubted. If the libertine gazed on her features, it awoke in him recollections that had long slumbered; of the time when his heart beat but for one. If, in her immediate sphere, any littleness of feeling was brought to her notice, it was met with an intuitive doubt, followed by painful surprise, that such feeling, foreign as she felt it to be to her own nature, could really have existence ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration. the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... had studied, talked, listened, and learned. He who had as yet given nothing, fought no enemy, saved no comrade or refugee or child in all this whirlpool of battling millions, felt a profound sense of his littleness, his ignorance. He who had imagined himself unfortunate had been blind, sick, self-centered. Here were soldiers to whom comfort and rest were the sweetest blessings upon the earth, and they could not grasp them. No more could they grasp them than could the gaping civilians and the distinguished ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... practical bondage to such notions. I tell you when you betake yourself to music or painting, carpentry or gardening, as a means of getting through the day, you are sapping your mental constitution and shortening your life: unless you are sustained by more than ordinary littleness of mind you will never see threescore and ten. All these things are good in proportion as you have difficulty in finding time for them. When you have to rise early in the morning and work hard to make ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... had not kept His commandments, and were disobedient to our priests, who admonished us for our salvation. And the Lord brought down upon us the anger of His Spirit, and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where now my littleness may be seen amongst strangers. And there the Lord showed me my unbelief, that at length I might remember my iniquities, and strengthen my whole heart towards the Lord my God, who looked down upon my humiliation, and had pity upon my youth and ignorance, and kept me before I knew him, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is That what we have of feeling most intense Outstrips our faint expression; even so this Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice Fools our fond gaze, and, greatest of the great, Defies at first our nature's littleness, Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... emotions as they arise in him. A woman, whose nature is large as her heart is tender, can smile upon childishness, and make allowances; but let her have ever so small a spice of vanity herself, and she cannot forgive childishness, or littleness, or vanity in her lover. Many a woman is so extravagant a worshiper that she must always see the god in her idol; but there are yet others who love a man for his sake and not for their own, and adore his failings ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... all anomalies, all the exceptions to the laws of hydrography, which the interior of America displays, are merely apparent; that the course of running waters furnishes phenomena equally extraordinary in the old world, but that these phenomena, from their littleness, have less struck the imagination of travellers. When immense rivers may be considered as composed of several parallel furrows of unequal depth; when these rivers are not enclosed in valleys; and when the interior of the great continent ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... President Adams. The meeting between him and his venerated predecessor, had in it something peculiarly affecting. General Jackson was among the earliest of those who took the hand of the President; and their looks and deportment towards each other were a rebuke to that littleness of party spirit which can see no merit in a rival, and feel no joy in the honor of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... sentence in such a whimsical tone and with such a frank smile that they were all forced to laugh, even the Michigan man. But Harley felt relief. The candidate had shown no littleness. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
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