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More "Petty" Quotes from Famous Books



... may say will perhaps hurt their feelings. People really care about nothing that does not affect them personally. True and striking observations, fine, subtle and witty things are lost upon them: they cannot understand or feel them. But anything that disturbs their petty vanity in the most remote and indirect way, or reflects prejudicially upon their exceedingly precious selves—to that, they are most tenderly sensitive. In this respect they are like the little dog ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... came through the dining-room door. It was evident she had no share in the general gloom that the hermit's absence cast over Baldpate. Her eyes were bright with the glories of morning on a mountain; in their depths there was no room for petty annoyances. ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... were, were laid to rest. The Spaniards left the Scottish coast and sailed away for Norway; and the game was played out, and the end was come, as the end of such matters generally comes, by gradual decay, petty disaster, and mistake; till the snow-mountain, instead of being blown tragically and heroically to atoms, melts helplessly and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... arrived, and it was agreed, at the suggestion of the Duke of Shoreditch, to take the offender to the Curfew Tower. Accordingly they crossed the lower ward, and passing beneath an archway near the semicircular range of habitations allotted to the petty canons, traversed the space before the west end of Saint George's Chapel, and descending a short flight of stone steps at the left, and threading a narrow passage, presently arrived at the arched entrance in the Curfew, whose hoary walls ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... my mem'ry do not fail, I've said, the youth's estates were put to sale, To pay for feasts the fair to entertain, And what he'd left was only one domain, A petty farm to which he now retired; Ashamed to show where once so much admired, And wretched too, a prey to lorn despair, Unable to obtain by splendid care, A beauty he'd pursued six years and more, And should for ever fervently adore. His want of merit was the cause ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine

... Arts of base Brewings, abridging his Bottles, and connecting his Guests together, does not always reap the Fruits of his own Care and Industry. Few People being aware of the underhand Understandings and Petty-Partnerships these Sons of Benecarlo and Cyder have topp'd upon them; and the many other private Inconveniences that they, in the course of their Business, are subjected to. Now, to let my Readers into this great Arcanum or Secret, I must acquaint them, that ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson

... with speculations about peace and war. The good or ill success of battles and embassies extends itself to a very small part of domestic life: we all have good and evil, which we feel more sensibly than our petty part of public miscarriage or prosperity. I am sorry for your disappointment, with which you seem more touched than I should expect a man of your resolution and experience to have been, did I not know that general truths are seldom applied ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... sombre was the shade of oaks and pines. Once I wandered into a tract so overgrown with bushes and underbrush that I could scarcely force a passage through. Nothing is more annoying than a walk of this kind, where one is tormented by an innumerable host of petty impediments. It incenses and depresses me at the same time. Always when I flounder into the midst of bushes, which cross and intertwine themselves about my legs, and brush my face, and seize hold of my clothes, with their multitudinous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... believed that the present was the settled state of things; and that the old order of things was unsettled for ever: that the French revolution was as much more permanent than had been the French despotism, as was the great fabric of nature, than the petty plastic productions of art. To exclude the period since the revolution, would be to exclude some of the strongest evidences of the friendship of one nation, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall

... however, the priest had the colonists well in hand, as may be understood from the lofty language which he could assume towards petty sacramental infractions. At St. Croix, for instance, three light fellows made a mock of Sunday and the mass, saying, "We go a-fishing," and tried to persuade some neighbors to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... doctrines, or to conspire against slavery? Many an august council has attempted to settle doctrines, and in vain; and you had before you a subject so vast, so pressing, so momentous, that in presence of its sublimity, any petty jealousy and fancied idea of superiority ought to have fallen as dust from the boughs of a cedar. You as delegates, had to meet this awful fact in the face, and to consider how it should be grappled with; how the united power of civilized nations should be brought ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... alliance with the Flemish burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... is something in the misfortunes of our very best friends that does not displease us; assuredly we can, most of us, laugh at their petty inconveniences, till called upon to supply them. Tom composed his features on the instant, and replied with more gravity, as well as with an expletive, which, if my Lord Mayor had been within hearing might ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... excessive accumulation of the riches of the world in the hands of some thousands of nobles or upstarts, under whom lived some hundreds of free men in poverty, and slaves by millions subjected to an unrestrained oppression. Each of these great proprietors lived in the midst of his slaves like a petty prince, indolent and capricious. His house at Rome was like a palace; every morning the hall of honor (the atrium) was filled with clients, citizens who came for a meagre salary to salute the master[151] and escort him in the street. For fashion required that a rich man should ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... most wealthy and puissant grandees of Spain; his possessions extended over some of the most fertile parts of Andalusia, embracing towns and seaports and numerous villages. Here he reigned in feudal state like a petty sovereign, and could at any time bring into the field an immense force of vassals ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... Council has decided to buy an army hut for use as a day nursery. It is this policy of petty insult that is bound in the end to goad the military ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various

... The whole petty tale of this day's ride I shall not dwell upon. Indeed, I scarcely noted the miles as they pass'd. For all the way we were chattering, Delia telling me how Captain Settle and his gang had hurried her (tho' without ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch

... such power be? The scriptures give us the most wonderful accounts of divine interference: Animals talk like men; springs gurgle from dry bones; the sun and moon stop in the heavens in order that General Joshua may have more time to murder; the shadow on a dial goes back ten degrees to convince a petty king of a barbarous people that he is not going to die of a boil; fire refused to burn; water positively declined to seek its level, but stands up like a wall; grains of sand become lice; common walking-sticks, to gratify a mere freak, twist themselves into serpents, and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... night we passed among the mountains recalled us painfully from the enjoyment of nature to all the petty miseries of personal discomfort. Arrived at our inn, a forlorn parlour, filled with the blended fumes of tobacco and whiskey, received us; and chilled, as we began to feel ourselves with the mountain air, we preferred going ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... of advocate before the village squire, at that time Bowling Green. He realized that this experience was valuable, and never, so far as known, demanded or accepted a fee for his services in these petty cases. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various

... document, which, by the way, contains no single fact that could not be substantiated by the clearest testimony, so little are they at head-quarters acquainted with the pranks that are played off on the unfortunate people by multitudes of petty tyrants in remote districts of the country—Sir Thomas, we say, having perused the aforesaid document, grinned—almost laughed—with a ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... Petty Officer fell flat upon the deck; They bore him to the Sick Bay just a weak and worthless wreck; But an A.B. who was standing by had caught the wicked word And told the Duty Officer exactly what occurred:— "Boy Simpkins (Second Class, too!), which I think yer oughter know, Sir, 'Ad the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various

... is a romance of Mediaeval Italy, the scene being laid in the 15th century. It relates the life of a young leader of Free Companions who, at the close of one of the many petty Italian wars, returns to his native city. There he becomes involved in its politics, intrigues, and feuds, and finally joins an uprising of the townspeople against their lord. None can resent the frankness and apparent brutality ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... away portions of the classical figures, and "the breasts of the nymphs in the brake." The soul of Tartuffe had entered into the body of a sinner of the last century. The antiquarian ghoul steals title-pages and colophons. The aesthetic ghoul cuts illuminated initials out of manuscripts. The petty, trivial, and almost idiotic ghoul of our own days, sponges the fly-leaves and boards of books for the purpose of cribbing the book-plates. An old "Complaint of a Book-plate," in dread of the wet sponge of the enemy, has been discovered by ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... facing should drive the petty little meannesses out of us, one would think, and call out all the latent heroism of our people. People talk about this being the Church's day of opportunity. So it is, for the war is teaching us ethical values, ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... and District Courts in every district. The higher courts are presided over by well trained, educated men. There is an efficient police force in every part of the group. The inhabitants are law-abiding and crimes of violence are very rare. There is very little petty theft, and even in Honolulu, the greatest center of population and a seaport town, many of the houses are left ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs

... continual occupation in the sessions of the Audiencia and rendering opinions. This year I am probate judge, and for the first four months of the year provincial alcalde; and since people find that matters are readily settled I am beset by the natives with their petty lawsuits. I wish that I might have had more time to collect what can be put together, and to write on law. However I shall not neglect perchance to make some slight report. The following is a clause from ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair

... in close contact with the Medes, of whom, however, they seem to have been wholly independent. Like the modern Kurds in this same region, they owned no subjection to a single head, but were under the government of numerous petty chieftains, each the lord of a single town or of a small mountain district. Shalmaneser informs us that he took tribute from twenty-five such chiefs. Similar tokens of submission were paid also to his son and grandson. After this the Assyrian records are silent as to the Persians ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her—the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the Marburys', ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... hour; for she was tired—he could see that—and worried—he could see that also. And he!—had he ever been so solemn, so implacably in earnest, so impatient of the playfulness which at another time he would have found merely amusing? Why was he all at once growing so petty with her and exacting? Little by little he went over the circumstances judicially, in an effort to restore her to lovable supremacy over ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... nights in which the moon shines; or, according to almanac authority, ought to shine, the street lamps are not lighted; so that, as it too frequently happens, when the moon is overclouded, or on rainy evenings when she is totally obscured, the streets are for the most part in perfect darkness. This petty economy is called "the magistrates' light," they having the direction of the lighting, paving, and ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen

... sans sensation, "You murder hawks and kites, lest they Should rob you of your fatted prey; And that great rogues may hold their state, The petty rascal meets his fate." ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... I fear," he called to Lana, leaping up the stairs. "And after my solemn promise to come early! But you excused me this morning when I was obliged to attend to petty affairs. Same excuse this time! Do I receive ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... foundation-stones upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the clear serene of the world of Spirit. He who can mount to a clear conception of Nirvana will find his thought far away above the common joys and sorrows of petty men. As to one who ascends to the top of Chimborazo or the Himalayan crags, and sees men on the earth's surface crawling to and fro like ants, so equally small do bigots and sectarians appear to him. ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... that he could scarcely speak. This was a new experience. At first it attracted him, but the hopeless vulgarity of the girl at his side, her tawdry clothes, her sordid, petty talk, her slang, her miserable profanity, soon began to revolt him. He felt that he could not keep his self-respect while such a ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... extreme of fashion, wear roses in their buttonholes, and spend upon ices and strawberries what would maintain a poor man for a year, would learn how infinitely more noble was the abstinence of this young Roman, who though born in the midst of splendour and luxury, learnt from the first to loathe the petty vice of gluttony, and to despise the unmanliness of self-indulgence. Very early in life he joined the glorious fellowship of those who esteem it not only a duty ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... reflect upon his present condition. All was lost! He was unfitted for the conduct of a small business, for the petty transactions and details which might suffice for one of meager wants. He would renounce the idea of that marriage which was his only salvation, and his creditors, as soon as they heard the news that this hope had vanished would fall upon him. He would find himself ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... had acquired an unenviable fame by some petty act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was "temp'ed," on which a neighbor, who had no need for repentance, promptly appeared on the scene ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... said to his young petty officer, "I want you to take command here with your four men. Disarm these fellows. I do not believe they will show trouble, but it will be well to let them know right at the start that the Nark has them under her guns. I am ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge

... and most able patriot, awaited my coming. No doubt you have heard, with a smile, of the insignificant wars and uprisings in those little tropic republics. They make but a faint clamour against the din of great nations' battles; but down there, under all the ridiculous uniforms and petty diplomacy and senseless countermarching and intrigue, are to be found statesmen and patriots. Don Rafael Valdevia was one. His great ambition was to raise Esperando into peace and honest prosperity and the respect of the serious nations. So he waited for ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... felt it was at last. As each day went by it grew harder and harder for the man to contain himself. Fighting desperately against it every hour, immersing himself as much as he could in the petty fiddling details of the office and the Victualing Yard so as to keep the fierce impulse under due control, Michael Trevennack yet found the mad mood within him more and more ungovernable with each week that went by. As he put it to his own mind he could ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen

... They like the spirit we have here. Well, now I come to you, and you are one of the big reasons for my wanting to put this over. Your salary makes me blush. It's all wrong that a man like you should have these petty worries, particularly with Mrs Holden so in need of the things a little money can do. Now this man Lewis is a reactionary. So, naturally, he doesn't ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... misdemeanour; but the grand jury would only find bills of indictment against two of them, and as two persons cannot commit a riot, the finding released them all. Mr. Plunkett then filed an ex-officio information against those persons, whom he, on evidence received, believed guilty; but the petty jury would not agree in their verdict, and the prisoners were discharged. This matter was investigated in parliament; but the result merely showed in what a daring manner juries were packed, and the name of justice ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... story, though he had perhaps too carefully guarded himself from his own eager desire to accept it Barter's every action with the cards offered confirmation of the belief that he had taken possession of the lost notes. He was certainly a petty rascal, and there was obviously nothing but opportunity needed to make him bloom into a rascal on a larger scale. So the temptation to drop the cards upon the table, to look his companion in the face, and to ask simply, 'How about that eight thousand pounds?' grew more ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... answered. "Human nature is very selfish, and then as now men who worked for the general welfare regardless of their own petty preferences were rare. To the side of the enemies of the infant invention flocked every one with a grievance. The gentry argued that the installation of locomotives would frighten the game out of the country ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett

... other; that if their chiefs were even disposed to live in peace they could not do it; their subjects would demand war and could not live without it. The same would have been said of the Seine, the Loire and every other dividing line between their petty communities. It would have been insisted on that such rivers were the natural boundaries of states and never ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... petty king that knoweth not his mind!' sneered Sir Gawaine, looking fiercely about the room. 'I pray thee, uncle,' he said to the king, 'listen not to their womanish persuasions, if thou ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert

... earnest. They give to such a clear stage and no favour, wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men. But for the majority, who are neither brave, self- originating, nor earnest, but the mere puppets of circumstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do, merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Therefore their hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise enough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and importunately, of what a certain great philosopher called, "whatsoever ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... regarded as its intense littleness and narrowness. The too often bitter and sordid realities of the struggle of life, as I saw it in London, had the effect upon me of making Sylvia's esoteric exclusiveness of interest seem so petty as to be an insult to human intelligence. I would stare out of the train windows, on my way back from Weybridge, at the countless lights, the endless huddled roofs of London; and, seeing in these a representation of the huge populace of the city, I would stretch out ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... Wordsworth, he did not allow enough for the long series of noxious influences under which Spain had suffered. And this, at any rate, is notorious—he spoke of the Spanish people, the original stock (unmodified by courtly usages, or foreign sentiments, or city habits) of the Spanish peasantry and petty rural proprietors. This class, as distinguished from the aristocracy, was the class he relied on; and he agreed with us in looking upon the Spanish aristocracy as traitors—that is, as recreants and apostates—from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... Subaltern officers, therefore, used power for private ends, while the masses were so inured to oppression that they offered no resistance. There has been a marked improvement in the personnel of late years; and Mr. Banerjea's lurid pictures of corruption and petty tyranny apply to a past generation of policemen. The Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Bengal does justice to a much-abused service in his Administrative Report for 1907-8. His Honour "believes the force to be a hard-working body of Government servants, the difficulties, trials, and even dangers ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... the soup. I was occupying my little chamber again and dreamed of Catherine day and night. But now, instead of being afraid of the conscription as I was in 1813, I had something else to trouble me. Man is never quite happy, some petty misery or other assails him. How often do we see this in life? My peace was ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... have overthrown? And if we turn our eyes towards our own country, how many of these instruments of Napoleon do we not see, who, after having fatigued him with their servile complaisance, have come to offer to a new power the tribute of their petty machiavelism? Now, as then, is it not upon the basis of vanity and corruption that the whole edifice of their paltry science rests, and is it not from the traditions of the imperial government that the counsels of ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein

... of Jews—petty merchants of the Trastevere—were leaving as Vergilius entered. The emperor, now alone save for his young caller, rose and gave him a sprig ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller

... Homeric or Miltonic song;" or he stands in the crowd—breathless, yet swayed as forests or the sea by winds—hearing and to judge the pleadings for the crown; or the philosophy which soothed Cicero or Boethius in their afflictions, in exile, prison, and the contemplation of death, breathes over his petty cares like the sweet south; or Pope or Horace laughs him into good humor; or he walks with neas and the Sibyl in the mild light of the world of the laurelled dead; and the court-house is as completely forgotten as the dreams of a pre-adamite life. Well may he prize ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... England," the summit of Owl's Head is 2,743 feet above the level of the lake, and the path to it is a mile and a half and thirty rods in length. It may seem niggardly not to throw off the last petty fraction; and indeed we might well enough let it pass if it were at the beginning of the route,—if the path, that is, were thirty rods and a mile and a half long. But this, it will be observed, is not the case; and it is a fact perfectly well ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... chatter for a while, and the limbs shiver, and we do not feel particularly comfortable while breaking the ice in our jugs, and performing our cold ablutions amidst the sharp, glass-like fragments, and wiping our faces with a frozen towel. But these petty evils are quickly vanquished, and as we rush out of the house, and tread briskly and firmly on the hard ringing earth, and breathe our visible breath in the clear air, our strength and self-importance miraculously increase, and the whole frame begins to glow. The warmth and vigour thus acquired ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... It is as one feels. I do not mean that petty god of creeds and religions, the feeble image that coarse hands have made from vague glimpses caught by those who were indeed inspired. I mean the total force, the imperishable breath, of the universe. And of that breath, my child, you and I and all ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... Road. Wat Dreary, alias Brown Will, an irregular Dog, who hath an underhand way of disposing of his Goods. I'll try him only for a Sessions or two longer upon his Good-behaviour. Harry Paddington, a poor petty-larceny Rascal, without the least Genius; that Fellow, though he were to live these six Months, will never come to the Gallows with any Credit. Slippery Sam; he goes off the next Sessions, for the Villain hath the Impudence to have ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay

... cross, this work of art having been an early (1647) victim of religious barbarism. In November he was accommodated with chambers in Whitehall. But from these he was soon ousted by claimants more considerable or more importunate, and in 1651 he removed to "a pretty garden-house" in Petty France, in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. James's Park. The house was extant till 1877, when it disappeared, the last of Milton's many London residences. It had long ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... locker. With this disgusting peace on, and no chance of prize-money, and plenty in their pockets for a good spell ashore, blue-jackets will be scarce when Sir Duncan Yordas sails. If I can get a decent berth as a petty officer, off I go for Calcutta, and watch (like the sweet little cherub that sits up aloft) for the safety of my dear papa and mamma, as the Frenchmen are teaching us to call them. What do you think ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... only be the result of sheer carelessness, or of the ignorance of some clerk employed to make out the list without adequate instructions given to him. It has, in my hearing, been held up as a specimen of invidious distinction to gratify some petty dislike; but this notion is simply absurd, and deserves no notice. At the same time, it betokens a carelessness that ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various

... visitor to that establishment, and that she had lost in one night some 6,000 pounds. In these circumstances it was remarkable, thought T. X., that she should report to the police so small a matter as the petty pilfering of servants. This, however, she had done and whilst the lesser officers of Scotland Yard were interrogating pawnbrokers, the men higher up were genuinely worried by the ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... that's interesting, too. Aren't you rather astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... wonder how, with his greatness—for he cannot but be conscious of it—he endures the restrictions of our narrow sphere. I mean," Miss Marty went on, as the Doctor lifted his eyebrows in some surprise, "the petty business of a country town such ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... occasionally, and always brought its quarrels to be settled by the minister. "It is a strange thing, Helen, my dear, what wonderful peace there often is in great misfortunes. They are quite different from the petty miseries which people make ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... Sussex, had ever been in Ireland. He implored the Queen not to trifle with it, declaring that he wished some abler general to take the command, not from any want of will, 'for he would spend his last penny and his last drop of blood for her Majesty.' Right and left Shane was crushing the petty chiefs, who implored the protection of the Government. Maguire requested the deputy to write to him in English, not in Latin, because the latter language was well known, and but few of the Irish had any knowledge of the former, in which therefore ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... following description of the happy vallies frequently found among the mountain-ranges may testify: One may be chosen as a specimen of many. At its northern end it was about four miles wide, being bounded on all sides by rocky, wooded ranges, with dark gullies from which numerous petty streams run down into the main one in the centre. The valley gradually grows narrow towards the south, and is bounded by steep cliffs betwixt which the waters find an outlet. Sometimes a valley of this kind, most beautiful, most productive, will ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... roost. These brave and haughty men who had governed the country for half a century, who had held the power of the United States at bay for four years, who had never doffed their hats to any prince or noble on earth, even in whose faults or vices there was nothing mean or petty, never having been suspected of corruption, who as Macaulay said of the younger Pitt, "If in an hour of ambition they might have been tempted to ruin their country, never would have stooped to pilfer from her," could not brook the sight of a Legislature made ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... quality as meagre in quantity; but being a lad with literary tastes, a desire for information, and an omnivorous appetite for reading, every book that fell in the way of young Otis was eagerly seized and its contents ravenously devoured. The life of a poor farmer, with its ceaseless drudgery and petty needs, was distasteful to the lad, and he was anxious to obtain a collegiate education, and thus become fitted to fight the battle of life with brain instead of muscle. His ambition was not discouraged by his father, but there was a great difficulty in the way of its gratification—the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... aside the haversack. From it we took food; from the canteens we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking; infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God for that, come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the mind ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... end by disclosing to the poet the faithlessness of his wife. Once she had been the mistress of the dying man, and that seems to him his one triumph in life. But when the poet arrives and begins to talk of the commonplaces of daily life, of petty gossip, petty intrigues, and petty jealousies, then the dying man suddenly sees the futility of the whole thing. To him, who has one foot across the final threshold, it means nothing, and he lets his friend ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... however, the lucky gambler returned to the room—but only to be a spectator, as he firmly said. Alas! his resolution failed him, and he quitted the tables indebted to a charitable bystander for a livre or two, to pay for his petty refreshments. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawlers way?—how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house—and that one or other owes six or seven millions, the defeat ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Wales it never succeeded in uniting the people; the petty patriotism of the family stood in the way of the larger patriotism of the nation; local rivalries and jealousies were always stronger than the sense of national unity. The attempt of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth to create a National Council, like the Great Council of England, ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little

... political quarrels might be otherwise settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them: and that, while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... anger which cut short the younger man's reply. On account of petty economy, for fear of ridicule, this editor refused to relieve some withered old woman, some bent and worried old man, who might be, who probably were, waiting, waiting, waiting in some out-of-the-way village. So Anderson reflected. Because there might not be a story in it this girl would ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... American colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ad majus" ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... who can't get beyond himself, his own aggrandizement and interests, must of necessity be small, petty, personal, and at once marks his own limitations; while he whose life is a life of service and self-devotion has no limits, for he thus puts himself at once on the side of the Universal, and this more than all else combined gives a tremendous power in oratory. ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... on the goodwill or judgment of their employers, whose minds were divided between keeping down the wages and the rates, and who had little of real principle or knowledge to guide them. It was possible to have recourse to the magistrates at the Petty Sessions, who could give an order which would override the vestry; but it was apt to be only the boldest, and often the least deserving, who could make out the best apparent cases for themselves, that ventured on such ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who had escaped, managed to raise another band of warriors. Spain, in all ages a guerrilla country, prone to partisan warfare and petty maraud, was at that time infested by bands of licentious troops, who had sprung up in the civil contests; their only object pillage, their only dependence the sword, and ready to flock to any new and desperate ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... national institutions and a representation of the people. Gratitude has done its natural work in their hearts; it has made them better. Some days before the fete were passed in reconciling all strifes, composing all differences between cities, districts, and individuals. They wished to drop all petty, all local differences, to wash away all stains, to bathe and prepare for a new great covenant of brotherly love, where each should act for the good of all. On that day they all embraced in sign of this,—strangers, foes, all exchanged the kiss of faith and love; they exchanged banners, as a token ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... modify his policy to gratify the lord of Glamorgan, and win over the house of Mortimer by the erection of a new franchise that was a palatinate in all but name. But such great "regalities" were, after all, exceptional. Much more irritating to an orderly mind were the innumerable petty immunities which made half the hundreds in England the appendages of baronial estates, and such common privileges as "return of writs," which prevented the sheriff's officers from executing his mandates on ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... he visited the well-known botanist Dr Royle, the curator of the Company's botanic garden there, then engaged in those labours on the Flora of the Himmalayas which have been since given to the world; and at Boorea, leaving the British territory, he entered that of the protected Seik states, whose petty chieftains are secured in their semi-independence by the treaty with Runjeet in 1809, which confined the ruler of Lahore to the right bank of the Sutlej. But their reception of the colonel did not appear to indicate any great degree of gratitude for these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... moral were to be gathered from these petty and wretched circumstances, was, "Let the past alone: do not seek to renew it; press on to higher and better things,—at all events, to other things; and be assured that the right way can never be that which leads you back to the identical shapes that you long ago left behind. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a rich man's abode, had a comfortable homeliness about it, but it had always been a costly house to keep, and now that it was less than ever needful to him to save money, he did not want to hear recriminations concerning such petty matters as the too frequent tuning of the schoolroom piano, and the unprofitable fabrics which had been bought for the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... child in matters of business. One of his Edinburgh neighbours remarked of him to Robert Chambers that it was strange a man who wrote so well on exchange and barter was obliged to get a friend to buy his horse corn for him. This idea of his helplessness in the petty transactions of life arose from observing his occasional fits of absence and his habitual simplicity of character, but his simplicity, nobody denies, was accompanied by exceptional acuteness and practical sagacity, and his fits of absence seem to have been neither so frequent nor ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... words become the pet of the petty. You care as little for the institution called 'Society' as I do, Mr. Mario. Moreover, there is no Society nowadays. Murray's has taken ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... occurred, lost his patience when he was not payed on time, lost his kindness towards beggars, lost his disposition for giving away and loaning money to those who petitioned him. He, who gambled away tens of thousands at one roll of the dice and laughed at it, became more strict and more petty in his business, occasionally dreaming at night about money! And whenever he woke up from this ugly spell, whenever he found his face in the mirror at the bedroom's wall to have aged and become more ugly, whenever embarrassment and disgust came over him, he continued ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... has scarcely been permitted to see the general aspect of the British aristocracy, or to become acquainted with their sentiments, their characters, or their manners. The petty, artificial world framed and got up for her deception, is no more capable of suggesting to her mind the vast moral and social creation beyond its narrow boundaries, than one or two leaves of a hortus siccus exemplify the productions ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... opponent John of Montfort could only secure his rights by promptitude. Accordingly he made his way to Nantes and, receiving a warm welcome from his burgesses, proclaimed himself duke. Very few of the great feudatories threw in their lot with him. His strength was in the petty noblesse, the townsmen, and the enthusiasm of the Celtic population of La Bretagne bretonnante, which made Leon, Cornouailles, and Vannes the strongholds of his cause. Yet the Penthievre influence took with it the Breton-speaking inhabitants of the diocese ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... sake, obey your impulses and let other people obey theirs. From now on you are to be identified with a profession that transcends the petty conventions of society. Confess! Aren't you already a little ashamed of getting angry with ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... Closely identified with the aggressive spirit of his section, he voiced a growing sense of humiliation that his country should be buffeted by every British ministry. The people of Kentucky and Tennessee had little patience with half measures in defense of national rights. The petty diplomacy of closet statesmen did not appeal to the soul of the frontiersman who was accustomed to hew his way to his goal. The people of this section, imperial in its dimensions, were prepared for large tasks done in a bold way. Their ideas of the Union transcended the policies ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... my Copenhagen friends acknowledged. The impressions of the journey were immediately written down, and I gave them forth under the title of "Shadow Pictures." Whether I were actually improved or not, there still prevailed at home the same petty pleasure in dragging out my faults, the same perpetual schooling of me; and I was weak enough to endure it from those who were officious meddlers. I seldom made a joke of it; but if I did so, it was called arrogance and vanity, and it was asserted that I never would listen to rational ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... way the white man is telling the black to abide upon the plantation raising cotton and corn, and further than this nothing will be required of him. He can cheat a white man or a black, steal in a petty way anything that comes handy, live in marriage or out of it to please himself, kill another negro if he likes, and lastly shoot every wild thing that can be eaten, if only he raises the cotton and the corn. But the white sportsmen of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... growly-wowly, snarley-warley as you, is quite beyond my comprehension; but then, you see, we live in a world of puzzles, you and I, Rosebud, and so it's of no use being puzzled, because that does no good, and only worries one. Don't it, deary sweety petty? Well, you can't answer of course, though I know that you ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne

... rearing and nursing it to its present state, and in the protection of it through the present war, that no man can doubt, but Providence has some nobler end to accomplish than the gratification of the petty elector of Hanover, or the ignorant and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... are most exorbitant, {116} I was advised to take a third-class ticket, and hire a cabin from one of the engineers or petty officers; I was greatly pleased with the notion, and hastened to carry it out. My astonishment, however, may be imagined when, on paying my fare, I was told that the third-class passengers were not respectable, that they were obliged to sleep upon deck, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... a hard fight was no doubt in preparation, and that it was the custom of the Spartans to array their hair with especial care when they were about to enter upon any great peril. Xerxes would, however, not believe that so petty a force could intend to resist him, and waited four days, probably expecting his fleet to assist him, but as it did not appear, the attack ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... doubtful characters with which our court abounded was one Joe Traill, who had been in prison many a time for petty larceny and the like. He was one of those who stink in the nostrils of cleanly, civilised society, and who are its shame and secret sore. There was no place for Joe in this great world of ours. He said to Joshua one night in his blithe way that there was nothing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... of offences for trial at the ensuing sessions, bears little comparison with those of former periods, and I am happy to state, that the crimes generally, are of a trifling nature, and principally petty thefts. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... people were not always inclined to bet the odds; and, if I would run no great risk, I even found it necessary to bet them sometimes myself. Every man who has made the experiment knows that the thirst of lucre, when thus awakened in a young mind, is insatiable, impetuous, and rash. I was weary of petty gains, and riches by retail. The ardour with which I examined the players, and each circumstance as it occurred, persuaded me that there were tokens by which an acute observer might discover the winning party. I had on former occasions remarked ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... Spanish strain in them—girls with a drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... boys saw little more of the horrors of the petty war. Aboard the schooner what met their eyes were the triumphs of peace. The next day flags were flying, bells ringing, guns firing, and the whole of the inhabitants of the town were marching in procession and ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn

... trace any resemblance to it in a life so different; but the old-fashioned Calvinistic divine in his small country parish, revolving in an actual world of petty details, and in another world of grim theological speculation and absorption in the contemplation of death, must have seldom smiled. The young pastor was bound by no vow of celibacy, but he knew that his life must ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft, illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... when he was silent, an unrest as of trouble he would not show. "The rascal has been doing something wrong," he said to himself; "he is afraid of being found out! And found out he is sure to be; he has not the brains to hide a thing! It's not murder—he ain't got the pluck for that; but it may be petty larceny!" ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... deified, and exercises a peculiar fatality over his fortune. The barbarism of Africa, may be attributed in part its great fertility, which enables its inhabitants to live without are but chiefly to its imperviousness to strangers. Every petty state is so surrounded with natural barriers, that it is isolated from the rest, and though it may be overrun and wasted, and part of its inhabitants carried into captivity, it has never been made to form a constituent ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... prince's coronet you wanted to dazzle my eyes—with the two hundred thousand subjects you offered me just now, you wanted me to corrupt my soul, and induce me to barter away the honor and greatness of France for the miserable people of a petty German prince! No, sir. I shall not sell my honor at so low a price. I stand here in the name of the French Republic and ask you, the representative of Austria, to fulfil what we have agreed upon at Campo Formic. Mentz must ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... earthly fortunes are actually precarious; and such an observation might inspire detachment from material things and a kind of philosophy. But what at first inspires sacrifice is a literal envy imputed to the gods, a spirit of vengeance and petty ill-will; so that they grudge a man even the good things which they cannot enjoy themselves. If the god is a tyrant, the votary will be a tax-payer surrendering his tithes to secure immunity from further levies or from attack by other potentates. God and man will be natural ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Government and Life of the Indians, they live in a kind of patriarchal Manner, variously diversify'd, not unlike the Tribes and Families mentioned in the Old Testament. Every small Town is a petty Kingdom govern'd by an absolute Monarch, assisted and advised by his great Men, selected out of the gravest, oldest, bravest, and richest; if I may allow their Dear-Skins, Peak and Roenoak (black and white Shells with Holes, which they wear on Strings about ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones

... his lifetime by popularity, but he is known now, and Byron is hardly the tenth part of a Shakespeare. Every storm must have its calm, and Byron took fame by storm. By a desperate daring he over-swept petty control like a rebellious flood, or a tempest worked up into madness by the quarrel of the elements, and he seemed to value that daring as the attainment of true fame. He looked upon Horace's "Art of Poetry" no doubt with esteem as ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawlers way?—how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house—and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the morning he polished his sonnets, while at midnight he poached game from a neighboring estate. Our era bestows unstinted admiration upon the essays of Lord Bacon. How noble his aphorisms! How petty his envy and avarice! What scholarship was his, and what cunning also! With what splendor of argument does he plead for the advancement of learning and liberty! With what meanness does he take bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... our first creation, before we sinned; but that similitude being at best but created, and since most unspeakably defiled, defaced and polluted with sin; there is now, no not in the best of men, as men, any sinless likeness, and similitude of God to be found, no such petty divine, or Godlike nature to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... informs us, that in his time, the petty British kings sent embassies to cultivate the alliance of Augustus, and make offerings in the Capitol: and that nearly the whole island was on terms of amity with the Romans, and, as well as the Gauls, paid a light tribute.—Strabo, B. iv. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... that he could obtain one of dried fruit, figs, currants, and raisins. We spent ten days there, and on our homeward voyage, keeping somewhat to the northward of our course, got among the islands of the Greek Archipelago. At that time a great many of the petty Greek chiefs, driven by the Turks from their hereditary domains, had established themselves on any rocky island they could find, with as many followers as they could collect, and nothing loth, used to carry on the respectable avocation of pirates. Some possessed only lateen-rigged craft, or ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston

... scenically sustained. But, in England, the vast intricacy and complex interweaving of property, of commerce, of commercial interests, of details infinite in number, and infinite in littleness, break down and fritter away into fractions and petty minutiae, the whole huge labyrinth of our public affairs. It is scarcely necessary to explain my meaning. In Athens, the question before the public assembly was, peace or war—before our House of Commons, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... with the interests of the capitalist class, which, oddly enough, shares his views: it needs many "hands," so as to own cheap labor-power that may fit it out for competition in the world's market. With such petty notions and measures, born of a near-sighted philistinism, the gigantic growing ills of the day are ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... hated greetings in the market-place, and there were generally loiterers in the streets to persecute him either about the events of the day, or about some petty pieces of business." ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... or other of its plainest rules. In such cases we have witnessed a sharpness and activity of intellect claiming almost our admiration. What contrivance of deception and artful evasion. What dexterity of quibble, and captious objection, and petty sophistry. What vigilance to observe how the plea in justification or excuse takes effect, and, if they perceive it does not succeed, what address in sliding into a different one. What quickness to avail themselves of any mistake, or apparent concession, in the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... detained in New York by a number of petty duties, but in a few days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage to Morningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my "infidelity" is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you is sufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how will Jessica meet me? ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... the latent cupidity of his soul, and he wants me to ride ahead, so that he can straggle along in the rear and investigate the contents of the purse at his leisure. While winking at the amusing little act of petty larceny already detected, I do not propose to give his kleptomaniac tendencies full swing, and so I meet his proposal to sowar and go ahead by peremptorily ordering ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... out of Port Sandwich, two reddish fish, about the size of large bream, and not unlike them, were caught with hook and line. On these fish most of the officers, and some of the petty officers, dined the next day. The night following, every one who had eaten of them was seized with violent pains in the head and bones, attended with a scorching heat all over the skin, and numbness in the joints. There remained no doubt that this was occasioned by the fish being of a poisonous ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... and Empires in my little day I have outlived, and yet I am not old; And when I look on this, the petty spray Of my own years of trouble, which have rolled Like a wild bay of breakers, melts away: Something—I know not what—does still uphold A spirit of slight patience;—not in vain, Even for its own sake, do ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... mechanism of a government which, en grand, becomes that of Delhi, Teheran, and Constantinople. The Governor farms the place from the Porte: he may do what he pleases as long as he pays his rent with punctuality and provides presents and douceurs for the Pasha of Mocha. He punishes the petty offences of theft, quarrels, and arson by fines, the bastinado, the stocks, or confinement in an Arish or thatch-hut: the latter is a severe penalty, as the prisoner must provide himself with food. In cases of murder, he either refers to Mocha or he carries out the ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... respectable, ever was, or ever can be, really happy. As work is our life, show me what you can do, and I will show you what you are. I have spoken of love of one's work as the best preventive of merely low and vicious tastes. I will go farther and say that it is the best preservative against petty anxieties and the annoyances that arise out of indulged self-love. Men have thought before now that they could take refuge from trouble and vexation by sheltering themselves, as it wore, in a world of their own. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... he said. 'You'd think from the fuss he's made that the business of the place was at a standstill till we got to work. Perfect rot! There's never anything to do here till after lunch, except checking the stamps and petty cash, and I've done that ages ago. There are three letters. You may as well enter them. It all looks like work. But you'll find the best way is to wait till you get a couple of dozen or so, and then work them off in a batch. But if you see Rossiter about, then start stamping ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse

... education of the soul. But if you are unhappy over petty worries and trials, you are wearing yourself to no avail; and if you are allowing small things to irritate and harass you and to spoil the beautiful days for you, take yourself in hand ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... has investigation, done concerning the universe of which we are a part? In the old days, before doubt began its work, before men asked questions and demanded proof, we lived in a little, petty, tiny world, which the imagination of the superstitious and the fear of ignorant men had created. But the cycles and epicycles which Ptolemy devised, and by means of which he explained, as well as he knew how, the movements of the ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... Romaine, do not let us be petty!" He drew in a chair and sat down. "Understand you have stolen a march upon me. You have introduced your soldier of Napoleon, and (how, I cannot conceive) he has been apparently accepted with favour. I ask ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... amused us? Did I not—but oh! what is man, that he dares so to accuse himself? My dear friend I promise you I will improve; I will no longer, as has ever been my habit, continue to ruminate on every petty vexation which fortune may dispense; I will enjoy the present, and the past shall be for me the past. No doubt you are right, my best of friends, there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men—and God ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... called Don Gumersindo, the possessor of a small entailed estate, one of those petty estates that, in olden times, owed their foundation to a foolish vanity. Any ordinary person, with the income derived from this estate, would have lived in continual difficulties, burdened by debts, and altogether cut off ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... will not let myself be corrupted and give myself up as lost, and yet I know that my thoughts are too great to be accepted from free conviction without slavishness by my living fellow-men. Therefore have I peace in this petty world under the heavy burden of my tremendous life. I did not confer it on myself and I have no choice. Were I to speak my mind freely and honestly, I should be either locked up or worshipped. I deserve neither one nor the other; but such is the nature of the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... plunges beneath, and remains there as long as his breath holds out. He comes up again at a great distance, and lands out of sight; then, when he is supposed to be dead, lost forever to the sight of man, he rises up and has his vengeance. You have an enemy? Some petty imprudence will betray him. But, while he sees you standing by on the watch, he will be ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... be the cause of casualties. Military drill is constantly approaching greater simplicity, as experience shows that various particulars may be dispensed with. Formerly, when soldiers were kept up as part of the state pageants, they were subjected to numberless petty tribulations of drill, which no longer exist. Pipe-clayed belts, for example, have disappeared, except in the marine corps. Frederick the Great was the first who introduced into drill ease and quickness of execution, and since his day it has been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... would not allow to herself that he had lied. His was not a petty nature given to lying, or to the faults of the weak and timid. He was a daring and defiant sinner, "risking damnation," as he had once said, for the desire of his heart. She could now understand his bitterness, his recurring moods of sadness and almost of remorse; ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part, With a little hoard of maxims ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... judgments of God, as they have an end, so the end of many of them prove the profit of those on whom they are inflicted, being I say, God's instrument of conversion to sinners; and so may fitly be compared to those petty judgments among men, as putting in the stocks, whipping, or burning in the hand: which punishments, and judgments, do often prove profitable to those that are punished with them; but eternal judgment, it is like those more severe judgments among ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... or demagogues, is generally so hateful, and at the same time so contemptible, so grasping, so irritable, so unscrupulous, and so oppressive—so much dictated by ambition, by antipathy and by vanity, so selfish, often so petty in its objects, and so regardless of human misery in its means, that a sovereign who behaves to other nations with merely the honesty and justice and forbearance which are usual between man and man, deserves the praise ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville

... the watchword is: "Seek the type" ("Typum quaeras").[630] But they went a step further still. In opposition to Marcion's antitheses and his demonstration that the God of the Old Testament is a petty being and has enjoined petty, external observances, they seek to show in syntheses that the same may be said of the New. (See Irenaeus IV. 21-36). The effort of the older teachers to exclude everything outward ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... sooner arrived at Palpa than he found himself absolutely dependent upon Harry's knowledge of Spanish; and this advantage on Escombe's part served in a great measure to place the two upon a somewhat more equal footing, and gradually to suppress those acts of petty tyranny which Butler had at first evinced ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... concentration which could enable him to examine a subject to its close. He would begin to talk with me seriously enough, and with a due solemnity, about the suit against him; but, in a tangent, he would dart off to the consideration of some trifle, some household matter, or petty affair, of which, at any other time, he must have known that his hearers had no wish to hear. Poor Julia confirmed the conjectures which I entertained, but did not utter, by telling me that her father had changed very much in his ways ever since ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... that we were vested with any political power; and therefore we could not interfere, and what became of her I know not, though we were afterwards told that on her resigning her trinkets as her ransom she would be released. Indeed the personal ornaments of the petty chiefs are generally the point of some lawless proceeding like the one alluded to, as they are seldom possessed of sufficient capital in specie to purchase jewels, but exchange their grain and fruits for clothes and precious stones. I have mentioned the above circumstance ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem

... replied the Bishop, a grave, earnest-looking man. "Would that His Majesty himself could stand on these walls and see with his own eyes, as you do, this splendid patrimony of the crown of France. He would not dream of bartering it away in exchange for petty ends and corners of Germany and Flanders, as is rumored, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... cried, almost before I entered the office—"what do you think they've done? I knew that young puppy's coming was no good to us! Here have I been here twelve years next Michaelmas, and he not a year, and blest if I haven't got to hand over the petty cash to my lord, because old Merrett wants the dear child to get used to a sense of responsibility in the business! Sense of rot, ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... as the newspapers say, but Rigby the tactless and the petty had shown that there was rumour concerning the relations of Byng and his wife, which Jasmine, at least, imagined ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... conquerers could not build up a strong, united kinigdom, but they had to content themselves with establishing a number of petty kingdoms which were constantly at war with each other. Later, the whole of England became subject to a sing sovereign. But the chief men of the separate kingdoms, which had now become simply shires or counties, retained ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... and insisted pertinaciously on the terms he felt his would-be Captain's necessity enabled him to command; and in the end Captain Semmes was fain to consent to the exorbitant rates of L4 10s. a month for seamen, L5 and L6 for petty officers, and L7 for firemen! "I was glad," he writes, "to get them even upon these terms, as I was afraid a large bounty in addition would be ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... shall be at some future time. My clarinet enables me to live in the humble manner I have always done. You remember, probably, that I had some skill in it, which I have since much improved. When travelling, my music was generally taken as payment for my bed and supper at the petty hostelries at which I put up; and when I came to a large town, I remained a few days, and usually gained ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... long ago,' he answered, 'by both of us, I should think. When my mother bribed you to leave Ilfracombe, you bartered my love and my happiness for the petty price she was able to pay. I was a weak fool in those days, and I took the business to heart bitterly enough, God knows; but the lesson was a useful one, and it served its turn. I have never trusted myself to love ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon

... Finn', well in hand, and was on the watch for promising subscription books by other authors. Clemens, with his usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the petty distractions and difficulties as they came along. Certain plays he was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... discourses; I mean, in my own and in that which you recited out of the book. Would not any one who was himself of a noble and gentle nature, and who loved or ever had loved a nature like his own, when we tell of the petty causes of lovers' jealousies, and of their exceeding animosities, and of the injuries which they do to their beloved, have imagined that our ideas of love were taken from some haunt of sailors to which good manners were unknown—he would certainly never have ...
— Phaedrus • Plato

... most satisfactory for Bulgaria. Now a chance is given her to fulfill her obligations to Russia, who made her free. Let the Bulgarian sword be thrust against the secular enemy of Slavdom and the petty differences be forgotten. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... stubbornness. But if they could not frighten or subdue him, they could still oppose and irritate him, and the contention was obstinate. This feeling even influenced the girls and women at the "mouth." They, too, organized in petty rebellion, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Then Ganga merely flows a watery stream; the elephants that bear the skies, and Indra's steed, are brutal forms; the charms of Rembha are the fleeting beauties of earth's weak daughters, and the golden age, a term of years. Love is a petty archer; the mighty Hanuman, in thy proud discernment, is ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta

... Queen." There were also the Essenes, who allegorized the Law; the Hellenists, who mixed it up with Greek philosophy; the Therapeutists, who thought supreme happiness to be meditation; the political Herodians; the Zealots; and other petty sects who formed the great mass of the people, and held either with or against the two great schools. The decisions of both schools are remarkable for their concise brevity. A phrase suggests many thoughts—a single word awakes a whole train of reasoning. ...
— Hebrew Literature

... light and air. Rashi (1064-1105), whose genial activity began before the first crusade, opened up Jewish religious literature to the popular mind, by his systematic commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. On the other hand, the Tossafists, the school of commentators succeeding him, by their petty quibbling and hairsplitting casuistry made the Talmudic books more intricate and less intelligible. Such being the intellectual bias of the age, a sober, rationalistic philosophy could not assert itself. In lieu of an Ibn Ezra or a Maimonides, we have Jehuda Hachassid and Eliezer of Worms, with ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... pursuit. Fergus sometimes indeed observed that he had offended Waverley, but, always intent upon some favourite plan or project of his own, he was never sufficiently aware of the extent or duration of his displeasure, so that the reiteration of these petty offences somewhat cooled the volunteer's extreme attachment to ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... by private interests and personal revenge. Their unlimited popularity was also a warrant that they would receive far more efficient assistance in their arduous labors than could be expected by the bishops, whose position was generally that of antagonism to their flocks, and to the petty seigneurs and powerful barons whose ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... parlor at the foot of the stairs, and the Representatives were summoned two by two. The Representatives agreed not to answer to their names, and to reply to each name which should be called out, "He is not here." But those "Burgraves" who had accepted the hospitality of Colonel Feray considered such petty resistance unworthy of them, and answered to the calling out of their names. This drew the others after them. Everybody answered. Amongst the Legitimists some serio-comic scenes were enacted. They who alone were not threatened insisted on believing that they were ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... beautifully dressed, and took a drink at the bar and looked round to see who would drink with him. He could never catch a responsive eye, so was forced to drink alone. He hated drinking, anyway. In many ways he was like his father. The petty clerks who were at the office failed to see him at the race course. He hated the races, anyway. In many respects he was like his father. But he was far more lonely than his father had ever been. Thus he went about very lonely, too proud to associate with ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... bound in the close-meshed strait-waistcoat of endless toil, petty anxiety. The days and hours heaped in front of them obliterated all possible view ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... pleases me well. Be Caesar as my husband. So you will save my life and my throne, of which I vow to you an equal share. With the help of your Northmen and the legions I command and who cling to me, we can defeat Constantine and rule the world together. This petty fray is nothing. What matters it if some lives have been lost in a palace tumult? The world lies in your grasp; take it, Olaf, and, with ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard

... seemed and devoid of desire at the hour when he stood near the corpse of his daughter, joined with the silent smoke of the censer, which rose like light mist in the air. How petty he appeared at that juncture, crushed, as it were, by some giant hand—not a demi-god in any sense, or a Titan, but rather an insect, pushing into some narrow cranny to hide from a bird of prey. Kranitski had seen Darvid then, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... great account in their countries and provinces, which, when they come up to the seat of the estate, are but of mean rank and scarcely regarded; so these arts, being here placed with the principal and supreme sciences, seem petty things: yet to such as have chosen them to spend their labours and studies in them, they ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... were wet to the skin, and even on a scorching day in August that is anything but a pleasant sensation. Then, too, the way was rough, and the briers and brambles along the path scratched their hands and tore at their clothing. Ordinarily all these petty annoyances would have tended toward making them irritable and cross, but on this day all such trifles passed over their heads unnoticed. For had they not between them done a marvelous thing? To save one life—to have brought back from eternity one little soul—was there not joy enough ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope

... night, undermined his health. He fell sick, and was compelled to give up his hap-hazard calling, to the great gain of Hebrew poetry. He went into the brokerage business, and his small leisure he devoted to his muse. Harassed by petty, sordid cares, this broker was yet a genuine idealist, though it cannot be maintained that Lebensohn was of the stuff of which dreamers are made and great poets. But in his mind, rationalistic and logical to the point of dryness, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... ideals than he could, with far greater command of Talmudic quotation, while their knowledge of how to run their local organization was naturally superior. But throughout all the mean surroundings, the petty wrangles, and the grotesque jealousies that tarnished the movement he retained his inner exaltation. He had at last found himself and found his art. He fell to work upon a great Michel-angelesque figure of the awakening genius of his people, blowing the trumpet of ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... came back towards the bed. His large mind felt a sudden contempt for this petty and mean woman. He did not understand her, and the contempt he felt for her in some way hurt him. He was afraid of what she ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... country, and they boast that they see better than their neighbours what real love of one's country should consist in. But of late they have grown, more candid and are ashamed of the expression 'love of country,' and have annihilated the very spirit of the words as something injurious and petty and undignified. This is the truth, and I hold by it; but at the same time it is a phenomenon which has not been repeated at any other time or place; and therefore, though I hold to it as a fact, yet I recognize that it is an accidental phenomenon, and may ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... rat when he's cornered! But I do believe that if he and Penfield could get in touch today, here in Genoa, he would hand over every dollar of those securities, and give up the job, and get back to his familiar old lairs among the New York poolrooms and wardheelers and petty criminals where he knows his enemies and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... home a smile; forget the petty cares, The dull, grim grind of all the day's affairs; The day is done, come be yourself awhile: To-night, to those who wait, take ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest

... notions of heaven, but all and each appear agreed upon the point that up into the stars alone their hoped-for heaven is to be found; and if all do not, in this agree, still there are some aspiring minds high soaring above sublunary things, above the petty disputes of differing creeds, and the vague promises they hold out to their votaries, who behold, in the firmament above, mighty and mysterious objects for ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... his time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings! ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith

... Medenham landed from Africa; during the preceding twelve months his license had been indorsed three times for exceeding the speed limit on the Brighton Road, and he had paid L40 in fines and costs to various petty sessional courts in Surrey and Sussex. Sunday, therefore, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of prayers or tears could save him. Nothing could comfort him now; Hattersley's rough attempts at consolation were utterly in vain. The world was nothing to him: life and all its interests, its petty cares and transient pleasures, were a cruel mockery. To talk of the past was to torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to his own regrets and apprehensions. ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... eyes answered hers, but he was puzzled. Had he probed her aright? It was one of those intimate moments that come to nervously organized people, when the petty detail of acquaintanceship and fact is needless, when each one stands nearly confessed to the other. And then she ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... enough to say somewhere: "I have always remarked that geometry leaves the mind just where it found it." Franklin also has clearly and plainly expressed a special aversion to mathematicians, in respect to their social qualities, and finds their petty contradictory ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... and introduced at the Comedie Francaise." The only fault which I never have had, which I never shall have, is vulgarity. That was an injustice and a determination to hurt my feelings. Vitu was no friend of mine, but I understood from this way of attacking me that petty hatreds were lifting up their rattlesnake heads. All the low-down, little viper world was crawling about under my flowers and my laurels. I had known what was going on for a long time, and sometimes I had heard rattling behind the scenes. I wanted to have the enjoyment ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... survey and charting of the tortuous and difficult ship-channel between St. George's and the Dockyard, at once held a consultation with the Senior Naval Officer, in the Admiral's absence, and, as a result of this consultation, three naval petty officers were detailed to show the Germans the best fishing-grounds. At the same time naval patrol boats displayed a quite unusual activity inside the reefs. Both patrol boats and petty officers had their private orders, and I fancy that these steps resulted in very few ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... most characteristic poems. I love the swing and the stride of his great long lines. I love his rough-shod way of trampling down and kicking out of the way the conventionalities that spring up like poisonous mushrooms to make the world a vast labyrinth of petty "proprieties" until everything is nasty. I love the oxygen he pours on the world. I love his genius for brotherliness, his picture of the Negro with rolling eyes and the firelock in the corner. These excerpts are some of his ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... Marmaduke persevere in his disbelief; but every day some fresh wave of tidings floated in. Murder wholesale had surely been perpetrated. Now came stories of death-bells at Rouen from the fishermen on the coast; now markets and petty sessions discussed the foul slaughter of the Ambassador and his household; truly related how the Queen had put on mourning, and falsely that she had hung the French Ambassador, La Mothe Feneon. And Burleigh wrote to his old friend from London, that some horrible carnage had assuredly taken ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... The stricken father was there, dragged from his dead by the petty concerns of this world which cannot bide for grief. He was as a sleep-walker. He had come into another universe. The hacienda sala, where his child lay mid tapers, where mumbled prayers arose, or this adobe, where uniformed men fouled ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... England nature; the solid self-respect which does not need—nor use—to put itself in the balance with anything else to be assured of its own quality. But part belonged to Diana's own personalty; in a simple, large nature, too simple and too large to feel small motives or to know petty issues. If her cheeks and brow were flushed at first, it was because the sun had been hot in the lot and Prince tiresome. She was as composedly herself as ever the young officer could be. But I think each of them was a little excited by the ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... that Erastus could afford to keep her in luxury, if he would, but some women are so constituted that they accept their fate rather than rebel, and Mary Hopkins lived the life of a slave, contenting herself with petty scoldings and bickerings that did nothing to relieve her ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne

... the other, he transformed it, within the space of thirty-seven years (which was the time that his reign lasted), into a great and nourishing Empire. It is not too much to say that, but for him, Parthia might have remained a more petty State on the outskirts of the Syrian kingdom, and, instead of becoming a rival to Rome, might have sunk shortly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... native blacks about the run, but by this time they were harmless enough: never killed shepherds, or took mutton without leave. They were somewhat addicted to petty larceny, but felony had been frightened out of their souls long ago. They knew all the station hands, and the station hands knew them. They soon spotted a new chum, and found out the soft side of him; and were generally able to coax or frighten him to give them tobacco, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... had in earning double the sum in the time I spent. Figure out the profit in that transaction if you can. Whatever it was, it was satisfactory, and indeed few things in life are sweeter than the practice of our pet and petty economies. We all have them. I once knew a very rich man who would light a match and race from one gas-jet to another until he burnt his fingers, lighting as many as he could before striking a second match. He would generally ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... determination, gallantry, patience and resource, the splendid training and high standard of discipline, which were necessary to success in this form of warfare. Lieutenant Charles G. Bonner, R.N.R., and Petty-Officer Ernest Pitcher, R.N., were awarded the V.C. for their services in this action, and many medals for conspicuous gallantry were also given to the splendid ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe

... the noblest parts of the immortal nature,—a waste and withering which are the almost certain consequence of violence done to its instincts and its laws. From these pains and terrors she suffered; and from some of smaller account,—from the petty insults, or speculations of the more coarse-minded of her neighbours, and the being too suddenly reminded by passing circumstances of the change which had come over her expectations and prospects; but her love, her forgiveness, her conviction of ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... resignation of Mr. Landells, immediately promoted my son to the post he had vacated, which appointment the committee confirmed. Here there was perfect union and reciprocal understanding. Neither had petty jealousies or reserved views. The success of the expedition was their object, and personal glory their aim. The leader had every confidence in his second, and the second was proud of his leader. But Mr. Burke committed an error in the selection ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills

... that the men carry on a petty trade in feathers, but that their principal occupation, at least that from which they derive the largest emolument, consists in apprehending, and leading back to their masters, run-away slaves. For their services in this department, they ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... trees and crags in long steep shadows down the hill. Then the sloping rays, through furze and brush-land, kindling the sparkles of the dew, descended to the brink of the Dike, and scorning to halt at petty obstacles, with a hundred golden hurdles bridged ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... rather, you wish to know simply whether I dream of love? Very well, I dream only of that! Have I lovers, or have I not? I have none, and never shall have, but that will not be because of my virtue. I believe in nothing, except my own self-esteem and my contempt of others. The little intrigues, the petty passions, which I see in the world, make me indignant to the bottom of my soul. It seems to me that women who give themselves for so little must be base creatures. As for myself, I remember having said to you one day—it is a million years since then!—that my person is sacred to me; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... impatience and violent measures. But if we put ourselves back equitably into the ways of thinking prevalent then, the excitement about Dr. Hampden will not seem so unreasonable or so unjustifiable as it is sometimes assumed to be. The University legislation, indeed, to which it led was poor and petty, doing small and annoying things, because the University rulers dared not commit themselves to definite charges. But, in the first place, the provocation was great on the part of the Government in putting into the chief theological chair an unwelcome man who could ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... second town in size, possessed not more than some thirty thousand souls, while York, Norwich, and Exeter, which came next, had considerably fewer people than that. The bulk of the people lived in the country, either in the villages, or in the petty market-towns which were not much superior. The country squire class was the most important in the community. Below this, but likewise occupying a very important position in the country, were the clergy and yeomen. Probably at no time was the yeoman ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead

... take me for a Country Squire, whose Reputation will be crackt at the loss of a petty Thousand? You have my Note for it ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... I was compelled to swallow. For ten long years I had been serving my country incessantly as midshipman and master's mate, and now at the very moment when I felt sure that I was about to emerge from the subordinate rank of a petty officer, and to obtain my commission as a lieutenant, no longer to be subject to the midnight calls of quartermasters and the unnumbered snubs which patient midshipmen from their superiors take, I found all my hopes of my promotion ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... their birthright and to toil a field of hope; to industry the wealth that it creates, and to the toiler his dues. So liberty to brotherhood shall lead, and brotherhood to peace, and brotherhood and peace shall bring to unity all human families, and men shall live no more in petty strife for gain, but for the souls of men. The destinies then, as in Virgil's eye, shall spin life's web, and to their spindles say, 'Thus go forever and forever on!' He is the leader appointed by Heaven for sublime events. I am sent to him as a knight of God. ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth

... incomparable. That Giotto and his successors went on for two hundred years painting saints and miracles was not because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into obscure regions. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... necessity be constituted. On the side of the court will be, all honors, offices, emoluments; every sort of personal gratification to avarice or vanity; and, what is of more moment to most gentlemen, the means of growing, by innumerable petty services to individuals, into a spreading interest in their country. On the other hand, let us suppose a person unconnected with the court, and in opposition to its system. For his own person, no office, or emolument, or title; no promotion, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of the prairie, never could think as clearly when her vision was bounded by walls. She had to have blue distance—the great, long look that swept away the little petty, trifling, hampering things, which so slavishly dominate our lives, if we will let them. So she took her way to a little lake behind the school, where with the school axe she had already made a seat for herself under two big poplar trees, and cut the lower branches of some of the smaller ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... needs, but retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family that he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"—a petty anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse, but ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... which the artist materialises the private conceptions of his mind. It would hardly be possible to find a more sympathetic series of illustrations than those which Frank Reynolds drew for Keble Howard's idyll of Suburbia, entitled "The Smiths of Surbiton." The author constructed out of the petty doings and humdrum habits of suburban life a charming little story of simple people, and with equal cleverness the artist built up, out of these slight materials, a series of exquisitely natural pictures, which revealed the almost incredible fact that semi-detached ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson

... behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the three had seen war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men, saying that "Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of every village laborer, and found on the ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... men within the limits of the camp; but stragglers who failed to return, and some who had been cut off, scalped and left for dead, but who had crawled back to die, convinced every one of the wisdom of the commanding officer's repeated orders and cautions. To chronicle the constant succession of petty skirmishes would be wearisome; yet they often resulted in torture and loss of life on the part of the soldiers, although the Indians in most ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... us declare war on all meanness, snobbishness, petty or great jealousies, all forms of injustice, all forms of special privilege, all selfishness and all greed. Let us drop bombs on our prejudices! Let us send submarines to blow up all our poor little petty vanities, subterfuges and conceits, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... answered, after stepping back a pace to assure himself by a careful look that no one was remarking a colloquy which the time and the weather rendered suspicious. "Use them if you please. Let them drink and swear and raise petty riots, and keep the Syndics on their guard! It is all they are good for, M. d'Albigny; and I cannot say that aught keeps back the cause so much as Grio's friends ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... considered as a creator, and for the rest goes about in unobtrusive gray like an unpainted actor who is nothing so long as he has no part to play. He worked in mute isolation, excluding and despising those petty ones who used their talent as a social ornament, who either went about in barbarous raggedness, whatever the state of their fortunes, or else were extravagant in "personal" cravats; whose foremost thought was to live happily, amiably, and artistically, ignorant of the fact ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... round a centre; and he is neither strong enough nor clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched little whirlpool in the mighty River of Becoming, interrupting—as he imagines, in his own interest—its even flow: and within that whirlpool are numerous petty complexes and counter-currents, amongst which his will and attention fly to and fro in a continual state of unrest. The man who makes a success of his life, in any department, is he who has chosen one from amongst these claims and interests, and devoted to it his ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... ministered to the sick; attended the dying; procured their coffins; spoke the comforting words, and sung the hymns at their funerals. She instructed them in their Sunday meetings, and gained release for those in prison for petty offences, or for those unjustly accused. Soldiers often appealed to her to assist and aid them. Her work at the jails was very wearing, for the poor creatures, not unfrequently the mother of an infant left at home, arrested for an imaginary offense, or for stealing bread to avert ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... about it? I can make a place for you in my organization. It seems to run to secret service, oddly enough. You will be rewarded far beyond anything you could expect in your present career of chasing petty crooks from Mercury to Pluto ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl

... satisfaction—that of finding that the lieutenant had made no report concerning his conduct on the night of the collision. In fact, the lieutenant had forgotten his mad words almost as soon as he had spoken them, for they were only the outcomings of his petty malicious spirit ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn

... consequence of superstition. As soon as any one falls ill, his friends and relatives come together, and deliberately discuss who might be the cause of the illness. All possible enemies are considered, every one confesses of his own petty quarrels, and finally the real cause is discovered. An enemy from the next village has called it down, and a raid upon that village is decided upon. Therefore, feuds are rather frequent, even between the coast villages, not to say a word of the cannibal mountaineers who ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... you haven't learned the lesson, you petty meddler, you don't understand it yourself, and ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... arrival, you appeared and seemed a part of it. Do you remember what I said then? I have reluctantly thought to-night that you could wear your coronet of beauty, not Only as a benignant queen, but as a petty tyrant,—that you could put it to ignoble uses, and make it a slave to self. It seemed at times that you only sought to lead men to bow in admiration to you, instead of inspiring them to stand erect in true manhood, with their faces heavenward. A woman endowed as you are can always ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... singing and making merry over tiny glasses of sweetened tea quite as naturally as sailors in a seaport groggery, or Germans over a keg of lager. Jolly, happy-go-lucky fellows though they outwardly appear, they prove no exception, however, to the general run of their countrymen in the matter of petty dishonesty; although I gave them money enough to purchase twice the quantity of provisions they brought back, besides promising them the customary small present before leaving, in the morning they make a further ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... great triumph for a woman. The affection which is equal to such a test certainly ought to be eternal. It is to be wondered at that women do not oftener employ it to judge of their lovers; a fool, an egoist, or a petty nature could never stand it. Philip the Second himself, the Alexander of dissimulation, would have told his secrets if condemned to a month's tete-a-tete in the country. Perhaps this is why kings seek to live in perpetual motion, and allow no one ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... proportion. We have already seen the extent to which it was carried in Italy. It was, if possible, surpassed in France. The diabolical ease with which these murders could be effected, by means of these scentless and tasteless poisons, enticed the evil-minded. Jealousy, revenge, avarice, even petty spite, alike resorted to them. Those who would have been deterred, by fear of detection, from using the pistol or the dagger, or even strong doses of poison, which kill at once, employed slow poisons without dread. The corrupt government of the day, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... you an answer to your last, which, on reflection, pleases me as little as it probably has pleased yourself. I will not wait for your rejoinder; but proceed to tell you, that I had just then been greeted with an epistle of * *'s, full of his petty grievances, and this at the moment when (from circumstances it is not necessary to enter upon) I was bearing up against recollections to which his imaginary sufferings are as a scratch to a cancer. These things combined, put me out of humour with him and all mankind. The latter part of my ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... Africa is a punishment for petty thefts and delinquincies. Trial by red water is generally applied to crimes of greater magnitude. After the usual ceremonial of calling a palaver, the operation is performed by heating a piece of ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry

... you, this evening, two suits of clothes such as we spoke of. In them you can pass as followers of some petty rajah, and are not likely to attract attention. I have inquired among some of my friends, and hear that the Rajah of Bohr left here today with his following. He is but a petty chief, and Bohr lies ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty

... find an utterance in the employment of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or even ridiculous. 'Gehenna,' that word of such terrible significance on the lips of our Lord, has in French issued in 'gene,' and in this shape expresses no more than a slight and petty annoyance. 'Ennui' meant once something very different from what now it means. [Footnote: Ennui is derived from the Late Latin phrase in odio esse.] Littre gives as its original signification, 'anguish of soul, caused by the death of persons beloved, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... was replaced by a Norman "vicecomes," who practically did as he chose, or as he was used to do in Normandy, in questions of procedure, proof, and judgment. The old English hundred courts, where the peasants' petty crimes had once been judged by the freemen of the district, had now in most cases become part of the fief of the lord, whose newly-built castle towered over the wretched hovels of his tenants, and the peasants came for justice ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green

... fields Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth's destruction thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth:—there ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... succeeding centuries, the political nullity of the German nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its original seat, while elsewhere it led the world. Hence, while England ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... emotions did not last long. Whatever his other shortcomings, Ashe possessed a just mind. By the time he had found Joan, after Mr. Peters had said his say, and dispatched him below stairs for that purpose, he had purged himself of petty regrets and was prepared to congratulate her whole-heartedly. He was, however, resolved that nothing should induce him to share in the reward. On that point, he resolved, he ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... mental health as ever it has been my fortune to meet; there was something so full of purpose and resolve—something so wholesome, too, about the character—something so womanly—I might almost say manly, and would, but for the petty prejudice maybe occasioned by the trivial fact of a locket having dropped from her bosom as she knelt; and that trinket still dangles in my memory even as it then dangled and dropped back to its concealment in her breast as she arose. But her face, by no means handsome in the common meaning, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... heads of hair were shorn, and many fine beards reaped that day, yet several still held out, and vowed to defend their sacred hair to the last gasp of their breath. These were chiefly old sailors—some of them petty officers—who, presuming upon their age or rank, doubtless thought that, after so many had complied with the Captain's commands, they, being but a handful, would be exempted from compliance, and remain a monument ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... the agony of a new idea." But his heart goes out to the unscholarly Cavalier with his dash and his loyalty, to the county member who "hardly reads two books per existence," and even to the rustic who sticks to his old ideas and whom "it takes seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one." A petty surface consistency must not be exacted from the miscellaneous utterances of a humorist: all sorts of complementary half-truths are part of his service. His own quite just conception of humor, as meaning merely full vision and balanced judgment, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... announcement of the renewal of hostilities volunteers flowed in on all sides, whether of young men full of ardor and excitement, or, as in many instances, of old soldiers who had already served their time. After a winter of petty skirmishing and reestablishing in Algeria the semblance of security, the Duke of Orlans led the army, considerably reinforced, in a raid against the Arabs under Abd-el-Kader in their own territory. The Zouaves accompanied this expedition, and whether in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... Ceylon, and which, from its being famous for its elephants in his days, is described by Ptolemy in the map he made of Ceylon sixteen hundred years ago as the elephantum pascua. The trade in elephants from Ceylon, which used to be lucrative, is now completely annihilated, in consequence of all the petty Rajahs, Foligars, and other chiefs in the southern peninsula of India, who used formerly to purchase Ceylon elephants as a part of their state, having lost their sovereignties, and being therefore no longer required to keep up any state of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various

... urged me to this answer. Hear me out. What, uncle, is the character you've stooped To fill contentedly through life? Have you No higher pride, than in these lonely wilds To be the Landamman or Banneret, [11] The petty chieftain of a shepherd race? How! Were it not a far more glorious choice To bend in homage to our royal lord, And swell the princely splendors of his court, Than sit at home, the peer of your own vassals, And share the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... elsewhere? or is this A preparation in the wond'rous depth Of thy sage counsel made, for some good end, Entirely from our reach of thought cut off? So are the' Italian cities all o'erthrong'd With tyrants, and a great Marcellus made Of every petty factious villager. My Florence! thou mayst well remain unmov'd At this digression, which affects not thee: Thanks to thy people, who so wisely speed. Many have justice in their heart, that long Waiteth for counsel to direct the bow, Or ere it dart unto its aim: but shine Have ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... and whence the Merrimac appeared, and where the Congress was sunk, and from what place the Monitor darted out upon its big antagonist. But everything was on a scale so vast that it was difficult to localize these petty incidents (big as they were in consequences), and the party soon abandoned history and geography for the enjoyment of the moment. Song began to take the place of conversation. A couple of banjos were produced, and both the facility and the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... fields, was hidden from the passer-by, and here began the great intrigue, as it was called then. Of a truth the plot, as it was conceived, was no mighty thing; it was designed, as many another gossamer web of court gallantry and petty pecuniary gain, for obscure individuals; but great it became through the potent will ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... separation was effected, whereon at a hoarse word of command, a company of soldiers began to fire at the men and continued doing so until all had fallen. Then petty officers went among the slaughtered and with pistols blew out the brains of any ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... which makes life supportable is the knowledge of Death's quick obedience. And the tragedy of life is not that we cannot forget, but that we can. Think of being an old woman with not so much as a connecting current between the memory and the heart, the long interval blocked with ten thousand petty events and trials! It must be worse than this. I shall have gone over the cliff long before that time comes. I would go to-day, but I cannot leave the world while he ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... first through the upper rooms, where a small but choice assortment of habitual drunkards and petty thieves were confined; these, as Sam Wardwell's father had predicted, either declined to converse or talked stupidly for a moment or two, and then begged either tobacco or money to buy it with. Still, Mr. Morton thought he saw in these wretched fellows some material to work ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... reproved him for talking of "soch things:" she holds it petty treason to speak of it, as they are both in office about the Court; though she confessed it would be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... affection of dependence, of habit. Yet for such as it was his soul uttered thanksgiving. Any other woman gifted with a less sweet nature would have felt for him nothing but hatred, but in Fatalite's mind neither spite nor malice ever found a place. The petty vices of womankind had never been hers. He knew now that he had been something to her, and that knowledge would make sunshine for him even in the shadow of a prison. It gave him courage also to play out the tragi-comedy to the end, to make a brave ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward

... in a longer or a shorter space successively crumbled to decay. At a time when the kings of Egypt had never ventured beyond their borders, unless it were for a foray in Ethiopia, and when in Asia no monarch had held dominion over more than a few petty tribes, and a few hundred miles of territory, he conceived the magnificent notion of binding into one the manifold nations inhabiting the vast tract which lies between the Zagros mountain-range and the Mediterranean. Lord by inheritance ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson

... them, that is. I am wearied to death with the perpetual annoyances and vexations, and petty calls upon my time—life is not worth having at such a rate! I'll have done ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... number of queens and concubines; but a petty Hindoo chief has been known to have two thousand women confined within the walls of his harem, and appropriated entirely to his pleasure. Nothing less than unlimited power in the husband is able to restrain women so confined, from the utmost disorder and confusion. They may repine ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... everybody in that hall in fear of death, and he began shouting his insults. Law was a farce in Linrock. The court was a farce. There was no law. Your father's office as mayor should be impeached. He made arrests only for petty offenses. He was afraid of the rustlers, highwaymen, murderers. He was afraid or—he just let them alone. He used his office to cheat ranchers and cattlemen ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey

... we do not keep our eyes on the model; we lose our earlier vision. A liberal education ought to broaden a man's mind so that he will be able to keep his eye always on the model, the perfect ideal of his work, uninfluenced by the thousand and one petty annoyances, bickerings, misunderstandings, and discords which destroy much of the efficiency of narrower, less ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... give a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private concerns, that it would not be right in me to do it."[381] This is the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... times, attained only a partial unity. The chief king indeed presided at Tara, and enjoyed the reputation and emoluments flowing to him on that account, but, upon the whole, no Irish king exercised more than a local sovereignty; they were all reguli, petty kings, and their direct authority was small. This being the case, it would appear to me that in the more ancient times the death of a king would not be an event which would disturb a very extensive district, and that, though his tomb might be considerable, it ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady

... had always existed between Richard and the King of France now led to constant petty wars between them. To secure his Norman province, Richard built on its border a splendid fortress, which he called his Chateau Gaillard,—"Saucy Castle." Amazed and enraged at the wonderful strength of this stronghold, perched on a rocky mount five hundred feet ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene

... occasions answered in the same tone—"And who says I have not a lover?" So Cousin Betty's lover, real or fictitious, became a subject of mild jesting. At last, after two years of this petty warfare, the last time Lisbeth had come to the house ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... weakened by the Southern element, revolted at first from the creed that is to prove its salvation. Not alone in our border States had the dragon crept, searing our fair institutions with his hot breath, but even upon the sturdy old Puritan stock were engrafted many of the petty notions that pass for 'principles' in Dixie. True, we were educated, all of us, into a sort of decent regard for the good old element of labor,—we call it industry,—more antique, since antiquity is a virtue, than aristocracy, for it began in Paradise. But this was a feature of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Tadman could only show her friendly feelings in a very small way, by being especially active and brisk in assisting all the household labours of the new mistress of Wyncomb, and by endeavouring to cheer her with such petty gossip as she was able to pick up. Ellen felt that the woman was kindly disposed towards her, and she was not ungrateful; but her heart was quite shut against sympathy, her sorrow was too profound to be lightened ever so little by human friendship. It was a dull despair, a settled conviction ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon

... in a rage, by loud, angry talking and evil-speaking and petty malice, by unkindness and hard-heartedness and an unforgiving spirit, we grieve Him. In a word, by not walking through the world as in our Father's house, and among our neighbours and friends as among His dear children; by not loving tenderly and ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle

... they. Indeed, so much did Fritz impress Eric with the value of carefully considering every petty detail of their outfit, so that they might not find something omitted at the last moment which would be of use, that there was danger of their forgetting more important articles— the "little things," ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the potency of the bottle, was to carry off the whistle as a trophy of victory. The Dane produced credentials of his victories, without a single defeat, at the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Warsaw, and several of the petty courts in Germany; and challenged the Scotch Bacchanalians to the alternative of trying his prowess, or else of acknowledging their inferiority. After man overthrows on the part of the Scots, the Dane was encountered by Sir Robert ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... every hour, and caused her aunt a species of petty martyrdom resembling the torture of perpetual pin-pricking, the incessant buzzing and stinging of a gnat, the endless creaking of rusty door-hinges,—minor miseries often more unendurable than some great mental or physical suffering. But although ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... sometimes led her to what we might hastily consider "waste her time" on the petty interests and troubles of people who appeared to us unworthy, what were we that we should blame her? The value of each soul is equal in God's sight; and when the books are opened there may be more entries ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden

... contained, whilst all around him the entire mansion proclaimed his immense fortune, his sovereign power, the whole history of the century which had made him the master. His grandfather, Jerome Duvillard, son of a petty advocate of Poitou, had come to Paris as a notary's clerk in 1788, when he was eighteen; and very keen, intelligent and hungry as he was, he had gained the family's first three millions—at first in trafficking ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... could do then would be easy for the Christian powers to do now if they would but make common cause against these marauders—nay, Italy alone should be able at any rate to sweep the Mediterranean free of their pirate galleys; but Venice and Genoa and Pisa are consumed by their own petty jealousies and quarrels, while all our sea-coasts are ravaged by these ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty

... from all eyes, no shadow was thick enough, no mystery sufficiently impenetrable. Now I can no longer recognise myself. I have the feelings neither of a lover nor a husband; my love has melted in adoration like thin wax in a fiery brazier. All petty feelings of jealousy or possession have vanished. No, the most finished work that heaven has ever given to earth, since the day that Prometheus held the flame under the right breast of the statue of clay, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... life, of the progression of organic products, of the melting of minute distinctions, ought to be consulted at each moment; for what is required to be reproduced is not the material circumstance, which it is impossible to verify, but the very soul of history; what must be sought is not the petty certainty about trifles, it is the correctness of the general sentiment, the truthfulness of the coloring. Each trait which departs from the rules of classic narration ought to warn us to be careful; for the fact which has ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... without struggling or making the effort necessary to remove them; and that it is only when they are felt to be intolerable to the great body of the people that one may confidently hope for redress and reformation. Petty wrongs are never repaired by the masses; they sometimes vindicate their rights by means of the strong arm, when seriously required to do so, but in general the wrong is endured, and the victim immolated without ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper

... modest man, and one knows not just how much of our admiration of him and his ship he would care to see spread upon the minutes. Were Mr. Green such a man as the captain, would he be lowering himself to have any truck with journalists and such petty folk? Mr. Green would not. Mark you: Captain Bone is the master of an Atlantic liner, a veteran of the submarine-haunted lanes of sea, a writer of fine books (have you, lovers of sea tales, read "The Brassbounder" and "Broken Stowage"?) a collector ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... was thinking of the long past day when this man had found her in the barren rocklands and taken her with the high hand of a lover. She, too, drifted away from the chilling courtroom with its judge and its petty officials.... And then all suddenly she knew that men were talking—and about her. She heard the drone of question and answer—the rambling statements of the stranger, Arizona, accusing her of strange things—of asking him to take her on rides ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... during the French War, and while he was serving as a petty officer in an armed packet plying between Falmouth and New York, that he met Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl, the only daughter of John and Anna Sanders, who had the distinction of being the granddaughter of an English ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... is seriously wrong, if she is really ill, that is different. But of the petty things that are only remembered in order to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... "Petty, you have no more idea of business than a goat," criticised Montgomery, and Paul lowered his head in humble confession. "That man who calcimines your studio could figure on a piece of work with more intelligence than you reveal. I'll pay $2,500. It's only ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon

... penetrating into the interior of this region, which, I think, is Blackwall—no, I forget what its name is. At all events, it has an ancient and most grimy and rough look, with its old gabled houses, each of them the seat of some petty trade and business in its basement story. Among these I saw one house with three or four peaks along its front,—a second story projecting over the basement, and the whole clapboarded over. . . . . There was a butcher's stall in the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... or economic, or worldly. And the three reasons are these:—First, Because such a descent would have degraded his mission, by lowering it to the base level of a collusion with human curiosity, or (in the most favorable case) of a collusion with petty and transitory interests. Secondly, Because it would have ruined his mission, by disturbing its free agency, and misdirecting its energies, in two separate modes: first, by destroying the spiritual auctoritas (the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... the only Continental Governments which are aware of the magnitude of the issues and the imminence of the danger. You and we perceive the utter folly, the sheer criminality, of plunging Europe in the horrors of a sanguinary war for the sake of a petty state governed by regicides and assassins. What interests have you or we to risk the welfare of our respective nations for the behoof of the Serbian military party whose dreams of greatness border on mania? No, it behoves us both to do all that lies in us to calm Russia's passion and ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... me much of the petty trickery of the court in order that I might understand how the ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... the boat finally drew up alongside. Willing hands helped Ted and Bill up the steep side of the Dewey and they were tendered such a reception as they had never known before. Then ensued a parley between the petty officer of the sunken gunboat Strassburg and ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll

... the way for the greater improvements which he meditated. Among these lesser, but by no means unimportant, reforms may be mentioned the abolition of an odious law which had long disgraced the legislation of so many Christian nations. The punishment by imprisonment for petty debts was, in the estimation of Pius IX., as unjust as it was cruel and hateful. It answered no better purpose, for the most part, than the gratification of private spite. By a generous contribution from his own funds, the Pope threw open the prisons of the Capitol. He set ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... that the eleven States of first rank alone held a full vote, the secondary States merely holding a half or a fourth of a vote, as, for instance, all the Saxon duchies collectively, one vote; Brunswick and Nassau, one; the two Mecklenburgs, one; Oldenburg, Anhalt, and Schwartzburg, one; the petty princes of Hohenzollern, Lichtenstein, Reuss, Lippe, and Waldeck, one; all the free towns, one; forming altogether seventeen votes. In constitutional questions the six States of the highest rank were to have each ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... you: The wife well-natured, and the mistress true. Now, poets, if your fame has been his care, Allow him all the candour you can spare. A brave man scorns to quarrel once a day; Like Hectors in at every petty fray. Let those find fault whose wit's so very small, They've need to show that they can think at all; Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below. Fops may have leave to level all they can; As pigmies would ...
— All for Love • John Dryden

... only misfortune is, that we did not enter into alliance with France six months sooner, as, besides opening her ports for the vent of our last year's produce, she might have marched an army into Germany, and prevented the petty princes there, from selling their unhappy subjects to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... his coffee-cup; and, the sun shining in the full splendor of a July noon, and promising a glorious day, forth sallied this poor fellow, an Oxford Street Adonis, going forth conquering and to conquer! Petty finery without, a pinched and stinted stomach within; a case of Back versus Belly, (as the lawyers would have it,) the plaintiff winning in a canter! Forth sallied, I say, Mr. Titmouse, as also, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... you offer to God as a sort of return for His great mercies to you. Did not Christ go through much more for you than you can possibly be called upon to undergo for Him? Did He bear the bitter cross who was sinless, and do you, who are at best so sinful, scruple to bear such poor trials and petty inconveniences? ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... of liberty,—and made Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, Lord Keeper, a "man of rash and insolent, though servile temper, and of selfish, temporizing, and trimming political conduct," who at that time had never acted as "a judge except at the Waldegrave Petty Sessions in making an order of bastardy or allowing a rate for the Parish poor," and was "as ignorant of the questions coming before him as the door-keepers of his court." But he was subservient, and had pleased the King by preaching the courtly doctrine that "subjects hold their ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... that it is spirited to do as we like, and as soon as we have sinned we discover that we were pleasing not ourselves but a taskmaster, and that while the voice said, 'Show yourself a man, beyond these petty, old-fashioned maxims'; the meaning of it was, 'Become ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... from Paritala when we arrived on some milando or other. These milandos are the business of their lives. They are like petty lawsuits; if one trespasses on his neighbour's rights in any way it is a milando, and the headmen of all the villages about are called on to settle it. Women are a fruitful source of milando. A few ears of Indian corn had been ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... say, woman? Thou silly straw, thou feather, who didst think to float towards thy passion's petty ends, even against the great wind of my will! Tell me, for I fain would understand. Why didst ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... of nocturnal robberies, there is much reason to suspect that the petty constables and divisional watchmen are either extremely negligent in the performance of their duty, or that they suffer themselves to be prevailed on by the house-breakers to be less vigilant than that duty ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... the appearance of technical skill; and he is so fond of displaying it, on all occasions, that I suspect he was early initiated in at least the forms of law, and was employed, while he remained at Stratford, in the office of some country attorney, who was at the same time a petty conveyancer, and perhaps, also, the seneschal of some manor court."—Vol. I. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... no kingdom of Norway, but a number of petty provinces, ruled over by warriors who are spoken of as kings, but whose rule was not very wide. Most powerful among them was Halfdan the Swarthy, who was only a year old in 810 when his father ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... muslins like a discrowned queen. That she had reached the age of two-and-twenty without having been in love was no source of surprise to those who knew her; for Mirpah Madgin hardly looked like a girl who would marry a poor clerk or a petty tradesman, or who could ever sink into the commonplace drudge of a hand-to-mouth household. She looked like a girl who would some day be claimed by a veritable hero of romance—by some Ivanhoe of modern life, well ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various

... in our country are greatly injured by the presence of their servants. Servants do for them what they ought to do for themselves. They acquire the habit of dependence, and it soon degenerates them into petty tyrants. If I had but two lessons to impress upon the young women of my generation, the first should be that a useful Employment is the primary means of developing ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... great Basilica of Assisi was built, drawing to itself pilgrims and privileges, an opposition of principles and of inspiration came to be added to the petty ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... of him to be robbed just at his own door; I daresay he feels that such a thing won't raise him in the eyes of Cranford society, and is anxious to conceal it—but he need not have tried to impose upon me, by saying I must have heard an exaggerated account of some petty theft of a neck of mutton, which, it seems, was stolen out of the safe in his yard last week; he had the impertinence to add, he believed that that was taken by the cat. I have no doubt, if I could ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... to the monastery. I misread the world, I misread human nature. I was one of the fools who think they know all the statesmanship that controls the destinies of nations, who think their petty untrained minds can grasp the great problems ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... had a comfortable homeliness about it, but it had always been a costly house to keep, and now that it was less than ever needful to him to save money, he did not want to hear recriminations concerning such petty matters as the too frequent tuning of the schoolroom piano, and the unprofitable fabrics which had been ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... gaze of the eagle, energy like that with which the strong wing of the royal bird cleaves the air, marked the noble Asmonean; for the soul's gaze was upward toward its Sun, and the soul's pinion soared high above the petty interests, the paltry ambition of earth. As there was dignity in the single-mindedness of the character of Judas, so was there power in the very simplicity of his words. I will mar that simplicity by ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker

... How petty men were, how cruel was the fate of the great, to whom envy clings like their own shadow, and whose image was basely distorted even by those who knew the grandeur of their intellect and their deeds, and who owed to them their ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... took as good as he gave; for every rag of his tail he would manage to indemnify himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France and Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over petty thefts, like the track of a single human locust. A strange figure he must have cut in the eyes of the good country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet, with a smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Noah Hawkins, though it may shock the reader, must be told in plain words. He was a professional burglar; none of your petty, clumsy craftsmen that get lagged for smashing a shopkeeper's till, but a follower to some extent in the footsteps of the masterful Charles Peace. During the previous February he had come out of Dartmoor—it was his third term of penal servitude—with ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon

... the whooping-cough, and the party trooped up the road towards a thatched and whitewashed cottage that stood askew at the top of a lane leading to the seashore. Two tall constables of the R.I.C. stood at the door of the cottage. It came to us, with a lifting of the heart, that we had chanced upon Petty Sessions day in Letterbeg, and ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... perhaps a doubtful one, were not disposed to gratify a curiosity which they probably considered morbid, by yielding to it. This was a mistake. It was a mistake, as much as it would be for us to leave out of our letters to our friends the petty incidents of daily life, and describe only grand principles and outside events. It is only to those loved most by us that we recite the trivial things, for we know that those trivialities link us closer ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... the Dead March in Saul. The long-rolling drums suddenly rent the soul, and destroyed every base and petty thought that was there. Clergy, headed by a bishop, were walking down the cathedral. At the huge doors, nearly lost in the heavy twilight of November noon, they stopped, turned and came back. The coffin swayed into view, covered with the sacred symbolic bunting, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... employment. Retaliation against England by means of legislation was utterly impossible. Each State looked after its commerce in its own peculiar fashion and the devil might take the hindmost. Their rivalries and jealousies were like those of petty kingdoms. If one State should close her ports is to English ships, the others would welcome them in order to divert the trade, with no feeling of national pride or ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... life of perpetual assault and battery. Last Saturday, March 3rd, 1847, one Benjamin Hodgekin, aged fifteen, had the misfortune to wash his feet in the debateable water; the belligerent powers made common cause, and haled the wretch before the Petty Sessions. His mother met me. She lived in service here till she married a man at Marksedge, now dead. This poor boy is an admirable son, the main stay of the family, who must starve if he were imprisoned, and she declared, with tears in her eyes, that she could ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... officers lived in complete harmony for three years was proof enough that they were well and wisely chosen, and Scott was equally happy in his selection of warrant officers, petty officers and men, who brought with them the sense of naval discipline that is very necessary for such conditions as exist in Polar service. The Discovery, it must be remembered, was not in Government employment, and so had no more stringent ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... are a mockery to her Philistine brothers, and a reproach to her commonplace sisters. She will have elevated her father to a lofty pinnacle of imaginative and immaculate excellence, from which a tendency to shortness of temper in matters of domestic finance resulting in petty squabbles with her mother, and an irresistible desire for after-dinner somnolence, will have gradually displaced him. One after another her brothers will have been to her Knights of the Round Table of her fancy, armed by her enthusiasm for impossible conflicts, of which they themselves, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various

... Friendship, which abhors and despises duplicity, art, and disguise; but Female Friendship, which consists in little else than a mutual disposition on the part of the friends, as they call themselves, to abet each other in obscure fraud and petty intrigue." ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... mate with him, should take care to be cultured and refined herself. Half the bad matches in the world are caused either by the educated women marrying the man thoroughly beneath her in all moral qualities, or the man who has spent his life cultivating his mind, falling a slave to the petty fascination of a pretty woman who has only beauty to ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford

... Admiralty; Lords Justices' court, Rolls court, Vice Chancellor's court, Stannary court^, Divorce court, Family court, Palatine court, county court, district court, police court; sessions; quarter sessions, petty sessions; court-leet [Fr.], court-baron, court of pie poudre [Fr.], court of common council; board of green cloth. court martial; drumhead court martial; durbar^, divan; Areopagus^; Irota. Adj. judicial &c 965; appellate. Phr. die Weltgeschichte ist ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... head in pride that a man possessed of such a brain and of the simple courage to try to express such magnificent ideas through human beings had ever shown favour toward her. Humbleness swept over her and she blamed herself for the petty thoughts concerning him that had been in her mind. "It does not matter," she whispered to herself. "Now I know that nothing matters, nothing but his success. He must do this thing he has set out to do. He must not be denied. I would give the blood out of ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson

... fact remains, as can be testified by the present writer from three years' residence as a university student in Germany, that the rank and file as well as the aristocracy—from laborers and small shopkeepers, petty officials, and students to Judges of the Supreme Court and university professors who have become "secret councilors" (Geheimrat)—not only in Berlin and Bonn but in Munich and Heidelberg, all have become ominously full of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... professed to I should have seen in this new and turbulent life of Marguerite the attempt to silence a constant thought, a ceaseless memory. Unfortunately, evil passion had the upper hand, and I only sought for some means of avenging myself on the poor creature. Oh, how petty and vile is man when he is wounded in one of his ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils

... months to have elapsed in this manner—months, to me, of prolonged torture and suspicion. Circumstanees, like petty billows of the sea, kept chafing upon the low places of my heart, keeping alive the feverish irritation which had already done so much toward destroying my peace, and overthrowing the guardian outposts of my pride and honor. How long the strife was to bo continued before the ocean-torrents ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to ingenious mischief for its own sake, with a disregard for petty convention which is an unfailing source of ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... to listen to the petty jealousies and the little grumblings of those not satisfied with their lot at table. One lady stated as an excuse for having her meals in her cabin that her neighbour, a bagman—or "drummer," as Americans would call him—made a noise with his mouth while eating; and another lady elected ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... but superficial; it entereth not into the closet and inmost cabinet of our hearts. For neither of us hath been wronged in his honour, nor is there any question betwixt us in the main, but only how to redress, by the bye, some petty faults committed by our men,—I mean, both yours and ours, which, although you knew, you ought to let pass; for these quarrelsome persons deserve rather to be contemned than mentioned, especially seeing I offered them ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... were a rising family, and offense comes down the hill like stones dislodged by the upward traveller. Mrs. Twemlow knew nothing she disliked so much as any form of haughtiness; it was so small, so petty, so opposed to all true Christianity. And this made her think that the Darlings were always endeavoring to patronize her—a thing she would much rather ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... filled the office of urban praetor be not given, and many other things quite impertinent to the proper idea of a history, which duly touches on prominent occurrences, and does not stoop to investigate petty details or secret motives, which any one who wishes to know may as well hope to be able to count those little indivisible bodies flying through ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... ambitious man might perhaps have remained satisfied with such a result. But Ali did not look upon the suzerainty of a canton as a final object, but only as a means to an end; and he had not made himself master of Tepelen to limit himself to a petty state, but to employ it ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Right in sight of the grandstand you blew up and quit in the stretch. I bet you think right now that you're makin' good because you're holdin' down the job, hey? That ain't makin' good, that's stealin' the boss's money—petty larceny, and deprivin' your future kids of a even chance—a felony! Give the boss everything you got, and he'll pay for it. If he don't, get out and dive in somewheres else! They ain't no place on earth where they ain't ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer

... the war Captain Edward Franklin returned to a shrunken world. The little Illinois village which had been his home no longer served to bound his ambitions, but offered only a mill-round of duties so petty, a horizon of opportunities so restricted, as to cause in his mind a feeling of distress equivalent at times to absolute abhorrence. The perspective of all things had changed. The men who had once ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... awakened, and brought like owls into the light of day, trembling with fear or with joy as they see and understand that the day of Judgment is come, is all expressed with a fulness, a spirit, a certainty of observation which leave the petty accuracy and mild energy of the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... that haughty conqueror resolved next summer to chastise them for this breach of treaty. He landed with a greater force; and though he found a more regular resistance from the Britons, who had united under Cassivelaunus, one of their petty princes, he discomfited them in every action. He advanced into the country; passed the Thames in the face of the enemy; took and burned the capital of Cassivelaunus; established his ally, Mandubratius, in the sovereignty of the Trinobantes; ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye, yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl's hurt vanity as the outspoken complaint of ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan

... was, my lord—just to please the priests just because he was a Papist. Do you think there was a single thing done, or a word said at Petty Sessions, but what Father Flannery knew all about it?—Yes, every word. When did the police ever take any of Father Flannery's ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... now deep, now shallow, now smooth, now tumultuous, now sparkling in sunshine, now gloomy under clouds, rolled on to the engulfing sea. It could not stop to concern itself with the petty comedies and tragedies that were being enacted along its shores, else it would never have reached its destination. Only last night, under a full moon, there had been pairs of lovers leaning over the rails of all the bridges along its course; but that was a common sight, like that of the ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Law was my mistress—took up all my time—absorbed all my devotion. I believe that I was a good lawyer—no pettifogger—the merely drilled creature who toils for his license, and toils for ever after solely for his petty gains, in the miserably petty arts of making gains for others, and eluding the snares set for his own feet by kindred spirits. As far as the teaching of this country could afford me the means and opportunity, I endeavored to procure a knowledge of universal ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... So, with a little alteration, the Greek epitaph of the woman who was the daughter, wife, sister and mother of princes, might apply to her, if, as I like to think, a first-rate American lawyer is entitled to as much respect as a petty Greek prince. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... our souls more, tossing for an hour Upon this huge and ever-vexed sea Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream, Than in a cycle of New England sloth, Broke only by a petty Indian war, Or quarrel for a letter more or less In some hard word, which, spelt in either way, 190 Not their most learned clerks can understand. New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... story in all the States of the ancient world. In addition to the decline in morals, there were political discords and endless wars between the petty princes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... felon of the rascal with the bogus gold brick, but that clumsy worker in the field of robbery does not get the returns which the scienced work of his brother professional brings in; therefore, when outraged law gives this petty malefactor the knock-out blow, the satisfied spectators, chattering about the majesty of something, depart and the curtain is rung down on another exhibition of what the American people are said ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood

... of peace is there that produces this god-like fibre in the plainest of men? Why, indeed, is it produced in the life of war? It is because in war sordidness and petty worries are eliminated; because the one great and ever-present fear, the fear of death, reduces all other considerations to their proper values. The actual fear of death is always present, but this fear itself cannot be sordid when men can meet it of their own free will ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh

... saying nothing. I glanced at his face, half shamed of my petulance, and I saw that he was no longer smiling. His lips were closed in that firm straight line which I had already seen once or twice, and which during years of trial became habitual to him. My own petty anger ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... anarchistic trouble before, killing of kings and hurling of bombs. Now there was a brief, almost bloodless, uprising; and the young new king fled. Prophets freely predicted that the unpractical and unpractised Republic could not last. But instead of destroying itself in petty quarrels, the new government has seemed to grow more able and assured with each ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... creatures carry the reason for their existence within themselves, so great is the perfection which they achieve with a gesture, an attitude, a glance. And then you reflect upon what they too often are in the privacy of their lives: narrow and domineering, attached to petty, useless duties, their minds lacking dignity, their souls lacking horizon; and you are sorry that they have not grown, through the sheer consciousness of their beauty, into ways that are kindly ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc

... pass. When Will Shakespeare is six, he hears that he is to go to school. But not to nod over a hornbook at the petty school—not John Shakespeare's son! Little Will Shakespeare is entered at King's New College, ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin

... and looked as if they had been kidnapped by a pressgang, as they had knocked off from the Tower of Babel. From the moment they came on board, Captain Vanderbosh was shorn of all his glory, and sank into the petty officer, while, to our amazement, the Scottish negro took the command, evincing great coolness, energy, and skill. He ordered the schooner to be wore, as soon as we had shipped the men, and laid her head off the land, then set all hands ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... or which conflicted with its claims. Not only would the legislative independence of a Dublin Parliament be thus destroyed, but the administration of justice would be affected on every Bench in the country, from the Supreme Court of Appeal down to ordinary petty sessions. A grievous wrong would be inflicted on Roman Catholic judges and law officers, some of whom are unsurpassed for integrity and legal ability. It is contrary to every principle of justice to place these honourable men in a position in which they would have to choose between their oath to ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... his career of arms, and even stimulate his vaulting ambition to deeds of yet wilder emprise, she ever esteemed Raleigh as he deserved to be esteemed, or penetrated the depths of his imaginative and creative genius, much less beloved him personally, as she did the vain and petty ambitious Leicester, or the high-spirited, the valorous, the ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... of the tower, with their wide, deliberate views ahead, embracing and binding together not only this port but the whole western world depending upon it, I found in the city jungle innumerable petty men, who could see only their own narrow interests of to-day, and who fought blindly any change for a to-morrow—fellows in such mortal fear of some possible benefit to their rivals that they could see none for themselves. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... your hands—think what I must suffer for these children, for my husband. At one word from you I shall owe them to you; the queen of France will owe you more than her kingdom, more than life." "Madame," returned the grocer's wife unmoved, with that petty common sense of minds in which calculation stifles generosity, "I wish it was in my power to serve you; you are thinking of the king; I am thinking of M. Sausse. It is a wife's duty to think of her husband." All hope is lost when no pity can be found in a woman's heart. The ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... "you drive me to despair. Can't you see that a man may remember the existence of a letter without remembering all its petty details? For instance, I know there's a Sultan of Morocco, but I don't know what he's like, or what his name is, or how he's dressed, or what his exact colour is. Still, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various

... red borders, a bed with a canopy, and draperies arranged as the provincial upholsterers arrange them for a rich bride; which in the eyes of Issoudun seemed the height of luxury, but are so common in vulgar fashion-plates that even the petty shopkeepers in Paris have discarded them at their weddings. One very unusual thing appeared, which caused much talk in Issoudun, namely, a rush-matting on the stairs, no doubt to muffle the sound of feet. In fact, though ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... work hard and save his skin—little else. The great adoration for John which had swept him off his commonplace feet—was it going to make good against life-long selfish caution? We wondered. It was curious to watch the new big feeling fight the long-established petty one. And it was with a glow of triumph quite out of drawing that we saw the generous instinct win ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... forgot all my busy schemes and hopes and aims, the tiny part I play in the world, with so much petty energy, such anxious responsibility. My purple-starred flower approved of my acquiescence, smiling trustfully upon me. "Here," it seemed to say, "I bloom and brighten, spring after spring. No one regards me, no one cares for me; no one praises my beauty; no one sorrows ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the ninth century, Harold Harfager, one of the reguli of Norway, subdued the other petty rulers, and made himself king of the whole country. The defeated party fled to Orkney, and other islands of the west: whence, betaking themselves to piracy, they returned to ravage the coast of Norway. Harold pursued them to their places of refuge, and conquered and colonised ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various

... ready to her hand, if she could bring herself to take it. What if, in the same hour in which he heard that his plan had gone amiss, he heard that she was to marry another? and such another that marry almost whom he might she would take precedence of his wife. That last was a small thought, a petty thought, worthy of a smaller mind than Julia's; but she was a woman, and passionate, and the charms of such a revenge in the general, came home to her. It would show him that others valued what he had ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... and even the charities in which I am nominally interested are managed by little groups of rich ones. The truth is, I learned thirty years ago that if one wants to make money one must go where money is and cultivate the people who have it. I have no petty legal business—there is nothing in it. If I cannot have millionaires for clients I do not want any. The old idea that the young country lawyer could shove a pair of socks into his carpetbag, come to the great city, hang out his shingle and ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... clever-looking man of about thirty-five. As we breakfasted together at the same table we entered into conversation. I learned from him that he was an attorney from a town at some distance, and was come over to Machynlleth to the petty sessions, to be held that day, in order to defend a person accused of spearing a salmon in the river. I asked him ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... Roman Catholic doctrine—to render them admissible to that service, though it was adopted in the House of Commons, was rejected by the House of Lords. But Pitt, who on that occasion had supported Wilberforce, did not confine his views to the removal of a single petty disability, but proposed to put the whole body of Roman Catholics on a footing of perfect equality with Protestants in respect of their eligibility to every kind of office, with one or two exceptions. ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... in England what Charlemagne had done in Germany. He either persuaded the various petty kingdoms of the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes to recognize him as their ruler, or forced them to do so; and thus under him all England ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren

... government railway at Ilo, who desired me to return and accept a position as engineer on the road. I told him of my troubles in that town with the officials. He met me soon afterwards, with a contract duly drawn up for eighteen months' service and a guarantee that I should not be molested by any petty official. ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... Preclude conviction, that a spirit strong, 165 In hope, and trained to noble aspirations, A spirit thoroughly faithful to itself, Is for Society's unreasoning herd A domineering instinct, serves at once For way and guide, a fluent receptacle 170 That gathers up each petty straggling rill And vein of water, glad to be rolled on In safe obedience; that a mind, whose rest Is where it ought to be, in self-restraint, In circumspection and simplicity, 175 Falls rarely in entire discomfiture Below its aim, or meets with, from without, A treachery that foils it or defeats; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously good- natured, might prove a boy. Gerald, living uncomplainingly in ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... amid earth's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a nobler life? We lost it in the daily jar and fact, And now live idly in a vain regret." ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... was due to enmity to Christianity. Not so. Masonry was not then, and has never at any time been, opposed to Christianity, or to any other religion. Far from it. But Christianity in those days—as, alas, too often now—was another name for a petty and bigoted sectarianism; and Masonry by its very genius was, and is, unsectarian. Many Masons then were devout Christians, as they are now—not a few clergymen—but the order itself is open to men of all faiths, Catholic and Protestant, Hebrew and Hindu, who confess faith ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... ancient Babylonian demonology; all the petty annoyances of life—a sudden fall, a headache, a quarrel—were set down to the agency of fiends; all the stronger emotions—love, hate, jealousy and so on—were regarded as the work of demons; in fact so numerous were they, that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... was now roused by his danger to a quick and painful remembrance of his folly; he now saw how happiness is lost when ease is consulted; he lamented the unmanly impatience that prompted him to seek shelter in the grove, and despised the petty curiosity that led him on from trifle to trifle. While he was thus reflecting, the air grew blacker and a clap of ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... have known you! ha, ha, ha!" I was not in a humour to enjoy his attempts at facetiousness; I therefore told him, that he had behaved disgracefully and meanly, and that I should publish his character among the adjoining tribes as below that of the most petty chief that I had ever seen. "Never mind," he replied, "it's all over now; you really are thin, both of you;—it was your own fault; why did you not agree to fight Fowooka? You should have been supplied with fat cows and milk and butter, had you ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... numerous, and that tomb-sculpture was important; but added to these there were civil monuments to show forth the glory of the cities and their great men, and there were public fountains and other sculptures which told of the splendor and fame of each one of the many petty powers into which the whole country was divided. The council-halls of the free cities were very fine, and gave great opportunity to Italian artists to give variety to their works, and the sculptors very early excelled in reliefs, which told ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... freedom and necessity; but the latter does not contain the bishop's reply, nor the author's rejoinder. Mr. Hobbes argues on this subject with his usual wit and subtlety; but it is a pity that in both the one and the other we stumble upon petty tricks, such as arise in excitement over the game. The bishop speaks with much vehemence and behaves somewhat arrogantly. Mr. Hobbes for his part is not disposed to spare the other, and manifests rather too much scorn for theology, and for ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... This intimation was followed by two very warm addresses from the lords and commons, in which they repeated their assurances of standing by her against all her enemies. They exhorted her to persevere in supporting the common cause, notwithstanding this petty attempt to disturb her dominions; and levelled some severe insinuations against those who endeavoured to foment jealousies between her majesty and her most faithful servants. Addresses on the same occasion were sent up from different parts of the kingdom; so that the queen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... quite enough of him. I think I have before intimated that that author never more intends to have Mr. Newby for a publisher. Not only does he seem to forget that engagements made should be fulfilled, but by a system of petty and contemptible manoeuvring he throws an air of charlatanry over the works of which he has the management. This does not suit the "Bells": they have their own rude north-country ideas of what is delicate, honourable, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... on hand at the police courts to give straw bail for his customers or establish an alibi for them in case they had been beating anybody to death on his premises. Consequently he presently became a political leader, and was elected to a petty office under the city government. Out of a meager salary he soon saved money enough to open quite a stylish liquor saloon higher up town, with a faro bank attached and plenty of capital to conduct it with. This gave him fame and great respectability. The position ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the secrecy of her chamber, she obtained 'redemption through the blood of Christ, even the forgiveness of sins.' Much to the chagrin of her father, she now became an avowed Methodist; and was subjected to the petty persecution, which usually awaits the first in a family that embraces vital godliness. On one occasion, her father locked her out of the house; and, on another, threatened to shoot her, but she remained firm to her profession; until ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth

... domestic affairs, and the eye of the master was considered the only one which could duly superintend these estates and those interests. Much incapacity to govern was revealed in this inordinate passion to administer. His mind, constantly fatigued by petty labors, was never enabled to survey his wide domains from the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... surprise. Imperious as he was, and stiffened by a good many of those petty prides which the spoiled children of the world escape so hardly, he found himself hesitating—groping ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... desirable emancipation from the restraint of home life. The love of books he considered a pose and he scoffed at the men who took their reading seriously. The university attracted him mostly by its most undesirable features, its sports, its secret societies, its petty cliques, and its rowdyism. The broad spirit and the dignity of the alma mater he ignored completely. Directly he went to Yale he started in to enjoy himself and with the sophisticated Underwood as guide, went to the devil faster than any man before him in the entire ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... like a warming pan, the soup was at its most important crisis. Gatty hearing the explosion of wrath, came as was her usual custom to join in the melee, also got a shower of invectives, but, knowing the soup-pot could not be left, she stood her ground, and occupied herself in various petty acts of mischief. For instance, the new cook had a perfect series of cloths and such like articles pinned to her when she made her appearance. Hargrave found all the gourds and pipkins into which she had put the vegetables changed, and, not being naturally sweet ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton

... Mr. Graeme, and commissioned him to fetch the family lawyer from Edinburgh. Alone with him she gave instructions concerning her will. The man of business shrugged his shoulders, laden with so many petty weights, bowed down with so many falsest opinions, and would ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... of all this, only quite simply, as if he were going to ride to the petty sessions at Colbeam, mentioned that he thought it right to go out to Canada ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... has a fine harbour, where ships arrive daily from different quarters of the world. I frequented also the society of the learned Indians, and took delight to hear them discourse; but withal I took care to make my court regularly to the king, and conversed with the governors and petty kings, his tributaries, that were about him. They asked me a thousand questions about my country; and being willing to inform myself as to their laws and customs, I asked them every thing which I thought worth knowing. There belongs to this king an island named Cassel; ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous

... viciousness of the agent; if the principle that governs the act and the effort put forth to conform to the principle be recognized as the true standard by which we are to judge, then two consequences will follow with respect to the conduct of life. The first is that the seemingly petty occasions of life are to be treated as grand occasions in so far as a moral principle is involved. For instance, a petty falsehood spoken for the purpose of securing business advantage or of avoiding business loss may seem to the average man a trivial ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler

... my continual occupation in the sessions of the Audiencia and rendering opinions. This year I am probate judge, and for the first four months of the year provincial alcalde; and since people find that matters are readily settled I am beset by the natives with their petty lawsuits. I wish that I might have had more time to collect what can be put together, and to write on law. However I shall not neglect perchance to make some slight report. The following is a clause from a letter of your Majesty which I found, addressed to the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair

... me what you can do, and I will show you what you are. I have spoken of love of one's work as the best preventive of merely low and vicious tastes. I will go farther and say that it is the best preservative against petty anxieties and the annoyances that arise out of indulged self-love. Men have thought before now that they could take refuge from trouble and vexation by sheltering themselves, as it wore, in a world of their own. The experiment has often been tried and always with one result. You cannot ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... How little is recorded besides battles, plagues, and religious foundations! That this should be the case, before the Conquest, is not surprizing. Our empire was but forming itself, or re-collecting its divided members into one mass, which, from the desertion of the Romans, had split into petty kingdoms. The invasions of nations as barbarous as ourselves, interfered with every plan of policy and order that might have been formed to settle the emerging state; and swarms of foreign monks were ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole

... I can make a place for you in my organization. It seems to run to secret service, oddly enough. You will be rewarded far beyond anything you could expect in your present career of chasing petty crooks from Mercury to Pluto ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl

... to a denial of the right of petition, very few wished to become identified with the cause of the Abolitionists. In truth it required no small degree of moral courage to take position in the ranks of that despised political sect forty-five years ago. Persecutions of a petty and social character were almost sure to follow, and not infrequently grievous wrongs were inflicted, for which, in the absence of a disposition among the people to see justice done, the law afforded ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... conducted in hard currency as indigenous bank notes have lost almost all value, and a barter economy now flourishes in all but the largest cities. During the bitter civil strive of 1996-97 most individuals and families have hung on grimly through subsistence farming and petty trade. The new KABILA government will be hard pressed to meet its financial obligations to the IMF or to put in place the financial measures advocated by it. Improved political stability would boost the country's long-term potential ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... There were about a dozen men in it. Two were Coast Guardsmen, one a lieutenant and the other a chief petty officer. Two others were state highway patrolmen. Another, in a blue uniform, was evidently the local policeman. The rest were in civilian clothes. All of them were watching a lean, youthful man who sat ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine

... not pleasant, Beorn, but at present I feel so thankful for my escape from those terrible waves that even the thought that we are all prisoners to this petty noble does not greatly concern me. Doubtless William of Normandy, who is the liege lord of the land, will speedily take us out of his hands. Were we alone it may be that we should suffer a long stay in his dungeons, but Harold and his brother are far too important personages to be allowed ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty

... present sweetness will be turned to brine; Thou'lt hardly make one petty, paltry wave. Lovest thou the sun? He will not know thee there. Is't sweet to run, Know thine own whence and where? 'Tis here thy joy, thy love, thy life are thine; There thou wilt neither be, nor do, nor have. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... dreaming. You? the admired! the worshipped! the luxurious!—and no blame to you that you are what you were born—could you endure a little parsonage, the teaching village school-children, tending dirty old women, and petty cares ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... have not the smallness of his. Her eyes are large and deep blue. There is enough rich color of lip, and fainter color of cheek, to relieve the whiteness of her complexion. The trouble on her face is of some permanence; it is not petty like that of the man's, but is at one with the nobility of her countenance. It seems to find rest in the tender sadness of the song, which, having finished, ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens

... stirred in her by Sir Henry's compliments, all the natural pleasure she had taken in the success of her great adventure as a business woman, in the ease with which she, the Squire's paid secretary, had lately begun to lead the patriotic effort of an English county—how petty, how despicable even, it seemed, in presence of a boy who had given his all!—even beside ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... with the Flemish burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both Flanders ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... everywhere out of literature, and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some university men has been justly condemned. But while such word-worms were crawling here and there out of the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were striding over them in their petty convolutions. Their intertwinings attracted the attention of the mere gazer, who is always more stricken with any microcosmic object that comes casually in the way and is embraced at a glance, than with objects the magnitude of which demand repeated examinations. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... his age: but when they met in conclave something usually happened, for the seat of the legislature was far away, and their will considerably more potent thereabouts than the law of the land. Sheriff, postmaster, railroad agent, and petty politician carried out their wishes, and as yet no man had succeeded in living in that region unless he did homage to the cattle-barons. They were Republicans, admitting in the abstract the rights of man, so long ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... extenso by Bayley.[55] Some of the towers are called by names (as for example, "Corande's" and "la Moneye" towers, the latter perhaps an early reference to the Mint) which no longer distinguish them. The Return shows that these—the Iron gate tower, "N," the two posterns of the wharf, and Petty Wales, "P.P.," the wharf itself, and divers other buildings—were all in need of repair, the total amount for the requisite masonry, timber, tile work, lead, glass, and iron ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... He fell sick, and was compelled to give up his hap-hazard calling, to the great gain of Hebrew poetry. He went into the brokerage business, and his small leisure he devoted to his muse. Harassed by petty, sordid cares, this broker was yet a genuine idealist, though it cannot be maintained that Lebensohn was of the stuff of which dreamers are made and great poets. But in his mind, rationalistic and logical to the point of dryness, there was a secluded recess pervaded with melancholy and real ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... ready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of morality. Here is a play in which almost every character is noble, in which treachery becomes a virtue, a lie becomes more vital than truth, and only what we are accustomed to call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and even criminal. And it is most like life, as life really is, in this: that at any moment the whole course of the action might be changed, the position of every character altered, or even reversed, by a mere ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons









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