Petty Quotes - Page 11

• It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings

  Isak Dinesen

  Lying, Sake, Christ

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Last Tales”, p.51, Vintage

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• The Band was always famous for its retirements we'd go and play and get a little petty cash together, and then not see each other till it was time to fill our pockets up again.

  Rick Danko

  Retirement, Play, Together

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• My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature

  Josephine Hart

  Mother, Essentials, Passionate

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• Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.

  Ernst Cassirer

  Giving Up, Men, Thinking

  Ernst Cassirer, Yale University. Louis Stern Memorial Fund (1944). “An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture”, New Haven : Yale University Press ; London : H. Milford, Oxford University Press

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• A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Morning, Business, Laughter

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, William Ernest Henley (1925). “The works of Robert Louis Stevenson”

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• Exemplary persons are steadfast in the face of adversity, while petty persons are engulfed by it.

  Confucius

  Adversity, Faces, Steadfast

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• War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

  C. E. M. Joad

  War, Men, Position Of Power

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• Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

  Zhuangzi

  Wisdom, Speech, Contentious

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• Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.

  Alexander Herzen

  Generations, Development, Introducing

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• Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop; to free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.

  Samuel Gompers

  Cutting, Long, Safety

  Samuel Gompers, William Green (1921). “The American Federationist”

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• We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

  Aesop

  Witty, Government, Political Will

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Thinking, Punishment, Deities

  Sheri S. Tepper (2013). “The Visitor”, p.216, Hachette UK

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• ..."And for God's sake, never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people's net-worth. As Yogi Ramen preached: 'Every second you spend thinking about someone elses dreams you take time away from your own.'"

  Robin Sharma

  Dream, Self Worth, Thinking

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• Every day God patiently bears with us, and every day we are tempted to become impatient with our friends, neighbors, and loved ones. And our faults and failures before God are so much more serious than the petty actions of others that tend to irritate us! God calls us to graciously bear with the weaknesses of others, tolerating them and forgiving them even as He has forgiven us.

  Jerry Bridges

  Forgiving, Serious, Weakness

  Jerry Bridges (2016). “The Practice of Godliness”, p.174, NavPress

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• An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

  Saint Augustine

  Wisdom, Art, Kings

  Saint Augustine of Hippo, Catholic Way Publishing (2015). “The City of God”, p.161, Catholic Way Publishing

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• The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

  Adam Gopnik

  Loyalty, Past, Desire

  "Blows Against the Empire" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. August 20, 2007.

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• The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.

  David Foster Wallace

  Home, Thinking, Giving

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

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• When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others

  Robert Greene

  Success, Worry, Envy

  Robert Greene (2010). “The 48 Laws Of Power”, p.4, Profile Books

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• Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Mistake, Lying

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• The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Men, Law, People

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• The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

  George Santayana

  Mistake, Self, Cynical

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• There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

  David Foster Wallace

  Frustration, Boredom, Adults

  "Ten Best Commencement Speeches: See A List, Take The Poll" by Katharine Zaleski, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 17, 2009.

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• The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Lying, Ideas, Giving

  "SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL".

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• All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

  Vernor Vinge

  Evil, Comfort, Twisted

  Vernor Vinge (2010). “Zones of Thought: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky”, p.310, Hachette UK

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• I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.

  Norton Juster

  Jobs, Effort, Monsters

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