Trifling Quotes - Page 4

• Do not be angry with people who are weak. That is the mark of a coward. There are plenty of things to be angry about in the world--people wielding political or religious authority who have been blinded by money, for example! That is the kind of evil young people should direct their rage at. Be angry about that, and you'll never lose your temper about trifling matters.

  Josei Toda

  Religious, People, Evil

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• Death is by no means separate from life. . . . We all interact with death every day, tasting it as we might a wine, feeling its keen edge even in trifling losses and disappointments, holding it by the hand, as a dancer might a partner, in every separation.

  Eugene Kennedy

  Death, Disappointment, Mean

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• In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

  Mark Twain

  Years, Two, Rivers

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• The birds looked upon me as nothing but a man, quite a trifling creature without wings-and they would have nothing to do with me. Were it not so I would build a small cabin for myself among their crowd of nests and pass my days counting the sea waves.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Men, Sea, Wings

  Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn, Rabindranath Tagore, Sigrid Undset, William Butler Yeats (1971). “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rabindranath Tagore, Sigrid Undset [and] William Butler Yeats”

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• For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.

  Aristotle

  Vices, Lines, Riches

  Aristotle (2015). “Politics”, p.164, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Men, Medicine, Age

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• Be vigilant! Be vigilant! If an evil is minor, resist it nonetheless. If a good deed is trifling, perform it all the same. Only wisdom and virtue can truly win men's devotion.

  Liu Bei

  Winning, Men, Evil

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• ...trifling employments have rendered woman a trifler.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Employment

  Mary Wollstonecraft (1997). “The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman”, p.196, Broadview Press

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• It is often interesting, in retrospect, to consider the trifling causes that lead to great events. A chance encounter, a thoughtless remark - and the tortuous chain reaction of coincidence is set in motion, leading with devious inevitability to some resounding climax.

  Patricia Moyes

  Interesting, Retrospect, Causes

  Patricia Moyes (1961). “Down Among the Dead Men”

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• God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

  Tom Wolfe

  Forever, Stories, Journalism

  "Mummy Wrap" by George Neumayr, "The American Spectator", spectator.org. January 10, 2005.

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• We are saved from nothing if we are not saved from sin. Little sins are pioneers of hell. The backslider begins with what he foolishly considers trifling with little sins. There are no little sins. There was a time when all the evil that has existed in the world was comprehended in one sinful thought of our first parent; and all the now evil is the numerous and horrid progeny of one little sin.

  James Howell

  Evil, Parent, Pioneers

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• Trifling favors are readily acknowledged, though cheaply esteemed; but important ones are most rarely remembered.

  Giovanni Ruffini

  Important, Favors, Obligation

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• To every class we have a school assign'd,
  Rules for all ranks, and food for every mind:
  Yet one there is, that small regard to rule
  Or study pays, and still is deem'd a school;
  That, where a deaf, poor, patient widow sits,
  And awes some thirty infants as she knits;
  Infants of humble, busy wives, who pay
  Some trifling price for freedom through the day.
  At this good matron's hut the children meet,
  Who thus becomes the mother of the street.

  George Crabbe

  Mother, Children, Humble

  George Crabbe (1858). “The Poetical Works of George Crabbe: With a Life of the Author”, p.239

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• None so nearly disposed to scoffing at religion as those who have accustomed themselves to swear on trifling occasions.

  John Tillotson

  Scoffing, Profanity, Swear

  John Tillotson (1720). “The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: Containing Fifty Four Sermons and Discourses on Several Occasions. Together with the Rule of Faith”, p.37

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• It is so often the odd, the unexpected, the apparently trifling, that stamps itself upon the memory for ever, while much more memorable things pass away like a breath of wind.

  Esther Meynell

  Memories, Memorable, Wind

  Esther Meynell (1940). “A Woman Talking”, London, Chapman & Hall [1940.]

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• An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.

  Charles Dickens

  Men, Keys, Hair

  Charles Dickens, Peter Preston (1998). “The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Stories”, p.358, Wordsworth Editions

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• One likes to hear what is to be going on, to be au fair with the newest modes of being trifling and silly.

  Jane Austen

  Silly, Likes, Fairs

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• Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be.

  Emily Post

  Attitude, Character, Personality

  Emily Post, Elizabeth L. Post (1984). “Emily Post's Etiquette”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me tobe doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Office, Monsters

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.6, Xist Publishing

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• Surely no man can reflect, without wonder upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life.

  Sir Fulke Greville

  Mean, Men, Doors

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• The present Constitution, with a few alterations of a trifling nature, is just as good as we want; and if it is sustained on this land of Joseph, it will be done by us and our posterity.

  Brigham Young

  Land, Done, Want

  Brigham Young (1860). “Journal of Discourses”

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• All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Sports, Horse

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• Let us resolve to talk more to believers about the Bible when we meet them. Alas, the conversation of Christians, when they do meet, is often sadly unprofitable! How many frivolous, and trifling, and uncharitable things are said! Let us bring out the Bible more, and it will help to drive the devil away, and keep our hearts in tune. Oh, that we may all strive so to walk together in this evil world; that Jesus may often draw near, and go with us, as He went with the two disciples journeying to Emmaus!

  J. C. Ryle

  Christian, Jesus, Heart

  Jay Patrick Green, Sr., John Charles Ryle (2002). “Why Read the Bible Through & How Readest Thou?”, Sovereign Grace Publishers,

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• King René of Anjou [(1409-80)]was a strange compound of amiable, great and trifling qualities. He was so excellent a sovereign as to acquire the surnom of the Good. He was brave in war, delighted in tournaments and wrote on them, instituted festivals and processions, partly religious and partly burlesque, was a fond husband, a romantic lover, a good painter for that age, and a true philosopher.

  Horace Walpole

  Religious, Kings, Husband

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• Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Writing, Patient, Operations

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