"Littleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... duped a friend; there was a pitiful and debasing weakness in his nature, which made him regard the lowest meanness as the subtlest wit. His mind too was not only degraded, but broken by his habits of life; a strange, idiotic folly, that made him love laughing at his own littleness, ran through his character. Houseman was young; he might amend; but Clarke had grey hairs and dim eyes; was old in constitution, if not years; and every thing in him was hopeless and confirmed; the leprosy was in the system. Time, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which it is impossible for any man to understand. In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He feels more vividly than any others can feel, the utter incomprehensibleness ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... philosophy furnishes an instructive theme; it enters into the history of the human mind, and fills a niche in our literary annals. The works of the scholastics, with the debates of these Quodlibetarians, at once show the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect; for though they often degenerate into incredible absurdities, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of the Herculean ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... facts, the tokens so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... and bearing the name of the Dumb Bell, the Crab nebula, hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawling terror, every point holding millions of worlds, thinking of these all transcendent wonders, and then remembering his own inexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of his whole race does not occupy a single tick of the great Sidereal Clock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he not utterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King of all this? In a word, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
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