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More "Littleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many lives are dwarfed by their very littlenesses. We are bothered with being short-sighted. The eyeglasses of the Master's purpose for us would wondrously widen out our scope of vision. And through the new eyes would come broader, farther, clearer views, and changed action. The littleness of our ideas would be amusing if ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... Mrs. Brace carefully brushing into a newspaper the litter made by his whittling. Her performance of that trivial task, the calm thoroughness with which she went about it, or the littleness of it, when compared with her complete indifference to the tragedy which should have overwhelmed her—something, he could not tell exactly what, made her more repugnant to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... hoary tower, awes the mind and touches the heart. And this partly because of its pitiful littleness. A handful of cracked and broken stones to tell of all that terrible harvest that Death reaped in the ruined village! But perhaps they tell it all as hosts of tombs could not do. One reads between the stones, then far out beyond them where mouldering bones are feeding the smiling ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... at Haverhill, disconcerted, disgraced, conscious of my own littleness and folly, and, as I was bid, took passage in the Telegraph coach for Hanover, giving orders that I should be ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... for the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness of a ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... impossible to break off without animosity, largely and completely. Infinitely preferable was Mary's state, she thought, where there was a simple thing to do and one did it. In fact, she could not help supposing that some littleness of nature had a part in all the refinements, reserves, and subtleties of feeling for which her friends and family were so distinguished. For example, although she liked Cassandra well enough, her fantastic method of life struck her as purely frivolous; now ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... But let that be forgotten which can never be recalled. Yes, we have only strength when we pursue wickedness. But wherein am I great? If I were so, should I want thee? Go, cunning flatterer; thou wilt only make me feel my own littleness. ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... betake yourself to music or painting, carpentry or gardening, as a means of getting through the day, you are sapping your mental constitution and shortening your life: unless you are sustained by more than ordinary littleness of mind you will never see threescore and ten. All these things are good in proportion as you have difficulty in finding time for them. When you have to rise early in the morning and work hard to make a little leisure for your favourite hobby, then you are getting its blessing. Now, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... into the smooth, boyish face so near her own, with its young curves and sharpnesses made wistful by the moonlight. She did not know why, but was suddenly filled with a sort of aching, protective pity when she heard those words mingling with the sound of the sea. It was Wilf's youngness and littleness in the face of that immensity. "Five thousand pounds before I die!" And the sea beating on the shore ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... best thank you by admitting that I should have found it very unpleasant to meet Mr. Mutimer. You felt that, and hence your kindness. At the same time, no doubt, you pity me for my littleness.' ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... that the feelings are irritated at the imagined audacity of the inanimate object, with the self-conceit of its impotence; and, finally, the eye is offended at its want of size. It does not, as might be at first supposed, enhance the sublimity of surrounding scenery by its littleness, for it provokes no comparison; and there must be proportion between objects, or they cannot be compared. If the Parthenon, or the Pyramid of Cheops, or St. Peter's, were placed in the same situation, the ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... form an offensive and defensive alliance with Catharine. Count Panin was at that time prime minister—a man of the old ministerial school, who regarded diplomacy as the legitimate science of chicane, was a master of all the littleness of his art, and was wholly under the influence of the King of Prussia. The count was all consent, and yet contrived to keep the ambassador at arm's-length; while the empress, equally crafty, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... persuade me that I was a well-known person, and that everybody in Vienna was familiar with my name. It is always wholesome for an author to be reminded from time to time of his insignificance and littleness, for it preserves him from giving way to pride, and pride is always the first ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the powers of nature, which had hitherto slumbered quietly, now came into play. The breeze freshened and a tremendous storm of thunder, lightning, and rain came on, as if to mock the fury of man, and humble him under a sense of his relative littleness. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... better and he was more used to me, which made it at least bearable to both of us. Before long the canyon widened out into the level forest land thickly studded with magnificent pines. I had again the feeling of awe and littleness. Everything was solemn and still. The morning air was cool, and dry as toast; the smell of pitch-pine choked my nostrils. We rode briskly down the broad brown aisles, across the sunny glades, under ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... solemn rapture to welcome them; no habit of their order proclaimed to themselves and the world that they were the elect of Christ, the brides of another life: but small, eating cares, daily prosaic duties, the petty friction of all the littleness and all the inglorious annoyances of every day, were as dust that hid the beauty and grandeur of their calling even from themselves; they walked unknown even to their households, unknown even to their own souls; ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... troubled by their plots the reign of Louis XVIII., he says:—"This Carbonarism never descended into the depths of society; it never moved the lower strata. How, then, could it be preserved from the vices of the middle class—egoism, littleness of ideas, extreme love of a mere material happiness, gross instincts!"—(P. 115.) So that he finds Carbonarism to have lacked in virtue, because it had not descended, for its disciples, sufficiently low in the scale of society!—to have grown corrupt, by reason of its not having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the door and went out upon the porch. The yard looked deserted and desolated, giving him a sudden realisation of his own littleness and the immensity of the hour. It was as if the wheels of time had stopped in the dim promise of things unfulfilled. A broken scythe lay to one side amid the straggling ailanthus shoots; near the wood-pile there was a wheelbarrow half filled with chips, and ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the last sentence in such a whimsical tone and with such a frank smile that they were all forced to laugh, even the Michigan man. But Harley felt relief. The candidate had shown no littleness. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... lie! Tell a lie for five dollars! Sell your manhood! Sell your soul for five dollars! You must rate yourself very cheap!" And then, they said, he fairly preached them a sermon on the nobility of perfect truthfulness, and the littleness and meanness of lying ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... of the master. Mr. Johnson cannot so much as hope for the success in escaping memory achieved by the last of those small Virginians whom the traditionary fame of a State once fertile in statesmen lifted to four years of imperial pillory, where his own littleness seemed to heighten rather than lower the grandeur of his station; his name will not be associated with the accomplishment of a great wrong against humanity, let us hope not with the futile attempt at one; but he will be indignantly remembered ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of lofty ambition I would recommend a balloon excursion. The higher you get, the smaller and more insignificant do earthly things appear. A balloon is the best pulpit imaginable from which to preach a sermon upon the littleness of mundane realities, first—because no one can hear you, and your congregation cannot therefore be held responsible for indifference to your teaching; and second—because at that height you are fully impressed with the truth of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... afforded her relief to assure herself to the contrary. The cowboy was one of a blood-letting breed; the hunter was a man of thought, gentleness, humanity. This situation was one of the kind that had made him despise the littleness of men. Helen assured herself that he was different from her uncle and from the cowboy, in all the relations of life which she had observed while with him. But a doubt lingered in her mind. She remembered his calm reference to Snake ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... search out and explain mysteries which will never be revealed, through the eternal ages. If men would but search and understand what God has made known of Himself and His purposes, they would obtain such a view of the glory, majesty, and power of Jehovah, that they would realize their own littleness, and would be content with that which has been revealed for themselves and ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... thing's, is regarded as a matter gone by. Here now we have the Red Sea brought under our notice in a most striking manner, and one that leads us not only to feel the greatness of the power of man over material things, but I trust it may also lead us to see our littleness when compared with Him who made us. We, that is the nations which brought about this great canal, have had to spend years and vast sums of money to carry out the end aimed at, and under the Divine aid it has been brought to a successful termination. But see what God did! Did the Almighty ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... adversary of to-day was the welcome guest of the morrow. The hand which had distilled the gall of disputation at one moment, was readily extended in kind fellowship the next. Mr. Brock was probably not exempt from failings, but he had certainly nothing of littleness about him. He respected an honorable and open adversary, more than a flattering and servile friend. His hostility was strong, but it was shortlived: his enmity was vigorous, but it had no memory. In other respects, too, he evinced a generous and benevolent heart. At all seasons and ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... things, Or whether it be little or be much. Discourse to him of prodigious armaments Assembled to besiege his city now, And of the passing of a mule with gourds— 'T is one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact, he will gaze rapt 150 With stupor at its very littleness, (Far as I see) as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results; And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we too see not with his opened eyes. Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, Preposterously, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... eternal snows and glaciers, the appalling clefts and abysses, the mighty cataract, the rushing waters, the frequent perils of avalanches and of tumbling rocks, the total absence of every soft feature of nature, were always reading an impressive lesson, and illustrating the littleness of man, and the greatness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... laughter, muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork. Forward the ship's bell sounded two double strokes, then a single, followed by a wail in minor key: "Five bells and all's well!" ... And of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, beneath the shining constellations of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... I answered, with sweet humility,—"say rather it is to shrine myself in amber. As the insignificant fly, encompassed with molten glory, passes into a crystallized immortality, his own littleness uplifted into loveliness by the beauty in which he is imprisoned, so I, wrapped around by the glory of my land, may find myself niched into a fame which my unattended and naked merit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... druffen. Aw hear some queer tales sometimes, but aw dooant tell all aw know. 'Ale sellers shouldn't be tale tellers.' But aw'm sooary to say at th' mooast ale sellers at' aw know are varry fond o' taletellin. Ther's nowt shows a chap's littleness as mich as to be allus talkin abaat his own or somdy else's private affairs; an' ther's nowt likely to produce moor bother nor that system o' tittle tattlin abaat other fowk's consarns. Ther's a deal ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... of Silliness, Pettiness, Pettedness, Perversity, or general Unpleasantness and Thrawn-ness. Multitudes of men are what in Scotland is called Cat-witted. I do not know whether the word is intelligible in England. It implies a combination of littleness of nature, small self-conceit, readiness to take offence, determination in little things to have one's own way, and general impracticability. There are men to whom even the members of their own families do not like to talk about their plans ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows. But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nation, it is proper that we attach to that other word, patriotism, a significance broader and loftier than has been conceived till now. By so much as the idea that we represent is great, by so much are we, in comparison with it, inevitably chargeable with littleness and short-comings. For we are of the same flesh and blood as our neighbors; it is only our opportunities and our responsibilities that are fairer and weightier than theirs. Circumstances afford every excuse to them, but ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... I afterwards learned might be known among the initiated as single Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical jokes that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... great from the littleness of their surroundings; but he only is great who is great amid greatness. Lincoln had great associates,—Seward, the sagacious diplomatist; Chase, the eminent financier; Stanton, the incomparable Secretary of War; with illustrious Senators and soldiers. Neither could take his part nor fill ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... massacres, insurrections, and wars. This complicated system of despotism, this Protean diversified institution of beggars and tyrants, this strange contradiction of glory in debasement and debasement in glory (type of the greatness and littleness of man), was not then matured, but was resplendent with virtues which extort esteem,—chastity, poverty, and obedience, devotion to the miserable, a lofty faith which spurned the finite, an unbounded charity amid the wreck ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... values not it, but the exercise of getting it; viewing his actual achievement, he is apt to reflect, "Is this pitiful thing, then, all that I toiled for?" Finer natures often experience a keen depression and sense of littleness in the pause that follows a success. But the fool is so swollen by thought of his victory that he is unfit for all healthy work till somebody jags him and lets the gas out. He never forgets the great thing he fancies he did thirty years ago, and expects ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... furnished a much better one—the meeting between the Vicar and his poor Olivia. We can bear the suffering of a Cordelia, because all in that is great though villany be successful; but there is a littleness in mere profligacy that infects even the victim. We could have wished that Mr Mulready had taken the "Meeting" for his illustration. How exquisitely beautiful is the text! The first impulse of affection is to forget, or instantly palliate the fault. "Welcome, any way welcome, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of life are embittered! My father-in-law was perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... assure you that it is something fearful. But I cast my eye up the shining mast and saw the stars and stripes floating there so calmly and serenely, and I remembered our glorious mission, and instantly I felt the Everlasting Arms about me. I realized as never before in my life, the utter littleness of man, and the almightiness of God. Here, floating thousands of feet above the earth, we can rest just as implicitly on His promises as we ever did in ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... nothing at all about, but whom he adored as a member of his family.... Good God! All that was ridiculous, he knew very well; it would have been far better to present himself just as he was, undisguised, in all his littleness. He knew that this pretending to equality with the thousand or more figures flitting in Leonora's memory, was grotesque. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing he would not do to stir her heart a little, be loved for a day, a minute, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... with your heart, in your mind you can be one with me. You feel the great and the beautiful things of life. There is no littleness in your nature. In reading with you just now I saw that your delight in poetry was as spirit-deep as my own; your voice had the true music, and your cheeks warmed with sympathy. You do not deny me the right ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... overthrew him. His life was pure as the heart of "the lily maid of Astolat," and demanded in man a purity as great as that of woman. His love was mighty, unsuspicious, tender. He was himself a king, born to rule, fitted to inspire. No littleness sapped his greatness. He rejoiced in others' strength, prowess, victory. His was an eye quick to discover merit in woman or man, as in Lynette. His heart was tender, and a cry for help awoke him from deep ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the greatest portrait-painter of any time, has familiarized us with the greatness, the littleness, the graces, the defects of that royal actor on the stage of Europe, whom his own age entitled Louis the Great. A wit, in his writings, of the first order—if we comprise under the head of wit the deepest discernment, the most penetrating satire—Saint-Simon ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... us think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call things by their right names, and Society hates that, though Queen Bess didn't mind it. You trumpet our own littleness in our ear, and we know it so well that we do not care to hear much about it. You shudder at sin, and we have all agreed that there is no such thing as sin, only mere differences of opinion, which, provided they don't offend us, we have no business with: adultery is a liaison, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the offspring of selfishness, which is apt to creep insidiously into our lives. We should crown the man who has achieved distinction and advise him as to pitfalls. "No sadder proof," Carlisle has said, "can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." There is no royal road to a lasting eminence but the toilsome pathway of diligence, self-denial and high moral rectitude; surely not by turning sharp corners to follow that "will-o'-the wisp" transient success, at the expense of upright conduct. Neither suavity of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... There may be much corruption in society, but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame and pity out of the heart of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small country village in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but not its worldly, wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, added to the bitter shrewdness and witty penetration of a gifted roue, and you have some idea of Venetian ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... unsound theories is worse than ignorance. Humility becomes a Mason. Take some quiet, sober moment of life, and add together the two ideas of Pride and Man; behold him, creature of a span, stalking through infinite space in all the grandeur of littleness! Perched on a speck of the Universe, every wind of Heaven strikes into his blood the coldness of death; his soul floats away from his body like the melody from the string. Day and night, like dust on the wheel, he is rolled along the heavens, through a labyrinth of worlds, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that great truth, of which my whole being is so full; I look into this living, busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator. To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history; 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 defeat of good, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the dreary, hopeless irreligion—all this is a vision to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... is a world. A mighty hand has sprinkled the suns like fruitful seeds across the limitless fields of space. Can human nature contemplate a scene so grand that reaches so far beyond the grasp of mind, and not feel its own insignificance, and the littleness of selfish actions? And yet you can behold these myriads of worlds and systems of worlds wheeling in the dim infinity of space—a spectacle awful in its vastness—and turn to the ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... her place in the semicircle a glow of satisfaction possessed her. She felt she had not failed, that she had, in truth, done very well. But later, when Mary Warner rose to deliver the Valedictory, Phoebe felt her own efforts shrink into littleness. The dark-eyed beautiful Mary was a sad thorn in the flesh for the fair girl who knew she was always overshadowed by the brilliant, queenly brunette. Involuntarily the country girl looked at David Eby—he was listening intently to Mary; his eyes never ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... After all, however, it would do me very little damage to concede that he intended the meaning which [Greek: ph]. appears to attribute to the epithet "low", for if he did mean "vulgar" words, it is evident that he considered vulgarity in such matters inseparable from littleness, as the "low" words must, if his line is not to lose its point altogether, have been ten in number, that is, every one a ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... said, "been far above what I consider the littleness of those people who think to show their superiority by abusing the stage, or rather by treating with supercilious contempt those who ornament the stage. Something," she added, with an air of patronage, ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... we have done nothing but dispute about it. They say, we did not see it to advantage, that we ran through the apartments, saw the garden en passant, and slubbered over Trianon. I say, we saw nothing. However, we had time to see that the great front is a lumber of littleness, composed of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold rails. The rooms are all small, except the great gallery, which is noble, but totally wainscoted with looking-glass. The garden is littered with statues and fountains, each of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... issues of Henry's policy, it shrinks into littleness if we turn from it to the weighty movements which were now stirring the minds of men. The world was passing through changes more momentous than any it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... peeped out from behind it at the panorama rolling past the window. At first she was intensely interested in the endless stream of strange faces, but when an hour had slipped by and still they came, always strange, always different, a sense of littleness and loneliness seized her, that amounted almost to panic. She longed to get away from this great myriad-footed monster of a city, back to something small and familiar and quiet; to neighbourly greetings and friendly faces. The loneliness caused by the strange ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... toward all others. Thus, for instance, the Pantheon, the Apollo Belvedere, some colossal heads, and very recently the Sistine Chapel, have by turns so won my whole heart, that I scarcely saw any thing besides them. But, in truth, can man, little as man always is, and accustomed to littleness, ever make himself equal to all that here surrounds him of the noble, the vast, and the refined? Even tho he should in any degree adapt himself to it, then how vast is the multitude of objects that immediately press upon him from ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... my honour and entered my house and played the traitor with me and tookest no thought unto that which I have done thee of benefits?" "O king," answered the youth, "I did this not of my choice and freewill and I had no [evil] intent in being there; but, of the littleness of my luck, I was driven thither, for that fate was contrary and fair fortune lacking. Indeed, I had striven with all endeavour that nought of foul should proceed from me and kept watch over myself, lest default appear in me; but none may avail to make head against ill fortune, nor doth endeavour ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... been a willing stranger. The halter of Jerusalem shall see A unit for his virtue, for his vices No less a mark than million. He, who guards The isle of fire by old Anchises honour'd Shall find his avarice there and cowardice; And better to denote his littleness, The writing must be letters maim'd, that speak Much in a narrow space. All there shall know His uncle and his brother's filthy doings, Who so renown'd a nation and two crowns Have bastardized. And they, of Portugal ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... been the depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the grass. But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness, of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke into the face ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... all these, and the like of them, are born indeed in the spring season—Earos epigignetai hore: and soon a wind hath scattered them, and thereafter the [203] wood peopleth itself again with another generation of leaves. And what is common to all of them is but the littleness of their lives: and yet wouldst thou love and hate, as if these things should continue for ever. In a little while thine eyes also will be closed, and he on whom thou perchance hast leaned thyself be himself ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... clear into the first part of October; then the fresher weather renewed my life and strength. All this time there were reports drifting about that the King was going to ransom Joan. I believed these, for I was young and had not yet found out the littleness and meanness of our poor human race, which brags about itself so much, and thinks it is better and higher than ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of this verse is to show that all persons, led by interest, become attached to particular things. The littleness or greatness of those things cannot aid or bar people's way to Emancipation. 'I may be a king, says Janaka, and thou mayst be a mendicant. Neither thy mendicancy nor my royalty can aid or obstruct our Emancipation. Both of us, by Knowledge, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... weaknesses and foibles of men, when he told of the political and social ambitions which stirred mankind in the outside world. But he knew that her merriment proceeded not from an ephemeral sense of the ludicrous, but from a righteous appraisal of the folly and littleness of those things for which the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... felt their littleness. The autumn night was crisp, and from his seat on a log he held out his fingers to the warm blaze. Now and then a yellow or red leaf caught in the light wind drifted to his feet and he gazed up half in fear at the great encircling ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... long run when the belittling process is fully carried out nations will disappear. Every one who seeks instruction on this point can look at Venice, Madrid, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Rome; all places which were formerly resplendent with mighty powers and are now destroyed by the infiltrating littleness which gradually attained the highest eminence. When the day of struggle came, all was found rotten, the State succumbed to a weak attack. To worship the fool who succeeds, and not to grieve over the fall ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... kindly emotions, and adds a new interest to the spirit of the warrior; it humbles him, to whom the earth is subject, before those mysterious Powers which weigh the destinies of man in their balance, in whose eyes the greatest and the least of mortals scarcely differ in littleness. Wallenstein's confidence in the friendship of Octavio, his disinterested love for Max Piccolomini, his paternal and brotherly kindness, are feelings which cast an affecting lustre over the harsher, more heroic ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... associate of Cicero and of Caesar. The Rabbin had probably read only the Pentateuch, and mingled with companions of mean occupations, and meaner minds. Cato was accustomed to the grandeur of the mistress of the universe; and the Rabbin to the littleness of a provincial town. Men, like pictures, may be placed in an obscure and unfavourable light; but the finest picture, in the unilluminated corner, still retains the design and colouring of the master. My Rabbin is a companion for Cato. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... some such opinions which rather scandalized his father who had grown up in the conventional school of unbounded, unreasoning reverence for the Hebrew, Greek and Keltic classics. From that they passed to the great problems, the undeterminable problems of the Universe; the awful littleness of men—mere lice, perhaps, on the scurfy body of a shrinking, dying planet of a fifth-rate sun, one of a billion other suns. The Revd. Howel like most of the Christian clergy of all times of course never looked at the midnight sky or gave ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... discoursing to the other ladies and kept at a distance from her. It did not signify that the other gentlemen took the opportunity of being near her: of what use in the world was their admiration while she had an uneasy sense that there was some standard in Deronda's mind which measured her into littleness? Mr. Vandernoodt, who had the mania of always describing one thing while you were looking at another, was quite intolerable with his insistence on Lord Blough's kitchen, which he ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... struggle, known in history as the World War. It was a mighty clash of ideas and ideals. Frazier Hunt, a war correspondent and journalist, selected the Little Rivers of France as a subject to carry his theme: that little things sometimes set apart great differences, and that littleness and greatness are not ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... frank class of women. She says she belongs to the genus irritabile. She is easily excited to every good emotion, and also to the nobler failings of anger, indignation, and pride. But she is so far above any meanness or littleness, that she don't know them when she sees them. They pass with her for what they are not, and she is spared the humiliation of knowing what her species is capable of. Kate's nature is very charming, but there is a gentler, calmer order of beings in the sex. I once was greatly attracted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... the icy beach with ashen-gray light, sparkling in a thousand points from the cascades, streams, and rippling pools, throwing into blackest shadow the gullies and hollows, and bringing to his mind, in spite of the weird beauty of the scene, a crushing sense of loneliness—of littleness—as though the vast pile of inorganic desolation which held him was of far greater importance than himself, and all the hopes, plans, and fears of his lifetime. The child had cried itself to sleep again, and he paced up and ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... say of the cunning cat-like Charles Greville, who crept on tiptoe through the world, observing and recording the littleness of men? His stealthy eye missed nothing; and the men whom he flattered and used little thought that the wizened dandy who pleased them with his old-world courtesy was chronicling their weakness and baseness for all time. A nobly patriotic Ministry came ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... that she was in danger of drowning, notwithstanding the littleness of the brook; and I ran to the point from which I had heard her plunge into the water, expecting to have to draw her out on the bank; but I found only a place where the grass was wallowed down as she had crawled out, and lying on the ground ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... myself, for there was not a sound except the slipping of a burden of snow from the trees or the crack and rustle which reminded me that a glacier was a moving river. The war seemed very far away, and I felt the littleness of our human struggles, till I thought of Peter turning from side to side to find ease in the cottage far below me. Then I realized that the spirit of man was the greatest thing in this spacious world ... ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments—a moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "over-muchness" toward some men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... many pipes each of their carefully guarded matches would light, and what each carried in his battered tin drinking-bottle, remembering with a dreary sort of amusement that he had heard this same incurable littleness of thought settled on men condemned to death. Still, it passed the time, and he was surprised out of a sort of reverie by the clanging of ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... loud and general applause of her people as an instant renunciation by Elizabeth of all friendship and intercourse with the perjured and blood-stained Charles, the midnight assassin of his own subjects; and it is impossible to contemplate without disdain the coldness and littleness of that character which, in such a case, could consent to measure its demonstrations of indignation and abhorrence by the narrow rules of a self-interested caution. But that early experience of peril and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... in the eyes of the world. This was indeed moral courage, and not weak changeableness or fickleness, because it had a noble object. To have adhered to his ordinary course in the colonel's case, when he had become convinced that he had been wronging that officer, would have been obstinacy and littleness." ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... springing beside the grave of another must work sadness in God. Yet Sainte-Helene did not know any young supplanter was there. He did not miss or care for the fickle vanity of applause; he did not torment himself with the spectres of the mind, or feel himself shrinking with the littleness of jealousy; he did not hunger for a love that was not in the world, or waste a Titan's passion on a human ewe any more. For him, the aching and bewilderment, exaltations and self-distrusts, animal gladness and subjection to the elements, ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of party may be suspected. It is, perhaps, true, that in the clamour, raised throughout the kingdom, Johnson overheated his mind; but he was a friend to the rights of man, and he was greatly superior to the littleness of spirit, that might incline him to advance what he did not think and firmly believe. In the False Alarm, though many of the most eminent men in the kingdom concurred in petitions to the throne, yet Johnson, having well surveyed ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... such thing as too much education, although educating us primitive men and women is apt to develop unexpected littleness. and thus create ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... gia (121v) 'there are some things which are not understood, or to which one's comprehension does not extend,' nani mo nai tocoro vo i qicoximexe (120v) 'will your Lordship kindly eat from this littleness which is nothing.' From these examples it is possible to see the ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... building, as its south doorway and font of Purbeck bear witness and the chancel arch too, unless indeed this be earlier still. The chancel, however, dates from the fourteenth century, a good example in its littleness of the Decorated style, but it is half spoiled by the enormous pew which blocks the entrance. The tower and spire and a good part of the nave are completely modern. The great yew in the churchyard must date at least from Edward I.'s time, and perhaps may have seen ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... conscious of a strange feeling of elation, which he attributed to his being free, and to the fact that he was his own master again in everything. And with this he confessed to a distinct feeling of littleness, of having acted meanly or unworthily of himself ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... streaming crowds of people, the note of the human process that sounds so loud there. She felt small even to herself, for the touch of beauty saves us from our own personalities, makes Gods of us to our own littleness. She passed under the railway bridge at Charing Cross, watched the square cluster of Westminster's pinnacles rise above her until they were out of sight overhead, ran up the little incline and round into Parliament Square, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ourselves to spoil this portrait by the avowal of a littleness. The chevalier put cotton in his ears, and wore, appended to them, two little ear-rings representing negroes' heads in diamonds, of admirable workmanship. He clung to these singular appendages, explaining that since his ears had been bored he had ceased to have headaches (he had had headaches). ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... hours I'd spend in viewing The elemental strife, My soul the while subduing With the littleness of life; Of life, with all its paltry plans, Its conflicts and its cares— The feebleness of all that's man's— The ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... all that," replied Rose: "I have always a strong wish where you are concerned, and your happiness. I hesitated whilst I was in doubt, but I doubt no longer: I have had a long talk with him. He has shown me his whole heart: he is the best, the noblest of creatures: he has no littleness or meanness. And then he is a thorough man; I know that by his being the very opposite of a woman in his ways. Now you are a thorough woman, and so you will suit one another to a T. I have decided: so no ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... of Lord Fawn's intellect the remembrance of this supposed wrong was always running up and down, renewing its own soreness. He regarded Greystock as an enemy who would lose no opportunity of injuring him. In his weakness and littleness he was quite unable to judge of other men by himself. He would not go a hair's breadth astray, if he knew it; but because Greystock had, in debate, called him timid and tyrannical, he believed that Greystock would stop ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... scorn of the proud, whom accident has placed above you—or worse still, in whose hands are, perhaps, placed many of the comforts of your life. But there! ascend that rock, Independence, and look justly down on their littleness of soul. Make the worthless tremble under your indignation, and the foolish sink before your contempt; and largely impart that happiness to others, which, I am certain, will give yourselves so much pleasure ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and the old Roman camps and military roads, to appeal powerfully to the boy's lively imagination. Every phase of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in Shakespeare's poetry; just as his characters reflect the nobility and the littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... mind from height to greater height. Men were long in accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming in the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... visit. Even in the common concerns of life; in the petty matters that wear away the brain at last; in the market-places of the world, this insight is not without its effect. The heart is humbled as the eyes open to the grandeur of the scheme, and to the consequent littleness of individual manhood; but again, the breast swells with the purest of all pride, when the thinker says to himself: I am the King—because the hero or highest type of the Articulata, Radiata, Mammalia, or any order of vegetable or animal life. All ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... self-sacrifice. But I dare say that when I have thus shown the reality and worth of the conjunct self, it will be felt that self-sacrifice is altogether illusory; for while it seems to produce loss, it is in fact the avoidance of what entails littleness. So ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient, phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the other hand there was something fascinating ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the need to occupy the "corner lots" of the planetary land mass was the urge of civilized peoples to advance from littleness to bigness as a goal in itself. Confined by limitations on communication and transportation, pre-civilized man was circumscribed and localized. With the advent of cultivation, land workers were tied to a particular piece of real estate on which they lived ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... over the backbone of the mountains. It gave one a different conception of men. They like ants on these mountains, David thought—insignificant, crawling ants. Here was where one might find a soul and a religion if he had never had one before. One's littleness, at times, was almost frightening. It made one think, impressed upon one that life was not much more than an accident in this vast scale of creation, and that there was great necessity for a God. In Kio's eyes, as he sometimes looked down into the valleys, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... by remembering Thy peace, and Thy unchangeable Godhood to me and all Thy creatures." But I did not come to myself all at once. The thought of God had not come, though it was pretty sure to come before I got home. I was brooding over the littleness of all I could do; and feeling that sickness which sometimes will overtake a man in the midst of the work he likes best, when the unpleasant parts of it crowd upon him, and his own efforts, especially those made from the will without sustaining impulse, come back upon him with ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... on in these strange hives is caught with what one knows to be true fidelity; its dulness, its littleness, its goings and comings, its spite, its reduction of the spiritual to the most ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of the existence of a remote past. One knows of this always, but the knowledge is never so living as in the actual presence of some witness to the life of bygone ages. I felt how short a space of human life was the period of our own existence. I was more impressed with my own littleness, and much more inclinable to believe that the people whose sense of the fitness of things was equal to the upraising of so serene a handiwork, were hardly likely to be wrong in the conclusions they might come to upon any subject. My feeling certainly was that the currency ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor trifles he cares for—his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his newspaper—that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined, that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or sublime—immortality ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... promenade of the place. Along this are to be seen innumerable small monuments, from a half to a whole metre in height, consisting of pieces of lava heaped upon each other. These miniature memorials form by their littleness a peculiar contrast to the bauta stones and jettekast of our Swedish forefathers, and are one of the many instances of the people's fondness for the little and the neat, which are often to be met in Japan. They are said ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... mean either stolidity or lethargy; far otherwise. Nor does it mean sluggishness, apathy or phlegmatism; quite the contrary. It does mean depth as opposed to shallowness, bigness as opposed to littleness, and vision as opposed to spiritual myopia. It means dignity, poise, aplomb, balance. It means that there is sufficient ballast to hold the ship steady on its way, no matter how much sail it spreads. When we see serenity, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... black or heavy; they are also painted with a full pencil, and rich juicy vehicle. Rembrandt, like Titian, Rubens, and others who were historical painters, seizes upon the great characteristics of nature without entering into the painful fidelity of topographical littleness; the same generalizing principles pervade every variety of subject. Fuseli, speaking of portrait painting as mere likenesses, adds—"To portrait painting thus circumstanced, we subjoin, as the last branch of uninteresting subjects, that kind of landscape ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... towards persons of dignity and affluence, and unassuming towards the middle class." In the fourth place, it is said that he cannot associate with others: this means that he is not at home with others than his friends: because he altogether shuns flattery and hypocrisy, which belong to littleness of mind. But he associates with all, both great and little, according as he ought, as stated above (ad 1). It is also said, fifthly, that he prefers to have barren things, not indeed any, but good, i.e. virtuous; for in all things he prefers ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... nostra pace. But this deepening sense of religion, this more perfect submission to the divine will in all things, affects only those higher intelligences who have breadth of view enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their betters ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of his word and renunciation of her own fancy which had put him in the place and given him the honor of a conqueror,—he accused Adelaide in his heart of prejudice and jealousy, and despised her for her littleness. In fact, he was nearer to loving Leam Dundas because of these strictures than he would have been had the rector's daughter praised her; and Adelaide, usually so politic, had made a horribly bad move by her unguarded confession ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile. Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage—a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners, the customs are of all varieties ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... body seems lazy and listless. An open spot on a mountain side, where a wide look can be had at the heavens and the 'arth, is a most judicious place for a man to get a just idee of the power of the Manitou, and of his own littleness. At such times, there isn't any great disposition to find fault with little difficulties, in the way of comperhension, as there are so many big ones to hide them. Believin' comes easy enough to me at such times, and if the Lord made man first out of'arth, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... Philadelphia, but never was one." "Oh, is that so? When are you going to be great?" "When I am elected to some political office." Young man, won't you learn a lesson in the primer of politics that it is a prima facie evidence of littleness to hold office under our form of government? Great men get into office sometimes, but what this country needs is men that will do what we tell them to do. This nation—where the people rule—is governed by the people, for the people, and so long ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... magnificent when on a large scale, becomes perfectly ridiculous when applied to a private street-mansion, or a haberdasher's warehouse. St. Paul's Church, Covent-Garden, is an instance of the unhappy effect produced by a combination of a similar kind; great in all its parts, with its original littleness, it very nearly approximates to the character of a barn. Inigo Jones doubtless desired to erect an edifice of stately Roman aspect, but he was cramped in his design, and, therefore, only aspired to make a first-rate barn; so far unquestionably ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, the kinship of all life, faith that the unknown is greater than the known and is only the As Yet Unknown, and resolution to find a manly highway to it, have been forgotten in a paroxysm of littleness and terror in which nothing is active except concupiscence and the fear of death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify his cruelty, and any tyrant ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... once more opened her sheltering arms and kept the wolf from the door. The new owner of Deering Castle, as the villagers had admiringly christened the grand old place, refused to sell it. Robert Garrett, with the littleness born of a mean, cramped nature, clung to this coveted possession as the one thing to be held, though all else were taken. He had money but knew not how to enjoy it. His household, for the most part, reflected the coarseness of his nature, and as time passed his retribution ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... representation. But either the nation did not in time perceive its real interests, or, perceiving them, was unable to declare them, on account of the forces and ascendancy of the Portuguese party; which, perceiving clearly to what a degree of weakness, littleness, and poverty, Portugal was reduced, and to how low a state it had fallen, would never consent (notwithstanding their proclamation of liberty, fearing a separation,) that the people of Brazil should enjoy a representation equal to what they themselves ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... [1]together[1] with Scathach and with Uathach and with Aife, [2]thou wast not a man worthy of me, for[2] thou wast my serving-man, even for arming my spear and dressing my bed." "That was indeed true," answered Cuchulain; "because of my youth and my littleness did I so much for thee, but this is by no means my mood this day. For there is not a warrior in the world I would not drive off this day [3]in the field of battle ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... same. It is a sacrifice, no doubt, to give up civilization and to begin life anew, but it is what our colonists are always doing. At any rate it is freedom—freedom from the corruption, the intrigue, the sloth, and the littleness of a decaying power like that of Carthage. You will be happy at least in having your wife with you, while the gods only know when I shall see the face of ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... him a form; a shape that should be human, but vast as the surrounding hills. Yet such was the symmetry of the vision that the visionary felt his littleness rather than the colossal proportions of the apparition. It was the semblance of one who, though not young, was still untouched by time; a countenance like an oriental night, dark yet lustrous, mystical ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... pleasure quite bereft, Sad but of tranquil mien; A state of perfect littleness, Yet with a ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... of his country, and assumed the air of one who not only kept the king's conscience but controlled the royal will. The story of this famous tour exhibits alike the greatness of his powers and the littleness of his character.[121] The homage paid to him was not undeserved, for he was assuredly the foremost gladiator of the whig party, and had given proofs of more varied ability than any living politician or lawyer. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... more strikingly so from the contrast of the [Hebrew: mvwl biwral] with the [Hebrew: wpT iwral]. The Judge of Israel in his deepest abasement, is here contrasted with the Ruler of Israel in His highest divine glory. The connection is seen also in the indication of Bethlehem's natural littleness, as contrasted with the greatness to be bestowed upon it by God. What could have induced the prophet thus strongly to point out this circumstance, had it not been that he considered Bethlehem as the type of the Jewish people in their misery, described in the preceding verse, and the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... must have been uttered, it came to her, as though from a great distance, thin and of an infinite littleness. Yet she allowed herself to be drawn back into the room, and made no demur to ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... peace!" Susanna felt this a leave-taking, but a leave-taking in love. In that moment she could have clasped the whole world to her breast. She felt herself raised above all contention, all spite, all littleness. This great spectacle had awakened something great within her, and in her countenance Sanna beamed in ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... to be the especial glory of Love, that it doth make unto all Sweetness and Greatness, and doth be a fire burning all Littleness; so that did all in this world to have met The Beloved, then did Wantonness be dead, and there to grow Gladness and Charity, dancing ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... tongues. Backbiting is the curse of village life, and seems to keep people by its effects upon the mind far more effectually in the grip of poverty than the lowness of wages. They become so saturated with littleness that they cannot attempt anything, and have no enterprise. To transplant them to the freer atmosphere of a great city, or of the Far West, is the only means of cure. At this particular village they were exceptionally given to backbiting, perhaps because everybody was more than usually related ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... sombre recesses, with the sunlight filtering through their branches two hundred and fifty feet above, one hears no sound save the tremendous diapason of the silence of the ages; here, more forcibly than elsewhere in the universe, is one reminded of the littleness of man and the glory ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the climax to his praise of a woman. And yet, we fear, he saw only too truly. What unexpected failures have we seen, literally, in this respect! How often did the Martha blur the Mary out of the face of a lovely woman at the sound of a crash amid glass and porcelain! What sad littleness in all the department thus represented! Obtrusion of the mop and duster on the tranquil meditation of a husband and brother. Impatience if the carpet be defaced by the feet even of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... non-commission'd mice to mind) Stick in the entrance as they go, And there are taken by the foe, Who, greedy of the victim, gluts With mouse-flesh his ungodly guts. Each great and national distress Must chiefly mighty men oppress; While folks subordinate and poor Are by their littleness secure. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... manufacturer—in this field, too, you can be the mere money-getter who crowds down and ignores those who have helped him to amass his wealth; or you can be the profit-sharer and co-worker. It all rests with yourself. It will not be the fault of the task you choose but the littleness of your vision if you dwarf your life and find ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... the east side the snow is some 2,000 feet lower than in Switzerland. This means that the climber can easily reach the realm where life is not, where ice and snow, rock and water reign, and man feels his littleness. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... managers, powerful, jealous fellow-actresses, ill health, bad luck! Behind the glamour and the glitter of the stage, what a world of carking care, of littleness, meanness, jealousy, and intrigue she had found herself called upon to ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... of national character without referring to large masses of people, it is impossible to be loud in your praises and at the same time honest. National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. If we become disgusted with one, we praise another, until we get disgusted with this too. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... great man and a hero, it would irresistibly excite our admiration; but the character of this prince leaves us in doubt whether this moderation ought to be ascribed to a noble self-command, or to the littleness of a weak mind, which even good fortune could not embolden, and liberty itself could not strip ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... such a favouring hour Show you the littleness of wealth and pow'r? Advent'rous climbers of the Mountain's brow; While Love, their master, spreads his couch below— 'My dearest Jane,' the untaught Walter cried, As half repell'd he pleaded by her side; 'My dearest Jane, think of ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... polished criticism, and petulant wit; we find a pervading ironical bitterness, rising at times to fierce invective, and even to the frenzy of passion when his mother is the theme, relapsing again to trance-like meditations on the depravity of the world, the littleness of man and the nullity of appearance; and when his mind does revert to this "great action," this "dread command," which is supposed to haunt it, and to keep it in a whirl of doubt and irresolution, it is because it is forcibly recalled to it, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... human heart knows aught of littleness, Suspects no man, compares with no one's ways, Hath in one hour most glorious length of days, A recompense, ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... admiration. They do their very best to induce us to join in their hymns of praise. 'Grandison,' says a Roman Catholic bishop, 'were he one of us, might expect canonisation.' 'How,' exclaims his uncle, after a conversation with his paragon of a nephew, 'how shall I bear my own littleness?' A party of reprobates about town have a long dispute with him, endeavouring to force him into a duel. At the end of it one of them exclaims admiringly, 'Curse me, if I believe there is such another man in the world!' 'I never saw a hero till now,' ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the Dover Castle. In the stern there was a lofty poop with spacious cabins. Six guns were ranged along on each side of the deck, and when the sails were got up they seemed so vast to the boys that they felt a sense of littleness on board the great craft. They had been relieved to find that Captain Vere had his own servitor with him; for in talking it over they had mutually expressed their doubt as to their ability to render such service as Captain Vere would be ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... that instead of returning to the family, she went directly to her own room. It was easy for her to see that Mr Harrel was bent upon using every method he could devise, to entangle her into some engagement with Sir Robert, and though she could not imagine the meaning of such a scheme, the littleness of his behaviour excited her contempt, and the long-continued error of the baronet gave her the utmost uneasiness. She again determined to seek an explanation with him herself, and immovably to refuse joining the party ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... have a dark account to render in the end. There is no more despicable character than a finished "manoeuverer." It implies a meanness, that can pry into the corners of others' affairs, an indolence, that neglects one's own proper business, and a mental vacuity, and a littleness of purpose, which are the dread of every noble mind. Beware of the impertinence of such persons. Be very sure that you give not your hand and heart where they point, instead of following, as you ought, your own good sense, and the promptings ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... in which men's natural goodness of heart will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of life—yes! perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outward manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pure intellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together with a flattering something of his own, added ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... Rameses," answered Ameni gravely. "If he did not wear the crown I could love him; I know him too, as well as if I were his brother, and value all that is great in him; nay I will admit that he is disfigured by no littleness. If I did not know how strong the enemy is, we might try to overthrow him with smaller means. You know as well as I do that he is our enemy. Not yours, nor mine, nor the enemy of the Gods; but the enemy of the old and reverend ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... generation of men, whirling off in wild Sahara waltz into infinite space, is but a spectacle, and a very brief and confused one. This lofty irony, pungent as it is, grows wearisome. By throwing a littleness on all things, it even destroys the very aliment it feeds on; nothing, at last, is worth the mocking. But the weariness it occasions is not its greatest fault. It leads to a most unjust and capricious estimate of the characters and actions of men. Capricious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... it all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization, he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, creaking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... big," assented another, "but littleness isn't everything! It won't keep you from growing big and stupid except ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... mongrel, merry place, this town of Boulogne; the little French fishermen's children are beautiful, and the little French soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge pompons on their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged fishermen; there is the town idiot, mocking a woman who is screaming "Fleuve du Tage," at an inn-window, to a harp, and there are the little ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... folk saw him, and how slim and light and small he looked beside their champion, and they beheld the Raven painted on his white shield, they hooted and laughed for scorn of him and his littleness. But he tossed his sword up lightly and caught it by the hilts as it fell, and drew nigher to the champion of the sea and stood facing him within reach of his sword. Then the chieftain on the high-seat put his two hands to ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... volume that no eye but God's and ours can read;—memories of neglect, of sin, of deep secrets that our hearts have hidden in their innermost folds. Such experiences sometimes there are when we muse upon the external universe; when we reflect upon the vastness of creation, the littleness of human effort, the transciency of human relations; when our souls are drawn away from all ordinary communions, and we feel that we are drifting before an almighty will, bound to an inevitable destiny, hemmed in by irresistible forces. Then, with every tie ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... was a great day for me; and to be going in gentle companionship with Kornel across the staring veld and along the empty road was a most wonderful thing, and its flavor is still a relish to my memory. I knew that he feared what we were to see—the littleness and mean poverty of it, after the spaciousness of the farm; but most of all it galled him that I should see it on this our first triumphant day. He was very gentle and most loving, but shadows grew on his face, and there was a track of worry between his brows that spurred me. I knew ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the time was about my own bigness, or rather "littleness," for I knew that I was still but a very small shaver— smaller even than my age would indicate—though I had a well-knit frame, and was tolerably tight and tough. I had some doubt, however, about my size, for I was ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... mysteries which will never be revealed, through the eternal ages. If men would but search and understand what God has made known of Himself and His purposes, they would obtain such a view of the glory, majesty, and power of Jehovah, that they would realize their own littleness, and would be content with that which has been revealed ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... being turn, Where a ne'er-setting sun illumes the year Eternal, and the incessant watch-fires burn Of unspent holiness and goodness clear,— Forget man's littleness, deserve the best, God's mercy in thy ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Castle. In the stern there was a lofty poop with spacious cabins. Six guns were ranged along on each side of the deck, and when the sails were got up they seemed so vast to the boys that they felt a sense of littleness on board the great craft. They had been relieved to find that Captain Vere had his own servitor with him; for in talking it over they had mutually expressed their doubt as to their ability to render such service as Captain Vere would be ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... moral courage, and not weak changeableness or fickleness, because it had a noble object. To have adhered to his ordinary course in the colonel's case, when he had become convinced that he had been wronging that officer, would have been obstinacy and littleness." ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... strength to the assurance, for the facts of the Christian life are such as to demand, both by its greatness and by its littleness, by its loftiness and by its lapses into lowliness, by the floodtide of devotion that sometimes sweeps rejoicingly over the mud-shoals and by the ebb that sometimes leaves them all black and festering, a future life wherein what was manifestly meant to be, and capable of being, dominant, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... traverse than the orbs to which they are attached. The entire system is presented to me as an Orrery of the apparent size of the area of landscape seen from the hill-top; but dimness and darkness prevent the diminution from communicating that appearance of littleness to the whole which would attach to it, were it, like an actual Orrery, sharply defined and clear. As the picture rises before me, the entire system seems to possess, what I suspect it wants, its atmosphere ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of Guipuzcoa. The priest had a natural military instinct—I would almost go so far as to say a spice of military genius; and had he had a knowledge of the profession of arms would probably have developed into a great general of the Cossack type. His hatred to Lizarraga led him into littleness and injustice. He chuckled at the idea of Lizarraga not being able to find the buried gun, as if that were any great triumph over him; and he sneered at the idea of Lizarraga, who was not able to take Oyarzun, meditating an attempt ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... petty pain, Its irritating littleness and care; They who have scaled the mountain, with content Sublime, descend to live upon the plain; Steadfast as though they breathed the mountain-air ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... couldn't guess which was which, and gave Jane's nose to Jessica, and Jessica's hands to Joscelyn, and Joscelyn's chin to Joyce, and Joyce's hair to Jennifer, and Jennifer's eyebrows to Joan; but when he caught Joan he guessed her at once by her littleness. ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... do battle with me? For when we were [1]together[1] with Scathach and with Uathach and with Aife, [2]thou wast not a man worthy of me, for[2] thou wast my serving-man, even for arming my spear and dressing my bed." "That was indeed true," answered Cuchulain; "because of my youth and my littleness did I so much for thee, but this is by no means my mood this day. For there is not a warrior in the world I would not drive off this day [3]in the field ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves, in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues among ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fascinating paths, under the great cross of a thousand pine trees, among the roses, and flowers that he had planted with his own hands, we came at last to the little house that Mrs. Miller had called "The poet's own room," and there were we refreshed with cool lemonade and cakes. In the littleness of my soul I wondered when we were to pay for these favors, but the longer we remained the more was I shamed as I saw that this hospitality was just the natural expression of a woman, and a beautiful daughter's ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... made, my honourable friend will, I am sure, agree with me, that we ought to meet it with a spirit worthy of these islands; that we ought to meet it with a conviction of the truth of this assertion—that the country which has achieved such greatness, has no retreat in littleness; that, if we should be content to abandon everything, we should find no safety in poverty, no security in abject submission; finally, that we ought to meet it with a firm determination to perish in the same grave with the honour and independence of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... solitary watch-tower, where he sits so near the eternal skies, that a whole generation of men, whirling off in wild Sahara waltz into infinite space, is but a spectacle, and a very brief and confused one. This lofty irony, pungent as it is, grows wearisome. By throwing a littleness on all things, it even destroys the very aliment it feeds on; nothing, at last, is worth the mocking. But the weariness it occasions is not its greatest fault. It leads to a most unjust and capricious estimate of the characters and actions of men. Capricious it must, of necessity, become. To be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... be the most awful metaphor of time. Thou hast stripped wealth and grandeur, leaving them but a shroud, and hast clothed obscurity and poverty with their eternally suggestive robe; thou hast affirmed, and thou preserved, that grim average of life which greatness refuses, which littleness fears, to realize. Romance and Poetry and Fancy are thy wards, making as thou dost the most holden eyes to overleap time's poor horizon, following departed treasure with wistful and unresigning love, as birds follow their ravaged nests, crying as they go. Oh, sombre chantress! Thou hast filled ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... dead Boswell wrote his life. It is one of the most wonderful lives ever written—perhaps the most wonderful. And when we have read it we seem to know Johnson as well as if we had lived with him. We see and know him in all his greatness and all his littleness, in all his weakness and all ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... extremest degree by the praises of innocence and the triumph of virtue. He now felt the vanity and folly of those pursuits in which he had been so deeply immersed, and was determined to abjure the littleness of pride, and the emptiness of sensual gratification. He did not now address his destined prize with the commendations of beauty. He bestowed upon her with profusion the epithets of discretion, integrity, and heroism; and poured into her ear the insidious ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... integrity by not seeking for anything, but simply trusting His grace. And so it is the very strength of a great faith, and gets a full answer. "Yet the dogs"—let that be your plea as you persevere for someone possibly possessed of the devil. Let not your littleness hinder ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... fair with light and shade and stars and flowers, Made fearful and august with woods and rocks, Jagg'd precipice, black mountain, sea in storms, Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns, But thro' Heaven's pavement rides as in despite Or mockery of the littleness of man! I see a mighty arm, by man unseen, Resistless, not to be controul'd, that guides, In solitude of unshared energies, All these thy ceaseless miracles, O world! Arm of the world, I view thee, and I muse On Man, who, trusting in his mortal strength, Leans on a shadowy staff, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... personal,—and that without a shadow of a cause! Within the short straight grooves of Lord Fawn's intellect the remembrance of this supposed wrong was always running up and down, renewing its own soreness. He regarded Greystock as an enemy who would lose no opportunity of injuring him. In his weakness and littleness he was quite unable to judge of other men by himself. He would not go a hair's breadth astray, if he knew it; but because Greystock had, in debate, called him timid and tyrannical, he believed that ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... ingeniously disguised somewhere. And the multiplicity of mirrors, and the message of the laconic monosyllable "Hot" on silver taps, and the discretion of the lighting, all indicated that the architect and creator of these marvellous microcosms had "understood." The cosy virtue of littleness, and the entire absurdity of space for the sake of space, were strikingly proved, and the demonstration amounted, in Audrey's mind, to ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... did not seem to me a lofty and inspiring view that Sylvia took. On the contrary, it exercised a choking effect upon me, by reason of what I 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. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... of this paper stands for a more or less excusable mistake. A ship may be "driven ashore" by stress of weather. It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be "run ashore" has the littleness, poignancy, and ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... selfishness, which is apt to creep insidiously into our lives. We should crown the man who has achieved distinction and advise him as to pitfalls. "No sadder proof," Carlisle has said, "can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." There is no royal road to a lasting eminence but the toilsome pathway of diligence, self-denial and high moral rectitude; surely not by turning sharp corners to follow that "will-o'-the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... harlot at Drury Lane! Henceforth, his insolence and artistry declined, and, though to the last there were intervals of grandeur, he spent the better part of fifteen years in the commission of crimes, whose very littleness condemned them. At last an exile from St. James's and Ranelagh, he was forced into a society which still further degraded him. Hitherto he had shunned the society of professed thieves; in his golden youth he had scorned to shelter him in the flash ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... fair for it. So home, and there found, as I expected, Mrs. Pierce and Mr. Batelier; he went for Mrs. Jones, but no Mrs. Knipp come, which vexed me, nor any other company. So with one fidler we danced away the evening, but I was not well contented with the littleness of the room, and my wife's want of preparing things ready, as they should be, for supper, and bad. So not very merry, though very well pleased. So after supper to bed, my wife and Mrs. Pierce, and her ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Christianity,' the arguments are absurd. He often shoots out incidental humorous or satirical shafts. But his most important and extended method is that of allegory. The pigmy size of the Lilliputians symbolizes the littleness of mankind and their interests; the superior skill in rope-dancing which with them is the ground for political advancement, the political intrigues of real men; and the question whether eggs shall be broken on the big or the little end, which has embroiled ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... requiems of sadness chanted in the great highways and quiet bypaths of life—the living of bygone ages are slumbering quietly in the dust, and the living of the present are hurrying to the same 'pale realms of shade.' The nations of antiquity have passed off the stage with all their grandeur and littleness, and the nations of more modern times are surging and dashing to and fro, like ships in the wild chaos of ocean's storms. God ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... passed their lives abroad, he grew to like the ways and habits of the Continent. He liked the easy indulgences in many things, he liked the cosmopolitanism that surrounds existence, and even in its littleness is not devoid of a certain breadth; and best of all he liked the vast interests at stake, the large questions at issue, the fortunes of states, the fate of dynasties! To come down from the great game, as played by kings and kaisers, to the small traffic of a ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... have sought for thousands of years, became distant friends of mine, too. And the thoughts which the sight of the countless globes involuntarily and inevitably evokes, were born in me, too,—thoughts of the littleness of the earth in our Solar System, and of our Solar System in the Universe, of immeasurable distances—so great that the stars whose rays, with the rapidity of light's travelling, are striking against our eyes now, may ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... [Hebrew: wpT iwral]. The Judge of Israel in his deepest abasement, is here contrasted with the Ruler of Israel in His highest divine glory. The connection is seen also in the indication of Bethlehem's natural littleness, as contrasted with the greatness to be bestowed upon it by God. What could have induced the prophet thus strongly to point out this circumstance, had it not been that he considered Bethlehem as the type of the Jewish people in their misery, described in the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... region worthy her command, it must have been that pale and holy star, which, splendid and alone in the firmament, heralds the approach of day; so unfitted might she have been deemed to mingle with a world less pure, so completely placed by nature above all the littleness of ordinary life. Her noble and majestic form was the casket of a rich and holy treasure, and her father's conscience had often quailed, when contemplating the severity of her youthful virtue. Dearly as ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... house rang with song and laughter. Our tables bent with good things to eat. Walls were hung with gay draperies. The floor was clean with sweet-smelling pine-branches. Now look at this mean house; its dirt floor, its bare stone walls, its littleness, its darkness! Look at our long faces. No one here could make a song if he tried. Oh! I am sick for dear ...
— Viking Tales • Jennie Hall
... what is directed by good sense, nothing found a place here from being only uncommon, for they think few things are very rare but because they are little desirable; and indeed it is plain they are free from that littleness of mind, which makes people value a thing the more for its being possessed by no one but themselves. Behind the shrubbery is a little wood, which affords a gloom, rendered more agreeable by its contrast with the dazzling beauty of that part of the garden that leads to it. In the high pale which ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... equally absurd—each believing he understands that which it is impossible for any man to understand. In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He feels more vividly than any others can feel, the utter incomprehensibleness ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... them she might gain some inspiration on the subject which Marcus Aurelius in his coldness had denied to her. "From you, who have so nobly claimed for mankind the divine attributes of free action! From you, who have taught my mind to soar above the petty bonds which one man in his littleness contrives for the subjection of his brother. Mackinnon! you who are so great!" And she now looked up into his face. ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... hope the Doctor will be so good as to take his own way in undeceiving the publick, I principally mean my friends and connections, who will be first angry at me, and next sorry to find such an instance of my littleness recorded in a book which has a very fair chance of being much read. I expect you will let me know what he will write you in return, and we here beg to make offer to you and Mrs. Boswell of our most ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs—out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes, so ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... sometimes. Even the very physical traits of the old captain of the Sofala, his powerful frame, his reposeful mien, his intelligent, handsome face, the big limbs, the benign courtesy, the touch of rugged severity in the shaggy eyebrows, made up a seductive personality. Mr. Van Wyk disliked littleness of every kind, but there was nothing small about that man, and in the exemplary regularity of many trips an intimacy had grown up between them, a warm feeling at bottom under a kindly stateliness of forms agreeable ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... retrospect of the exertions of man, the fate of empires and their rulers, and marking the grand destruction of ages, it seems the necessary change of the leading to improvement. Our very soul expands, and we forget our littleness—how painfully brought to our recollection by such vain attempts to snatch from decay what is destined so soon to perish. Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath?—this I, so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving or receiving fresh energy? What will break the enchantment of animation? ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... which is slight and evanescent at first sight, but which mounts up to a mighty sum in the end, which is an essential part of an important whole, which has consequences greater than itself, and where more is meant than meets the eye or ear. We complain sometimes of littleness in a Dutch picture, where there are a vast number of distinct parts and objects, each small in itself, and leading to nothing else. A sky of Claude's cannot fall under this censure, where one imperceptible gradation is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Bible-Classes, Sunday-School, a Sewing-Class, a Mutual Labour Loan Society, a Shelter for Homeless Girls, a library, an Invalid Children's Dinner, a bath-room and lavatory, a Flower Mission, and—hear it, ye who fancy that a penny stands very low in the scale of financial littleness—a Farthing Bank! All this free—conducted by an unpaid band of considerably over a hundred Christian workers, male and female—and leavening the foundations of society, without which, and similar missions, there would be very few leavening influences at all, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity, caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to himself alone, and by himself ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows," "slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility," "lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of as a brainless noodle, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be—as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity—per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... good," cried Benassis. "It was a pleasure to hear you say over again what I have so often said in the midst of this avenue. There is something holy about this place. Here, we are like two mere specks; and the feeling of our own littleness always brings us into the presence ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments; that a young ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... friends—but yes, I have. I have Michael Clones and Captain Ivy, though he's far away-aye, he's a friend of friends, is Captain Ivy. These naval folk have had so much of the world, have got the bearings of so many seas, that they lose all littleness, and form their own minds. They are not like the people who knew me in Ireland—the governor here is one of them—and who believe the worst of me. The governor—faugh, he was made for bigger and better things! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... left the beach at Haverhill, disconcerted, disgraced, conscious of my own littleness and folly, and, as I was bid, took passage in the Telegraph coach for Hanover, giving orders that I should be called ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... writer, Prof. Denslow,[33] does not hesitate to express the opinion very emphatically that "as it is, in no country do the people feel such an overwhelming sense of the littleness of the men in charge of public affairs" as in the United States. And in another place he dwells on the fact that "responsible government educates office-holders into a high and honourable sense of their accountability to the people," and makes "statesmanship a permanent ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... purpose. So many lives are dwarfed by their very littlenesses. We are bothered with being short-sighted. The eyeglasses of the Master's purpose for us would wondrously widen out our scope of vision. And through the new eyes would come broader, farther, clearer views, and changed action. The littleness of our ideas would be amusing if it were not ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... again who of you are going to be great? Says a young man: "I am going to be great" "When are you going to be great?" "When I am elected to some political office," Won't you learn the lesson, young man; that it is prima facie evidence of littleness to hold public office under our form of government? Think of it. This is a government of the people, and by the people, and for the people, and not for the office-holder, and if the people in this country rule as they always should rule, an officeholder ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... and the fact that it is more durable than the body does not preclude the possibility of its being mortal. Socrates, however, argues that contraries cannot exist in the same thing at the same time, as, for example, the same object cannot partake of both magnitude and littleness at the same time. In like manner, heat while it is heat can never admit the idea of cold. Life and death are contraries and can never coexist; but wherever there is life there is soul, so that the soul contains that which is contrary to death and can never admit death; consequently ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... O my companions in infinite littleness, born like me to suffer everything and to be ignorant of everything, are there enough madmen among you to believe that they know all these things? No, there are not; no, at the bottom of your hearts you feel your nonentity as I render justice to mine. But you are arrogant ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... character—in the later years it might be truly said "clarum et venerabile nomen"—exercised on all with whom he was connected. If indeed he had a fault, it was that his standard of action was so high, his nature so absolutely above the littleness of ordinary life, that he attributed to inferior men far purer and more unselfish objects than those that really moved them. "Vixit enim tanquam in Platonis politeia, non ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... undoubtedly, overwrought at times. There were days when the sight of a book filled me with physical nausea, with contempt for the littleness, the narrow outlook, that seemed to me to characterise every written work. I was fiercely, but quite impotently, eager at such times to demonstrate the futility of all the philosophy ranged on the rough wooden ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... unthinkable. An altar of some sort men must have—God, or Nature, or Law. But the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of man's incompleteness. A witness more overwhelming is the prayer of the Christian. What a very strange thing, is it not, for man to pray? It is the symbol at once of his littleness and of his greatness. Here the sense of imperfection, controlled and silenced in the narrower reaches of his being, becomes audible. Now he must utter himself. The sense of need is so real, and the sense of Environment, that he calls out to it, addressing ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... from fairyland. I would call to mind all that I had read of Robin Goodfellow and his power of transformation. Oh, how I envied him that power! How I longed to be able to compress my form into utter littleness; to ride the bold dragonfly; swing on the tall bearded grass; follow the ant into his subterraneous habitation, or dive into the ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... above our littleness, that watched, fascinated, the struggle of lights and shadows over the soul entangled in the wreck of a man's body, the rocks had a monumental indifference. And between their great, stony faces, turning pale in the gloom, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... really knows them the littleness of man in comparison with these mighty mountains is not the impression made upon him. He is not overawed and overcome by them. His soul goes out most lovingly to them because they have aroused in him all the greatness in his soul, and purified it—even if only for a time—of ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... sons of the freed-woman,—to solemn Egypt, riddle of nations, the vast, silent, impenetrable mystery of the world. By continual pondering over the footsteps of the Seekers, the Sought-for seemed to grow to vast proportions, and the Found to shrink to inappreciable littleness. For me, over the dreary ice-plains of the Poles, over the profound bosom of Africa, the far-stretching steppes of Asia, and the rocky wilds of America, a great silence brooded, and in the unexplored void faint footfalls could be heard here and there, threading their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... men with false reputation of learning will, by their acts, cause Truth to be contracted and concealed. And in consequence of the shortness of their lives they will not be able to acquire much knowledge. And in consequence of the littleness of their knowledge, they will have no wisdom. And for this, covetousness and avarice will overwhelm them all. And wedded to avarice and wrath and ignorance and lust men will entertain animosities towards one another, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... household, only he blundered the text. Bletson wrote long and big words about the political obligation incumbent on every member of the community, on every person, to sacrifice his time and talents to the service of his country; while Harrison talked of the littleness of present affairs, in comparison of the approaching tremendous change of all things beneath the sun. But although the garnishing of the various epistles was different, the result came to the same, that they were determined at least to keep sight of Woodstock, until ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... saints,—for I heard Mary Grace say so to Miss Marks—as meaning that my Father was resentful because some of them attended the service at the Wesleyan chapel on Thursday evenings. But my Father was utterly incapable of such littleness as this, and when he talked of 'jealousy' he meant a lofty solicitude, a careful watchfulness. He meant that their spiritual honour was a matter of anxiety to him. No doubt when he used to tell me to remember that our God is a jealous God, he meant that my sins and shortcomings were not matters of ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... their domestic concerns, and to put it beyond the power of calumny to throw the least reflection on their honor. Character is much easier kept than recovered, and that man, if any such there be, who, from sinister views, or littleness of soul, lends unseen his hand to injure it, contrives a wound it will never be in his power ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... failings," the exile wrote, and we may be sure that he had by this time discovered, like the rest of the world, that as a swashbuckler and intriguer he was noisy and petulant, but on the whole anything but great. The Fronde left behind it a sense of littleness, of poverty-stricken humanity, and this particular frondeur had seen the mask drop from the features of his fellow-men. Now, in the quiet of the country, in disgrace with fortune and his own conscience, he grasped a new and this time a dignified and suitable ambition. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the girl interrupted, "is a great gentleman, but he is never one of those who would stop the rot in a decaying race. He is a great strong man is Mr. Andrew, and deceit and littleness are things he knows nothing of. I wish ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with the littleness and spite, The falsehood and the treachery of men, I cried, "Give me but justice!" thinking then I meekly craved a common boon which might Most easily be granted; soon the light Of deeper truth grew on my wondering ken, (Escaping baneful damps of stagnant fen), And then I saw that in my ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... has had for ages the knowledge of the more recent discoveries and institutions of the West, which have done so much for Europe, yet it has been unable to use them, the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... political power between the military caste and the commercial classes and the proletariat. In spite of that change, flogging is still an institution in the public school, in the military prison, on the training ship, and in that school of littleness called the home. The lascivious clamor of the flagellomaniac for more of it, constant as the clamor for more insolence, more war, and lower rates, is tolerated and even gratified because, having no moral ends in view, we have sense enough to see that nothing but brute ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... furnish out numberless instances of small deceit. His conduct is marked with a littleness, which though allowed by general consent, is not strictly just. A person with whom I have long been connected in business, asked, if I had dealt with his relation, whom he had brought up, and who had lately entered into commercial ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... already told you," she said wearily. "I see a throne, a life with all the confining littleness of a prison, with none of the breadth of an empire. I see the sacrifice of all I love. I see year upon year of purple desolation.... Purple is the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... to join in their hymns of praise. 'Grandison,' says a Roman Catholic bishop, 'were he one of us, might expect canonisation.' 'How,' exclaims his uncle, after a conversation with his paragon of a nephew, 'how shall I bear my own littleness?' A party of reprobates about town have a long dispute with him, endeavouring to force him into a duel. At the end of it one of them exclaims admiringly, 'Curse me, if I believe there is such another man in the world!' 'I never saw a hero till now,' says another. 'I had rather have Sir C. Grandison ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... behind the blinds of her highest window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way from here; ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... passed might be successfully dared by another. But now—with one ship growing smaller behind them, and the other, containing they knew not what horror of human agony and human helplessness, lying a burning wreck in the black distance ahead of them—they began to feel their own littleness. The Malabar, that huge sea monster, in whose capacious belly so many human creatures lived and suffered, had dwindled to a walnut-shell, and yet beside her bulk how infinitely small had their own frail cockboat appeared ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... bring himself down to the littleness of her daily life, he determined to show his disapproval of every phrase of its meanness as far as he could without offending her. He had made her feel that he condemned her course towards Miss Burton that evening, and he had ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... He that thinks on a cube of an inch diameter, has a clear and positive idea of it in his mind, and so can frame one of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and so on, till he has the idea in his thoughts of something very little; but yet reaches not the idea of that incomprehensible littleness which division can produce. What remains of smallness is as far from his thoughts as when he first began; and therefore he never comes at all to have a clear and positive idea of that smallness which is consequent to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... very young,' said Mr. Bevan, strongly impressed with the littleness of the figure;' but she has been a Communicant for more than a year, and she ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Apollo Belvedere, some colossal heads, and very recently the Sistine Chapel, have by turns so won my whole heart, that I scarcely saw any thing besides them. But, in truth, can man, little as man always is, and accustomed to littleness, ever make himself equal to all that here surrounds him of the noble, the vast, and the refined? Even tho he should in any degree adapt himself to it, then how vast is the multitude of objects that immediately press upon him from all sides, and meet ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... society, but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame and pity out of the heart of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small country village in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but not its worldly, wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, added to the bitter shrewdness and witty ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... jog-trot. I knew my horse better and he was more used to me, which made it at least bearable to both of us. Before long the canyon widened out into the level forest land thickly studded with magnificent pines. I had again the feeling of awe and littleness. Everything was solemn and still. The morning air was cool, and dry as toast; the smell of pitch-pine choked my nostrils. We rode briskly down the broad brown aisles, across the sunny ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... I should be able to support myself, unless I fed upon snails and other insects, which they offered, by many learned arguments, to evince that I could not possibly do. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favorite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was nearly thirty feet high. After much debate, they concluded unanimously that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... visionaries on sudden death, it comes as a shock to discover that back there, where life is so sweetly certain, fear still strides unabashed. They had thought that fear was dead—stifled by heroism. They had believed that personal littleness had given way before the magnanimity ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... circumference and sixty-two feet high, without reckoning the plinth and abacus. They are covered with paintings and sculptures, the colors of which are wonderfully fresh and vivid. If, as seems probable, the great design of Egyptian architecture was to impress man with a feeling of his own littleness, to inspire a sense of overwhelming awe in the presence of the Deity, and at the same time to show that the monarch was a being of superhuman greatness, these edifices were well adapted to accomplish their purpose. The Egyptian ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... political and social ambitions which stirred mankind in the outside world. But he knew that her merriment proceeded not from an ephemeral sense of the ludicrous, but from a righteous appraisal of the folly and littleness of those things for which the world ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of a kingdom. Had this trait been related of a great man and a hero, it would irresistibly excite our admiration; but the character of this prince leaves us in doubt whether this moderation ought to be ascribed to a noble self-command, or to the littleness of a weak mind, which even good fortune could not embolden, and liberty itself could not strip ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to spoil this portrait by the avowal of a littleness. The chevalier put cotton in his ears, and wore, appended to them, two little ear-rings representing negroes' heads in diamonds, of admirable workmanship. He clung to these singular appendages, explaining that since his ears had been bored he had ceased to have headaches (he had had headaches). ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... which no fellow can understand. Thousands come to it, thousands go from it. Porters grow gray-headed beneath its roof. Buns, once fresh and tender, become hard and misanthropic in its refreshment rooms, and look as if they had seen the littleness of existence and were disillusioned. But there the station stands, year after year, wrapped in a discreet gloom, always the same, always baffling and inscrutable. Not even the porters understand it. "I couldn't say, sir," is the civil but unsatisfying reply with which research is met. Now ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... self-control which is the supreme attribute of greatness. Potent, and almost irresistible in every conflict with others, and only to be vanquished by his own acts, he possessed many of the higher qualities of genius. He was rapid, resolute, and daring, filled with contempt for the littleness of mankind, yet molding every atom which composed that littleness to purposes at utter variance with its nature. In defiance of the first essence of republican theory, he built himself an imperial throne on the crushed privileges of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... notion of "mathematical infinitude." Their infinite universe, after all, is not an "absolute," but a "relative" infinite; that is, the indefinite. "The universe must extend indefinitely in time and space, in the infinite greatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts—in the infinite variety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of existence. The finite can not express the infinite but by being multiplied infinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in any reasonable relation, or ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... incompatible, probably there never lived a proud man, who was not vain of his very pride. A generous aspect is, however, sometimes assumed by pride; but vanity is inalterably contemptible in its selfish littleness, its restless greediness. Who shall tell its victims—who shall set bounds to its triumphs? Reason is more easily blinded by vanity than by sophistry; time and again has vanity misdirected feeling; often has vanity roused the most violent passions. Many have been enticed ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... is there who has not revelled in the thought of something new, the eager desire to see something fresh? The country boy to see vast London with all its greatness and littleness, its splendour and its squalor, its many cares and too often false joys—the town boy to plunge into that home of mystery and wonder, the country. And though as a rule the country boy is disappointed, he of the town, when once he has tasted the true joys of the country ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... contemporaries, of producing 'scandalous Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own calmer and wiser utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an heroic attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world, his indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and we know from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from the attribution to his pen of writings utterly alien to his character. "... really," he cries, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... we have one of many examples that, in art as well as in nature, gigantic productions precede those that evince regularity of proportion, which again in their turn decline gradually into littleness and insignificance, and that poetry in her earliest appearance attaches itself closely to the sanctities of religion, whatever may be the form which the latter assumes among ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... habits clung most tenaciously—that old-fashioned, homely, delightful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the years of the Peloponnesian war, looked back so fondly. If the impression of Greece generally is but enhanced by the littleness of the physical scene of events intellectually so great—such a system of grand lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one of its fine coins—still more would this be true of those centres of country ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and prose writings neither take away from, nor add to his poetical reputation. There is, occasionally, a littleness of manner, and an unnecessary degree of caution. He appears anxious to say a good thing in every word, as well as every sentence. They, however, give a very favourable idea of his moral character in all respects; and his letters to Atterbury, in his disgrace and exile, do equal honour to both. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... least, with the "infinite" which is therefore in consciousness, just as it is impossible to talk of "spaces" without presupposing the one space of which given "spaces" are parts. That we are oppressed with our own littleness, that we "look before and after and sigh for what is not," that we are conscious of finiteness, means that we partake in some way of an infinite which reveals itself in us by an inherent necessity of self-consciousness. There are, then, some ideas within us—at least there is ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Perversity, or general Unpleasantness and Thrawn-ness. Multitudes of men are what in Scotland is called Cat-witted. I do not know whether the word is intelligible in England. It implies a combination of littleness of nature, small self-conceit, readiness to take offence, determination in little things to have one's own way, and general impracticability. There are men to whom even the members of their own families do not like to talk about their ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Here now we have the Red Sea brought under our notice in a most striking manner, and one that leads us not only to feel the greatness of the power of man over material things, but I trust it may also lead us to see our littleness when compared with Him who made us. We, that is the nations which brought about this great canal, have had to spend years and vast sums of money to carry out the end aimed at, and under the Divine aid it has been brought to a ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... sentiment; it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it. He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down. Of such minds are mannerists in Art; in the world, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 812. Minoes, so called either for their littleness, or (as Dr. Cajus imagined) because their fins be of so lively a red, as if they were died with the true Cinnabre-lake called Minium: They are less than Loches, feeding upon nothing, but licking one ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... one thing clear in the midst of her mortification; and that was, that she hated and detested Nicholas with all the narrowness of mind and littleness of purpose worthy a descendant of the house of Squeers. And there was one comfort too; and that was, that every hour in every day she could wound his pride, and goad him with the infliction of some slight, or insult, or deprivation, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... sparrows. Ellen moved with this rank and file of the army of labor, and all at once a sense of comradeship seized her. She began to feel humanity as she had never felt it before. The sense of her own littleness aroused her to a power of comprehension of the grandeur of the mass of which she was a part. She began to ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... To all men of lofty ambition I would recommend a balloon excursion. The higher you get, the smaller and more insignificant do earthly things appear. A balloon is the best pulpit imaginable from which to preach a sermon upon the littleness of mundane realities, first—because no one can hear you, and your congregation cannot therefore be held responsible for indifference to your teaching; and second—because at that height you are fully impressed with the truth of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... balance true." And I must have the personal conscious future, which is to right the wrongs of the ages, if I am to believe and preach the faithfulness of God. But we must guard against an impatience which is our littleness. In the immense times of the Almighty, every dark mystery of human being can move away, and leave the "sky of Providence at last, arching over the soul with not a cloud to dim its stars." For my present faith I hold it ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... dark account to render in the end. There is no more despicable character than a finished "manoeuverer." It implies a meanness, that can pry into the corners of others' affairs, an indolence, that neglects one's own proper business, and a mental vacuity, and a littleness of purpose, which are the dread of every noble mind. Beware of the impertinence of such persons. Be very sure that you give not your hand and heart where they point, instead of following, as you ought, your own good sense, and the promptings ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his own utter helplessness. ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... In the littleness of things, it so happened that at a time when John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake, serious, solemn, side-by- side, were telling the widow of Jimmy Blair that the Tidewater Southern Railroad, in which her husband had largely interested himself before his death, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... that, there were probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie there might have been perhaps ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... the especial glory of Love, that it doth make unto all Sweetness and Greatness, and doth be a fire burning all Littleness; so that did all in this world to have met The Beloved, then did Wantonness be dead, and there to grow Gladness and Charity, dancing in ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... the hurt man and an "aahh"—but not once a word of blame. I should want to curse the careless hand that wrenched my wound, but these soldiers of France and Belgium whom I carried had passed beyond littleness. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... the partnership and give up his share in the profits of the expedition. I was one of the witnesses who signed this instrument, in which Pedrarias released and assigned over all his interest in Peru to Almagro and his associates, - by this act deserting the enterprise, and, by his littleness of soul, for feiting the rich treasures which it is well known he might have acquired from the golden ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... to his praise of a woman. And yet, we fear, he saw only too truly. What unexpected failures have we seen, literally, in this respect! How often did the Martha blur the Mary out of the face of a lovely woman at the sound of a crash amid glass and porcelain! What sad littleness in all the department thus represented! Obtrusion of the mop and duster on the tranquil meditation of a husband and brother. Impatience if the carpet be defaced by the feet ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... replied, and a noble fellow he is—God bless him wherever he may be. But I added, I have another brother who is a slaveholder in Tennessee, and with which one, I asked, in the name of all that is good, were they going to place me. I wondered if these "honorable" men, who sought by such littleness to defeat me, did not find out whether I did not have some other relatives,—women, perhaps, who believed in things unearthly and spiritual,—whose opinions they could quote to defeat me. Shame on such ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... into quarters; St. Paul's and the Tower of London could be distinctly seen, the light falling happily upon their proportions. Old and New London Bridges, were like two feeble efforts of the works of man; and here we saw the triumph of nature over art, and the littleness of the great works of man. At one time, on nearing Battersea Bridge, we observed a small, black streak ascending from the surface of the Thames, which we concluded to be the smoke from a Richmond steam packet. At that time the course ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... of Warwick and Kenilworth, and the old Roman camps and military roads, to appeal powerfully to the boy's lively imagination. Every phase of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in Shakespeare's poetry; just as his characters reflect the nobility and the littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... important events, what littleness of mind, yet what stretch of intellect were henceforth issued by the recluse of Strawberry, as he plumed himself on being styled, from that library of 'Strawberry!' Let us picture to ourselves the place, the persons—put on, if we can, the sentiments and habits of the retreat; ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Discourse to him of prodigious armaments Assembled to besiege his city now, And of the passing of a mule with gourds— 'T is one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact, he will gaze rapt 150 With stupor at its very littleness, (Far as I see) as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results; And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we too see not with his opened eyes. Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, Preposterously, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... Government that caused the settlement of Connecticut, of New Haven, as well as of Rhode Island. The noble minds of the younger Winthrop, of Eaton, no more than that of Roger Williams, could shrivel themselves into the nutshell littleness of the Massachusetts Bay Government—so called, indeed, by courtesy, or by way of accommodation, rather than as conveying a proper idea of a Government, as it consisted solely of Congregationalists, who alone were eligible to office and eligible as electors ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... thereby producing the intolerable and glaring continuity of perpetual day. Those who would be the agents of Providence must observe the workings of Providence, and be content to work also in that way, and by those means, which Almighty wisdom appoints. There is infinite littleness in despising small things. It seems paradoxical to say that there are no small things; our littleness and our aspiration make things appear small. There are, morally speaking, no small duties. Nothing that influences human virtue and happiness can ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... early and there was plenty of time, of course; but there was something about the countless delivery wagons that passed and re-passed without stopping which impressed us with the littleness of our importance in this great whirl of traffic, and the ease with which a transfer clerk's promise, easily and cheerfully made, might be as ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Alan's lips, as he looked up again at the flags beating softly above his cabin. Mary Standish was not what Stampede's discovery had proclaimed her to be; there was some mistake, a monumental stupidity of reasoning on their part, and tomorrow would reveal the littleness and the injustice of their suspicions. He tried to force the conviction upon himself, and reentering the cabin he went to bed, still telling himself that a great lie had built itself up out of nothing, and that the God of all things was good to him because ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... presumes to pronounce Goldsmith's inattention affected and attributes it to jealousy. "It was strongly suspected," says he, "that he was fretting with chagrin and envy at the singular honor Dr. Johnson had lately enjoyed." It needed the littleness of mind of Boswell to ascribe such pitiful motives to Goldsmith, and to entertain such exaggerated notions of the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... up towards it in love and awe, till it seems near to one—ground on which one may freely tread, because one appreciates and admires; and so one forgets the distance between its grandeur and one's own littleness." ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Canada. There seemed to be a natural antagonism between him and them. The reason is not far to seek. Persons of the social grade of Mackenzie were inconceivably odious to this "diner-out of the first water;" while men like Bidwell and Baldwin made him painfully conscious of his own littleness and insufficiency for the task which he had undertaken. Yet he could not venture to call to his Council any of the remnant of the Tory Compact, and thereby utterly ignore the Liberal principles which were presumed to have dictated his appointment. The Tories, moreover, had seen fit to petition ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... journey over the backbone of the mountains. It gave one a different conception of men. They like ants on these mountains, David thought—insignificant, crawling ants. Here was where one might find a soul and a religion if he had never had one before. One's littleness, at times, was almost frightening. It made one think, impressed upon one that life was not much more than an accident in this vast scale of creation, and that there was great necessity for a God. ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... she saw him in the reality of his littleness, which she had divined; this would-be conqueror. She saw him as his intimates often see the great man without his front of Jove. Don't we know that Napoleon had moments of privacy when he whined and threatened ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... when he concludes that examination of his childhood memories which he undertook in order to prove the depravity of the soul from its first day on earth. He says: 'In the littleness of children didst Thou, our king, give us a symbol of humility when Thou didst say: Of such is the kingdom ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... to full agreement; (b) or it may itself be agreed upon, while the details are still objects of dispute. But in that case the large thought, having put the details in proper perspective, prevents unpleasant conflict by revealing their comparative littleness. Also, agreement on the large point convinces each disputant of the other's partial sanity, at least, and thus preserves harmony; (c) or, finally, the principle itself may become an object of dispute. Even then the ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... abysses, the mighty cataract, the rushing waters, the frequent perils of avalanches and of tumbling rocks, the total absence of every soft feature of nature, were always reading an impressive lesson, and illustrating the littleness of man, and the greatness of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... Instead of "a holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable watering-place—and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him as ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, His pond an ocean, his parterre a down: Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shivering at a breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole a labour'd quarry above ground; 110 Two Cupids squirt before: a lake behind Improves the keenness of the northern wind. His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall! No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... listen to the howl of winter's wind? Whence, but from the secret reflection of what houseless wretches feel from it? Or do you administer comfort in affliction—the motive is at hand; I have had it preached to me in nineteen out of twenty of your consolatory discourses—the comparative littleness of our ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... actually made of jewels. And so God places a solemn value and responsibility on the humble workers, the people that try to hide behind their insignificance the trifling opportunities and the single talents; and our littleness will not excuse us in ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... furthers his case. For him, the small height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... neet, seem to be druffen. Aw hear some queer tales sometimes, but aw dooant tell all aw know. 'Ale sellers shouldn't be tale tellers.' But aw'm sooary to say at th' mooast ale sellers at' aw know are varry fond o' taletellin. Ther's nowt shows a chap's littleness as mich as to be allus talkin abaat his own or somdy else's private affairs; an' ther's nowt likely to produce moor bother nor that system o' tittle tattlin abaat other fowk's consarns. Ther's a deal ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... thought was that she was in danger of drowning, notwithstanding the littleness of the brook; and I ran to the point from which I had heard her plunge into the water, expecting to have to draw her out on the bank; but I found only a place where the grass was wallowed down as she had crawled out, and lying on the ground was ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... woman stands side by side with man, his equal in the eye of the law as well as the Creator, will the high destiny of the race be accomplished. She is the mother of the race, and every stain of littleness or inferiority cast upon her by our institutions will soil the offspring she sends into the world, and clip and curtail to that extent his fair proportions. If we would abrogate that littleness of her character which finds a delight in the gewgaws of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... itself. Before, it would have contested for a trifle; now it yields at once, not with reluctance and pain by way of practicing virtue, but as it were naturally. Its own vices are vanished. This creature so vain before now loves nothing but poverty, littleness and humiliation. Before, it preferred itself above everybody; now everybody above itself, having a boundless charity for its neighbor, to bear with his faults and weaknesses, in order to win him by love, which before it could not do but with very great constraint. The rage ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... very limited, it is true, and if we are aiming at Christian perfection, we are accustomed to look upon ourselves as such. And the oftener we compare our borrowed perfections with those of God, the more deeply convinced of our littleness shall we become. But yet, how little soever we may be, we have, in a certain sense, capacity for the infinite; and for it, only the infinite is sufficient. Hence, as all the wealth of this world could never make any man ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... similar were natural to the man. He could not help them. It was impossible for him not to be continually proclaiming his own greatness. "Don't tax me with littleness," he said in one of his letters to Delphine Gay, in which he justified his breaking with her husband. "I think myself too great to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... directly to her own room. It was easy for her to see that Mr Harrel was bent upon using every method he could devise, to entangle her into some engagement with Sir Robert, and though she could not imagine the meaning of such a scheme, the littleness of his behaviour excited her contempt, and the long-continued error of the baronet gave her the utmost uneasiness. She again determined to seek an explanation with him herself, and immovably to refuse joining the party ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... bright with intelligence, whose dark eyes blazed with life and fire, and whose every gesture betrayed spirit, grace, and quick understanding. A child for a father to be proud of. No meanness there; no littleness in the fine, high-bred features; everything that the father's heart could wish, except perhaps some little want of robustness; one might have desired that the limbs were less exquisitely graceful and delicate—more stout ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
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