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More "Paltry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... complaining of the gale-swept tops of the great trees, in spite of the vast dull roar of the great falls, that had seemed a dirge, a ray of cheer had entered the little shack. It had seemed to her like such a paltry and mean excuse for a dwelling, when she had first seen it, and had been so thoroughly in keeping with the sordid nature she had at once attributed to this man whom she believed to have brought her there with amazing lies. But now, in some way, it had become a link, and the only one, that still ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... notions of the resurrection, though they were true as far as they went, seemed poor and paltry beside what Christ had taught him. He was not going to wait till the end of the world— perhaps for thousands of years—in darkness and the shadow of death, he knew not where or how. His soul was to pass at once into life,— into joy, ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... about sucking from each flower, the droplet of honey, when the heavy mass of pure and sweet honey is available?" By which he questioned why they sought with such eagerness the paltry pleasures of this world, when the state of cosmic consciousness ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... work. It often happened, that really valuable works have met with very little success, owing to want of energy or want of thought on the part of the publishers; while, on the other hand, not a few bad or paltry books, utterly unworthy of public, patronage, have, through active commercial management, met with a considerable demand, and brought both profit and fame to the writers. The truth of this was once more proved in the sale of Clare's works. In the first published volume, the ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... the more anxious that we should settle everything with the prefect in the quietest way, because des Lupeaulx has designs upon the place for himself," said the minister, continuing his talk with the deputy; "his paltry little estate is in your arrondissement; we won't want him ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... large masses employed in European warfare, may smile at the paltry forces of the Spaniards. But in the New World, where a countless host of natives went for little, five hundred well-trained Europeans were regarded as a formidable body. No army, up to the period ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... paltry Patcher is a bald translator, Whose awl bores at the words but not the matter; But this TRANSLATOR makes good use of leather, By stitching ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... infested the country. I know where the stones are hidden away, and I can, if you like, lead you to what the British think you will never find. But if you are going to believe the words of this malicious boy, and consider me to be a common thief, I've done. You can have the few paltry stones I brought away to sell and pay for my bread and meat till the war is over, and let me go. I don't want to act as your guide into Kimberley! It's nothing to me! I have told you what I did; and what is more, I'd do ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... Content: but we will leave this paltry land, And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece;— I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;— Where painted carpets o'er the meads are hurled, And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world; Where woods ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and withered man, that derelict of art, Who for a paltry franc will make a crayon sketch of you? In slouching hat and shabby cloak he looks and is the part, A sodden old Bohemian, without a single sou. A boon companion of the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine, He broods and broods, ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... Man's rule: he therefore deems I shall endure it — I, the unconquered Air! Imagines this triumphant strength may bear His paltry sway! yea, ignorantly dreams, Because proud Rhea now his vassal seems, And Neptune him obeys in billowy lair, That he a more sublime assault may dare, Where blown by tempest ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the attitude of clergymen toward the wealthier members of their congregation. And, in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, with absolutely no cause. The Church is in need. The poor are in dire distress. Missions languish for the few paltry thousands that would carry the Word triumphant ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... thing, overflowing with the animation that comes from a quick intelligence—a keen appreciation of the intelligence of the great artists who had interpreted a story which thrilled the imagination of generation after generation, and he felt that Parliament was a paltry thing. Parliament—what was Parliament? The wrangle of political parties over a paltry issue. It had no real life in it; it had nothing of the fullness and breadth of the matters that interested such people as ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... all particulars of quantity, quality, and price. The loads from the seed depots and outworks, come rolling up in the afternoon, and have all to be weighed, checked, noted down, and examined. Every man's hand is against you. You cannot trust your own servants. For a paltry bribe they will try to pass a bad parcel of seed, and even when you have your European assistants to help you, it is hard work to avoid being over-reached ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... revenge on Elaine! To buy back Clifford for a paltry four pounds a week—to have the delicate pleasure of doling out the money in the role of Lady Bountiful! She had a mental vision of the sweet little letters she could write to Elaine when she enclosed the monthly cheque—letters so sweet that they ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... reproduction, around whose primary stage gathers all that is attractive or beautiful in organic life; the 'moment' toward which everything blossoms, and from which everything fades, was not by them ignored as non-existent, or treated in paltry equivoque, as though it were a secondary consequence and a vile corruption, instead of a healthy cause. Their science was, it is true, only founded on observation (and therefore easily warped to error by apparent analogies) instead of induction, while their aesthetics had the same ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... may tell you that one of my objects in calling on poor Alresca was to consult him about the point. The truth is, I am threatened with trouble if I appear at the Opera Comique, particularly in 'Carmen.' The whole matter is paltry beyond words, but really ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... kind to which his mind had a deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain style, sometimes even to a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in every city the pestilence swept off its hundreds daily; manufactures, commerce, agriculture, the industries of town and rural district, ceased; the Courts swarmed with petty nobles, who vaunted paltry titles; and resigned their wives to cicisbei and their sons to sloth: art and learning languished; there was not a man who ventured to speak out his thought or write the truth; and over the Dead Sea of social putrefaction floated the sickening oil ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... us retreat to-morrow, or to-day, but I would not willingly part from my mother's brother in unkindness about a paltry pipkin." ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... utter with the clearness and forcibleness common to the Greek thunderers of yore, who spoke out what was in them, grandly, simply, and with the fearless majesty of thought that reeked nothing of opinions. Oh, he would rouse the hearts of men from paltry greed and covetousness, . . from lust, and hatred, and all things evil,—no matter if he lost his own life in the effort, he would still do his utmost best to lift, if only in a small degree, the deepening ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... fingers quivering, I walked over to join the group curiously inspecting the translated lawn. I, I had done this; out of the most miserable I'd made the loveliest—and for a paltry five dollars. I tried to recapture the memory of what it had looked like in order to relish the contrast more, but it was impossible; the vivid present blotted out the decayed ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the three-penny tax on tea, or the paltry tax on paper and sugar to which our revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with the taxation of the women of this Republic? The orphaned Pixley sisters, six dollars a day; and even the women who are proclaiming the tyranny ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... purpose of his creation. For what more can we do here below? The God who formed us, breathing into our nostrils the breath of life, is, in his Almighty power and wisdom, far removed beyond the sphere of our poor and paltry offices. We are of the clay; and return to the elements from which we are formed. He is a Spirit, without beginning of days or end of years. The extent of our limited exertions reaches no further than our ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... thousand ducats! "Oh," cries Portia when she hears, "what a paltry sum! Pay the Jew ten times the money and tear up the bond, rather than that Antonio shall lose a ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... for a thousand doubloons," murmured the black, overhearing the offer, and taking it in earnest, and, with the strange vanity of a faithful slave, appreciated by his master, scorning to hear so paltry a valuation put upon him by a stranger. But Don Benito, apparently hardly yet completely restored, and again interrupted by his cough, made ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... supposed, it is difficult to believe that the enemy was prepared for such resistance as he has met with. To all appearance, the Germans expected to break through in a few days, and hoped that this success would rehabilitate the credit of the paltry young prince whom we here see entangled in barbed wire, his uniform in rags, and despair depicted on his haggard face. Another confessed failure would finish the career of the Crown Prince; and yet there are limits to the endurance of any troops, and these limits have now been reached. ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... calls this answer paltry, but I find his counter-objection involved. M. Bayle will have those who are for the two principles to take their stand chiefly on the assumption of the supreme freedom of God: for if he were compelled to produce all that which he can, he would produce also ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... now, Madame, you have had a sample of all our poor talents, save and except that paltry talent of mine which in other company concludes such a performance. I pray you tell me what ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... there is a natural limit to growth.[54] It is obvious that the existence of these limitations imposes struggle upon individual beings and upon species, seeing that the world contains only a restricted quantity of energy, that is to say of nutriment. But Nicolai shows that war is the most paltry, the stupidest, one may even say the most ruinous, among all forms of struggle. Modern science, which enables us to estimate the amount of solar energy reaching our planet, shows us that the entire animal world does not as yet make use of more than ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... all, riches are the one desirable thing in the world, or even the most desirable. But this was only a passing thought. So fascinated was Midas with the glitter of the yellow metal, that he would still have refused to give up the Golden Touch for so paltry a consideration as a breakfast. Just imagine what a price for one meal's victuals! It would have been the same as paying millions and millions of money (and as many millions more as would take forever to reckon up) ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... proposal I objected that walking would be twenty times more genteel than such a paltry conveyance, as Blackberry was wall-eyed, and the colt wanted a tail; that they had never been broken to the rein, but had an hundred vicious tricks, and that we had but one saddle and [v]pillion in the whole house. All these objections, however, were overruled, so ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... himself in love with me. Celeste he knew. She was chaffing him about being taken for Meysey Hill, and suggested that he should be presented to me as the millionaire. He told me with a coarse nervous laugh. I was his wife. We were to live in some wretched London suburb. His salary was a few paltry hundreds a year. Anna, I listened to all that he had to say, and I called to him to let me get out. He laughed. I tried to jump, but he increased the speed. We were going at a mad pace. I struck him across the mouth, and across the eyes. He ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Royal Host, for one; and, in the daytime, that he even drew his pen about the Herstal Business, which is now getting to its crisis, and wrote one of the Manifestoes, still discoverable. And we need not doubt, in spite of his now sneering tone, that things ran high and grand here, in this paltry little Schloss of Moyland; and that those three were actually Suppers of the Gods, for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... received from Mr. MacAlpine, "you told me that my stupid book had given me nothing more than a nervous fever, but this has come also to pay the doctor's bill. Is it not a great deal of money? What a lucky thing that I went in for half profits, and did not take the paltry fifty pounds which they ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Sheriff at breakfast, when his host soon spoke of what was uppermost in his heart—the purchase of the fine herd of cattle near Gamewell. 'Twas clear that a vision of them, purchased for twenty paltry gold pieces, had been with him all through the night, in his dreams. And Robin again appeared such a silly fellow that the Sheriff saw no need of dissembling, but said that he was ready to start at once to look ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... even me, 'Come,' and he has given me 'rest.' I have had a long, long struggle, but the conflict is over. Ah, He is so different from human creditors! I have been a poor debtor, chased, hunted, oppressed, goaded almost to insanity, and none took pity on me, because I owed them a few paltry dollars, which I had the heart to pay, but, through the robberies of another, and their oppressions, could not. But what a debt I owed my Savior! Yet, without a word of reproach, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... is made out of Carlyle's alleged gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his "liver" is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a "Sartor Resartus," it would be a vastly ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... whole, should yet be worked out so carefully as to possess individual merit of their own. I see, though; I see how to remedy the defect you have suggested. I can easily bring him out by darkening the shadows of the background. Then, this fairy at his elbow is paltry, and too near him besides. I shall paint her out altogether. She takes the eye off my principal figures, and breaks that grand line of light pouring in from the morning ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... kind-hearted fellow, "Thou little better thing than earth," "thou wretch"! Henry VIII. talks of a "lousy footboy," and the Duke of Suffolk, when he is about to be killed by his pirate captor at Dover, calls him "obscure and lowly swain," "jaded groom," and "base slave," dubs his crew "paltry, servile, abject drudges," and declares that ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... what you and I once saw raised in a paltry village near Chelmsford, after a poor hungry fox, who, watching his opportunity, had seized by the neck, and shouldered a sleek-feathered goose: at what time we beheld the whole vicinage of boys and girls, old men, and old women, all the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... found the enemy, my false self, in the house of my life. To that she gave herself, as if she gave herself to me. Oh, how she made me love her!—if that be love which is a deification of self, the foul worship of one's own paltry being!—and that when most it seems swallowed up and lost! No, it is not love! Does love make ashamed? The memories of it may be full of pain, but can the soul ever turn from love with sick contempt? That which at length is loathed, can never have ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... more honest, and a less boyish one. Who doubts that you can fight, you silly fellow? haven't I seen you? I want you to show me a much higher sort of courage: the courage to repair a wrong, not the paltry valor to ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... studies, and married to a virtuous lady. He afterwards renounced the world, and was ordained lector; but was overcome by his violent passion for eloquence to teach rhetoric. St. Gregory Nazianzen wrote to him in the strongest terms, exhorting him to renounce that paltry or ignoble glory, as he elegantly calls it.[1] This letter produced its desired effect. St. Gregory returned to the sacred ministry in the lower functions of the altar: after some time he was called by his brother Basil to assist him in his pastoral duties, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... But as time went on I grew to understand that my abilities were third-rate. I should have done all right with a large capital—say a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—but only a man far cleverer than I am could have got anywhere in that business with a paltry sixteen thousand to begin on. I got one or two connections and did pretty well, off and on, for a time; but if I hadn't made one or two lucky strikes in stocks my capital would simply have run away in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... unwillingness. But do not suppose that I value you so lightly as did your late master, who thinks, foolish man, that you are no better than many another bond slave whom he might buy in the marketplace. Had Reas exacted an hundred gold marks instead of two paltry marks of silver, I should willingly have given ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... said I; "let him enjoy his paltry booty. I like to spend it; why should not he? Yesterday he, and all the newly-engaged servants whom you had hired, served me honorably, and cheerfully assisted me to enjoy ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... People will consent to place themselves at the author's standpoint, to view the subject with his eyes, in order to judge a work intelligently. They will lay aside—and it is M. de Chateaubriand who speaks—"the paltry criticism of defects for the noble and fruitful criticism of beauties." It is time that all acute minds should grasp the thread that frequently connects what we, following our special whim, call "defects" with what we call "beauty." Defects—at all ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... best that were ever reared on the banks of the Potomac, would be but a paltry price, for one ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... stings me that this chivalrous king of ours, this degenerate grandson of Henry the Great, should think of selling for a few paltry livres such an heritage as this. Shame ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... wealth and glory of the world had He willed so to do, and thereby have failed in His Messianic mission. This fact Satan knew full well. Many men have sold themselves to the devil for a kingdom and for less, aye, even for a few paltry pence. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... coffers teem'd with gold, Their sordid souls still sighed for more: And to procure the paltry trash They scour'd the seas from shore ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... there isn't a shadow of war in the sky. Money that might be spent, and should be spent, on the betterment of the lives of the people and destroying, the possibility of poverty and want, is spent in Dreadnoughts and weapons to kill. Hundreds of millions are being spent on the Army and Navy, while paltry sums are grudged for education and all those things which go to make up the manhood ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... is of little avail in miscellaneous matters; whereas, a very indifferent cur, bred about the house, and accustomed to assist in every thing, will often put the more noble breed to disgrace in those paltry services. If one calls out, for instance, that the cows are in the corn, or the hens in the garden, the house-colley needs no other hint, but runs and turns them out. The shepherd's dog knows not what is astir; and, if he is called out in a hurry for such work, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... not the thirty dollars, to which he had limited himself in thought, but his entire month's salary,—he might lose all by the lack of a paltry dollar or so. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... unalloyed. The vice, unhappily, is not unknown in England. A country which had the ingenuity to call a penny reading "university extension," and to send its missionaries into every town, cannot be held guiltless. But our poor attempts at culture dwindle to a paltry insignificance in the light of American enterprise; and we would no more compare the achievement of England in the diffusion of learning with the achievement of the United States, than we would set ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... been revealed to the saints by Christ or the Virgin. The Pagan gods were devils, and to hold communication with devils was mortal sin and sure damnation. But lots of people communicated with devils for much more paltry motives, for greed of gold or love of woman, and were yet saved by the intercession of some heavenly patron, or found it worth while not to be saved at all. Domenico, like them, put the question of salvation behind him. He might think of that afterwards, when he had possessed himself of the proportion ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... You misjudge Mr. Dale cruelly. To show you, father, how free our love is from the base and paltry motives you impute, and that we do not need your help, ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... understand: Let us be friends, and part forever. Before we became such intimate friends there was something within that told us we were destined to mingle our lives. Let our souls never know that we have parted upon earth; let not the paltry chance of a moment undo our ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... the earth, but for whom some ridiculous fanatics called 'missionaries' had projected a wild scheme to do something; and they, forsooth, must be kept from starving somehow, even though they had been unmitigated fools; so the paltry collections are doled out, with sarcastic undertones about the 'waste of money,' and the sin of missionaries wearing clothes, and expecting to have things to eat after throwing themselves away. Don't talk to me! I've ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... much store by such paltry physical acquirements, cousin," I replied; "I swim fairly, ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... when a grating sound was heard, and a shock was felt which sent most of the ship's company toppling down on their noses; the water surged up alongside, and we found that we were on shore. Here might be a speedy conclusion to all our hopes of prize-money—not that we cared for the paltry sum the vessel in sight might have given us, but for what we might obtain by our cruise altogether. Not a moment was lost in clewing-up everything, lowering boats, and in laying out anchors; but, notwithstanding, we stuck hard and fast. British seamen, however, do not give way to despair ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... hard work, is now induced, by an awed and holy mood, produced by art, to keep his good resolutions. Describe the mask, and show its meaning and fitness for Prospero's purposes. Why is Prospero so disturbed at the reminder of so paltry a plot as that of Caliban and his associates? Is it likely that these drunken fellows could frame any plot that would be but as gossamer before his art? Is it natural that so low a creature as Caliban should show more ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... silent night! The senator of haughty Rome Impatient, urged his chariot's flight, From lordly revel rolling home: Triumphal arches, gleaming, swell His breast with thoughts of boundless sway: What recked the Roman what befell A paltry province far away, In the solemn midnight, ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... you be humble, daughter? You must look up, not down, and see yourself A paltry atom, sap-transmitting vein Of Christ's vast vine; the pettiest joint and member Of His great ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... out soon enough," coughed an old woman in a kitchen apron and with a dish-rag in her hand. "Shame!" John, the poor devil, who had to put up with the worst at home, had tried to secure for himself a paltry half pound of butter for the coming time of scarcity, and, without remembering that he had concealed it in his pocket, neatly wrapped in his handkerchief, had stepped near the kitchen fire, and now the grease was disgracing him by running ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... mainspring of the actions of Maccabeus. The clear, piercing gaze of the eagle, energy like that with which the strong wing of the royal bird cleaves the air, marked the noble Asmonean; for the soul's gaze was upward toward its Sun, and the soul's pinion soared high above the petty interests, the paltry ambition of earth. As there was dignity in the single-mindedness of the character of Judas, so was there power in the very simplicity of his words. I will mar that simplicity by no interpolations of my own, but transfer unaltered to ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... doubt of it! I shouldn't care for the paltry return in money," said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, "if it wasn't for the glory ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... competitions and worthless honours. You require a nobler goal, and a more glorious reward. He who feels in his soul that Fate has reserved for him a great and exalted part in this world's drama may reasonably look with indifference on these paltry ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... accommodation, or to any particular species of food, but wherever these objects, in general, may come to be preferred to their character, to their country, or to mankind; they actually commit such error, wherever they admire paltry distinctions or frivolous advantages; wherever they shrink from small inconveniencies, and are incapable of discharging their duty with vigour. The use of morality on this subject, is not to limit men to any particular ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... minute, scanty, small, diminutive, little, narrow, short, tiny, inconsiderable, mean, paltry, slender, trifling, infinitesimal, microscopic, petty, slight, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... played a noble part among these men, whose only remaining merit in her eyes was devotion to a lost cause. She pictured her lover's face upon the background of this company, rejoicing to see it stand forth among those paltry and puny figures who were but the instruments of his ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... the person to whom he applied for the Meltings had withstood every plea of wife and fourteen children, no business, and good character, and had refused him this paltry little office, because he might hereafter attempt to get hold of the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster for life; would not Mr. Perceval have contended eagerly against the injustice of refusing moderate requests, because immoderate ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... required might then have been made, and the retreat might have been effected with inconsiderable loss. Such a precaution was the more necessary, as he could not be ignorant that Bluecher's troops had already gained a march upon him, and was waiting for him at the Saale. Thus the want of a few paltry wooden bridges proved as ruinous to the French army as the battle itself. It lost, solely because it was unprovided with them, great part of its yet remaining artillery, several thousands of dead, who were ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... Mr Dempster had been a little more disagreeable than usual about some copying not being finished, and then gone out, leaving me thinking what I could do to give him a little more satisfaction, so as to induce him to raise the very paltry salary he paid me. "'Tain't nonsense. Mother says that if I stop I shall some day rise and get to be Lord Mayor, but I don't think Demp would like it, so when you're ready ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... with a dreffle tight twist in it; Thet the war is a war fer the spreadin' o' slavery; Thet our army desarves our best thanks fer their bravery; Thet we 're the original friends o' the nation, All the rest air a paltry an' base fabrication; Thet we highly respect Messrs. A, B, an' C, An' ez deeply despise Messrs. E, F, an' G. In this way they go to the eend o' the chapter, An' then they bust out in a kind of a raptur About their own vartoo, an' folks's stone-blindness To the men thet 'ould actilly ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... deliverance on the earth, as indeed the event proved. Plutarch of Athens? He was superannuated. Syrianus? A mere logician, twisting Aristotle to mean what she knew, and he ought to have known, Aristotle never meant. Her father? A man of triangles and conic sections. How paltry they all looked by the side of the unfathomable Jew!—Spinners of charming cobwebs..... But would the flies condescend to be caught in them? Builders of pretty houses..... If people would but enter ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... them than a highway robber has to my purse. What will be the consequence if I put them in possession of the facts. In forty-eight hours, I shall have received perhaps one hundred lashes, and be on my way to the Louisiana cotton fields. Of what service will it be to them. They will get a paltry sum of two hundred dollars. Is not my liberty worth more to me than two hundred ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... object of love. "Our heart is made for love," said Saint Augustine, the great Christian disciple of Plato: "therefore it is unquiet till it finds repose in God." From this unrest proceed all our miseries. Men do not always succeed in contenting themselves with a petty prosaic happiness, a dull and paltry well-being, and in stifling the while the grand instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its indefinite aspirations attach themselves to objects which cannot ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... new urgency of this habitual thought brought a new suggestion. There was something hanging by a cord round his bare neck; something apparently so paltry that the piety of Turks and Frenchmen had spared it—a tiny parchment bag blackened with age. It had hung round his neck as a precious charm when he was a boy, and he had kept it carefully on his breast, not believing ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... a philosopher, but he could not help feeling a little galled that the demand which had destroyed him had been so trivial. He had handled millions—on paper, it was true, but still millions—and here he was knocked out of time by a paltry twenty thousand pounds. ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... Dad and mother still pushing, scheming, intriguing; always with the affectation of despising reclame, yet doing nothing—not the most simple act—without a careful eye to it! Years ago, as I've said, there was an intelligible motive for our paltry ambitions; but now, when they have force les portes and can afford to be sincere and independent——! [Checking herself.] But I oughtn't to speak of my folks like this, ought I, even to you whom I can trust! [Penitently.] ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... longing, and flatly to stifle the innate striving toward artistic creation, is to become (as with Wycherley and Sheridan) a man who waives, however laughingly, his sole apology for existence. The proceeding is paltry enough, in all conscience; and yet, upon the other side, there is much positive danger in giving to the instinct a loose rein. For in that event the familiar circumstances of sedate and wholesome living cannot but seem, like paintings viewed ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... outbreak. After having thrown off the yoke of a knave—and perhaps hung the knave up by the neck, or chopped his head off with an axe—mankind not unfrequently fall under the control of a fool; frightened at their temerity in dethroning an idol of metal, they bow down before a paltry statue ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... is nothing remarkable in it; it is to be met with all over England; but we have placed it beside its neighbor q to show how the same form and idea are modified by the mind of the nations who employ it. The design is the same in both, the proportions also; but the one is a chimney, the other a paltry model of a paltrier edifice. Fig. q is Swiss, and is liable to all the objections advanced against the Swiss cottages; it is a despicable mimicry of a large building, like the tower in the engraving of the Italian cottage (Sec. 31), carved in stone, it is true, but not ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... it pass'd between his grinders, Or't had been happy for gold-finders: He cock'd his hat, you would have said Mambrino's[3] helm adorn'd his head; Whene'er he chanced his hands to lay On magazines of corn or hay, Gold ready coin'd appear'd instead Of paltry provender and bread; Hence, we are by wise farmers told[4] Old hay is equal to old gold:[5] And hence a critic deep maintains We learn'd to weigh our gold by grains. This fool had got a lucky hit; And people fancied he had wit, Two ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... their amorous propensities know no bounds. All classes, from the highest to the lowest, indulge in coarse sensuality and shameless profligacy. Even the chief would boast of obtaining a paltry toy or trifle in return for the prostitution ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... by its faults, but by the difficulties and accidents of the fortune through which it passes, while, in the railway novel, interest is obtained with the vulgar reader for the vilest character, because the author describes carefully to his recognition the blotches, burrs and pimples in which the paltry nature resembles his own. The "Mill on the Floss" is perhaps the most striking instance extant of this study of cutaneous disease. There is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fate and a designing oysterman place you in the next box to three or four of these geniuses, you will, unless very much of a philosopher, be disgusted, for the time being, with human nature. Their paltry imitations, their miserable brayings, their misquotations from Shakspeare, their mendacious accounts of interviews with the "Boy," will be enough to drive you mad. Some such thing as the following ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... been persuaded to undertake a laborious piece of business, which will employ me diligently for about ten days. The eloquence which wrought upon me was principally money. I am now at wages. What sacrifices of time and pleasure do I make to this paltry object—contemptible indeed in itself, but truly important and attractive as the means of gratifying those I love. No other consideration could induce me to spend another day of my life in objects in themselves uninteresting, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... intemperance and ending with submission. His speeches were never good, but at his own dinner he stated so many untruths about the Duke of Wellington that his own partisans bawled out 'No, no,' and it was a complete failure. His whole spirit there was as bad as possible, paltry and commonplace. That man, with all his talents, never can or will do in any situation; he is base, cowardly, and unprincipled, and with all the execrable judgment which, I believe, often flows from the perversion of moral sentiment. Nobody can admire his genius, eloquence, variety and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... to add," he said, "that though you forgot you were my son, and refused to act as my son, when you withheld the paltry sum for which I begged, yet I could not refrain from coming once more to look on my child's face—to look on the face of my departed wife in yours—for I know that a very brief period must finish my life ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... What a paltry thing, after all, is man, man uncomplemented by woman! Left to himself, he stagnates; linked with a woman, he rises—-or sinks. A gentle touch stimulates him, a confiding heart makes of him a new creature. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... "Moreover," says he, "if we could have amassed cups of gold and silver, excellent horses, or no mean sums of money, we could in those days have laid up abundance of wealth for ourselves. But we regarded books not pounds, and valued codices more than florens, and preferred paltry pamphlets to pampered palfreys.[198] In addition to this we were charged with frequent embassies of the said prince of everlasting memory, and owing to the multiplicity of state affairs, we were sent first to the Roman chair, then to the court ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... released Long-Island from many of those paltry and vulgar names which fringed its beautiful shores; their Cow Bays, and Cow Necks, and Oyster Ponds, and Mosquito Coves, which spread a spell of vulgarity over the whole island, and kept persons of taste and fancy ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... miles from Fort Gibson on the twenty-first of June and signed by Samuel M. Taylor, acting assistant chief, John Spears of the Executive Council, and Alexander Foreman, president of the convention. To all intents and purposes the Cherokees were asked, in return for some paltry offices chiefly military, to institute a sort of system of military land grants. White people were to be induced to enlist in their behalf and were ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... fellow in Middlemarch than Bowyer," said Ladislaw, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows were always ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... always made my blood run cold, "that never before in my career have I devoted so much thought to any single individual, in the different cases I have handled, as I have to you. As an individual, you are a paltry thing: it is rather your remarkable good fortune that interests me as a philosopher of sorts.... I assure you it will cause me serious concern to be the instrument of severing your really extraordinary strain of good luck. I don't mind telling you, as man to man, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... artfully, He haggles over paltry sums. In this strange field his war must be And by such blows his ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... son of a dear dead friend. Don't let me go away feeling that I can never trust any one again. I won't believe it—I can't believe it—that the blood and breed in your young veins would let you stoop to be a miserable, contemptible thief, and for the sake of a paltry silver watch. Why, my dear boy, you must have known that, as soon as you were old enough to want a watch, you could have had a gold one of the very best. Why, hang it all, sir, for your father's and mother's sake, ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... palace, had been alienated or embezzled; the royal banquet was served in pewter or earthenware; and such was the proud poverty of the times, that the absence of gold and jewels was supplied by the paltry artifices of glass and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... fourth was too deliberate, anxious to have much time. All scented the true value of his situation, all wanted time to consider, and he had no time to consider. Judge Kitchen did agree to lend him thirty thousand dollars—a paltry sum. Joseph Zimmerman would only risk twenty-five thousand dollars. He could see where, all told, he might raise seventy-five thousand dollars by hypothecating double the amount in shares; but this was ridiculously insufficient. He had figured again, to a dollar, and he must have at least two ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... facts are simple, and perhaps, uninteresting; but they serve to exhibit a characteristic of the lower classes of Mexicans. Doubtless, such paltry thieving is the result of a want of animal courage, easily discernible by the close observer of the Mexican race. Of course there are many ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... think a paltry wall can save, A narrow ditch can thwart us,—these, so bold, With but a span betwixt them and the grave! Saw they not Troy, which Neptune reared of old, Sink down in ruin, as the flames uprolled? But ye, my chosen, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... higher dignity; for at this moment I hear a direful and portentous note issuing from the bosom of the great council of the league, and resounding throughout the regions of the east, menacing the fame and fortunes of Peter Stuyvesant; I call, therefore, upon the reader to leave behind him all the paltry brawls of the Connecticut borders, and to press forward with me to the relief of our favorite hero, who, I foresee, will be wofully beset by the implacable Yankees in the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... prided himself that he had come off fairly well with Slavovitch, whose seven hundred and fifteen eggs he had bought at a flat rate of two dollars and a half. On the other hand, he grumbled because the little restaurant across the street had held him up for two dollars and seventy-five cents for a paltry hundred and thirty-four eggs. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... matter of a paltry poisoned dagger at stake and a fortune that may be mythical or may be like that of Croesus, for all I care, we could play the game according to rules," he exclaimed. "But when you begin to tamper with a life like that of Inez de Mendoza—you ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... said the offended Mr. Vickers, regarding him fiercely, "stick to it like leeches. Now, suppose I was a young man keeping company with a gal and her father wanted to borrow a couple o' quid—a paltry couple o' thick'uns—what d'ye ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... that there was nothing real in that religion, but that reality in presence of it was so paltry that it deserved not the time for thought. Expanses of some kind, of which hitherto he had not had a suspicion, surrounded him,—certain immensities, certain clouds. That cemetery began to produce on him the impression of a meeting-place for madmen, but also of a place mysterious and awful, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... beautiful new life, who can deny? We are not what we were, but better, or rather, with boundless means of being better if we will. We have entered a fresh era of time for good and evil; the fact is patent in every sermon we hear, in every book we read, in every invention, even the most paltry, which we see registered. Shall we think hardly of the man who saw the dawn of our own day, and welcomed it cheerfully and hopefully, even though he fancied the mist-spectres to be elements of the true sunrise, and knew not—and who knows?—the purposes of Him whose paths ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... us, with two trumpets and a hautboy, which he desir'd might play us to church, where our musick did the office of an organ, but separate from the singing, which was by the fathers well perform'd. Our musick played 'Hey, boys, up go we!' and all manner of noisy paltry tunes. And after service, our musicians, who were by that time more than half drunk, march'd at the head of the company; next to them an old father and two fryars carrying lamps of incense, then an image dressed with flowers and wax candles, then about forty priests, fryars, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... struggling with debt and difficulty, farming his own lands, and clinging to his magnificent home with a love of place almost as tenacious as that of the younger Foscari, was at last forced to abandon it, retired to a paltry lodging in a paltry town, and died there about twenty years ago, broken-hearted. His successor, bound by no ties of association to the spot, and rightly judging the residence to be much too large for the diminished estate, immediately sold the superb fixtures, and would have entirely ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... their agony of prayer Come thrilling to our hearts in vain? To us whose fathers scorned to bear The paltry menace of a chain; To us, whose boast is loud and long Of holy Liberty and Light; Say, shall these writhing slaves of Wrong Plead vainly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... would treasure that so long as I lived in remembrance of his Excellency, together with the honourable message he had sent me; for I considered that the splendid favours of his Excellency had amply recompensed my pains, whereas that paltry stone insulted them. This speech annoyed the Duke so much that he sent for his treasurer, and scolded him more sharply than he had ever done before. At the same time he gave me orders, under pain of his displeasure, not to leave Ferrara ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... of Browning's knaves cannot be better expressed than by Chesterton. 'They are real somewhere. We are talking to a garrulous and peevish sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of God uttering ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... an immense roof broken by casement windows with carved triangular pediments. Before the castle lies a vast green sward the trees of which had recently been cut down. On either side of the entrance bridge are two small dwellings where the gardeners live, connected across the road by a paltry iron railing without character, evidently modern. To right and left of the lawn, which is divided in two by a paved road-way, are the stables, cow-sheds, barns, wood-house, bakery, poultry-yard, and the offices, placed in what were doubtless the remains ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... the church are still standing in a more or less perfect state, and all correspond in design, proportion, and execution to the tower. The ruins of the old Hindoo temples about the place, and about every other place in India, are totally different in all three; here they are all exceedingly paltry and insignificant, compared with the church and its tower, and it is evident that it was the intention of the founder to make them appear so to future generations of the faithful, for he has taken care to make his own great work support rather than destroy them, that they might ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... him had been paltry and weak, easily crushed by her own pride; and she, too, had worn a mask in assuming a contempt for him, whilst, as a matter of fact, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Specious petitions were continually addressed to the easy magistrates of Rome, which stated the want of stones or bricks, for some necessary service: the fairest forms of architecture were rudely defaced, for the sake of some paltry, or pretended, repairs; and the degenerate Romans, who converted the spoil to their own emolument, demolished, with sacrilegious hands, the labors of their ancestors. Majorian, who had often sighed over ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... without having a tendency to effect any national object. But the British character rather wounds by its pride, and offends by its haughtiness, and open violence, than injures by the secret indulgence of a malignant, but a paltry and unprofitable revenge: and, certainly, such unworthy motives ought not lightly to be imputed to a great and magnanimous nation, which dares to encounter a world, and risk its existence, for the preservation of its station in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... her, and misrepresented her? Was Annie, indeed, all bad? Hester had to own to herself that to-night Annie was better than she—was greater than she. Could she now have undone the past, she would not have acted as she had done; she would not for the sake of a little paltry revenge have defiled her conscience with a lie, have told her governess that she could throw no light on the circumstance of the stolen essay. This was the first lie Hester had ever told; she was naturally both straightforward and honorable, but her sin of sins, that which made her ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... one, two, three persons, yourself being he who will, if possible, suffer most," resumed the marquis, impressively—"it is, I say, for you to decide between exposure and the inquisition on one hand, and the surrender of those paltry diamonds on ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Satan was coming for her niece, if not actually come; he was close at hand, if not arrived. The crushing, if done at all, must be done instantly, so that Satan should find the spirit so broken and torn to paltry fragments as not to be worth his acceptance. She stretched forth her hand and took hold of her niece. "Linda," she said, "do you ever think of the bourne to which the wicked ones go;—they who are wicked ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... strangely lost its head in 1808. I never considered this a good story, but now that I see it in its new type on the fair page of the present volume, I am amazed to think I ever marked it for inclusion at all. It seems to me poverty-stricken in fancy and very paltry in tone, the idea of making beautiful flowers as mean-spirited as trumpery men and women can be being wholly undesirable. It is too late to take it out, especially as Mr. Bedford has drawn a very charming picture for it, but I hope it will remain only as an object-lesson. ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... measures; that the oaths of allegiance sworn to Joseph and the constitution had been sworn under compulsion by a minority, who, pious as the people were, did not, for that reason, consider even themselves as bound, much less the nation as a whole—all this was serious enough, but it was paltry when compared with what had taken place in German lands while he had ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... my female friends against this influence. Marry for riches alone, and you will be a neglected, unhappy wife, as sure as gold is not kindness. How many of your sex have sold their honor for paltry lucre. Our cities contain awful testimonies to this fact. Beware of that path, which leads in this fearful direction. Marry only a good man. Heed the advice of Themistocles to that Athenian, who consulted him in relation ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... a Huguenot refugee, arrived with a demand for surrender. The heart of the valiant Champlain was wrung. He had inspected his empty magazine and the rickety fort which the improvidence of the Company had allowed to fall into ruin. But even the weakness of his starved and paltry garrison did not affect his fortitude. Kirke's envoy was courteously dismissed, with the bold assurance that Quebec would defend itself to the last man. Champlain still clung to the hope that supplies would arrive ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... money replaced and the despatch-box locked, and to overtake them, even by running, ere they should be lost in that maze of corridors, my uncle's house. As it was, I went with a heart divided; and the thought of my treasure thus left unprotected, save by a paltry lid and lock that any one might break or pick open, put me in a perspiration whenever I had the time to remember it. The lawyer brought us to a room, begged us to be seated while he should hold a consultation with the doctor, and, slipping out of another ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... resources of her mind upon him and open to him a fine career; he should owe his future power and position to her influence; in that way she could pay her debt. He would indeed be a fool to refuse such a future; and for what? a few paltry thousands, more or less. He would be infamous if he withdrew for ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... work in plenty to be had, but, like most of the new- comers, he was not satisfied to take fixed wages. They seemed paltry indeed compared with the drunken figures that were on every lip. In the presence of the uncertain he could not content himself with a sure thing. Nevertheless, he was soon forced to the necessity of resorting to it, for through ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... developed as the painful struggle reached its termination. It seems as if, in spite of Reshid Pasha and Ibrahim and their fierce armies, it would have been easy for Missolonghi and its brave defenders to have been saved. But rival ambitions and paltry jealousies divided the leaders of the Revolution. They were quarrelling while the power that each one coveted for himself was, step by step, being wrested from them all; and when they tried to do well their want of discipline often rendered their efforts ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... might bring them some profit; but usually they furnish the commodities which they bring from Manila, at the very highest prices, receiving in exchange those of the provinces at the lowest and most paltry rates." ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... standing well with his mistress, let him never appear in her presence with such a gentleman as Mr. Tims. She will despise him to a certainty; nor, though his soul be as large as Atlas or Teneriffe, will it compensate for the paltry dimensions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... his own terms and undertook to instruct in the French and Latin languages, so as to qualify them for the colleges of Westminster and Eton. While this plan was in its infancy, he was so fortunate as to meet with Jennings, who, for the paltry consideration of thirty pounds a year, which his necessities compelled him to accept, took the whole trouble of educating the children upon himself, contrived an excellent system for that purpose, and, by his assiduity and knowledge, executed all the particulars to the entire ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... matter of course, in order that they may learn not to flinch from pain, or lose their tempers, or turn cowards, when they have to fight. "And so do I," says St. Paul; "they, poor men, submit to painful and disagreeable things to make them brave in their paltry battles. I submit to painful and disagreeable things, to make me brave in the great battle which I have to fight against sin, and ignorance, and heathendom." "Therefore," he says, in another place, "I take pleasure in afflictions, in persecutions, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... him follow his purpose alone," cried Barnstable. "There is no human power, always saving my superior officer, that shall keep me from throwing abroad these tiny signals, and having a private talk with my dark-eyed Kate. But for a paltry pilot! he may luff and bear away as he pleases, while I shall steer as true as a magnet for that old ruin, where I can bring my eyes to bear on that romantic wing and three smoky vanes. Not that I'll forget my duty? no, I'll help you ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... your tavern with scorpion-words. For my girl, who has fled from my embrace (she whom I loved as ne'er a maid shall be beloved—for whom I fought fierce fights) has seated herself here. All ye, both honest men and rich, and also, (O cursed shame) all ye paltry back-slum fornicators, are making hot love to her; and thou above all, one of the hairy-visaged sons of coney-caverned Celtiberia, Egnatius, whose quality is stamped by dense-grown beard, and ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Nebuchadnezzar; for he hath set up an idol in the market-place of Altdorf, to which he requireth blind homage to be paid by fools and cowards. Now, the King of Babylon's idol, the prophet tells us, was of solid gold, a metal which the world is, I grieve to say, too prone to worship; but Gessler's paltry Baal is but the empty ducal bonnet of Austria, which he hath exalted on a pole; and he commands the men of Uri to bow down before it, under penalty of death. Wouldst thou wish thy husband to degrade the name of a Swiss, by stooping to such ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... France is turned into a gaming-hell,' said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's own brother: 'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel.' These vices or follies were less mischievous than her intervention in affairs of state. Here her levity was as marked as in the paltry affairs of the boudoir and the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both dissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's influence that procured the dismissal of the two virtuous ministers by ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... have torn that hulking fellow where he stood, yet he meant no harm; nay, he had a strong persuasion that he was doing something meritorious (how he hit it I can't tell) in not committing himself and binding you when he had no more than a clerk's paltry income. But I have heard that trees, stripped of leaves in flowery May, revenge themselves by bursting out green, if the frosts will let them, in foggy November. So the prudence of twenty-five may ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... disgraceful scene of his cross-examination at Westminster, and the condemnation by his venal judges at the order of a paltry king. It became known, or shrewdly guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. a hectoring alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or sent alive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was a cowardly and ignominious submission of the English Government to the insolence ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the grounds which were alleged to excuse the submission were the virtues of the reigning king: and therefore, as they sagaciously argued, the submission must only remain in force for his life. They introduced a limitation to that effect. Some further paltry dabbling was also attempted with the phraseology: and at length, impatient with such dishonest trifling, and weary of a discussion in which they had resolved to allow but one conclusion, the king and the legislature thought it well to interfere ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... allowed to drift to inordinate movements be wrecked by vice." And Augustine says (in the same sermon) that "fasting loves not many words, deems wealth superfluous, scorns pride, commends humility, helps man to perceive what is frail and paltry." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Prayers and Tears, that might have mov'd a Scythian or wild Arab, or indeed any thing but him, to pay her her Portion. To which, however, he seemingly consented, and promis'd to take her to Town with him, and there give her all the Satisfaction she cou'd expect: And having dipp'd some paltry Acres of Land, deeper than ever Heaven dipp'd 'em in Rain, he was as good as his Word, and brought her to Town with him, where he told her he would place her with an ancient Lady, with whom he had contracted a Friendship at his first coming ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... would you like to have one of your own boys or young brothers treated as you threaten to treat him? There's life and work and happiness in him, and you'd just knock it all to pieces for the sake of a paltry revenge. What good can killing the boy do to any of you? Why, I'll tell you— murder will out, and you'll all be ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... you could give me a raw potato and make me imagine it was a peach; you could force me to admire your foolish caprices as though they were strokes of genius. You could have influenced me to crime, yes, even to mean, paltry deeds. Because you lacked intelligence, instead of carrying out my ideas you acted on your own judgment. But when at last I awoke, I realized that my honor had been corrupted and I wanted to blot out the ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... ventures to mutilate the Ministerial measure in such a manner as will in all probability bring down all the wrath of the Commons on him and his Conservative majority. I am not at all sure but that the Government is content to exhibit its paltry numbers in the House of Lords, in order that the world may see how essentially it is a Tory body, that it hardly fulfils the conditions of a great independent legislative assembly, but presents the appearance ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... married her, had only engaged himself so to do, when they made him Dean of Barchester—all which may be read in the diocesan and county chronicles. And now that he was wealthy, the new dean did contrive to pay the debts of his poor friend, some lawyer of Camelford assisting him. It was but a paltry schedule after all, amounting in the total to something not much above a hundred pounds. And then, in the course of eighteen months, this poor piece of preferment fell in the dean's way, this incumbency of Hogglestock with its stipend reaching one hundred and thirty pounds a year. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... their knees, to knock their heads nine times against the ground, which Mr. Van Braam, in his journal, very coolly calls, performing the salute of honour, "faire le salut d'honneur." And they were finally dismissed, with a few paltry pieces of silk, without having once been allowed to open their lips on any kind of business; and without being permitted to see either their friend Grammont, or any other European missionary, except one, who had special leave to make them a visit of half an hour, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... afterwards, did indeed pass an act reversing the convictions and attainders in all but six of the cases; and ordering the distribution of the paltry sum of L578 among the heirs of twenty-four persons, as a kind of compensation to the families of those who had suffered; but this was ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... to me! The wife gossiped as usual, with a tap now and then to the child, a bone to the dogs, and a smile to the philosopher. Not once did Heurtebise turn towards us, and yet he was not asleep. I hardly know whether he thought. Dear, valiant fellow! In those paltry and ceaseless struggles, the mainspring of his strong nature had broken, and he was already beginning to die. The silent death agony, which however was rather an abandonment of life, lasted several months; and then Madame Heurtebise found herself ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... famous island of Britain a certain paltry scribbler, very voluminous, whose character the reader cannot wholly be a stranger to. He deals in a pernicious kind of writings called "Second Parts", and usually passes under the name of "The Author of the First". I easily foresee that as soon ...
— English Satires • Various
... man, you speak as if this paltry sum were all the wealth of the Indies. Why, from Ormonde or Buckingham, with their twenty thousand, down to ranting Dicky Talbot, there was not one of my set who could not have bought me out. Yet I must have my coach and four, my town house, my liveried servants, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of that inspiration, was to be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals, when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country, broke out into frantic masquerade, of which that silly carnival of Rome is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic. 'When,' as the learned O. Muller says, 'the desire of escaping from self into something new and strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand ways; not merely in revelry and solemn, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... couple of hundred thousand pounds or so. You see, when I was worth fifty thousand I thought I was somebody, but I soon learned how paltry an amount that is. No, sir; two hundred thousand pounds are necessary to make a rich man, and not a penny less, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... only ventured to suggest that it would be foolish not to give Lord Mount Rorke the opportunity of changing his mind. She spoke of his immense fortune, and exaggerated it until she made even Berkins seem a paltry creature ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... I am not married. I have shown you why I was not long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the sort. But I remember considering it unjust to devote one paltry day to the Moon's majesty. For night is sacred to the Moon, each night that ever was the friend of lovers,—night, the renewer and begetter of ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... unknown, his tenderest feelings torn and wounded by the behaviour of the Armours, and so miserably poor that he had been for some weeks obliged to skulk from the sheriff's officers to avoid the payment of a paltry debt. He returned, his poetical fame established, the whole country ringing with his praise, from a capital in which he was known to have formed the wonder and delight of the polite and the learned; if not rich, yet with more money already than any ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... sick of seeing my own name Tagged to some paltry line, While this old corpus without shame Sits ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... peers of the realm,—no time for pleasure or relaxation,—being devoted entirely to public interests of the greatest magnitude; for on his shoulders rested the government of the kingdom. What was the paltry dispute of a few hundred pounds in a distant colony to the Prime Minister of England! All that Franklin could secure was an interview with the great man's secretaries, and they did little ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... towards the end of 1770, in the Juno, Captain Stott, which was sent to the Falkland Islands, in consequence of the forcible seizure of them by the Spanish squadron. It is remarkable that this paltry dispute, which might be almost forgotten but for the virulent invective of "Junius," and the masterly defence of the Government by Dr. Johnson, should have given to the navy two such officers as Nelson and Pellew; neither of whom might otherwise have found ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... too far beyond the scope of any one human personality for me to regard them indifferently. I wish I could. I have reason to believe myself the bearer of a message to many men. This belief is in itself enough, one would say, to deplete a man of paltry purpose. I wish to be considered only as the messenger, who comes and departs, and is thought of no more. The message remains, and should remain, the only material ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... they care nothing. Here am I who for the last ten hours have had neither meat nor drink. Not that I mind the meat so much, but, 'slife, my throat is dry as one of their sermons, and I would cheerfully give four of my five hours of life for a posset of sack. A paltry lot are they, Kenneth, holding that because a man must die at dawn he need not sup to-night. Heigho! Some liar hath said that he who sleeps dines, and if I sleep perchance I ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... never turned his thoughts to preferment in the Church, which he is invariably telling us he disliked, had not Beaufort given assurance that he would put him in the way of holding some high and lucrative post in England; and then when he received a paltry benefice, instead of expressing thanks like the other dependents on the Prince Prelate, he was silent, from fear of the power possessed by Beaufort, or from retaining even in his contracted fortunes the politeness which he had inherited from his noble forefathers:—"egere alii ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the moonlight. The broad glare of day is so garish and extravagant. Besides, there is a restlessness and a buz no human being, at least no sensible human being, can endure. Everything is on the stir. Every creature, however paltry and insignificant, whether moth, mote, or atom, seems busy. Whereas, one serene soft gaze of the moon appears to allay nature's universal disquiet. The calm and mellow placidity of her look, so heavenly and undisturbed, lulls the soul, and subdues ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... this paltry consideration with a princely gesture. "I don't mind that part," he insisted. "Mr. Graham, if you'll teach me the drug business I'll ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... being still the possessor of twenty-five cents in silver. It was not much, but it seemed a great deal better than being penniless. A week before he would have thought it impossible that such a paltry sum would have made him feel comfortable, but he had passed through ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... time, and think fit, upon better acquaintance, to let me into her case, it may be a happy day for her, if I find it a just one; for, you must know, that when I was at the bar, I never was such a sad fellow as to undertake, for the sake of a paltry fee, to make white black, and black white: For what would that have been, but to endeavour to establish iniquity by quirks, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... circulated, in which the logic of a small sharp pettifogger was employed to prove that writs, issued in the joint names of William and Mary, ceased to be of force as soon as William reigned alone. But this paltry cavil had completely failed. It had not even been mentioned in the Lower House, and had been mentioned in the Upper only to be contemptuously overruled. The whole Magistracy of the City swelled the procession. The banners ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... large family. Why should any one have power lawfully, to "lift" the only cow from half-starved children. The defence for this woman was that through trouble she did not know what she was doing. It was a mean, paltry defence; she did know that she wanted to keep her cow, and the law should be altered to enable her to do so. The law that enables men of means to strip these poor wretches of everything that stands between them and their little children and starvation, is ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... struck, and are bruised and disfigured as a matter of course, in order that they may learn not to flinch from pain, or lose their tempers, or turn cowards, when they have to fight. "And so do I," says St. Paul; "they, poor men, submit to painful and disagreeable things to make them brave in their paltry battles. I submit to painful and disagreeable things, to make me brave in the great battle which I have to fight against sin, and ignorance, and heathendom." "Therefore," he says, in another place, "I take pleasure in afflictions, in persecutions, in necessities, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... that we are all to share alike and have everything in common, instead of one being rich and another poor, and one having hundreds of acres and another not enough to make him a grave, and one a houseful of servants and another not even a paltry foot-boy. I am going to ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... from the icy currents which blew from the north, quite an abundance of flowers, though there was a perfect absence of trees. They were dwarfed and ordinary-looking plants, saxifrages and other alpine growths, and so insignificant, that in another part of the world they would have been looked upon as paltry weeds, but here they were rushed after by both the lads, Watty being down on his knees directly ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... they are right. The positive cast of their minds prevents them from seeing the beautiful in aught but costly material, well-defined forms, and highly-polished workmanship: hence, to them Bagtche Serai must be a mere group of shabby huts adorned with paltry ornaments, and fit only for the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... for Ireland; ay, a Cuchullin you were, Philip, Culann's chain-bound: but she unmanned you. She soaked the woman into you and squeezed the hero out of you. All for Adiante! or a country left to slavery! that's the tale. And what are you now? A paltry captain of hussars on the General's staff! One O'Donnell in a thousand! And what is she?—you needn't frown, Phil; I'm her relative by marriage, and she 's a lady. More than that, she shot a dart or two into my breast ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this Preface without an expression of regret at the dark and terrible fate which overtook the high-minded, patriotic, and distinguished Irishman, Thomas D'Arcy McGee. He was a man who loved his country well; and when the contemptible squabbles and paltry dissensions of the present have passed away, his name will be a hallowed memory, like that of Emmet or Fitzgerald, to inspire men with high, ideals ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... you have had a sample of all our poor talents, save and except that paltry talent of mine which in other company concludes such a performance. I pray you tell me what ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... of which must destroy the other—but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the Constitution frigate, which had performed such gallant deeds in the Mediterranean, as "a bundle of pine boards sailing under a bit of striped bunting," and they declared that "a few broadsides from England's wooden walls" would, "drive the paltry striped bunting from the ocean." They did not heed the injunction, "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... done for the people nothing but an insult to the nobility. His popular sentiments were in some sort but the liberality of his genius. The vast expansiveness of his mighty soul had no resemblance with the paltry impulses of demagogues. In acquiring rights for the people he seemed as though he bestowed them. He was a volunteer of democracy. He recalled by his part, and his bearing, to those democrats behind him, that from the time of the Gracchi to his own, the tribunes who most served the people ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... This dispute, seemingly paltry yet really serious, sudden in its appearance and dependent for its issue upon other considerations than its own merits, may serve to convince us of many latent and yet unforeseen dangers to the peace of the western hemisphere, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... they do purchase human life cheap, and make a rare profit of it, for without these poor fellows how could they hold their possessions in spite of native and foreign enemies? For what a paltry and cheap annuity do these men sell their lives? For what a miserable pittance do they dare all the horrors of a most deadly climate, without a chance, a hope of return to their native land, where they might haply repair their exhausted energies, and take a new lease of life! Good God! if these ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... It is a long edifice with wings, and is only two stories high, though it can be seen afar, owing to its being situated on elevated ground. It has fifteen windows in the upper and twelve in the lower story, with a paltry-looking door something like that of a barn, the ascent to which is by a single step. The interior corresponds with the exterior, offering nothing which can gratify curiosity, if we except the kitchens, which are indeed magnificent, and so large that food enough might be prepared in them ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... The pettiness of human souls, The cheap frivolities of life, The keen pursuit of paltry goals,— How small they seem beneath the dome That ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... of rapine and murder. For this is the line of argument pursued by the representative of Athens in the Melian Debate. The substance of what he says may briefly be stated as follows "You are weak—we are strong; Melos is a paltry island, Athens is queen of the Aegaean, and the existence of an independent city in these waters is an insult to her empire. Let us waste no time in discussions about abstract law and right. For the mighty there is but one law—to get what they can, and to keep it; and the weak have no ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... of this mount, towering above the 'high places' and the hills, and turn without repining to the plains beneath, where puny man has pitched his tent and wars upon his fellow, mocking the sublimity of Nature with his paltry tyranny? I felt as if I lived in other times, and my eye eagerly but vainly sought for some traces of that 'ark' which furnished a refuge and a shelter to the creatures of God's mercy when the 'waters prevailed, and were increased ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... cutting down the flagstaff at the residence of the American consul. European states had purchased immunity for their commerce by paying tribute to these rapacious pirates; and the United States had followed the custom. The Pasha of Tripoli, however, was dissatisfied with the American tribute, a paltry eighty-three thousand dollars, and demanded more. The other Barbary powers threatened to make common cause with him. Anticipating trouble, Jefferson had sent a small squadron to the Mediterranean even before the dramatic act of the Pasha at the American consulate; and hostilities ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... disembowelled bird, which occurs in the indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary French in aught resembled that of the English. "We have not," says the orator, "been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man." Into this perilous but singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr. Stewart could enter safely and at will. One of the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... that all our marriages are made. So exquisite is the adaptation of Bass to Treble, of Tenor to Contralto, that oftentimes the Loved Ones, though twenty thousand leagues away, recognize at once the responsive note of their destined Lover; and, penetrating the paltry obstacles of distance, Love unites the three. The marriage in that instant consummated results in a threefold Male and Female offspring which takes ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... possess a paltry Irish title I cared little. My son was now heir to an English earldom, and I made him assume forthwith the title of Lord Viscount Castle Lyndon, the third of the family titles. My mother went almost mad with joy at saluting her grandson as 'my Lord,' and I felt that all ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to spare. Don't say no. It will raise my own position to say 'I and Rochebriant keep house together.' It must be so. Come here to-morrow. As for not having a career,—bah! I and Duplessis will settle that. You shall be a millionaire in two years. Meanwhile we will join capitals: I my paltry notes, you ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... up of Browning's knaves cannot be better expressed than by Chesterton. 'They are real somewhere. We are talking to a garrulous and peevish sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Uncle Grafton, to cry "God save the King!" again when an English fleet sailed up the bay. Mr. Carvel's hand was large and his heart was large, and he was respected and even loved by the patriots as a man above paltry subterfuge. He was born at Carvel Hall in the year of our Lord 1696, when the house was, I am told, but a small dwelling. It was his father, George Carvel, my great-grandsire, reared the present house in the year 1720, of brick brought from England as ballast for the empty ships; ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it of which I alone know. Those who force themselves upon Caesar, as these citizens do, must learn to have patience. And you—if you would fill the position to which I intend to raise you—must first take care to leave all paltry considerations and doubts behind you. However, all that will come of itself. Softness and mercy melt on the throne like ice before the sun. You will soon learn to scorn this tribe of beggars who come whining round us. If I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of grandeur and renown with which Jeroboam had surrounded the kingdom could not hide its wretched and paltry character from the prophet's eyes; "for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease. And it shall come to pass at that day that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel."* ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... weekly, and opens his house for conversations on the Sundays. I found at his breakfasts, tea and coffee, with hot rolls, and men of celebrity afraid to speak. At the conversations, there was something even worse. A few plausible talking fellows created a buzz in the room, and the merits of some paltry nick-nack of mechanism or science was discussed. The party consisted undoubtedly of the most eminent men of their respective lines in the world; but they were each and all so apprehensive of having their ideas purloined, that they took the most guarded care never to speak ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... his intrigue with Lady Newhaven. He had been attracted, excited, partially, half-willingly enslaved. He had thought at the time that he loved her, and that supposition had confirmed him in his cheap cynicism about woman. This, then, was her paltry little court, where man offered mock homage, and where she played at being queen. Hugh had made the discovery that love was a much overrated passion. He had always supposed so; but when he tired of Lady Newhaven he was sure of it. His experience was, after all, only the same as that which ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... sports, but Godwin was one of those upon whose awaking intellect is forced a perception of the brain-defect so general in women when they are taught few of life's graces and none of its serious concerns,—their paltry prepossessions, their vulgar sequaciousness, their invincible ignorance, their absorption in a petty self. And especially is this phase of thought to be expected in a boy whose heart blindly nourishes the seeds of poetical passion. It ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... powerless &c. 158; frivolous, petty, niggling; piddling, peddling; fribble[obs3], inane, ridiculous, farcical; finical, finikin[obs3]; fiddle-faddle, fingle- fangle[obs3], namby-pamby, wishy-washy, milk and water. poor, paltry, pitiful; contemptible &c. (contempt) 930; sorry, mean, meager, shabby, miserable, wretched, vile, scrubby, scrannel[obs3], weedy, niggardly, scurvy, putid[obs3], beggarly, worthless, twopennyhalfpenny, cheap, trashy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Army of the Potomac the people had looked as the bulwark of the country—the central force that should in good time take Richmond and give the last blow to the rebellion. The miserable bickering and paltry fears which had detached McDowell's division from the grand army, to defend Washington when never threatened, had been comparatively unknown or little understood. Many and disastrous months were yet to elapse, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... species of brutes; or rather, indeed, of our idea of devils; for I don't know that any brutes can be taxed with such malevolence. A sirloin of beef was now placed on the table, for which, though little better than carrion, as much was charged by the master of the little paltry ale-house who dressed it as would have been demanded for all the elegance of the King's Arms, or any other polite tavern or eating-house! for, indeed, the difference between the best house and the worst ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... years? O small And paltry period compared with all The tide of centuries that flowed and ebbed ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... serving as props for the vines. It didn't look amiss, but the heat, Junker, the heat spoiled all pleasure. And the dirt in the taverns, the vermin, and the talk about bravos, who shed the blood of honest Christians in the dark for a little paltry money. If your tongue dries up in your mouth, you'll find nothing but hot wine, not a sip of cool beer. And the dust, gentlemen, the frightful dust. As for the steel in Brescia—it's worthy of all honor. But the feather was stolen from my hat ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his views of conquest. But that this great man—as he is usually reckoned even by adversaries—this hero according to some—this illustrious warrior, and mighty sovereign—should have stooped to be guilty of an act of mean and petty malice worthy of a spiteful old woman,—a piece of paltry cruelty which could not at all conduce to his success in the war, or produce any effect except to degrade his country, and exasperate ours;—this, surely, is quite incredible. "Pizarro," says Elvira in Kotzebue's play, "if not always justly, at ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... atmosphere of patriotic mourning and amidst the discouragement of defeat. National life, such as it became reconstituted after that terrible shock, revealed to them on all sides nothing but abortive hopes, paltry struggles of interest, and a society without any other hierarchy but that of money, and without other principle or ideal than the pursuit of material enjoyment. Literature ... reflected these same tendencies; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... alter my garb, and when one of them stammeringly referred to the Empress's tastes I asked him with plainness if he had got any definite commands on this paltry matter ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... impossible. Pray listen to reason. We are utterly unprepared for a sea voyage; it is simply madness to think of performing a journey of five hundred leagues upon a wretched pile of beams, with a counterpane for a sail, a paltry stick for a mast, and a tempest to contend with. As we are totally incapable of steering our frail craft, we shall become the mere plaything of the storm, and it is acting the part of madmen if we, a second time, run any risk upon this ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... drift to inordinate movements be wrecked by vice." And Augustine says (in the same sermon) that "fasting loves not many words, deems wealth superfluous, scorns pride, commends humility, helps man to perceive what is frail and paltry." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... "El Dorado"—the golden realm!—the home of an everlasting summer! Rob pauses dramatically; he comes to a full stop. How mean is the parlour of the comfortable Wood Street tavern! How paltry its pewter pots and clumsy flagons! How dull ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... blow, and that the hardest, bitterest of all—undermine what had been the very keystone of his life, the one really flawless element in the whole sad story? Her love—the strength of which she boasted—had been sullied by jealousy, dimmed by reservations, a paltry thing beside his; and yet, be that as it might, she knew it was all she had to give. She had given him her whole heart, irrevocably. Let her prove it by ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... us these paltry inducements to betray the secrets of our skill. We are—we hope we may say it without undue pride—an All-Round Angler, and we are not going to be squared by a bait of that kind. (2) We have never pretended ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... what havoc you may make in the happiness of a worthy man; look at his character; see his exemplary conduct; and could you, for the paltry gratification of your vanity, condemn him to the pangs of unrequited love. He has now, I fear, the ills of poverty to struggle against; did you notice his emotion when speaking of his mother and sisters? perhaps they are dependant on him,—you must ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... say true; it is a grave comedy. I follow the opinion of Longinus, who says comedy ought always to be sentimental. Sir, I value a sentiment of six lines in my piece no more than a nabob does a rupee. I hate those dirty, paltry equivocations, which go by the name of puns, and pieces of wit. No, Sir, it ever was my opinion that the stage should be a place of rational entertainment; instead of which, I am very sorry to say, most people go there for their diversion: accordingly, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp in the corner of the room. Lady Tamworth fancied that ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... great lilies in vases, wreaths of stephanotis; and, above all, roses—great garlands of white roses had been woven, and they hung along and across. A blossom fell, a sob sounded in the stillness; and how trivial it all seemed, and how impotent to assuage the bitter burning of human sorrow: how paltry and circumscribed the old grey church, with its little graveyard full of forgotten griefs and aspirations! This hour of beautiful sorrow and roses, how long will it be remembered? The coffin sinks out of ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... he had the desire. They are all men of families, well connected, and many of them have children grown up. Would they do an act that would bring disgrace not only upon themselves but their relatives, wives, children, and forever debar them from society for a paltry few dollars that they could bilk a railroad company out of? The idea is preposterous, and ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... utterly mysterious; they now shone out all too clearly, in glaring colours. He knew that he himself had not touched the money, and no one else had been left with it, except Hamish. Debt! what had the paltry fear of debt and its consequences been compared ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... herself and her mission, along with that mignonne, provoking, pretty, little face of hers, are altogether too incongruous! No, Ethel bores me, it must be confessed; and I have got to marry her—all for a paltry twenty thousand pounds! What a fool I was to propose before I had seen ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... failed to discover any more money. He felt indignant. That a miser should have but a paltry ten dollars in his ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger
... one morning, after Mr Dempster had been a little more disagreeable than usual about some copying not being finished, and then gone out, leaving me thinking what I could do to give him a little more satisfaction, so as to induce him to raise the very paltry salary he paid me. "'Tain't nonsense. Mother says that if I stop I shall some day rise and get to be Lord Mayor, but I don't think Demp would like it, so ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... war 's a damned war, an' them thet enlist in it Should hev a cravat with a dreffle tight twist in it; Thet the war is a war fer the spreadin' o' slavery; Thet our army desarves our best thanks fer their bravery; Thet we 're the original friends o' the nation, All the rest air a paltry an' base fabrication; Thet we highly respect Messrs. A, B, an' C, An' ez deeply despise Messrs. E, F, an' G. In this way they go to the eend o' the chapter, An' then they bust out in a kind of a raptur About their own vartoo, an' folks's stone-blindness To the men thet ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... the bear before I believe in the gnome or kobold!" cried Dale. "Oh, Melchior! now I have so far had so much respect for you as a frank, manly Switzer, don't spoil it by trying to cloak an error with a paltry excuse. You did not properly secure the rope; it came off; and it was an accident. You know it was an accident, so ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... very pretty, and written down looks very well. In reality, however, it is not so; something, I know not what, is lacking, and everything is very paltry. In other lands, in the delightful isles of Oceania, in the old, lifeless quarters of Stamboul, it seemed as if mere words could never express all I felt, and I struggled vainly against my own inability to render, in human language, the penetrating ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... endowed with hospitals, arsenals, quays, and fortifications, La Bourdonnais learned that a new governor was already installed there. His dissensions with Dupleix had borne their fruits; he had been accused of having exacted too paltry a ransom from Madras, and of having accepted enormous presents; the Company had appointed a successor in his place. Driven to desperation, anxious to go and defend himself, La Bourdonnais set out for France with ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... lovely thing, overflowing with the animation that comes from a quick intelligence—a keen appreciation of the intelligence of the great artists who had interpreted a story which thrilled the imagination of generation after generation, and he felt that Parliament was a paltry thing. Parliament—what was Parliament? The wrangle of political parties over a paltry issue. It had no real life in it; it had nothing of the fullness and breadth of the matters that interested ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... gilt dragon for a handle, these smaller jugs, boxes, and dishes, all of the same pattern, all with dark-blue dragons (no cold "Canton" blue, but a rich, splendid ultramarine), large and small, prancing and sprawling on a pale buff ground,—what were these things doing in the paltry bedroom of a common farm-house? Hilda felt a new touch of indignation at "these people" for presuming to have such things ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... the insults of the proud Generals, nor the knowledge of coming pain for herself. Her thought was all of the mission entrusted to her; and so, though thwarted and set aside, she showed no petty anger, dreamed not of any paltry vengeance such as others might have dealt the soldiers, by refusing to march with them on the morrow. Oh, no; hurt she might be—indeed we knew she was—her pain being for the dishonour done her Lord in this disrespect of His messenger; but no thought of reprisal entered ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Then let come what might on this plane of foolish contention, where we strive to cover the Immutable with the petty mask of our mutabilities. We sweat and toil for ends which we know not, and our paltry and blind decisions, our triumphs and failures, determine nothing but the degree of our own ignorance and impotence. The Lord's aims and issues are not ours, and ours do but measure our spiritual stature, and direct our ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of Levasseur, and black grew the brow of Captain Blood as the Frenchman's tale was unfolded. At the end he roundly expressed his disapproval. The Dutch were a friendly people whom it was a folly to alienate, particularly for so paltry a matter as these hides and tobacco, which at most would fetch a bare ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... other examples of course of this principle of self-criticism, as the necessary condition of all criticism. It applies quite as much, for instance, to the other great complaint which my Kensington friend would make after the complaint about paltry ornament; the complaint about what is commonly called backsheesh. Here again there is really something to complain of; though much of the fault is not due to Jerusalem, but rather to London and New York. The worst superstition of Jerusalem, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... themselves delightfully at home. It is wild as a hawk, an untamable creature that slowly pines to death when brought into contact with civilization. Greedy street venders, who ruthlessly tear up the plant by the yard, and others without even the excuse of eking out a paltry income by its sale, have already exterminated it within a wide radius of our Eastern cities. How curious that the majority of people show their appreciation of a flower's beauty only by selfishly, ignorantly picking every ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... travelling over the gold region. Now, whether headquarters are freighted with munitions of war, etc., or whether the cargo consists of blankets, shirts, etc., to clothe the suffering Indians, for the paltry consideration of gold, no one cares or knows; but the principle should be, that, if privates can or will be off making their thousands, those who are better ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... and shallow stream. Although from the extent of the stockade Mogoung has evidently in former periods (during the Shan dynasty) been of extent and consequence, it is at present a mean and paltry town. It derives any little consequence it possesses from being the rendezvous of the Shan-Chinese, who flock ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... great foreboding—the deep voice of an elemental power that knows no mercy. Within twenty feet of them men and women were struggling like dumb and driven animals for bare life—struggling, shouting, quarrelling over a paltry precedence of a minute or so in going to the boats; within a hundred yards of them, out over the dark waters, Agatha's mother, thrown from an overturned boat, was struggling her last struggle, with her silly old face turned indignantly ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... takes upon himself to comment. We listen submissively to much school-book lore as to "Claudius" and the "fourth century" and the "residence of Roman Emperors," but when it rains Bishops and Archbishops and Electors we fly before them. For, after all, what signifies the paltry learning of a dry-as-dust dominie compared with the vivid tales these grand old ruins tell if suffered to speak for themselves? In Treves people need to absorb silently, and then assimilate undisturbed by weary ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... Paternoster Row end of Cheapside, was uncovered July 21st, 1855. The Builder at the time justly lamented that so much good metal was wasted. The statue is without thought—the head is set on the neck awkwardly, the pedestal is senseless, and the two double lamps at the side are mean and paltry. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... what a giant structure will fall to the earth, if, at this crisis, the empress should fail me! Think what a triumph it would be to dash aside my rivals and seize the helm of state to gather, upon the deck of one stout ship, all the paltry principalities that call themselves 'Austria;' to band them into one consolidated nation; and then to steer this noble ship into a haven of greatness and glorious peace! Binder, to this end alone I live. I have outlived all human illusions. I have ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one's daily bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and, with it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered with a ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... suspend. But I would willingly hear what is Atticus's opinion of Caesar."—"Upon my word," replied Atticus, "you are wonderfully consistent with your plan, to say nothing yourself of the living: and indeed, if you was to deal with them, as you already have with the dead, and say something of every paltry fellow that occurs to your memory, you would plague us with Autronii and Steiani without end. But though you might possibly have it in view not to incumber yourself with such a numerous crowd of insignificant wretches; or perhaps, to avoid giving any one room to complain that he ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... fate and the paltry ambitions of men had combined to rob Columbus of his just title to fame, the name of the double continent that he discovered was given to another. To that other the name remains, but the continent itself ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... to their own level, they are apt to sink to theirs; and persons with talents that might have served for nobler purposes are suffered to degenerate into diseurs de bons mots and raconteurs de societe, content with the paltry distinction of being considered amusing. How many such have I encountered, satisfied with being pigmies, who might have grown to be giants, but who were consoled by the reflection that in that world in which their sole aim is to shine, pigmies are more tolerated than giants, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... led this brave soldier in gray so utterly to forget himself for the sake of doing a deed of mercy to his enemies. There is more grandeur in five minutes of such self-renunciation than in a whole lifetime of self-interest and self-seeking. There is something Christly in it. How poor, paltry, and mean, alongside the records of such deeds, appear men's selfish strivings, ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... chieftains seldom chose to abide in person a siege of this nature; and I have not observed a single instance of a distinguished baron made prisoner in his own house[41].—Patten's Expedition, p. 35. The common people resided in paltry huts, about the safety of which they were little anxious, as they contained nothing of value. On the approach of a superior force, they unthatched them, to prevent their being burned, and then abandoned them to the foe.—Stowe's Chronicle, p. 665. Their only ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... should be tried by a jury of his peers. But the way things have worked out, the man of average intelligence is apt to have to face a dozen jurors who are chosen partly for their lack of intelligence, and partly because their earning ability is so low that they are willing to serve for the paltry wage of a ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... enough plausibility in the theory to make it mischievous. The allegorical interpretation of the Book of Canticles was in truth the source of, or at least the model for, a vast amount of unwholesome and repulsive pietism. Not a word need be said for such a paltry narrative of endearments and sickly compliments as the "Revelations of the Nun Gertrude," in the thirteenth century. Nor are we concerned to deny that the artificially induced ecstasy, which is desired on account of the intense pleasure which is said ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... have loved him, and asked no return. If I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his caprices for a word of love a year. I should have been. Who knows it better than I? You were exacting, proud, punctilious, selfish. My love would have been devoted—would have trod your paltry whimpering ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... infusion of some polemic element was necessary to make the meat savory and such as their souls loved. Their ambition was not to grow in grace, but in social influence and regard—to glorify their dissent, not the communion of saints. Upon the chief corner-stone they would build their stubble of paltry religionism; they would set up their ragged tent in the midst of the eternal temple, careless how it blocked up window ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... while ago," and the lean brown face puckered into a smile. "Come! In what way can I oblige'ee, friend? I can grant you any wish you like. Say the word—and it's done! Just think what you could do if you had heaps of money, now—piles of suvrins in that owld chest in your bedroom, instead o' they paltry two-an'-twenty suvrins which you now got heeded ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... this hideous hell on earth, Making a by-word of your native land, Stripped of your wealth, how paltry is your worth! See how men shrink ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... It is unnecessary to add that no gentleman will use profane language in the presence of a lady. For profanity there is no excuse. It is a low and paltry habit, acquired from association with low and paltry spirits, who possess no sense of honor, no regard for decency and no reverence or respect for beings of a higher moral or religious nature than themselves. ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... herself. He might be a cad, but he was real; his honest love possessed him body and soul. It was a matter of expediency to her; a thing to debate with herself, to dally over, with paltry pros and cons. ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... note the advantageous effect that is produced upon the sailing of a ship when it becomes possible to check the sheets and braces even a few paltry inches; it was distinctly noticeable in the case of the schooner; her movements were perceptibly freer and easier, she no longer drove her keen cut-water into the heart of the seas, receiving their blows upon the rounding of her weather bow with a force sufficient ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... life of a President of these United States before his election, been made an ambassador, or counsel, or something? Didn't Pierce send Hawthorne to Liverpool, not because of his transcendant genius, but for the reason that he had written a paltry life ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... a doubtful one, and sent me to fight Hellesfield, which it was never intended that I should win. Then Miller dug his own grave. He opposed me there and I lost the seat. Horlock was politely regretful, scarcely saw what could be done for me at the moment, was disposed to join in a paltry little domestic plot to send me to the Lords. This was at the time I came down to Martinhoe, the time, except for those brief moments in Paris, when ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... national hatred of the Austrians, I turned from the sight, resolved not to be pleased. The arena of the amphitheatre is smaller, and less oval in form than I had expected: and in the centre, there is a little paltry gaudy wooden theatre for puppets and tumblers,—forming a grotesque contrast to the massive and majestic architecture around it: but even tumblers and puppets, as Rospo observed, are better than wild beasts and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... Company be swayed by so paltry a consideration in subjecting us to so grievous an inconvenience? Surely not; a body of men so respectable could neither have authorized nor sanctioned such sordid parsimony. The generous proposition originated with Mr. Simpson alone, and to him ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... of the great truth about it—and that therefore Mr. Stephens's declaration amounts substantially to saying that slavery was to be the corner stone of his new Government; and so your assertion, that 'he has made no such declaration,' is a paltry verbal quibble, unworthy of a sensible ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... clear, piercing gaze of the eagle, energy like that with which the strong wing of the royal bird cleaves the air, marked the noble Asmonean; for the soul's gaze was upward toward its Sun, and the soul's pinion soared high above the petty interests, the paltry ambition of earth. As there was dignity in the single-mindedness of the character of Judas, so was there power in the very simplicity of his words. I will mar that simplicity by no interpolations of my own, but transfer unaltered to my pages ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... later, the Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced a Bill, empowering the Government to lend the paltry sum of L620,000 to Irish railways, which Sir Robert also opposed, saying that "the measure of Lord George Bentinck was free from some of the objections which forcibly applied to the present measure." ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... persons address an audience from the stage, it is usual, either in words or gesture, to say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, your servant.' If I were base enough, mean enough, paltry enough, and brute beast enough to follow that fashion, I should tell two lies in a breath. In the first place, you are not ladies and gentlemen, but, I hope, something better—that is to say, honest men and women; and, in the next place, if you were ever so ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... range and variety of his reading. Examine the Christ Church Canterbury catalogue in Henry Eastry's time, and note what a remarkable variety of subjects is comprised in what we nowadays consider rather a paltry number of books. There is another point worth bearing in mind. Speaking of Bishop Shirwood's books, a writer in the English Historical Review says: "Many of the books bear his mark, Nota, scattered over the margins, or a hand with a long pointing ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... forgotten. Pray pardon me," he said, "but the attack was so violent, the blow so savage, the weapon must have been so keen, that it is almost impossible to connect it with a mere attempt to commit a paltry robbery. I thought, and the police thought, that it was a case ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork. I wouldn't read another of those books ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the province, because, as the subsidy was on the basis of paying to the provinces annually eighty cents per head of population, the people were really being sold by the government like sheep for this paltry price. The trusted Tilley, easily first in popular affection by reason of his probity and devotion to public duty, was discredited. His opponent in the city of St John, A. R. Wetmore, illustrated the dire effects of Confederation in an imaginary dialogue, between ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... advice:—'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... since His design admits of improvement? Can we conceive of Him as doing something in answer to a human petition which He would not do apart from such a petition? Can we think of Him as being prevailed upon by our assiduities and importunities to alter His decrees—is not this whole notion rather paltry and derogatory to His dignity? Everybody is familiar with these questions and arguments; let us see in what proportion truth and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... was not in his nature to battle and grub with his fellows for a few paltry dollars, and the call of his father's blood was strong in his veins. Bob was the kind of fellow who likes to make a heap of his winnings, when he has any, and stake it all on the turning of a card; if this metaphor may be employed to designate Bob McGraw's nature without ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... an emotional satisfaction which brings comfort to all, and amongst these any of hysterical nature probably become far happier and better citizens under her wing than they would otherwise have been. No nets will catch the expanding soul which is rising out of its paltry self into ideals nearer ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... darting an impatient glance, "is it nothing to be reduced to this paltry situation—to be caged in a miserable cottage—to be obliged to toil almost in the menial concerns of her ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Because if a man will take from a woman something so precious as her love, surely he may share with her anything so paltry as her money. (Eric turns ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... upon the very face of it, a paltry scheme of present income. And, seeing his entered classes of boys and girls must soon have done with him, he has doubtless acted wisely, and quite in accordance with his own interest, to have made all ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in cases of violations, and the prosecutions were to be conducted {187} by the Department of Justice. To enable these officials to execute the law, Congress has appropriated $50,000 annually—which is just about one tenth the minimum amount needed for the purpose. This paltry sum has been expended as judiciously as possible with marked results for good. Trouble, however, soon developed in the courts. One autumn day Harvey C. Schauver went a-hunting on Big Lake, Arkansas, and finding no Ducks handy he shot a Coot, which was against ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... and not its internal subdivisions. One great object of the war, we had supposed, was to abolish all fallacies of sectional distinction in a patriotism that could embrace something wider than a township, a county, or even a State. But Mr. Johnson has chosen to revive the paltry party-cries from before that deluge which we hoped had washed everything clean, and to talk of treason at both ends of the Union, as if there were no difference between men who attempted the life of their ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... are full of much better things) his pockets. Suppose the person to whom he applied for the meltings had withstood every plea of wife and fourteen children, no business, and good character, and refused him this paltry little office because he might hereafter attempt to get hold of the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster for life? would not Mr. Perceval have contended eagerly against the injustice of refusing moderate requests, because immoderate ones may hereafter be ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... but an under-plot of the Prophet, whose object was indeed far beyond that of becoming the paltry instrument of a rusty intrigue. It was a custom with Dick o' the Grange, for a few years previous to the date of our story, to sleep during the assizes, in the head inn of the town, attended by Jemmy Branigan. This was rendered in some degree necessary, by the condition of his bad leg, and his ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... me up with conceit and I thought if these words be true, why should I bury my talents in a little magazine in exchange for a paltry twenty-five dollars per thousand words? I would write a play and do something worth while. Just as I had the skeleton of the play well formed and a good start made on it, I came into the possession of a few thousand dollars by the death of an uncle in California. ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... the disposition of the proceeds. "Of course, I don't know in whose hands it lay, Lady Isabel," she said, raising her tea cup to her lips, and in order to do so curtaining it behind her ample veil, "but the Roman Catholics seemed to consider that it was all to go to them, and the paltry sum I have mentioned was all they gave Mr. Cotton and me for our charities!" Her black eyes snapped nenacingly at Lady Isabel over the rim of ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... money," said the offended Mr. Vickers, regarding him fiercely, "stick to it like leeches. Now, suppose I was a young man keeping company with a gal and her father wanted to borrow a couple o' quid—a paltry couple o' thick'uns—what ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... the coral islands and the orange-groves. There you will see all the beauty of the world, and will laugh at the thought of having been content in this dull meadow, with its stupid daisies and buttercups, and its paltry little brook. Also you will find many cousins there, leaves such as you never dreamed of, wonderful in size and shape and color. Say, then, little playmates, will you come with me, and see all these ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... valuable possession, for another jewel of the same kind, but so worn and defaced as to be utterly worthless. In one shop there were a great many crowns of laurel and myrtle, which soldiers, authors, statesmen, and various other people pressed eagerly to buy; some purchased these paltry wreaths with their lives, others by a toilsome servitude of years, and many sacrificed whatever was most valuable, yet finally slunk away without the crown. There was a sort of stock or scrip, called Conscience, which seemed to be in great demand, and would purchase almost anything. Indeed, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sent by Leonas, and admitting none of his appointments with the exception of that of Nebridius, he now celebrated the Quinquennalia[114] as emperor, and wore a splendid diadem inlaid with precious stones, though when first entering on that power he had worn but a paltry-looking crown like that of a ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... And, further, no sooner had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first fatuous temptation. He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple. And as for common prudence—had he not risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or three days? Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... it ought to have killed me; but it took a great deal more than a paltry bottle of physic to kill a man in ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indeed sad to see professors, for the sake of paltry pelf, or to escape from persecution, denying the Lord Jesus. It subjects religion to scorn and contempt, and doubles the sorrows and sufferings of real Christians. Bunyan expresses himself here in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... now of promise fickle, Niggard ooze, and paltry trickle, Freshet sprinkling scanty dole, Where the roaring ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... of after recollection, the whole thing seems absurd, even paltry. But as I heard it then, declaimed with hot, earnest fluency by an enthusiast who had spent long, clever years over his case, it appeared to prove itself up to the hilt. Of course his arguments must have been warped, and his premises ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... two months, he had carried the double load, and beaten his schedule; in early May, he was falling behind at the rate of fifty dollars a week. With twelve weeks ahead, he faced a deficit of a paltry six hundred dollars—and the Mix amendment was peeping over ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... state some repose and watched for a suitable opportunity to regain the country; instead of which, although he had lost so great an empire by sea and land, he yet insisted on continuing his frantic and fruitless efforts to reconquer the paltry territory of Messenia. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... best intentions, are apt to go too far in punishing, and forget to pay due attention to the peculiarities of each child. His mother, he said, once whipped him till the blood came, for having taken a paltry little nut. He adds, that, in punishing children, the apple should be placed beside the rod, and they should not be chastised for an offence about nuts or cherries as if they had broken open a money-box. His parents, he acknowledged, had meant it for the very best, but they had kept him, nevertheless, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... mist, was the deadly opening to the Dardanelles. Presumably, one of those hill-tops, just visible, was old Achi Baba, which had defeated the invaders of Helles; and another, Sari Bair, beneath which lay the invaders of Suvla, wondering if they, too, had been beaten by a paltry hill. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... mention a thousand cases of the like kind—it is said that Jesus, the head of this religion, on a certain occasion walked upon the sea; when, upon sifting the narrative, it is found that it was but upon a paltry lake, the lake of Galilee, upon which he performed that great feat!—a thing to which the magic of which he is accused—and doubtless with justice—was plainly equal; while to walk upon the sea might well have been beyond that science. How much of what we have heard is to be distrusted also, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
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