"Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... One year later, Hengest and AEsc fought once more with the Welsh at Crayford, "and offslew 4,000 men; and the Britons then forsook Kent-land, and fled with mickle awe to London-bury." In this account we may see a dim recollection of the settlement of the two petty Jutish kingdoms in Kent, with their respective capitals at Canterbury and Rochester, whose separate dioceses still point back to the two original principalities. It may be worth while to note, too, that the name AEsc means the ash-tree; and that this tree ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... an indiscretion, as he had the power in his hands to do you an injury. Most men have got some little bit of petty tyranny in their hearts. I have had none." To this Harry could only bow. "I let my two boys do as they pleased, only wishing that they should lead happy lives. I never made them listen to sermons, or even to lectures. Probably I was wrong. Had I tyrannized over them, they would ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... observed Noble, who in return observed her not at all, being but semi-conscious. Looked upon thoughtfully, it is a coincidence that we breathe; certainly it is a mighty coincidence that we speak to one another and comprehend; for these are true marvels. But what petty interlacings of human action so pique our sense of the theatrical that we call them coincidences and are astonished! That Julia should arrive during Noble's long process of buying a ticket to go to her was stranger than that she stopped to look at him, though ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Loombo are the highest of these, and it is clearly the interest of the supreme pontiffs of those ecclesiastical capitals to encourage such, and to intimate to the Sikkim authorities, the claims those who perform them have for preferment. Dispensations for petty offences are granted to Lamas of low degree and monks, by those of higher station, but crimes against the church are invariably referred to Tibet, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... in the generation of the quantities." This would seem to be sufficient to set at rest any conceivable controversy, establishing an equal claim to originality, conceding priority of discovery to Newton. Thus far all had been open and honorable. The petty complaint, that, while Leibnitz freely imparted his discoveries to Newton, the latter churlishly concealed his own, would deserve to be considered, if it were obligatory upon every man of genius to unfold immediately to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... was raised upon one of the breast-works thrown up by them for defence, of which several are to be met with in walking a few miles into the country, and some of them very substantial. Their campaigns in this petty warfare were carried on very deliberately. They made a regular practice of commencing a truce at sunset, when they remained in mutual security, and sometimes agreed that hostilities should take place only between certain hours of the day. The English resident, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... base condition, a high degree of sense. Then, recognising that he could not compass his end without causing a bruit, and not being minded to brave so great a dishonour in order to be avenged upon so petty an offender, he was content by a single word of admonition to shew him that his offence had not escaped notice. Wherefore turning to them all, he said:—"He that did it, let him do it no more, and get you hence in God's peace." Another would have put them to the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... hogsheads of liquor. He captures an entire fleet of warships. A rival race of pygmies endeavors to secure his services so as to obtain the balance of power. The quarrels between these little people seem ridiculous, and so petty as to ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes and intrigues through these Memoirs! By a few strokes of his pen, in words that bite like acid, he etches for us the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang, their gluttony and drunkenness, their ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... what he was my old skipper," observed Jack. "And you fine young fellows couldn't do better than join her," exclaimed a petty officer, who was standing near, clapping Jack ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... feared and abhorred, and now, in the wane of her beauty, she was easily content with such crumbs of money profit as could be picked up by an easy code of a plastic surface morality which covered only her petty intrigues. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... they. Indeed, so much did Fritz impress Eric with the value of carefully considering every petty detail of their outfit, so that they might not find something omitted at the last moment which would be of use, that there was danger of their forgetting more important articles— the "little things," apparently, absorbing all ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... system full at once of pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech on the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He entered into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. He did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had grown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... pipes and the curved hull, or glued to their special gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether—but one will never forget the eyes or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in particular. On deck his was no more than a grave, rather striking countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as I saw him in profile handling a vital control, he looked like the Doge of Venice, the Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order, an old-time Pope—anything that signifies trained and stored intellectual power utterly ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... was cool and decided. He possessed in an eminent degree the egotism that makes possible great crimes and great criminals, and his degenerate brain dealt with this colossal horror as simply as if it had been a petty theft. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... attempts to spur the jaded adrenals with artificial excitements. Consequent melancholia and depression, the "blues," are inevitable. A survey of drug addicts would probably show a definite percentage of this type. The same applies to certain petty criminals and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... wid dem and dey put me behind de door. Dey tole me to set der till dey cum out. And when I see dem cumin' out to follow behind and get into de carrage. I dursent say nothin'. I wuz like a petty dog. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... of missionary lectures has helped to give the men a new world view of Christianity. It has lifted the simple villager, and the man who has never known anything save the narrow ruts of his own denomination, above the petty interests and divisions of his former life to face world problems and the wide extension of the Kingdom of God. Four lecturers have followed each other to present a great world view to the men in these thirty huts: Butcher of New Guinea showed the effect of the impact of the Gospel upon primitive ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... A petty court-martial was called to adjust a question of army discipline. The court was composed of Z. Taylor, Colonel Commanding, Major Thomas F. Smith, a fiery-tempered gay officer of the old army, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, and the new Second Lieutenant ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... flocks of sheep, and lived in opulence compared with many of the other tribes of North America. After the acquisition of this territory by the United States they became disaffected by reason of encroaching civilization, and the petty wars between United States troops and the Navajos were in the main disastrous to our forces, due in part to the courage, skill, and superior numbers of the Navajos and in part to the character of the country, which is easily defended, as the ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... Ages; connection real indeed, but slight, of small importance. Neither from the magician of old, nor the seeress of Celts and Germans, comes forth the true Witch. The harmless "Sabasies" (from Bacchus Sabasius), and the petty rural "Sabbath" of the Middle Ages, have nothing to do with the Black Mass of the fourteenth century, with the grand defiance then solemnly given to Jesus. This fearful conception never grew out of a long chain of tradition. It leapt forth from the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... after the fashion of modern days, and Mr. Madison was given to understand that Mr. Gallatin would not be confirmed if nominated as secretary of state. Mr. Madison yielded to this dictation, and from that day forward was, as he deserved to be, perplexed and harassed by a petty oligarchy. Mr. John Quincy Adams, in a note on this affair, says that, "had Mr. Gallatin been appointed secretary of state, it is highly probable war with Great Britain would not have taken place." But it is improbable that any step in foreign intercourse ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... down at sea, when heaven was all tranquillity,' there come also dark and nights of wild tempest when we have to lay to and ride out the gale with a tremendous strain on the cable. Our sorrows, our disappointments, our petty annoyances, and the great irrevocable griefs that sooner or later darken the very earth, are all to be classified under this same purpose, 'that the trial of your faith ... might be found unto praise and honour and glory.' And so, I beseech you, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... "coprolite" digging[208] resulted in the systematic turning over of a considerable area, their number is astounding, proving the existence of a teeming population. Many thousands of coins were turned up, scarcely ever in hordes, but scattered singly all over the land, testifying to the amount of petty traffic which must have gone on generation after generation. For these coins are very rarely of gold or silver, and amongst them are found the issues of every Roman Emperor from Augustus to Valentinian III. And, besides the coins, the soil was found to teem ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... and see. I ... I ... want to do some Empire work or something. I can't explain. But we've just got into such a maze of petty happenings and petty pleasures, and since the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... many centuries it has been famous for its monasteries, some of which are built of timbers taken from imperial palaces. Formerly the missionaries from neighbouring seaports found at Putu refuge from the summer heat, but it is now abandoned, since it afforded no shelter from the petty piracy at all times so rife in ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... fine harbor, where ships arrive daily from the different quarters of the world. I frequented also the society of the learned Indians, and took delight to hear them converse; but withal, I took care to make my court regularly to the Maharaja, and conversed with the governors and petty kings, his tributaries, that were about him. They put a thousand questions respecting my country; and I, being willing to inform myself as to their laws and customs, asked them concerning everything which ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... inflection, or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it; and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has published such petty ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... not a great while before the mothers began to come in with their petty savings, also, and after a long talk with Mr. Barrington, one day, a real banking institution was incorporated, with the stock issued in dollar shares. Mr. Barrington, as president, headed the list of ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... are nothing—or little at best— But duty with greatness the least can invest: One note on the flute or the trumpet may seem A poor petty work for ambition's fond dream,— But what if that note be a need-be to blend And quicken the score from beginning to end? To show forth the mind of the Master, who guides With baton unerring Time's mixture of tides, The good with the evil, the blessing and bane, The Amazon rushing far into the main, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for adding one thing more—that it should be pointed out to Mr. Attorney to consider whether the crime of the Daughter, who, as I apprehend, lived with & was maintained by her Father, may not be Petty Treason. ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... trivial and absurd the whole thing is! Even a man whose career has been ruined by malicious persecution will be avoided like a pest if it is known that he dins the account of his wrongs into everyone's ears. How, then, shall the sufferer by the petty injuries of ordinary sport be listened to with patience? Of all bores, the grievancemonger is the fiercest and worst. Lay this great truth by in your memory, and be mindful of it in more important matters than sport when the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... very good thing to establish some direct communication with the King and Thiers, as well as the truth of all the reasons by which he supported this proposal; but the following day he came down with a whole host of petty objections, 'which seemed to prevail in his perplexed and unserviceable mind.' The Duke of Bedford writes to me that he expects this state of things will lead to a fresh combination of parties, and the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... from whom creation came; There is no word whereby to speak His name But petty men have mouthed it ...
— New Thought Pastels • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that she was in the power of a desperate man, who would sacrifice her in a moment if she thwarted him. Through cowardly fear she remained his reluctant but abject slave, pricking him with the pins and needles of petty annoyances, when she would have pierced him to the heart had she dared. This monstrous state of affairs could not last forever, and, had not death terminated the unnatural relation, some terrible catastrophe would no doubt have occurred. Having contracted a western fever, she soon ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... friend, of whom I had heard so much, to turn up together one Sunday evening. So great was my ignorance of the world, so wild my enthusiasm, that I imagined every socialist as a hero, willing to throw away his life at a moment's notice on behalf of the "Cause." I had had no experience of the petty internal strifes, of the jealousies and human frailties which a closer knowledge of all political parties reveals. I remember how ashamed I felt of the quite unostentatious comfort of our home, how anxious I was to dissemble the presence of servants, how necessary ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... and master of the destinies of his adopted country. A dazzling future opened before him. Within a year he had pacified Europe, crushing the armies of Austria by a succession of brilliant victories, and laying prostrate the petty states of the Italian peninsula. Peace with England was also in sight. Six weeks after his victory at Marengo, Bonaparte sent a special courier to Spain to demand—the word is hardly ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... tumult such as to bring to mind 'the day of judgment," the death-shrieks, songs, yells, and "people beside themselves, for the most part not knowing where they are nor what they want."—Each district is also a petty center, while the Palais-Royal is the main center. Propositions, "accusations, and deputations travel to and fro from one to the other, along with the human torrent which is obstructed or rushes ahead with no other guide than its own inclination and the chances ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... are mere petty details; don't bother about the means to an end. You, a little time ago, were trying to control your servants by kindness, but it is necessary to command and compel them, and to do it ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... the petty vices of childhood appears to shock adults so much as lying; and none is more widespread among children—and among adults. As we are speaking of children, however, it is enough to say that all children lie—constantly, persistently, universally. Perhaps you will be less grieved by the lies of ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... less petty than New York; if I should be out of the tug and scramble there. But I mustn't judge New York, viewing it through the Van Dams' eyes. If I did, I should see ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the pre-eminent value of the Jew as a bond of empire, an intermediary between the heterogeneous nations which they brought beneath their sway. Each in turn showed favor to his religion, and accorded him political privileges. The petty tyrants of all ages have persecuted Jews on the plea of securing uniformity among their subjects; but the great conqueror-statesmen who have made history, realizing that progress is brought about by unity in difference, have recognized in Jewish individuality a force making ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... General Gallieni. "The Apaches of Paris have not acquired an undeserved reputation. There is no crime on the calendar they would not commit for a few cents. From petty thievery to murder they have advanced by degrees, until to-day the life of a person who ventures among them is not worth a cent, should they believe he had ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... a matter of a few petty structural details, falling within the finical department of the classifier, we might pass them over without hesitation; but a creature that turns itself upside down in order to walk with its belly ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... exasperated shrug, and began to walk about the room. "She turns to Carter," he burst out again angrily, "a man who could hurt me irreparably by letting it get about that my mother-in-law had to ask him for a petty loan!" ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... went to the Town Hall below Lucetta's house, to attend Petty Sessions, being still a magistrate for the year by virtue of his late position as Mayor. In passing he looked up at her windows, but nothing of her ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the artistic criticism of this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before. It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw morals and religion, language and society, along ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... written a beautiful little tract on this subject—"Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline." God never places us in any position in which we can not grow. We may fancy that He does. We may fear we are so impeded by fretting, petty cares that we are gaining nothing; but when we are not sending any branches upward, we may be sending roots downward. Perhaps in the time of our humiliation, when everything seems a failure, we are making the best kind of progress. God delights to try our ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the hour prefixed, in order to make some promised domestic arrangements for the day, they had taken it for granted that she must have met with me at some distance from home—and that either the extreme beauty of the day had beguiled her of all petty household recollections, or (as a conjecture more in harmony with past experiences) that my impatience and solicitations had persuaded her to lay aside her own plans for the moment at the risk of some little domestic inconvenience. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... torment and petty aggravation that a man could stand for three months, I left and went to work at the White Oak Ranch. The boss there set me to grubbing out oaks, and I can assure you it was a relief after ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... sail-setting with his hands in his pockets, and swore promiscuously at every one, from the mate downwards, in a hearty comprehensive way, which showed a mind that was superior to petty distinctions. Having run over all the oaths that he could think of, he dived below and helped himself from the rum bottle, a process which appeared to aid his memory or his invention, for he reappeared upon deck and evolved a new many-jointed expletive ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Norway, Gascony, and France. At Caerleon he holds a tournament at which all the monarchs of the world are present; there he puts upon his head thirty crowns, and exacts recognition as the sovereign lord of the universe. So incredible is it that a petty king of the sixth century, scarcely remarked by his contemporaries, should have taken in posterity such colossal proportions, that several critics have supposed that the legendary Arthur and the obscure chieftain who bore that name ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... gun twice or thrice a-week; and by that means lives much cheaper than those who have not so good an estate as himself. He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges: In short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying; and has been several times foreman of the petty-jury. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Philippa Chaucer L10 a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his wife's services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... commotions, commenced holding their meetings in Oxford." Among those who removed to Oxford were, "first, Dr Wilkins, then I, and soon after Dr Goddard, whereupon our company divided. Those at London (and we when we had occasion to be there) met as before. Those of us at Oxford, with Dr Ward, Dr Petty, and many others of the most inquisitive persons in Oxford, met weekly for some years at Dr Petty's lodgings, on the like account, to wit, so long as Dr Petty continued in Oxford, and for some while after, because of the conveniences we had there ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... military authority was not wanting, in enforcing these arbitrary distributions of worldly goods; and a petty holder of a commission in the state militia was to be seen giving the sanction of something like legality to acts of the most unlicensed robbery, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in Captain MacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could have induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in Belfast to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... is not to be supposed that all these petty causes of complaint were on one side. Arthur often felt grieved and somewhat irritated by Mary's altered manner or moody silence, showing that he had offended in ways unknown to himself; and there were also times when her ridicule of his somewhat uncultivated taste granted ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... dissolution—dragged almost to the verge of that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of prayers or tears could save him. Nothing could comfort him now; Hattersley's rough attempts at consolation were utterly in vain. The world was nothing to him: life and all its interests, its petty cares and transient pleasures, were a cruel mockery. To talk of the past was to torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... bona fide into our living faith of man, and man's history. Like the landscape of some Alpine country, where the primeval granite Titans, protruding their huge shoulders every where above us and around, make us feel how petty and how weak a thing is man; so ought our imagination to picture the inhabitants of the world before the Flood. Nobility precedes baseness always, and truth is more ancient than error. Antediluvian man—antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as nobler ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... chronic grumblers were Carter Weatherbee and Percy Cuthfert. The whole party complained less of its aches and pains than did either of them. Not once did they volunteer for the thousand and one petty duties of the camp. A bucket of water to be brought, an extra armful of wood to be chopped, the dishes to be washed and wiped, a search to be made through the outfit for some suddenly indispensable article—and these two effete ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... recite their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his most striking characteristics, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... London, where he studied with great zeal, meanwhile supplying his wants by acting as the theatrical critic of the 'Morning Chronicle.' There, seated in an obscure corner of the pit or upper gallery, we may imagine the Chancellor in embryo, jotting down the petty excellences and failings of the players, to pamper the taste of the frivolous on the morrow; while below him, in the decorated boxes and circles, lolled the vain crowd of coroneted simpletons and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... he wanted he took with an iron hand, without ruth and without scruple. But in the unspeakable dissolution in which they were now involved did anything make a difference? The dreadful mill in which they had been ground had crushed from them all petty distinctions of personality, individuality. Humanity—the elements of character common to ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... beside me, saying nothing. I glanced at his face, half shamed of my petulance, and I saw that he was no longer smiling. His lips were closed in that firm straight line which I had already seen once or twice, and which during years of trial became habitual to him. My own petty ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... this immorality, and, although she had learned suddenly to disseminate, although she received the comtesse with outstretched hand and smiling lips, she felt this consciousness of hollowness, this contempt for humanity increasing and enveloping her, and the petty gossip of the district gave her a still greater disgust, a still lower ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... concrete presentment in space of the soul of a people. If that soul be petty and sordid—"stirred like a child by little things"—no great architecture is possible because great architecture can image only greatness. Before any worthy architecture can arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannons of Europe ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wretched as was their own condition, could not refuse a portion of their pittance to one whom they still regarded as their rightful lord. [154] The native gentleman who had been so fortunate as to keep or to regain some of his land too often lived like the petty prince of a savage tribe, and indemnified himself for the humiliations which the dominant race made him suffer by governing his vassals despotically, by keeping a rude haram, and by maddening or stupefying himself daily with strong drink. [155] Politically he was insignificant. No ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be a disembodied spirit, and no longer subject to the petty annoyances that belong to the flesh?" cried he, fretfully. "My knowledge, too, is a moth,—only vexing me by a sense of the limitations of my condition. If I could grasp Nature,—if I could handle the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... This petty tyrant, of infamous memory, was the chief of the Angevin auxiliaries of William, who received as his reward the hand of Lucy, sister of the Earls Edwin and Morcar; and with her also received all the ancient domains of their family in the neighbourhood ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... excelled all the other untaught men I ever knew. Until my acquaintance with him commenced, I had been accustomed to hear the removal of what was widely known in the north of Scotland as "the travelled stone of Petty," attributed to supernatural agency. An enormous boulder had been carried in the night-time by the fairies, it was said, from its resting place on the sea-beach, into the middle of a little bay—a journey of several hundred feet; but old John, though he had not ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... show me what you can do, and I will show you what you are. I have spoken of love of one's work as the best preventive of merely low and vicious tastes. I will go farther and say that it is the best preservative against petty anxieties and the annoyances that arise out of indulged self-love. Men have thought before now that they could take refuge from trouble and vexation by sheltering themselves, as it wore, in a world of their own. The experiment has often been tried and ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... he first made the personal acquaintance of Mr. Halifax. The manor-house family brought several other "county families" to our notice, or us to theirs. These, when John's fortunes grew rapidly—as many another fortune grew, in the beginning of the thirty years' peace, when unknown, petty manufacturers first rose into merchant princes and cotton lords—these gentry made a perceptible distinction, often amusing enough to us, between John Halifax, the tanner of Norton Bury, and Mr. Halifax, the prosperous owner of Enderley Mills. Some of them, too, were clever enough to ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the country one of the world's poorest. Most formal transactions are conducted in hard currency as indigenous banknotes have lost almost all value, and a barter economy now flourishes in all but the largest cities. Most individuals and families hang on grimly through subsistence farming and petty trade. The government has not been able to meet its financial obligations to the International Momentary Fund or put in place the financial measures advocated by the IMF. Although short-term prospects for improvement are dim, improved political ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... scarcely can trace whence I received it—I was agreeably surprised to perceive such an appearance of comfort in this part of Germany. I had formed a conception of the tyranny of the petty potentates that had thrown a gloomy veil over the face of the whole country in my imagination, that cleared away like the darkness of night before the sun as I saw the reality. I should probably have discovered much ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... services of such an able soldier should have been lost to the army and the country, a few weeks later, through the petty jealousies of small men, who wanted a scape-goat to cover up their own shortcomings. For over twenty years this grand American soldier, the soul of honor, who would at any moment sacrifice his life sooner than be guilty of an act inconsistent with his noble profession, has been ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... our true interests by the measure of mankind. Let no man think himself any longer in the first place as a New England man, as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, but all of us Americans,—that was the vision and message of Washington; and that insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, and disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, prosperity, strength, largeness of life, and an ever broadening horizon. Let no man think of himself any longer in the first place as an American, as an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a German, a ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... confirmation of the reasonless dogmatism preceding, it is not made with fairness, because my opinion of the construction is omitted by the quoter. See Institutes of English Gram., p. 162. In an other late grammar,—a shameful work, because it is in great measure a tissue of petty larcenies from my Institutes, with alterations for the worse,—I find the following absurd "Note," or Rule: "An infinitive or participle is often followed by a substantive explanatory of an indefinite person or thing. The substantive is then in the objective ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... far from being an easy task. The general Government may appoint governors, secretaries, and other public functionaries; and judges, marshals, collectors, etc., may accept offices with salaries of 3000 or 4000 dollars per annum; but how they are to obtain their petty officers, at half these sums, remains to be seen. The pay of a member of Congress will be accepted here by those alone who do not know enough to better themselves. Mechanics can now get 10 to 16 dollars ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... then she added, that if I did not know what was good for me, she, my mother, did, and she would take care my interests did not suffer. It was her duty to look after them as my mother, and she would. Oh! that little word "duty"! It seems to me all sorts of petty cruelties are committed in the name of "duty." And after that Dick Stanton never came to the house, but I, more unwilling than ever, was sent for to entertain him. Even now I don't know whether he really cared, or ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... the first burst of friendship the foolish woman had poured out all her silly, sordid secrets to Chloe Carstairs, and then, possibly, repented having done so. They fell out, you see, and I suppose Mrs. Ogden, being a woman of a small and petty character herself, was only too ready to suspect her former friend. She swore, you know, that no one but Chloe could have known some of the details which were mentioned in the letters. I can't tell you how vile the whole thing was—and it was quite ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... for some palpable wrong, some distinctive time or cause. He was himself too simple-hearted to reflect that it is seldom a great fault which destroys liking for a person. A great fault can be forgiven. It is small personal offences constantly repeated; little acts of meanness, and, above all, the petty plans and provisions of a selfish nature. Besides which, the soul has often marvellous intuitions, unmasking men and things; premonitions, warnings, intelligences, that it cannot doubt and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... was a real personality to Halcyone. She could not bear it when in church she heard the meanest acts of revenge and petty wounded vanity attributed to Him. She argued it was because the curate did not know. Having come from a town, he could not be speaking of the same wonderful God she knew in the woods and fields—the God so loving and tender in the springtime to the budding flowers, so gorgeous in ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... uninteresting—mostly commercial agents or small tradesmen representing the old-established petty commerce with Mexico. The new order of things was suggested, somewhat ominously, only by the presence of two young surgeons on their way to increase the effective force of the military ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Austria, Belgium, there was no central authority to which these questions could be referred for decision when the threads of mutual interest became tangled. Instead, secret and competitive statecraft made the tangle worse. The mass of conflicting jurisdictions and of petty jealousies that have grown up among the two score of independent and sovereign states of Europe made ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... religious motives. It got me into a sad mess, because I did not dare to go direct to life. I used to fret because your uncle seemed so indifferent to these things. He was a wise and good man, and lived by a sort of inner beauty of character that made all mean cruel spiteful petty things impossible to him. Then when he died, I had a terrible time to go through. I felt utterly adrift. My old system did not give me the smallest help. I was trying to find an intellectual solution. It was then that I met Miss Gordon, the great evangelist. She ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the petty official renewed his eulogies of His Excellency. He was going to make his headquarters in Don Marcelo's property, and on that account granted him his life. He ought to thank him. . . . Then again his face trembled with wrath. He pointed to some bodies lying ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... it for?" And Patty looked the girl in the eyes, in a real curiosity to know why she should descend to this petty meanness. ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... their crowd at Bellevue were perpetually complaining of the high wages they had to pay. They gave it as an excuse for all sorts of petty meanness. Adelle felt that Major Pound would have the suitable reply to the mason's argument, but ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... than whom an archer knave, or one that had committed more petty wrongs, did not present himself that day at the water-gate, was regularly fortified by every precaution that the long experience of a vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contention between mighty factions, of the struggles of orators, the exaltation and deposition of tyrants, the triumph and punishment of generals, is now become a scene of petty intrigue and perpetual disturbance, between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry. "The wild foxes, the owls and serpents in the ruins of Babylon,"[202] were surely less degrading than such inhabitants. The Turks ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... fleet until the 13th of March, when, at his own request, he was removed into his Majesty's ship Orion. The whole crew of the Crescent volunteered to follow him, and his application for them was in part complied with; as also for Lieutenants Otter and Rye, and some of the warrant and petty officers, who were consequently turned over to that ship, which was fitting at Portsmouth. As it would be a considerable time before she could be refitted so as to be ready for sea, Captain Saumarez was, at the special ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... thought and passion lay beyond his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of office, the sharp social contrasts, east wind and Christmas jollity, hunger, misery, and hot punch"—"so ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... decades, there has been no time for a proper tradition to be created by the civil government of Japan; and because there is no such tradition, the island empire of the East has no true foreign policy and is at the mercy of manufactured crises, being too often committed to petty adventures which really range her on the side of those in Europe the Allies have set themselves to destroy. It is for this reason that the Chinese are consistently treated as though they were hewers of wood and drawers of water, helots who are occasionally flattered in the columns of the daily ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... those possessed of means paying in addition an income tax. Ten years ago taxes were levied in furs, but they are now paid in coin of the realm. I was surprised to find that these natives are self-governed to a certain extent; minor crimes, such as theft, petty larceny, &c., being judged by prominent men in the towns and the head-man of each village. Murder and more serious crimes are dealt with by a Russian ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... has never had, even in its palmiest days. The numerous victims required to supply it would convert the whole slave coast into a perfect pandemonium, for which this country would be held responsible in the eyes both of God and man. Its petty tribes would then be constantly engaged in predatory wars against each other for the purpose of seizing slaves to supply the American market. All hopes of African civilization would ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought about this direful result, is one of the most ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... our tale, if it convinces Small states that 'tis a wiser thing To trust a single powerful king, Than half a dozen petty princes. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... straighten out one's limbs, And leap elastic from the level counter, Leaving the petty grievances of earth, The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears, And all the needles that do wound the spirit, For such a pensive hour of soothing silence. Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress, Lays bare her shady bosom;—I ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the Sacred Isle and also the Isle of Destiny, may find a destiny worthy of fulfilment: not to be a petty peasant republic, nor a miniature duplicate in life and aims of great material empires, but that its children out of their faith, which has never failed may realise this imemorial truth of man's inmost divinity, and in expressing it may ray the light over ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... gathered up the shameful inheritance of him whom they have overthrown? And if we turn our eyes towards our own country, how many of these instruments of Napoleon do we not see, who, after having fatigued him with their servile complaisance, have come to offer to a new power the tribute of their petty machiavelism? Now, as then, is it not upon the basis of vanity and corruption that the whole edifice of their paltry science rests, and is it not from the traditions of the imperial government that the counsels of their wisdom ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... "jeel," and receiving, as a kind of blackmail, another saucerful of "skim," which, I am informed, is really the refuse of the sugar, but, for all that, wonderfully toothsome. Bear with a countryman's petty foolishness, ye mighty people who live in cities, and whose dainties come from huge manufactories. Some man reading these pages will remember that red-letter day of the summer-time long ago, and the faithful hands that plucked the fruit, and the ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... applications. The fact is that faith is always the unknown dimension. A man may know how many children he has, and how much money he has; but no man knows how much faith he has. Everybody who has read Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great remembers the petty squabbles of Voltaire, Maupertius, and the other thinkers who moved about the person of that famous prince. They seemed to have been for ever twitting each other with getting ill, and, notwithstanding their philosophy, sending for a priest to minister beside their supposed deathbeds. ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... petty auctions in the States, a person is employed to bid up articles, in order to raise their price. Such a person is called a Peter Funk, probably from that name having frequently been given when things were bought in. In short, it is now ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... small talk and epigrams of the various petty impinging circles under the social dome passed into and out of her small ears—gossip, epigrams, aphorisms, rumours, apropos surmises, asides, and off-stage observations, subtle with ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... could this republic stand if such a man should see fit to change its form? Even now our petty millionaires buy courts and legislatures, and the control of great cities. But the new king would know no limitations to this power. He would make the laws, shape and dictate public opinion, subsidize the church and the schools, direct the courts, control all industries, direct all banks, fix the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... a single year, his father set him up in trade, joining with him in the conduct of a country store his elder brother, William, a youth more indolent, if possible, as well as more disorderly and uncommercial, than Patrick himself. One year of this odd partnership brought the petty concern to its inevitable fate. Just one year after that, having attained the ripe age of eighteen, and being then entirely out of employment, and equally out of money, Patrick rounded out his embarrassments, and gave symmetry to them, as it were, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... prisoner entered, walking with hands manacled, at the side of an imposing garde de Paris. He still wore his smart clothes, and was as coldly self-possessed as at the moment of his arrest. He seemed to regard both handcuffs and guard as petty details unworthy of his attention, and he eyed the judge and Coquenil with ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... one into the other—of the smaller into the greater, or of the town-dwellers into the country stock. The result of this law is, that mixed nations will tend with the progress of time to revert to their original types, and either fall apart into petty groups and provincial distinctions, as in Spain, or will eliminate the weaker or less numerous race, the old or the new, as the one or the other predominates. The political character of our English nation has changed ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that! A space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer, better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised him, startled him really, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... he could bear. Each little discomfort taken separately would have been altogether negligible. But when petty discomforts accumulate there comes a time when one more, however small it be, has the effect of a sudden infliction. He ground his teeth with fury at those pattering drops of water, but the realization of impotence ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the jackdaws build in the ivy; their moats, where the hoary carp bask and fatten; their drawbridges and heavy doors and loopholed windows,—these all tell of the unrest, the semi-war-like state of feudal days, when each great seigneur was a petty king in his own county, with his private as well as public feuds, and his little army of men-at-arms ready to do his bidding, to sally forth and fight for the king or to defend his own walls ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... 1789. I believe this to be the last instance in which this old punishment was inflicted, at least in the metropolis. The burning part of the ceremony was abolished by the 30 Geo. III., c. 48., and death by hanging made the penalty for women in cases of high or petty treason. E. S. S. W.'s informants are wrong in supposing that the criminals were burnt whilst living. The law, indeed, prescribed it, but the practice was more humane. They were first strangled; although it sometimes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... question he feared to answer. To drag out into the open his petty, selfish reasons, shorn of the tinsel glamor of so-called "service" and "progress," would be ...
— Irresistible Weapon • Horace Brown Fyfe
... not have you think he was an absolutely perfect man. He was too sensitively organized for that. A touch, a look that was not in harmony with his thoughts, would make him turn pale at times, and I have seen him put to such suffering by petty physical causes, that I have sometimes wondered where his great soul got its strength to carry him through the exigencies of his somewhat trying calling. But whatever his weaknesses—and they were very few,—he was ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... earnestly, no matter on what topic, I am sure of recovering their natural expression; sure of seeing all the little precious every-day peculiarities of the man or woman peep out, one after another, quite unawares. The long maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome recitals of petty grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the faintest suspicion of anything like general interest, which I have been condemned to hear, as a consequence of thawing the ice off the features of formal sitters by the method just described, would fill ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... elephants in his days, is described by Ptolemy in the map he made of Ceylon sixteen hundred years ago as the elephantum pascua. The trade in elephants from Ceylon, which used to be lucrative, is now completely annihilated, in consequence of all the petty Rajahs, Foligars, and other chiefs in the southern peninsula of India, who used formerly to purchase Ceylon elephants as a part of their state, having lost their sovereignties, and being therefore no longer required to keep up any state of this description. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... precluded the possibility of her asking any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic, demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The room was unconcealably poor: the little faded "relics," the high-stocked ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio, grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the wall-paper, served only to accentuate ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... levity and prattle which had no meaning. She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures, poor as they were, could not be preserved pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. They were always jealous of the beauty of each other, of a quality to which solicitude can add nothing, and from which detraction can take nothing away. Many were in love ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read one of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles and be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His characters ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... growing harder and harder. It seemed to her that poverty in itself was bearable enough, but that the ever-increasing load of debt was not bearable. As long as she could remember, it had always been like a mill-stone tied about their necks, and the ceaseless petty economies and privations seemed of little avail; she felt very much as if she were one of the Danaids, doomed forever to pour water into a vessel ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... time had protected his head from the burning sun. Jehovah's concluding remonstrance voices the message of the book. Like the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of Jonah presents in graphic form the unbounded love of the heavenly father and contrasts it sharply with the petty jealousies and hatred of his favored people. It was a call to Israel to go forth and become a missionary to all the world and a protest against the nation's failure ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... a petty world within itself—a wheel within a wheel—in so far as it is entirely occupied with its own concerns, affords its peculiar catalogue of virtues and vices, its own cares, pleasures, regrets, anticipations, and disappointments—in ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... the same, I call it mean, petty, base, contemptible of them, to think so much of the paltry losses they may have suffered through him. They were only ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last. If the noble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous: never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authorship in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare. For the rest, the Italy of Milton's day, its ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... With you we find Robust and hearty friendship, free from all The laws of petty gods men travail for. No wrangle here o'er things of small avail— No knavery, nor charity betrayed— But comrade beings—'Stalwart, steadfast, good. You help the world in the noblest way of all— By living nobly—showing in your lives The utmost beauty, the full power and love That ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... whether the once famed De Walton is become afraid of his enemies more than fits a knight, or makes imaginary doubts the pretext of tyrannizing over his friend. I cannot say it would make much difference to me, but I would rather have it that the man I once loved had turned a petty tyrant than a weak-spirited coward; and I would be content that he should study to vex me, rather than be ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... sordid penury as I then witnessed I had read, but never supposed I should be compelled to witness, much less to share. Notwithstanding the closeness of this hole, it was excessively cold. There was not a soul there to welcome me, the petty officers being all away on dockyard duty. It might have been ten o'clock when I was first ushered into this region of darkness, of chill and evil odours. I remained with my surtout coat on, sitting on my chest with my hands clasped before me, stiff with cold, and melancholy almost to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... of late how often he was given to muttering. Previously, petty annoyances had not moved him to these half-audible and solitary comments which he had always found contemptuously amusing in others. He wondered whether this new trick was the result of his business ventures, his sly charities, or his approach toward the suggestive ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... any capacity for organization or leadership; the discussion of town affairs sharpened the wits, and, better still, educated the towns-man in a distinct recognition of his political relations; he learned to think politically, and as the Revolution drew near, the petty interests of the local community widened into larger questions of state when the towns themselves found that they were parts of a larger body corporate. Then the principle of representation was constantly delocalizing the town, and bringing ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... let me guess That into Celia, into me, He and unnumbered dead have come To be our intimates, To make of us their home Commingling earth and heaven.... That by our true and mutual deeds We shall at last be shriven Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds And petty separate fates— That I in every man and he in me, Together making God, are gradually creating whole The single soul. Somebody called Walt Whitman— Dead! He is alive instead, Alive as I am. When I lift my head, ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... already—too much petty jealousy and working at cross-purposes. I have been thinking over the entire problem. You yourself know how many people have escaped through jealous or over-zealous officers making premature arrests. We have six different secret-service ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of a petty clerk in one of the government departments, and merely dowered with a modest portion of three thousand francs, she had married a young man as poor as herself, but intelligent and industrious, whom she loved, and who adored ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... public. Goldoni wrote because he liked to write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers. Against Alfieri's hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, we have to set Goldoni's love of Venice and its petty pleasures. He would willingly have drunk chocolate and played at dominoes or picquet all his life on the Piazza di San Marco, when Alfieri was crossing the sierras on his Andalusian horse, and devouring a frugal meal ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... way home she was tormented by the wonder how that wrap could have come in her husband's studio, and what reason he could have for being disturbed by her seeing it there. She was not a woman given to petty or vulgar jealousy, and she had from the first left the artist perfectly free in his professional relations to be governed by the necessities or the conveniences of his profession. She could not ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... with a speed that betokened a wholesome remembrance of a good many hard thrashings in the past and a reasonable dread of similar ones in the future. If I held the doctrine of transmigration, I should be firmly persuaded that the souls of parish beadles, drunken captains, and other petty tyrants, shifted quarters into the bodies of Jamaica negroes' donkeys. One patriotic black woman, whose donkey was rather refractory, relieved her mind by exclaiming, in a tone of infinite disgust, 'O-h-h you Roo-shan!' accompanying her objurgation by several emphatic demonstrations ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man, anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Rome, which canonized the petty Celestine V., refused this supreme consecration to the glorious Innocent III. With exquisite tact she perceived that he was rather king than priest, rather ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... mother were still more deeply rooted. The Jesuits found Rhodolph a docile pupil; and never on earth have there been found a set of men who, more thoroughly than the Jesuits, have understood the art of educating the mind to subjection. Rhodolph was instructed in all the petty arts of intrigue and dissimulation, and was brought into entire subserviency to the Spanish court. Thus ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... longer shall divide our time By acts or pleasures,—doing petty things Of work or warfare, merchandise or rhyme; But we shall sit beside ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Philip. I am but a petty landowner, while it is already known that you are the owner of a considerable estate; and have gained consideration and credit, and as a knight have right to precedence over many of them. If you had intended to settle in France, ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! How is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and temporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to take one's self seriously, to spend one's thought on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision of universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A man may ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Peking society has therefore vanished, and in its place are highly suspicious and hostile Legations—Legations petty in their conceptions of men and things—Legations bitterly disliking one another—in fact, Legations richly deserving all they get, some of the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the biggest thieves in the world, and would rob even their own parents, so, not surprisingly, those in our ranks showed little respect for the property of their allies. On the march or in bivouac, they stole anything they saw; but as no one trusted them, petty thieving became more difficult, so they decided to operate on a grand scale. They organised themselves into bands, and at night they would don peasant headgear and slip out of the bivouac to meet at an agreed spot, then they would return to the camp ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... all my might this great hussy of a town," he rolled out in Southern accents; "but since this morning I despise her! The poor little province you think so petty is an honest girl; but Paris is a prostitute, a greedy, lying comedian; and I am very thankful not to be robbed ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... power to charm, can charm no longer; but, en revanche, those which do please, please a thousand times more: thus what we lose on one side, we gain on the other. Perhaps, on the whole, a technical knowledge of the arts is apt to divert the mind from the general effect, to fix it on petty details of execution. Here comes a connaisseur, who has found his way, good man! from Somerset House, to the Tribune at Florence: see him with one hand passed across his brow, to shade the light, while the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... through scented shadow to Graham's homestead and discussed crops and cattle with the rancher. On these occasions, he had long conversations with Helen Savine, who, finding no person of liberal education thereabouts, was pleased to talk to him. There was nothing incongruous in this, for petty class distinctions vanish in the bush, where, when his daily task is done, the hired man meets his ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... of years, accompanied him. She had been in service in Paris, an insignificant maid-of-all-work, but withal so devoted to her brother that she had left her situation to follow him, subsisting scantily on her petty savings. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and disorder, within and without,—full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,—each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts,—is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the portcullis fall!" At home he had been wont to speak of the "oldest families in Cranston," complaining of the invasions of "new people" into the social territory of the McCords and Mellins and Kramers—a pleasant conception which the presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was of short duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him amazingly ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington |
