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Quotes About Paltry

Drawn by conceit from reason's plan How vain is that poor creature man; How pleas'd in ev'ry paltry elf To grate about that thing himself.
~ Charles Churchill
Word For The Day PICAYUNE (PIK uh yoon') adj. Trivial or petty, small or small-minded.
~ Deb Baker
And why must Prudence go so far out of her way to make everyone around her look so paltry-hearted and piggish, in comparison to her own mighty sacrifices?
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
floccinaucinihilipilificatrix
~ Robert A. Heinlein
His was a country of fearful men: proud in the talking, paltry in the living, and every promise another lie.
~ Andrew O'Hagan
Sometimes roused by desires (say, the trip to Tunisia), but they're desires of before --somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore , another country, the country of before.--Today it is a flat, dreary country--virtually without water--and paltry.
~ Roland Barthes
It didn't amount to a fart in a windstorm, nohow.
~ Ferrol Sams
I could write a treatise on the secret sources of Mexican sentimentalism. What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others, we Mexicans. And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
~ Roberto Bolano
Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
~ Angela Carter
Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
He never was worth the powder it'd take to blow him to hell.
~ Shirley Damsgaard
She must have achieved almost exactly what she wanted: a nice Early Night, a nice Early Life. It was certainly easy, easy and empty of spirit. She personified the terrible sin of sloth at its most paltry. Not the sloth of despair in the face of God. Despair would be like staying up spiritually too late.
~ John Osborne
Ten or twelve couples? No, no, Dassett would not be talking of red carpets and awnings for such a paltry affair as that!' said his lordship. These ominous words struck a chill into his wife's soul.
~ Georgette Heyer
Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slaves? What a paltry imagination you do have. Mine, I fear, sometimes seems excessive, even to me.
~ Bernard Cornwell
Lastly, concerning the disdain to receive into natural history things either common, or mean, or oversubtle and in their original condition useless, the answer of the poor woman to the haughty prince who had rejected her petition as an unworthy thing and beneath his dignity, may be taken for an oracle: "Then leave off being king." For most certain it is that he who will not attend to things like these as being too paltry and minute, can neither win the kingdom of nature nor govern it.
~ Francis Bacon
If rejection and priviledge are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgement of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light.
~ Milan Kundera
But Josef does not feel sick. He feels clearheaded. To his mind the nostalgic insufficiency proves the paltry value of his former life. So I revise my diagnosis: "The patient is suffering from masochistic distortion of memory.
~ Milan Kundera
If a man is to have a fault, it should be a passionate one, like insatiable curiosity. It would be a pity to be damned for something paltry.
~ Gary Jennings
It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation.
~ Carol Shields
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
~ Tracy K. Smith
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
~ John Updike
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
~ Vladimir Nabokov
It seemed to him 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.
~ Henryk Sienkiewicz