"Littleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found that during her residence in York Street she had spent a good deal more than she had supposed. She had entertained a good deal, giving frequent "little dinners." But dinners, however little, are apt in London to leave tradesmen's bills not altogether small in proportion to their littleness. "The fact is," said my mother, "that potatoes have been quite exceptionally dear." For a very long series of years she never heard the last of those exceptional potatoes. But despite the alarming deficit caused by those unfortunate vegetables, I do not think the abandonment of the establishment ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient, phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the other hand there was something ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... true humility. It proves its integrity by not seeking for anything, but simply trusting His grace. And so it is the very strength of a great faith, and gets a full answer. "Yet the dogs"—let that be your plea as you persevere for someone possibly possessed of the devil. Let not your littleness ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... littleness as human beings, because to our microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... ennobling sentiment; it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it. He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down. Of such minds are mannerists in Art; in the world, tyrants of ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... misled by the false notion of "mathematical infinitude." Their infinite universe, after all, is not an "absolute," but a "relative" infinite; that is, the indefinite. "The universe must extend indefinitely in time and space, in the infinite greatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts—in the infinite variety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of existence. The finite can not express the infinite but by being multiplied infinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in any reasonable relation, or in any intelligible ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... tell you that Mrs. Jameson showed me the other day a charming likeness of my sister which she had made—like that pretty thing she did of me—with all the dresses of her parts? If I could have done a great littleness, I could have gone down on my knees and begged for it; I wished ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... in the season, a visit to the seaside, and then home in the autumn to peddle about the estate, made up the year when they did not go abroad. There was a broad park, noble trees, a great mansion, a stately approach; but within it seemed all littleness of spirit. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... with the animating visions of Plato, and was the associate of Cicero and of Caesar. The Rabbin had probably read only the Pentateuch, and mingled with companions of mean occupations, and meaner minds. Cato was accustomed to the grandeur of the mistress of the universe; and the Rabbin to the littleness of a provincial town. Men, like pictures, may be placed in an obscure and unfavourable light; but the finest picture, in the unilluminated corner, still retains the design and colouring of the master. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... its iron insistence. The habits of convention are so powerful that life's great issues are often obscured by them. Going to her final doom a woman would stop to give the last careful touch to her hair—the mechanical obedience to long habit. It is not vanity, not littleness, but habit; never shown with subtler irony than in the case of Madame de Langrois, who, pacing the path to her execution at Lille, stooped, picked up a pin from the ground, and fastened it in her gown—the tyranny ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not forget the behavior of the apothecary, undertook to deliver the message herself, happy in the triumph she should enjoy over the littleness of Mr. Vincent's suspicions. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... night she would go over her day and probe it for tender points. "Oh, that was a dreadful thing to say," was a refrain that would keep her awake for hours, wriggling and giggling in her bed over the dreadfulness of it. She had too little egoism. The lack gave her face a look of littleness. A lack of altruism has the same outward effect. A complete face should be full of something, of gentleness, of vigour, of humour, of wickedness. The admirer's face was only half full of anything. All the same there was charm about ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... Arden, the old castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, and the old Roman camps and military roads, to appeal powerfully to the boy's lively imagination. Every phase of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in Shakespeare's poetry; just as his characters reflect the nobility and the littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions of the people ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... slight and evanescent at first sight, but which mounts up to a mighty sum in the end, which is an essential part of an important whole, which has consequences greater than itself, and where more is meant than meets the eye or ear. We complain sometimes of littleness in a Dutch picture, where there are a vast number of distinct parts and objects, each small in itself, and leading to nothing else. A sky of Claude's cannot fall under this censure, where one imperceptible ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... longer littleness and humility; he had paid, as it were, like a gentleman, for Goldenhorns. "Here you are," he could say. "I've brought along a horse; we ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... dimensions of its object on account of a comparison with others. The question then is, how from the same impression and the same idea we can form such different judgments concerning the same object, and at one time admire its bulk, and at another despise its littleness. This variation in our judgments must certainly proceed from a variation in some perception; but as the variation lies not in the immediate impression or idea of the object, it must lie in some other impression, that ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... significance of Miracles. Littleness of human Science: Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. Space and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse of Immortality. How Space hides from us the wondrousness of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... laborers who were going by train to their day's work, and wondering how many pipes each of their carefully guarded matches would light, and what each carried in his battered tin drinking-bottle, remembering with a dreary sort of amusement that he had heard this same incurable littleness of thought settled on men condemned to death. Still, it passed the time, and he was surprised out of a sort of reverie by the clanging of ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... him, the small height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... littleness are terms merely comparative; and we err in our estimation of things, because we measure them by some wrong standard. The trifler proposes to himself only to equal or excel some other trifler, and is happy or miserable ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... chess-board, into black and white compartments—a moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "over-muchness" toward some men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... long hours I'd spend in viewing The elemental strife, My soul the while subduing With the littleness of life; Of life, with all its paltry plans, Its conflicts and its cares— The feebleness of all that's man's— The might ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... ornamented his petitions with any high sounding phrases. He was not so much a man carrying on in a loud voice before his Maker as he was a little boy with a sore toe and troubles appertaining to his littleness and inexperience, and faults and forgetfulness, all of which he let out with the emotion of a child to his father, and with such reality of detail that the whole congregation accompanied him with his lamentations and regrets. Whenever I lifted my head after one of Brother I's prayers, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... body does not preclude the possibility of its being mortal. Socrates, however, argues that contraries cannot exist in the same thing at the same time, as, for example, the same object cannot partake of both magnitude and littleness at the same time. In like manner, heat while it is heat can never admit the idea of cold. Life and death are contraries and can never coexist; but wherever there is life there is soul, so that the soul contains that which is contrary to death and ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... returning to the family, she went directly to her own room. It was easy for her to see that Mr Harrel was bent upon using every method he could devise, to entangle her into some engagement with Sir Robert, and though she could not imagine the meaning of such a scheme, the littleness of his behaviour excited her contempt, and the long-continued error of the baronet gave her the utmost uneasiness. She again determined to seek an explanation with him herself, and immovably to refuse joining the party ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... though infinitely above scheming or contriving for any the most advantageous matrimonial establishment that could be among the apparent possibilities of any one most dear to him, and disdaining even as a littleness the being quick-sighted on such points, he could not avoid perceiving, in a grand and careless way, that Mr. Crawford was somewhat distinguishing his niece—nor perhaps refrain (though unconsciously) from giving a more willing assent ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... could but shut her glorious eyes to all the shabby littleness they will have to see, we might hazard the rest," he sighed to himself. "If the pure visions of her maiden years might veil from her those gross realities of every-day life! With what face shall I meet her glance after it ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... that, as he says to Madame Hanska, her loss can never be made up to him. It is possible also to sympathise with the feeling, perhaps unacknowledged even to himself, which peeps out in a letter to Madame Hanska in 1840.[*] In this he reproaches his correspondent for her littleness in not writing to him because he cannot answer her letters quickly, and tells her that he has lately been in such straits that he has not been able to pay for franking his letters, and has several times eaten a roll on the Boulevards ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... panorama rolling past the window. At first she was intensely interested in the endless stream of strange faces, but when an hour had slipped by and still they came, always strange, always different, a sense of littleness and loneliness seized her, that amounted almost to panic. She longed to get away from this great myriad-footed monster of a city, back to something small and familiar and quiet; to neighbourly greetings and friendly faces. The loneliness caused by the strange ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... turncoats and slaves for going so far to meet his wishes, and that they should be at the same time frowned upon at Kensington for not going farther. The King was not to be moved. He had been too great to sink into littleness without a struggle. He had been the soul of two great coalitions, the dread of France, the hope of all oppressed nations. And was he to be degraded into a mere puppet of the Harleys and the Hooves, a petty prince who could neither help nor hurt, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... spring season—Earos epigignetai hore: and soon a wind hath scattered them, and thereafter the [203] wood peopleth itself again with another generation of leaves. And what is common to all of them is but the littleness of their lives: and yet wouldst thou love and hate, as if these things should continue for ever. In a little while thine eyes also will be closed, and he on whom thou perchance hast leaned thyself be himself a ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... of gossiping, my dear girls, is the disgrace of our sex. The pursuits of women lie necessarily within a narrow sphere, and they naturally sink, unless raised by refinement, or by strong principle, into that littleness of character, for which even their own husbands and fathers (if they are men of sense) are tempted to despise them. The minds of men, from their engagements in business, necessarily take a larger range; and ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... reality very small for her age, and everybody called her "little;" but she got very few privileges on account of her youth and littleness. In those days, and especially in a family like Josiah Thayer's, where there were so many children that each had to scratch for itself at an early age or go without, six years was considered comparatively ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... obese and his face lean. A fat bust and a bony countenance. His nails were channelled and short, his fingers knotted, his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and his forehead a murderer's, broad and low. The littleness of his eye was hidden under his bushy eyebrows. His nose, long, sharp, and flabby, nearly met his mouth. Barkilphedro, properly attired, as an emperor, would have somewhat resembled Domitian. His face of muddy yellow might have been modelled in slimy paste—his immovable cheeks were like putty; he ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... It was an effect beyond argument and reason; it was the magic flowering of centuries in a single moment, the silent awful sigh of a nation's saecular soul. It took majesty and loveliness from the walls around it, and rendered them again tenfold. It left nothing common, neither the motives nor the littleness of men. In Priam's mind it gave dignity to Lady Sophia Entwistle, and profound tragedy to the death of Leek; it transformed even the gestures of the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... miracle. No one expected to find him in this galley; being there, the banks were rapidly crowded with a throng lost in admiration of his strong, swift, graceful stroke. Difficult to say which the most admirable, the lofty height, far above the littleness of Party conflict, from which he surveyed the topic, the charm of his language or the dexterity with which, without seeming to rebuke the follower who had moved the Amendment and the eminent men who were prepared to support it, he sustained the Ministry in their effort to reconstruct ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves, in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... of the things which no fellow can understand. Thousands come to it, thousands go from it. Porters grow gray-headed beneath its roof. Buns, once fresh and tender, become hard and misanthropic in its refreshment rooms, and look as if they had seen the littleness of existence and were disillusioned. But there the station stands, year after year, wrapped in a discreet gloom, always the same, always baffling and inscrutable. Not even the porters understand it. "I couldn't say, sir," is the civil but unsatisfying ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... must arm your hook, with the line in the inside of it; then take your Scissers and cut so much of a browne Malards feather as in your own reason wil make the wings of it, you having with all regard to the bigness or littleness of your hook, then lay the outmost part of your feather next to your hook, then the point of your feather next the shank of your hook; and having so done, whip it three or four times about the hook with the ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... Liane's light laughter, muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork. Forward the ship's bell sounded two double strokes, then a single, followed by a wail in minor key: "Five bells and all's well!" ... And of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, beneath the shining constellations of eternity. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner's cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness of ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... figures past—or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be—as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity—per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... outward sense Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is That what we have of feeling most intense Outstrips our faint expression; even so this Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice Fools our fond gaze, and, greatest of the great, Defies at first our nature's littleness, Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... want, this child had not the giddy, thoughtless disposition usually characteristic of girls of her age. She had too early gained an insight into the uncertainty and emptiness of all earthly magnificence, not to appreciate the littleness of those things upon which young girls usually place so high an estimate. Her thoughts were not occupied with the adornment of her person, and she did not bend her young head beneath the yoke of capricious fashion: for her, there were higher and nobler enjoyments, and Hortense was never happier ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... sky line. Many of the great buildings, of white and red sandstone, had then appeared, but the street was largely in the possession of small shops—oyster houses, bookstores and the like. Not until I neared the sacred temple of the Tribune did I feel a proper sense of my own littleness. There was the fountain of all that wisdom which had been read aloud and heard with reverence in our household since a time I could but dimly remember. There sat the prophet who had given us so much—his genial views of life and government, ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... existing religion of strong organisation, predestined them to Christianity. Christianity in fact, addressing itself by preference to the more humble feelings in human nature, met here with admirably prepared disciples; no race has so delicately understood the charm of littleness, none has placed the simple creature, the innocent, nearer God. The ease with which the new religion took possession of these peoples is also remarkable. Brittany and Ireland between them scarce count two or three ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of this ingenuous greatness of soul, Aramis felt his own littleness. It was the second time he had been compelled to bend before real superiority of heart, which is more imposing than brilliancy of mind. He replied by a mute and energetic pressure to ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... divined it all,' said Robert, drawing a long breath when she stopped, which seemed to relax the fibres of the inner man, 'the fever and the fret of human thought, the sense of littleness, of impotence, of evanescence—and he has soothed ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,—the soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,—showing itself cognate, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... with the two principal parties concerned, Louis XIII. and Cardinal Richelieu. With all his weaknesses of temper and mind, the king had intellect enough to know what were the great interests of his kingdom and power, and on whose shoulders they rested. Above all the littleness of a court cabal he could not but discern the great questions which impended, and with which he felt quite incompetent to deal. And he could perceive but one man in his kingdom able to handle these great ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... on the subject which Marcus Aurelius in his coldness had denied to her. "From you, who have so nobly claimed for mankind the divine attributes of free action! From you, who have taught my mind to soar above the petty bonds which one man in his littleness contrives for the subjection of his brother. Mackinnon! you who are so great!" And she now looked up into his ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... the ships lying at their anchors on the sea, and the shores of Fife far far beyond it. It was a great and a grand sight; and made me turn from the looking at it into my own heart, causing me to think more and more of the glory of the Maker's handiworks, and less and less of the littleness of prideful man. But Tammie had gotten his drappikie, and the tongue of the body would not lie still a moment; so he blethered on from one thing to another, as we jogged along, till I was forced at the last to give up thinking, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things, should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of genius ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... walks, or whom you may observe at a concert or in the ball-room. You will see many very charming faces, the like of which the world cannot match—figures somewhat too spare of flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a marvellous littleness of hand and foot. But look further, and especially among New England young girls: you will be struck with a certain hardness of line in form and feature which should not be seen between thirteen and eighteen, at least; ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... not mean either stolidity or lethargy; far otherwise. Nor does it mean sluggishness, apathy or phlegmatism; quite the contrary. It does mean depth as opposed to shallowness, bigness as opposed to littleness, and vision as opposed to spiritual myopia. It means dignity, poise, aplomb, balance. It means that there is sufficient ballast to hold the ship steady on its way, no matter how much sail it spreads. When we ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... stewed since George III. The worst of it is, as the House gets more and more divided (like the French Chambers) into sets, it also becomes more and more incapable of getting through its business, and the littleness of the individual members becomes daily ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... mind from height to greater height. Men were long in accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming in the sunbeams ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... prosperity once more opened her sheltering arms and kept the wolf from the door. The new owner of Deering Castle, as the villagers had admiringly christened the grand old place, refused to sell it. Robert Garrett, with the littleness born of a mean, cramped nature, clung to this coveted possession as the one thing to be held, though all else were taken. He had money but knew not how to enjoy it. His household, for the most part, reflected the coarseness of his nature, and as time passed his retribution was meted out in rebellious ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... one wishes for amusement. Then everything about town is so nice, pretty, and sociable. The shops, also, are fine. Too often we have spent our summers in places that were a trifle dreary. Mountains oppress me with a sense of littleness, and their wildness frightens me. The ocean is worse still. The moment I am alone with it, such a lonely, desolate feeling creeps over me—oh, I can't tell you! I fear you think I am silly and frivolous. You think I ought to be inspired by the shaggy mountains and wild ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... unceasing rush of footsteps and clash of voices! And must I be confounded in the crowd? Let me preserve my individuality in the desert! If I were not an insect, it might be different; but as I am no larger than other men, I will not daily measure myself by their standard; I will forget in solitude the littleness ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... were here far from being at home. Jerusalem was then nearly what it is to-day, a city of pedantry, acrimony, disputes, hatreds, and littleness of mind. Its fanaticism was extreme, and religious seditions very frequent. The Pharisees were dominant; the study of the Law, pushed to the most insignificant minutiae, and reduced to questions of casuistry, was the only study. This exclusively theological and canonical ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Harboro of the very marrow in his bones. He would have fought uncomplainingly to the end against injustice. He would cheerfully have watched the whole world depart from him, if he had had the consciousness of righting in a good cause. He had thought scornfully of the people who had betrayed their littleness by ignoring him. But what if they had been right, and his had ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... gathering twilight he halted to clutch at the railing and look out across where the waters met—where Sycamore Creek flowed into Middleville River. The roar of water falling over the dam came melodiously and stirringly to his ears. And as he looked again he was assailed by that strange sense of littleness, of shrunkenness, which had struck him so forcibly at the station. He listened to the murmur of running water. Then, while the sweetness of joy pervaded him, there seemed to rise from below or across the river or from somewhere the same ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... mystery of the infinite, of the order and symmetry of the plan of creation, of the proof of the existence of a God, who controls the sweet influences of Pleiades and makes strong the bands of Orion. The unspeakable thought, the unformulated prayer, the poignant sense of individual littleness, of atomic unimportance, in the midst of the vast scheme of the universe, inform every eye, throb in every breast, whether it be of the savant, with all the appliances of invention to bring to his cheated senses the illusion of a slightly ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... clothes his children with frailties, that they may be humble in their own eyes, and be concealed from the eyes of the world. The Tabernacle was covered with the skins of the beasts, while the Temple of Herod was ornamented with gold. Let us not afflict ourselves on account of our littleness and infirmities, since God so orders it, but become as little children. When a little child falls, it cannot raise itself, but lets another do for ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... made of jewels. And so God places a solemn value and responsibility on the humble workers, the people that try to hide behind their insignificance the trifling opportunities and the single talents; and our littleness will not excuse us ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... kept His commandments, and were disobedient to our priests, who admonished us for our salvation. And the Lord brought down upon us the anger of His Spirit, and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where now my littleness may be seen amongst strangers. And there the Lord showed me my unbelief, that at length I might remember my iniquities, and strengthen my whole heart towards the Lord my God, who looked down upon my humiliation, and had pity ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... then to left as he spoke, from the distant shadowy bulk of Mount Hillbay to the limitless ocean ruffled by the winds of heaven. Then, as if the fair prospect rendered him conscious of his own littleness and the insignificance of his woes, he ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... first part of October; then the fresher weather renewed my life and strength. All this time there were reports drifting about that the King was going to ransom Joan. I believed these, for I was young and had not yet found out the littleness and meanness of our poor human race, which brags about itself so much, and thinks it is better and higher than the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... possible, for to my mind nothing in life was clearer than that my only chance lay in my falling in with a ship. Yet how did my heart sink when I reflected upon the mighty breast of sea in which I was forlornly to seek for succour! My eyes went to the squab black outline of the boat, and the littleness of her sent a shudder through me. It is true she had nobly carried me through some fierce weather, yet at the expense of many leagues of southing, of a deeper penetration into the solitary wilds of ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... my eye up the shining mast and saw the stars and stripes floating there so calmly and serenely, and I remembered our glorious mission, and instantly I felt the Everlasting Arms about me. I realized as never before in my life, the utter littleness of man, and the almightiness of God. Here, floating thousands of feet above the earth, we can rest just as implicitly on His promises as we ever ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... LaPlace's Mecanique Celeste. The latter I read aloud. I mention it because in a way it served as an antidote for that growing sense of expansion in my intellect. In the vastness of infinite space I found the littleness of man ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the childishness, the frivolity, the instability, the disrespectfulness, the sentimentality, the high falutinism, the superficiality, the looseness of principle, everything that made up the greatness and littleness of the France of the end of last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri, when once he disliked ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... clasped his hands, and multiplied signs of the cross over host and chalice. The prayers of the canon of the mass now fell from his lips in a very ecstasy of humility and gratitude. His attitude, his gestures, the inflections of his voice, all expressed his consciousness of his littleness, his emotion at being selected for so great a task. Vincent came and knelt beside him, lightly lifted the chasuble with his left hand, the bell ready in his right; and the priest, his elbows resting on the edge of the altar, holding the host with the ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... representation. But either the nation did not in time perceive its real interests, or, perceiving them, was unable to declare them, on account of the forces and ascendancy of the Portuguese party; which, perceiving clearly to what a degree of weakness, littleness, and poverty, Portugal was reduced, and to how low a state it had fallen, would never consent (notwithstanding their proclamation of liberty, fearing a separation,) that the people of Brazil should enjoy a representation ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made his own. This creative artist has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty pretences. And he stoops to no littleness in his art—least of all to the miserable vanity of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of littleness and impotence, twilight gloom, burnished night, bitter cold, unreality, phantasmagoria, [Footnote: Phantasmagoria: illusive images.] ghosts like those which surged about Aeneas, [Footnote: Ghosts about Aeneas: referring to the descent ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... his name and character—in the later years it might be truly said "clarum et venerabile nomen"—exercised on all with whom he was connected. If indeed he had a fault, it was that his standard of action was so high, his nature so absolutely above the littleness of ordinary life, that he attributed to inferior men far purer and more unselfish objects than those that really moved them. "Vixit enim tanquam in Platonis politeia, non ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... abysses, the mighty cataract, the rushing waters, the frequent perils of avalanches and of tumbling rocks, the total absence of every soft feature of nature, were always reading an impressive lesson, and illustrating the littleness of man, and the greatness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... she was a giantess to my eyes. The time was to come when I was to see her in a new light, to judge her from a new perspective, to realize the incongruity between her aspiration and accomplishment, to smile at her solemn adherence to academic ritual; and yet to realize that in her littleness and poverty she gave me what was good and all that was in her power. I may regret that I did not delve deeper into the mysteries of those foot-ball scores and discover, through them, the greater seats of learning. Perhaps I might have known then that not all their ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... part of our statesmanship—to ease the burden as we can, and enfranchise those who spend and are spent for the sustenance of the race. But what shall we say of those who are free and yet choose littleness and bondage, or of those who, though they might see the whole face of society, nevertheless choose to spend all a life's space poring upon some single vice or blemish? I would not for the world discredit any sort of philanthropy except the small and churlish ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... inches suddenly. This would draw a quick intake of the breath from the hurt man and an "aahh"—but not once a word of blame. I should want to curse the careless hand that wrenched my wound, but these soldiers of France and Belgium whom I carried had passed beyond littleness. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... as they go, And there are taken by the foe, Who, greedy of the victim, gluts With mouse-flesh his ungodly guts. Each great and national distress Must chiefly mighty men oppress; While folks subordinate and poor Are by their littleness secure. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... his hand, that he might thoroughly, and not in part only, purge his floor, and take away the dross and the tin of his people, and make a man finer than gold. Withal, they grew high, rough, and self-righteous; opposing further attainment; too much forgetting the day of their infancy and littleness, which gave them something of a real beauty; insomuch that many left them, and all visible churches and societies, and wandered up and down as sheep without a shepherd, and as doves without their mates; seeking their beloved, but could ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... uniform, possessed none of the littleness which may sometimes belong to these descriptions of men. It formed a majestic pile, the effect of which was not inspired, but improved, by order and symmetry. There was nothing in it to dazzle by wildness, and surprise by eccentricity. It was of a higher species of moral beauty. It contained ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... originates in some soft kindly emotions, and adds a new interest to the spirit of the warrior; it humbles him, to whom the earth is subject, before those mysterious Powers which weigh the destinies of man in their balance, in whose eyes the greatest and the least of mortals scarcely differ in littleness. Wallenstein's confidence in the friendship of Octavio, his disinterested love for Max Piccolomini, his paternal and brotherly kindness, are feelings which cast an affecting lustre over the harsher, more heroic qualities wherewith they are combined. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... been a willing stranger. The halter of Jerusalem shall see A unit for his virtue, for his vices No less a mark than million. He, who guards The isle of fire by old Anchises honour'd Shall find his avarice there and cowardice; And better to denote his littleness, The writing must be letters maim'd, that speak Much in a narrow space. All there shall know His uncle and his brother's filthy doings, Who so renown'd a nation and two crowns Have bastardized. And they, of Portugal And Norway, there shall be expos'd with him Of Ratza, who hath counterfeited ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... was going to stop in France, but if it were part of his closeness not to tell, it was part of her pride not to ask. She relented when he asked if he might get a map of his and prove the littleness of Holland from it, and in his absence she could not well avoid saying to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... he hers, for he seemed dazed, in spite of the straight way he stood, and it was easy to behold how white his face was. She made the presentation of us both at the same time, and as the other man came into the light, my mouth dropped open with wonder at the singular chances which the littleness ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... God! thou brave and beauteous world, Made fair with light and shade and stars and flowers, Made fearful and august with woods and rocks, Jagg'd precipice, black mountain, sea in storms, Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns, But thro' Heaven's pavement rides as in despite Or mockery of the littleness of man! I see a mighty arm, by man unseen, Resistless, not to be controul'd, that guides, In solitude of unshared energies, All these thy ceaseless miracles, O world! Arm of the world, I view thee, and I muse On Man, who, trusting in his mortal strength, Leans on a shadowy staff, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the greatest, let us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind of wonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, those passages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings reached them that they had ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... I heard Mary Grace say so to Miss Marks—as meaning that my Father was resentful because some of them attended the service at the Wesleyan chapel on Thursday evenings. But my Father was utterly incapable of such littleness as this, and when he talked of 'jealousy' he meant a lofty solicitude, a careful watchfulness. He meant that their spiritual honour was a matter of anxiety to him. No doubt when he used to tell me to remember that our ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... he displayed, preferring him above the rest and advancing him to a station and a degree where to his thought aspired not. But now he is minded to part him from that small portion of intellect which raised him high from his lowness and made him great after his littleness. Heaven forfend and forbid that the Commander of the Faithful should envy his slave what little he hath of understanding and worth and renown! Now, if his slave should drink wine, his reason would depart ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... creditor, and duped a friend; there was a pitiful and debasing weakness in his nature, which made him regard the lowest meanness as the subtlest wit. His mind too was not only degraded, but broken by his habits of life; a strange, idiotic folly, that made him love laughing at his own littleness, ran through his character. Houseman was young; he might amend; but Clarke had grey hairs and dim eyes; was old in constitution, if not years; and every thing in him was hopeless and confirmed; the leprosy ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pebbly strand of the side of the inlet I jumped out and walked away, eager to be alone to enjoy the glory of it all away from the rasping voices, the worldly talk of my companions, the perpetual "littleness" of ideas that ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... say is true, Kishimoto San, but hasn't it a flavor of littleness to label as a national habit the acts of a few exhilarated travelers? What have you to say of the vast army of American women who could not be forced into doing ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... architecture, dim and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament. Beneath that vast breadth and height, as she had fancied them, the personal man might feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness; a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... say, the powers of nature, which had hitherto slumbered quietly, now came into play. The breeze freshened and a tremendous storm of thunder, lightning, and rain came on, as if to mock the fury of man, and humble him under a sense of his relative littleness. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... for whom we supremely care, and no one who cares much for us; to have no place where we can shield ourselves from outward opposition and inward despair; to have no larger life in which we can merge the littleness of our solitary selves; to touch other lives only on the surface, and to take no one to our heart;—this is the sad estate of the man or woman who refuses to enter with whole-souled devotion into union with another in the building ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... Rochester to the effect that Mr. Roach Smith always felt a little "touchy" about the satire on archaeology in Pickwick, in re "Bill Stumps, his mark." That, however, we took cum grano salis, because this gentleman, from his delightful conversation and frank manner, is evidently above any such littleness. He is, however, free to confess, that Dickens had not much love for Strood, but ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... Palatinate, and the murder of Buckingham; so in Shire Lane, opposite, the talk must have run on Marlborough's victories, Jacobite plots, and the South-Sea Bubble; Addison must have discussed Swift, and Steele condemned the littleness of Pope. It was the custom of this aristocratic club every year to elect some reigning beauty as a toast. To the queen of the year the gallant members wrote epigrammatic verses, which were etched with a diamond ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... physical traits of the old captain of the Sofala, his powerful frame, his reposeful mien, his intelligent, handsome face, the big limbs, the benign courtesy, the touch of rugged severity in the shaggy eyebrows, made up a seductive personality. Mr. Van Wyk disliked littleness of every kind, but there was nothing small about that man, and in the exemplary regularity of many trips an intimacy had grown up between them, a warm feeling at bottom under a kindly stateliness of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... that she was in danger of drowning, notwithstanding the littleness of the brook; and I ran to the point from which I had heard her plunge into the water, expecting to have to draw her out on the bank; but I found only a place where the grass was wallowed down as she had crawled out, and lying on the ground was the satchel she had ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... littleness and spite, The falsehood and the treachery of men, I cried, "Give me but justice!" thinking then I meekly craved a common boon which might Most easily be granted; soon the light Of deeper truth grew on my wondering ken, (Escaping baneful damps of stagnant fen), And then ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... that thus denied having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls; the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, with their guns peacefully ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... when applied to a private street-mansion, or a haberdasher's warehouse. St. Paul's Church, Covent-Garden, is an instance of the unhappy effect produced by a combination of a similar kind; great in all its parts, with its original littleness, it very nearly approximates to the character of a barn. Inigo Jones doubtless desired to erect an edifice of stately Roman aspect, but he was cramped in his design, and, therefore, only aspired to make a first-rate barn; so far unquestionably ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... did not seem to me a lofty and inspiring view that Sylvia took. On the contrary, it exercised a choking effect upon me, by reason of what I regarded as its intense littleness and narrowness. The too often bitter and sordid realities of the struggle of life, as I saw it in London, had the effect upon me of making Sylvia's esoteric exclusiveness of interest seem so petty as to be an insult to ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... follies of a mountebank—still more did the typical man-about-town, with his whims and his foibles, his shallow aims and his lost opportunities, compare strangely with the larger souls of his generation. For the moment was one which called forth the greatness or the littleness of those who met it, and which heightened that contrast ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... tradesman can furnish out numberless instances of small deceit. His conduct is marked with a littleness, which though allowed by general consent, is not strictly just. A person with whom I have long been connected in business, asked, if I had dealt with his relation, whom he had brought up, and who had ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdingnag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, His pond an ocean, his parterre a down: Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shivering at a breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole, a laboured quarry above ground; Two Cupids squirt before; a lake behind Improves the keenness of the northern wind. His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall! No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... better, Sir, to send the men away,' said he to the Colonel, for he was a much privileged subaltern. He put his arms round the rag-bound horror as he spoke, and dropped him into a chair. It may not have been explained that the littleness of Mildred lay in his being six feet four and big in proportion. The Corporal, seeing that an officer was disposed to look after the capture, and that the Colonel's eye was beginning to blaze, promptly removed himself and his men. The mess was left alone with the carbine-thief, who ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... to be the especial glory of Love, that it doth make unto all Sweetness and Greatness, and doth be a fire burning all Littleness; so that did all in this world to have met The Beloved, then did Wantonness be dead, and there to grow Gladness and Charity, dancing in ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson |
