Best Pettiness Quotes & Sayings

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self. — Gore Vidal

All the itch and clutter of the world, its bother and fuss, its nagging pettiness, can wear you down so easily. And this is why I like the beach ... — William Boyd

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves. — Simone Weil

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self. — Eric Hoffer

Ah, he would take her beyond
beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul. — Edith Wharton

But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited ... — Milan Kundera

Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart
even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections. — Rob Brezsny

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. — Iain Pears

People love their causes they champion; they love their divisions and neatly packaged boxes of identity; for without them, they would be forced to look within, find themselves, set aside pettiness and face reality (that's quite frightening to most). As a result, they are like a lost ship at sea, forced to submit to the waves of society. — Dara Reidyr

We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb. — D. A. Carson

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones
those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. — Susan Sontag

I think you are a liar because you think you know what is true. You think you feel what is true. But you do not yet know what you do feel and what you do know. Your desire and do not take; you love and are too afraid to feel your love; you conceal your vanity and pettiness from yourself; you are afraid to look into your soul and see what you are. That iis why i think you are a liar. — Alison Croggon

I believe people who go into politics want to do the right thing. And then they hit a big wall of re-election and the pettiness of politics. In the end, politics gets in the way of the business of people. — Kevin Costner

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Tao has no place for pettiness, and nor has Virtue. Pettiness is dangerous to Virtue; pettiness is dangerous to the Tao. It is said, rectify yourself and be done. — Zhuangzi

Running keeps me at a physical peak and sharpens my senses. It makes me touch and see and hear as if for the first time. Through it I get through the first barrier to true emotions, the lack of integration with the body. Into it I escape from the pettiness and triviality of everyday life. And, once inside,stop the daily pendulum perpetually oscillating between distraction and boredom...It is the swing from boredom to anxiety, from depression to worry, that exhausts and defeats us. The sure knowledge that we can be much more than we are frustrates us. — George Sheehan

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man. — Wilhelm Reich

America wasn't perfect, but nothing touched by human hands could be. There was greed, corruption, selfishness, pettiness, hatred. But there were good things too. Freedoms, ideas, choices, hope and the possibility that anyone could be anything, here, if they were willing to strive for it. — Wildbow

Like families, competitors can bring out the worst as well as the best in each other. Like romance, competition has many faces, some of them ugly. In addition to showing me my grace and graciousness, the mirror of sports has reflected back to me my jealousy, pettiness, and arrogance. — Mariah Nelson

The search for myself is ended. I am buried in the world, I knew I would find my place there one day, the old world cloisters me, victorious. I am happy, I knew I would be happy one day. But I am not wise. For the wise thing now would be to let go, at this instant of happiness. And what do I do? I go back again to the light, to the fields I so longed to love, to the sky all astir with little white clouds as white and light as snowflakes, to the life I could never manage, through my own fault perhaps, through pride, or pettiness, but I don't think so. — Samuel Beckett

He saw all those private aspects of me - and I mean not just sexual private parts, but my darker side, my meanness, my pettiness, my self-loathing - all the things I kept hidden. So that with him I was completely naked, and when I was feeling the most vulnerable - when the wrong word would have sent me flying out the door forever - he always said exactly the right thing at the right moment. He didn't allow me to cover myself up. He would grab my hands, look me straight in the eye and tell me something new about why he loved me. — Amy Tan

We believe - we believe that, if we tell the people the truth, that they will act bigger than the pettiness we see in Washington, D.C. We believe it is possible to forge bipartisan compromise, and stand up for our conservative principles. — Chris Christie

A sense of solemn aspiration comes upon us as we view the mountain. We are uplifted. The entire scale of being is raised. Our outlook on life seems all at once to have been heightened. And not only is there this sense of elevation: we seem purified also. Meanness, pettiness, paltriness seem to shrink away abashed at the sight of that radiant purity. — Francis Younghusband

I have decided to keep a record of my inmost real-self thoughts. Perhaps it will help me to find out what I really am like: horrid, I know: selfish, conceited, and material-minded. For instance, lately whenever I've tried to concentrate on anything serious or beautiful, I've started thinking about the Spencers' dance next week. I am ashamed of my pettiness. I'm going to try to do better this year
develop my character more and not always be thinking about enjoying myself. I've always been so happy, I dread disappointment and unhappiness, but they would be good for me. But I don't want them. — Rosamond Lehmann

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or-to put the thing less cynically-we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. — E. M. Forster

Princes always are always happy to see developing among their subjects the taste for agreeable arts and for superfluities which do not result in the export of money. For quite apart from the fact that with these they nourish that spiritual pettiness so appropriate for servitude, they know very well that all the needs which people give themselves are so many chains binding them. When Alexander wished to keep the Ichthyophagi dependent on him, he forced them to abandon fishing and to nourish themselves on foods common to other people. And no one has been able to subjugate the savages in America, who go around quite naked and live only from what their hunting provides. In fact, what yoke could be imposed on men who have no need of anything? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

You are chosen to be faithful women of God in our day, to stand above pettiness, gossip, selfishness, lewdness, and all other forms of ungodliness. Recognize your divine birthright as daughters of our Heavenly Father. — Howard W. Hunter

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. — Thomas Pynchon

Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices. — Christopher Hitchens

Pettiness of mind, ignorance and presumption are the cause of stubbornness, because stubborn people only want to believe what they themselves can imagine, and they can imagine very few things. — Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

A noble heart cannot suspect in others the pettiness and malice that it has never felt. — Jean Racine

It has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the church blocked the way. — Philip Yancey

Immense France has her freaks of pettiness. That is all. To this there is nothing to say. Peoples, like planets, possess the right to an eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is identical with the persistence of the I. — Victor Hugo

Does truth lie in the everyday events, the daily incidents, in the pettiness and vulgarity most people's lives are compounded of, or does the truth have its abode in the dream it is given us to dream to flee our sad human condition? — Jorge Amado

The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he'd submerged himself in work and writing and books. — Laird Barron

More than jealousy or possessiveness pettiness kills love. — Marty Rubin