James The Lesser Quotes & Sayings

Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply. — Philip Yancey

Did you just smack me in the face with a fish?"
"I did."
"Why did you just smack me in the face with a fish, Danny? — Scott Sigler

It was rather that he discovered for himself the inherent undesirability of becoming a leader; it was an act of pomp engaged in by lesser men who enjoyed bedecking themselves in feathers. He would let others use office to proclaim their feats. He would concentrate on the feat itself, doing what had to be done ... in silence. — James A. Michener

Stupidity was usually a lesser crime than vigilantism. — James S.A. Corey

[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. — James Madison

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage — James Weldon Johnson

Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. "Them's the Good Lord's words in red," he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleaned from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes. — Sara Niles

A form of speech: the lesser for the greater. — James Joyce

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court ...
-the beginning of the story A Neighbor's Landmark — M.R. James

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one. — James Richardson

Living life was like putting
the beach into a jar. The point wasn't to fit everything in;
it was to attend to the most important things first - the
big, beautiful rocks - the most valuable people and
experiences - and fit the lesser things in around them.
Otherwise, the best things might get left out — James Patterson

There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better. — Sinclair Lewis

Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none. — William James

That gut-wrenching feeling of defeat I can still feel today. Losing and God are the two things that I fear. I fear no man — Joe Calzaghe

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity. — Wendy Lesser

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then knowledge is a dish best left untouched. — Jill Archer

The music industry's actions at the time of 9/11 and since have been actions driven by patriotism in most instances, and greed and stupidity to a lesser degree. Sounds like real life doesn't it? — Ronnie James Dio

I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song. — Gavin DeGraw

Those that spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. — M.R. James

Catholic missionaries labored earnestly to convert indians. They fervently believed that God expected them to save the Indians' souls by convincing them to abandon their old sinful beliefs and to embrace the one true Christian faith. But after baptizing tens of thousands of Indians, the missionaries learned that many Indians continued to worship their own gods. Most priests came to believe that the Indians were lesser beings inherently incapable of fully understanding Christianity. — James L. Roark

He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. Give him one more chance. — Ian Fleming

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects. — Allan McLeod Cormack

Tarkin himself had discussed the need for such a weapon with the Emperor long before the end of the Clone Wars. But no one outside the Emperor knew the full history of the moonlet-sized project. Some claimed that it had begun as a Separatist weapon designed by Geonosian Archduke Poggle the Lesser's hive colony for Count Dooku and the Confederacy of Independent Systems. But if that was the case, the plans had to have somehow fallen into Republic hands before the Clone Wars ended, because the weapon's spherical shell and laser-focusing dish were already in the works by the time Tarkin first set eyes on it following his promotion to the rank of Moff - escorted to Geonosis in utmost secrecy by the Emperor himself. — James Luceno

The point wasn't to fit everything in; it was to attend to the most important things first - the big, beautiful rocks - the most valuable people and experiences - and fit the lesser things in around them. Otherwise, — James Patterson

Our Lord's descent from the holy heights of the Mount of Transfiguration was more than a physical return from greater to lesser altitudes; it was a passing from sunshine into shadow, from the effulgent glory of heaven to the mists of worldly passions and human unbelief; it was the beginning of His rapid descent into the valley of humiliation. — James E. Talmage

But cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them, that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness, involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. — James Madison

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I'm a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.
-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki — Andrew James Pritchard

College campuses are a focus of prevention efforts for meningococcal disease because of the increased incidence of the disease during adolescence and young adulthood, as well as transmission from crowded living conditions and social behaviors common among college students. — Erik Paulsen

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more. — John Adams

It was Supreme Chancellor Palpatine himself who had presented the schematic to the Strategic Advisory Cell at the second briefing. But in fact the battle station wasn't a product of Republic research and development; it had originated with the Separatists. The captive Geonosian leader, Poggle the Lesser, maintained that Count Dooku had provided Poggle's hive with the basic plans, and that the Geonosians had merely refined them. — James Luceno

Strauss's, for instance, which begins in the heavens. The artist doesn't ascend to glory, he appears in it, he already has it and the world is prepared to recognize him. Meteoric, like a comet - those are the phrases we apply, and it's true, it is a kind of burning. It makes them highly visible, and at the same time it consumes them, and it's only afterwards, when the brilliance is gone, when their bones are lying alongside those of lesser men, that one can really judge. I mean, there are famous works, renowned in antiquity, and today absolutely forgotten: books, buildings, works of art. — James Salter

Nothing stands so much in the way of the production and propagation of the great philosopher by nature as does the bad philosopher who works for the state. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law" - those wogs, barbarians, niggers - is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again," leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest. — James Baldwin

Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end. — Karel Capek

...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to deliver our blows gently. — James McWilliams