Quotes & Sayings About Smallness

Dead infants don't get urns unless you pay for them - and then they stuff crap in besides just ashes to cover the smallness. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest. — Victor Hugo

I had in my life looked at a number of beautiful starry nights, where with just two colours and the simplest of styles nature draws the grandest of pictures, and I felt the feelings of wonder and smallness that we all feel, and I got a clear sense of direction from the spectacle, most definitely, but I mean that in a spiritual sense, not in a geographic one. — Yann Martel

The fundamental difficulty in myothermic observations is the smallness of the changes involved and their rapidity. — Archibald Hill

The one, they reasoned, must have already existed in the other; for since everything that comes into being must arise either from what is or from what is not, and it is impossible for it to arise from what is not (on this point all the physicists agree), (35) they thought that the truth of the alternative necessarily followed, namely that things come into being out of existent things, i. e. out of things already present, but imperceptible to our senses because of the smallness of their bulk. — Aristotle.

It isn't the smallness of this place that bothers me. It's the grey that's worked its way into the walls. It's the stains on the carpet from some other life that came and left before ours. Bert always said he'd give me a good deal on paint but some places take burning down and rebuilding to make them shiny."
-Ed, page 10 — Cath Crowley

Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It — G.K. Chesterton

Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our accomplishments. — John Calvin

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand. — Colson Whitehead

I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why? — Emily Carr

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness. — Wilhelm Reich

If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude — Ann Voskamp

So much of life is in the smallness of moments ... but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant — Ally Condie

But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. — Gustave Flaubert

I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation! — Frances Power Cobbe

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters. — C.S. Lewis

Work to connect yourself to the allness of life
instead of identifying with the smallness of it
and you'll awaken to a greatness already living within you that is no more bothered by the little things in life than a mountain is made miserable by the rain that falls upon it. — Guy Finley

With Your sweet Soul, this soul of mine
has merged as water does with wine.
Who can part the water from the wine,
or me from You when we combine?
You have become my greater self;
how can smallness limit me?
You've taken on my being,
how shall I not take on Yours?
Forever, You have claimed me
that forever I may know You're mine. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it. — Erik Erikson

Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible. — Tana French

As Attraction is stronger in small Magnets than in great ones in proportion to their Bulk, and Gravity is greater in the Surfaces of small Planets than in those of great ones in proportion to their bulk, and small Bodies are agitated much more by electric attraction than great ones; so the smallness of the Rays of Light may contribute very much to the power of the Agent by which they are refracted. — Isaac Newton

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. — Mark Twain

The Word frees us from smallness of mind (1 Kings 4:29) and from threatening confinements (Psalm 18:19). — John Piper

The purpose of life is to be beautiful, to be bountiful, to be blissful, to be graceful and grateful. What a wonderful English word-grateful. If one is great and full, one is God. And whenever smallness faces you, you should be great, and full-full of that greatness. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness. — Chris Hedges

I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is
death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought. — Erich Fromm

I stared up in disbelief at the information my eyes fed my brain, and lost myself to the stars.
For the first time in my life I had a greater idea of how infinitesimally small our planet really is and, furthermore, how tiny and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of the vast universe.
I took a seat on a rock next to Lily and took in the moment to comprehend the vastness of everything else, and the incredible smallness of I. — Craig Stone

Those who understand the cross increasingly see their sin as God does, and therefore begin to feelabout sin as does God. We begin to mourn for and hate it. In other words, at the cross God becomes larger and we become smaller. This separation is at the heart of the fear of God. This "fear" opens God's wisdom to us because only in light of God's immensity can I see the importance of living for the right end, his glory. And only in the light of my smallness can I feel overawed by the means he used to save me, his cross. — William F. Farley

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. — Wilhelm Reich

The smallness of our desires may contribute reasonably to our wealth. — William Cobbett

I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard. — David Foster Wallace

Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn't take, their constant bickering and smallness, it's like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don't scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test. — Donald Barthelme

Disrespect is a symptom of weakness, of smallness, of an existential problem. By acting rude to me he's showing me what he really thinks of himself. — Patricia Cornwell

I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation. — Pieter Zeeman

Out there on an endless number of worlds there must be other life, other people, creatures, types of life forms, all thinking they matter. But individually, they, including himself, those on the station, and those on Earth, amounted to so little. And yet that smallness mattered so much. A tiny blip of life on a dust fragment spinning through space had all the meaning in the universe. It — C.F. Barnes

It's a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your "I" is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary "I." No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever. — Richard Rohr

For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced - in his smallness of mind - that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone - against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts - that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to G-d. — Meir Kahane

To create a space for all our words, Drawing us to listen inward and outward. We seldom notice how each day is a holy place Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, Transforming our broken fragments Into an eternal continuity that keeps us. Somewhere in us a dignity presides That is more gracious than the smallness That fuels us with fear and force, A dignity that trusts the form a day takes. So at the end of this day, we give thanks For being betrothed to the unknown And for the secret work Through which the mind of the day And wisdom of the soul become one. — John O'Donohue

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. — Philip Roth

The significance of [the fine-structure constant] goes far beyond atomic physics, however. It is the smallness of 1/137 compared to unity that enables us to treat the coupling between the electromagnetic field and a charged particle such as an electron as a small perturbation, a fact of great computational importance. [Forces of Nature] — Paul Davies

Let us not have puny thoughts. Let us think on a greater scale. Let us not have those of the future decry our smallness of concept and lack of foresight. — Adolph Murie

What almost no one understands is how every level of severity in this diagnosis is underpinned by shame. Which means we don't "fix it" by cutting people down to size and reminding folks of their inadequacies and smallness. Shame is more likely to be the cause of these behaviors, not the cure. — Brene Brown

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. — Jeanette Winterson

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our 'appropriate smallness. — John Ortberg

But still, my heart beats. It dreams. It wonders. And most dangerous of all, it hopes, because despite its smallness, this hope is still a great something — Emalynne Wilder

(Vice President) Garner has taken his personal smallness, his lack of generosity, and forged it into a political principle. He has no imagination, no convictions, and he substitutes political cynicism for social understanding. — Hamilton Basso

My best advice is to prepare daily to be bigger than your smallness. In my opinion, the reason most people stop and turn back from their dreams is because the tiny person found inside each of us wields more power than our bigger person. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

It's the abject smallness of the earth that gets you. — Stuart Roosa

If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you. — Pat Conroy

Suddenly (like walking into a light you know) you discover this: the certainty that nothing is certain, the deep relief of your own incredible smallness."
(From "Even If You Could Explain It Completely") — Adele Kenny

Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be are expressions of your longing for happiness. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Three hours later they watched the Ile de France slip out toward the flat blue distance of the open sea and sky. How astouding, Andras thought, that a ship that size could shrink to the size of a house, and then to the size of a car; the size of a desk, a book, a shoe, a walnut, a grain of rice, a grain of sand. How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic. — Julie Orringer

He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connetions - their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature. — H.P. Lovecraft

The life spills over, some days.
She cannot be at rest,
Wishes she could explode

Like that red tree -
The one that bursts into fire
All this week.

Senses her infinite smallness
But can't seize it,
Recognizes the folly of desire,

The folly of withdrawal -
Kicks at the curb, the pavement,
If only she could, at this moment,

When what she's doing is plodding
To the bus stop, to go to school,
Passing that fiery tree - if only she could

Be making love,
Be making a painting,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe

Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow flames -
She believes if she could only catch up

With the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,
Then she would be at rest -
If she could forget school,

Climb the tree,
Be the tree,
burn like that. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

If a god had made the world, might world always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile ... — Edward Bond

There's strength in observing one's miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn't smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on. — Durga Chew-Bose

Maybe I am getting too grown to want to sleep with Mama. But like a baby, I still have this smallness to my mind. I don't need her hands to convince me the world I can't see from under my blanket is real. I need her hands to do more than her words. Convince me the world I see outside it- ain't. — Connie Rose Porter

This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. — Christopher Isherwood

But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private. — Donna Tartt

Immediately upon the fall, the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness, to an exceeding smallness and contractedness ... Before, his soul was under the government of the noble principles of divine love, whereby it was enlarged to the comprehensiveness of all his fellow creatures and their welfare ... [But] sin, like some powerful astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness, and God was forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings. — Jonathan Edwards

It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants. — William Cobbett

People who are servants-humbly, honestly, and joyfully-keep getting revealed as the biggest winners. People who recognize and embrace their smallness keep getting bigger and bigger in God's eyes. It's the oddest scoring system. — John Ortberg

Universe will be a very small place once we solve our speed problem! When that day comes, no man will talk about the greatness of the universe! All greatness comes from our smallness and from our slowness! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation. — E.F. Schumacher

Why value humility in our approach to God? Because it accurately reflects the truth. Most of what I am - my nationality and mother tongue, my race, my looks and body shape, my intelligence, the century in which I was born, the fact that I am still alive and relatively healthy - I had little or no control over. On a larger scale, I cannot affect the rotation of planet earth, or the orbit that maintains a proper distance from the sun so that we neither freeze nor roast, or the gravitational forces that somehow keep our spinning galaxy in exquisite balance. There is a God and I am not it. Humility does not mean I grovel before God, like the Asian court officials who used to wriggle along the ground like worms in the presence of their emperor. It means, rather, that in the presence of God I gain a glimpse of my true state in the universe, which exposes my smallness at the same time it reveals God's greatness. — Philip Yancey

You can't force yourself to say "yes" to a bigger life. You will do it in your way. You will do it when smallness hurts too much. — Tama J. Kieves

Priests confine broad truths into narrow doctrines, because more rules mean that they have more power. Priests mistake their own prejudice for conscience and mistake what they personally fear for what should universally be feared. Priests look inward to their own small souls and try to impress that smallness on the world, when they should be looking at the greatness of the universe and trying to impress that upon their souls. Priests forget they owe everything to their gods and begin to think the world owes everything to them . . . : the cat stopped, and shook his head. :Power is a poison. — Mercedes Lackey

...like that legendary journey that begins with a single step, I had already embarked upon my first resentment.

A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. — Lionel Shriver

Fear not the phantom of death,
My Countrymen, for his greatness
And mercy will refuse to approach
Your smallness; and dread not the
Dagger, for it will decline to be
Lodged in your shallow hearts. — Kahlil Gibran

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness. — Louis L'Amour

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship? — George Eliot

Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. — Anthony Marra

He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless. — Christopher Isherwood

if somthing accurs outside wht we call the natural order,its very smallness may be more immediately unnerving than,for istance,the eclipse of the sun to a tribe without astronomy,where holy awe must override any other feeling. very small cracks in our outer sell of reason let in very cold air.

memory in a house,1973 — L.M. Boston

The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness. — Sarah Ruhl

Forgive me, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen. — Michel Faber

So many of us think ourselves into smallness, into inferiority, by thinking downward. We are held back by too much caution. We are timid about venturing. We are not bold enough ... Struck down by our own caution, our own lack of faith in ourselves and our abilities. Opportunities? There were many. But always there was risk. Do we dare? We vacillate. Time hurries by. Opportunity gone. We anguish. The years roll on. Finally, we convince ourselves that it's too late and settle for cheap imitations of life. — Og Mandino

I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened. — Ellen McLaughlin

God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular. — Pearl S. Buck

The point of life is to transcend the smallness of the finite self by identifying with things that last. — Larry Brilliant

But the irony: Don't I often want to desperately wriggle free of the confines of a small life? Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness--I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder. Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry. Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image? — Ann Voskamp

Sometimes I wish we could open ourselves up to each other as much as we do to the sky. To the smallness and the enomity. — David Levithan

But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person's view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him. — Jonathan Edwards

I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth. — Gary Shteyngart

The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company. — Pope John XXIII

Seeing oneself as a prophetic minority does not mean retreat, and it certainly does not mean victim status. It also does not confer faithfulness. Marginalization can strip away from us the besetting sins of a majoritarian viewpoint, but it can bring others as well. We must remember our smallness but also our connectedness to a global, and indeed cosmic, reality. The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive. Our story is that of a little flock and of an army, awesome with banners. Our legacy is a Christianity of persecution and proliferation, of catacombs and cathedrals. If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission. — Russell D. Moore

As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness. — Douglas Coupland

I suppose the half-breeds in Manitoba, in 1870, did not fight for two hundred forty acres of land, but it is to be understood there were two societies who treated together. One was small, but in its smallness it had its rights. The other was great, but in its greatness it had no greater rights than the rights of the small, because the right is the same for everyone. — Louis Riel

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn. — Ann Zwinger

There's greatness in smallness. Just look into the eyes of a child. — Dean Henryson

The tears in my pus-filled eyes became a thousand little crystals of ever color. Like stained-glass windows, I thought. God is with you today, Papi! In the midst of nature's monstrous elements, in the wind, the immenseness of the sea, the depth of the waves, the imposing green roof of the bush, you feel your own infinitesimal smallness, and perhaps it's here, without looking for Him, that you find God, that you touch Him with your finger. I had sensed Him at night during the thousands of hours I had spent buried alive in dank dungeons without a ray of sun; I touched Him today in a sun that would devour everything too weak to resist it. I touched God, I felt Him around me, inside me. He even whispered in my ear: You will suffer; you will suffer more. But this time I am on your side. You will be free. You will, I promise you. — Henri Charriere

If the grandeur of the aim, the smallness of the means, the immensity of the result are the three measures of a man's genius, who would dare humanly compare a great man of modern history with Muhammad? — Alphonse De Lamartine

Hate nobody; love everybody. It won't cost you anything. Love never costs anything. Love is the most selfish act. It gives you so much protection, grace, and radiance. It doesn't give you any smallness or suffering. The attitude of conscious living is to love and give grace to someone worthy of your trust. Do not seek anything from people. Give love instead, and rely on God. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

I've not conducted my life in the service of smallness. — Barry Diller

Seeing your own smallness is called insight
Honoring your own tenderness is called strength — Jonathan Star

The reason "other churches" don't grow: "Jim, the truth is, I couldn't have a real prayer meeting in my church. I'd be embarrassed at the smallness of the crowd ... " — Jim Cymbala

I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars. — Fernando Pessoa

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