Quotation Explorer - 'Petty'

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe. - Robert Service
Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality. - Henry David Thoreau
Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
A crisis does not always appear to a policymaker as a series of dramatic events. Usually it imposes itself as an exhausting agenda of petty chores demanding both concentration and endurance. - Henry Kissinger
Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, and vanishing away.
Humans are petty monsters by nature and big brutes by social causes. - Zoran Zeković
The Master said, The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.(Analects 4.16) - Confucius
Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous. - Chuang-tzu
Modern war has decimated many a country; but it has always spawned millions of bureaucrats. They fatten on shortages and thrive on trouble. Peace can never offer such opportunities for exercising petty tyrannies, using red tape to regiment the individual and making life generally unpleasant.
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Take patiently the petty annoyances, the trifling discomforts, the unimportant losses which come upon all of us daily; for by means of these little matters, lovingly and freely accepted, you will give Him your whole heart, and win His. - Francis de Sales
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
The most fundamental problem is not that we don’t have a system to run but those with knowledge are cynically manipulating the system for petty personal desires. - Nilantha Ilangamuwa
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets. - Edward Abbey
Success is meaningless if you can't sleep at night because of harsh things said, petty secrets sharpened against hard and stony regret, just waiting to be plunged into the soft underbelly of a 'friendship.' - Margaret Cho
It is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. - J. K. Rowling
Petty minds foster petty hearts, and have the funny habit of shooting themselves in the foot. - Adriano Bulla
I do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he's nowhere near being in love. - Orhan Pamuk
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty. - Lillian Hellman
Rather than campaigning to help women, feminists today are more likely to be picking fights on Twitter, or dressing up petty grievances as proof of rampant 'sexism'. - Angela Epstein
Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics. - Vladimir Odoevsky
Fee-fi-fo-fum, you better run and hideI smell the blood of a petty little coward - Set it off
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty face from day to day. - William Shakespeare
Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different. - John Steinbeck
...and here is a bed of roses for the great king now beyond us and our petty little world. - Michelle Shen
Nice mix of Tory MPs saying this issue shouldn't be used for petty political pointscoring, & Tory MPs trying to score petty political points. - Andy Zaltzman
Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. - Richard M. Nixon
The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor. - William Feather
Two wrongs don't make a right, but neither does one. Revenge may seem petty by day, but on some nights she becomes Justice. - Ashly Lorenzana
We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community. - Haile Selassie I
From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out, and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch. - Ed Mitchell
Disclosing one's "deep, dark secrets" makes them no less deep or dark or secret than any other petty flaw. - Alan de Jager
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. - Sir Winston Churchill
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. - Henry David Thoreau
True evil is always petty and often incompetent. - Claire Chilton
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. - Winston Churchill
And deep down, she felt like maybe she didn't deserve it-that she belonged with the petty thieves and guys who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast - Jennifer McMahon
I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it. - Sophie Scholl
Does the fact that I can no longer remember my own phone number indicate my growing feebleness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concentrate on the important and the critical. - Don Norman
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