amoret ::: n. --> An amorous girl or woman; a wanton.
A love knot, love token, or love song. (pl.) Love glances or love tricks.
A petty love affair or amour.
Bayinnaung. (r. 1551-1581). Burmese king and third monarch of the Taungoo dynasty. Bayinnaung was the brilliant general and brother-in-law of King Tabinshwehti (r. 1531-1550), who first expanded the territory of the city-state Taungoo to create the Taungoo empire (1531-1752). Tabinshwehti sought to reunify the various kingdoms and petty states that had once been vassals to the first Burmese empire of Pagan (1044-1287). To this end, he followed a policy of conciliation toward vanquished peoples, especially the Mon, whose brand of reformed Sinhalese THERAVADA Buddhism he favored. Bayinnaung continued this ecumenical religious policy even while he aggressively extended the borders of his empire eastward through military campaigns launched in the name of the Buddha. In a series of campaigns, he subdued the Shan tribes, the Lao kingdom of Vientiane, and the Thai kingdoms of AYUTHAYA and Chiangmai, creating briefly Southeast Asia's largest polity. Throughout these territories, he built pagodas and distributed copies of PALI scriptures. In the Shan hills, he compelled the local warlords to abandon human sacrifice and convert to Buddhism, requiring them to provide material support to missionary monks dispatched from his capital. While officially promoting the reformed Buddhism of the Mon, Bayinnaung remained tolerant of local Buddhist custom and allowed independent monastic lineages to continue. He maintained close diplomatic relations with the Buddhist kingdom of Sri Lanka and offered munificent gifts to its palladium, the TOOTH RELIC at Kandy. In 1560, when the Portuguese captured the relic, Bayinnaung sought to ransom it for 300,000 ducats, only to have his emissaries witness its destruction in a public ceremony ordered by the archbishop of Goa. Legend says that the tooth miraculously escaped and divided itself into two, one of which was returned to Kandy, while the other was gifted to Bayinnaung, who enshrined it in the Mahazedi pagoda at his capital Pegu. The religious policies of Bayinnaung and his successors greatly influenced the character of Burmese Buddhism and society. Royal patronage of Buddhist scholarship coupled with the proliferation of village monastery schools fostered a common Buddhist identity among the populace that crossed ethnic boundaries and facilitated a degree of peasant literacy that was unusual in premodern societies.
beadle ::: v. --> A messenger or crier of a court; a servitor; one who cites or bids persons to appear and answer; -- called also an apparitor or summoner.
An officer in a university, who precedes public processions of officers and students.
An inferior parish officer in England having a variety of duties, as the preservation of order in church service, the chastisement of petty offenders, etc.
"Behind this petty instrumental action of the human will there is something vast and powerful and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater than our individual choice. And in this total Truth, or even beyond and behind it, there is something that determines all results; its presence and secret knowledge keep up steadily in the process of Nature a dynamic, almost automatic perception of the right relations, the varying or persistent necessities, the inevitable steps of the movement. There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
“Behind this petty instrumental action of the human will there is something vast and powerful and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater than our individual choice. And in this total Truth, or even beyond and behind it, there is something that determines all results; its presence and secret knowledge keep up steadily in the process of Nature a dynamic, almost automatic perception of the right relations, the varying or persistent necessities, the inevitable steps of the movement. There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” The Synthesis of Yoga
BELIEF is absolute, unreasonable emotional conviction, unamenable to correction or reason. Everybody has his petty beliefs about almost any absurdity, and this is because man is unable to truly know anything but definitively established facts in the visible world. In contrast, assumption, is preliminary, valid only until one has come to know, in amenable to rational arguments, and desires correction. K 1.2.11
petty ::: 1. Of small importance; trivial. 2. Secondary in importance or rank; subordinate. pettier.
pettychaps ::: n. --> Any one of several species of small European singing birds of the subfamily Sylviinae, as the willow warbler, the chiff-chaff, and the golden warbler (Sylvia hortensis).
petty ::: superl. --> Little; trifling; inconsiderable; also, inferior; subordinate; as, a petty fault; a petty prince.
pettywhin ::: n. --> The needle furze. See under Needle.
cazic ::: n. --> A chief or petty king among some tribes of Indians in America.
chandlerly ::: a. --> Like a chandler; in a petty way.
chiff-chaff ::: n. --> A species of European warbler (Sylvia hippolais); -- called also chip-chap, and pettychaps.
Chuang Tzu: (Chuang Chou, Chuing Chi-yuan, between 399 and 295 B.C.) The second greatest Taoist, was once a petty officer in his native state, Meng (in present Honan), in the revolutionary and romantic south. A little-travelled scholar, he declined a premiership in favor of freedom and peace. His love of nature, his vivid imagination and subtle logic make his works masterpieces of an exquisite style. Only the first seven and a few other chapters of Chuang Tzu (English transl. by H. (Giles and by Feng Yu-lan) are authentic. -- W.T.C.
Class: (Socio-economic) Central in Marxian social theory (see Historical materialism) the term class signifies a group of persons having, in respect to the means of production, such a common economic relationship as brings them into conflict with other groups having a different economic relationship to these means. For example, slaves and masters, serfs and lords, proletariat and capitalists are considered pairs of classes basic respectively to ancient, medieval and modern economies. At the same time many subordinate classes or sub-classes are distinguished besides or within such primary ones. In "'Revolution and Counter-Revolution" for instance, Marx applies the term class to the following groups, feudal nobility, wealthy bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, small farmers, proletariat, agricultural laborers, subdividing the class of small farmers into two further "classes", peasant free-holders and feudal tenants. The conflict of interests involved has many manifestations, both economic and non-economic, all of which are considered part of the class struggle (q.v.) -- J.M.S.
cockswain ::: n. --> The steersman of a boat; a petty officer who has charge of a boat and its crew.
Defects of others ::: it is the petty ego in each that likes to discover and talk about the defects of others. The ego has no right to judge them, because it has not the right view or the
dinar ::: n. --> A petty money of accounts of Persia.
An ancient gold coin of the East.
Divine and surrender more and more one’s ordinary persona! ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of actions so that the Divine may lake up cveiything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and prefe- rences into a divine Light and a greater knowledge, our petty persona] troubled blind stumbling will into a great calm, tran- quil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feel- ings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obs- cure outcome. If one insists on one's own ideas and reasonfogs, the greater Light and Knowledge cannot come or else is marked and obstructed in the coming at every step by a lower inter- ference ,* if one insists on one’s desires and fancies, that great luminous Will and Force cannot act in its own true power— for you ask it to be the servant of your desires ; if one refuses to give up one’s petty ways of feeling, eternal Love and supreme
dwarfish ::: a. --> Like a dwarf; below the common stature or size; very small; petty; as, a dwarfish animal, shrub.
Embezzlement - Theft of money or property from a business by an individual in whose custody it has been placed. An example is a bookkeeper who steals from the petty cash fund.
^emo^'e the cause ; for the cause is always in oneself, perhaps a vital defect somewhere, a wrong movement indulged or a petty desire causing a recoil, sometimes by its satisfaction, sometimes by its disappointment.
FAULT-FINDING. ::: The lower vital takes a mean and petty pleasure in picking out the faults of others and thereby one hampers both one’s own progress and that of the subject of the criticism.
filchingly ::: adv. --> By pilfering or petty stealing.
fiscal ::: a. --> Pertaining to the public treasury or revenue. ::: n. --> The income of a prince or a state; revenue; exhequer.
A treasurer.
A public officer in Scotland who prosecutes in petty criminal cases; -- called also procurator fiscal.
fopling ::: n. --> A petty fop.
godhead ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the Godhead is all that is universe and all that is in the universe and all that is more than the universe. The Gita lays stress first on his supracosmic existence. For otherwise the mind would miss its highest goal and remain turned towards the cosmic only or else attached to some partial experience of the Divine in the cosmos. It lays stress next on his universal existence in which all moves and acts. For that is the justification of the cosmic effort and that is the vast spiritual self-awareness in which the Godhead self-seen as the Time-Spirit does his universal works. Next it insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body. For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic. Finally, it insists at great length on the divine manifestation in all things in the universe and affirms the derivation of all that is from the nature, power and light of the one Godhead.” *Essays on the Gita
Godhead ::: “… the Godhead is all that is universe and all that is in the universe and all that is more than the universe. The Gita lays stress first on his supracosmic existence. For otherwise the mind would miss its highest goal and remain turned towards the cosmic only or else attached to some partial experience of the Divine in the cosmos. It lays stress next on his universal existence in which all moves and acts. For that is the justification of the cosmic effort and that is the vast spiritual self-awareness in which the Godhead self-seen as the Time-Spirit does his universal works. Next it insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body. For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic. Finally, it insists at great length on the divine manifestation in all things in the universe and affirms the derivation of all that is from the nature, power and light of the one Godhead.” Essays on the Gita
grammaticaster ::: n. --> A petty grammarian; a grammatical pedant or pretender.
grammatist ::: n. --> A petty grammarian.
headborrow ::: n. --> The chief of a frankpledge, tithing, or decennary, consisting of ten families; -- called also borsholder, boroughhead, boroughholder, and sometimes tithingman. See Borsholder.
A petty constable.
henpeck ::: v. t. --> To subject to petty authority; -- said of a wife who thus treats her husband. Commonly used in the past participle (often adjectively).
huckster ::: n. --> A retailer of small articles, of provisions, and the like; a peddler; a hawker.
A mean, trickish fellow. ::: v. i. --> To deal in small articles, or in petty bargains.
IGNORANCE. ::: Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life.
This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth.
Sevenfold Ignorance ::: If we look at this Ignorance in which ordinarily we live by the very circumstance of our separative existence in a material, ip a spatial and temporal universe, wc see that on its obscurer side it reduces itself, from whatever direction we look at or approach it, into the fact of a many- sided self-ignorance. We are Ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming ; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence — that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self ; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becom- ing in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence — that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming ; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-sclf — that is the tViTid, \Vie egoistic ignorance. V/c aie ignorant of oat eteinai becoming in Time ; we take this Uttle life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space for our beginning, our middle and our end, — that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is super-conscient, sub- conscient, intraconscient, circumcooscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence — that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming ; we take the mind or life or body or any two or all three tor our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to deter- mine sovereignly by its emergence from their operations, — that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoy- ment of our life in the world ; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.
Imprest System- A reimbursement system whereby the total petty cash payment is reimbursed to the original sum in hand.
In Freemasonry, King Solomon is especially honored as the builder of the Temple and as the first of the Three Grand Masters — the other two being Hiram, King of Tyre, and Hiram Abif — all of whom were concerned with the building of the Temple. The evil ending of Solomon’s life, according to the Biblical account, is almost overlooked in Masonic ritual and literature. In the Jewish Encyclopedia (“Solomon”), according to one writer, Solomon is represented as “the wise king par excellence”; and “in Arabic literature, Solomon is spoken of as ‘the messenger of God’ ”; according to another writer in the same work, however, “a critical sifting of the sources leaves the picture of a petty, Asiatic despot, remarkable, perhaps, only for a love of luxury and for polygamous inclinations.” Only by interpreting the Bible esoterically can we arrive at the truth regarding King Solomon; and such interpretation fully corroborates the characterization of “the wise king par excellence”; and fully supports both Masonic ritual and tradition in regarding King Solomon as the first and chief of the Three Grand Masters.
insignificant ::: 1. Too small to be important. 2. Unimportant, trifling, or petty; of no consequence, influence or distinction. 3. Without meaning. insignificance.
INTEGRAL YOGA ::: This yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness or Divine Supramental Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ānanda. But for that, the surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to the Higher Consciousnessis indispensable, since it is too difficult for the mortal human being to pass by its own effort beyond mind to a Supramental Consciousness in which the dynamism is no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call to such a change should enter into this yoga.
Aim of the Integral Yoga ::: It is not merely to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.
Conditions of the Integral Yoga ::: This yoga can only be done to the end by those who are in total earnest about it and ready to abolish their little human ego and its demands in order to find themselves in the Divine. It cannot be done in a spirit of levity or laxity; the work is too high and difficult, the adverse powers in the lower Nature too ready to take advantage of the least sanction or the smallest opening, the aspiration and tapasyā needed too constant and intense.
Method in the Integral Yoga ::: To concentrate, preferably in the heart and call the presence and power of the Mother to take up the being and by the workings of her force transform the consciousness. One can concentrate also in the head or between the eye-brows, but for many this is a too difficult opening. When the mind falls quiet and the concentration becomes strong and the aspiration intense, then there is the beginning of experience. The more the faith, the more rapid the result is likely to be. For the rest one must not depend on one’s own efforts only, but succeed in establishing a contact with the Divine and a receptivity to the Mother’s Power and Presence.
Integral method ::: The method we have to pursue is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform Our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sādhaka of the sādhana* as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sādhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid, - the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for the weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It” makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a Succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.
There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga.
Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such as it stands organised by our past evolution and without rejecting anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change. Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some elements or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefathers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in Nature, in the other it becomes swift and selfconscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.
Key-methods ::: The way to devotion and surrender. It is the psychic movement that brings the constant and pure devotion and the removal of the ego that makes it possible to surrender.
The way to knowledge. Meditation in the head by which there comes the opening above, the quietude or silence of the mind and the descent of peace etc. of the higher consciousness generally till it envelops the being and fills the body and begins to take up all the movements.
Yoga by works ::: Separation of the Purusha from the Prakriti, the inner silent being from the outer active one, so that one has two consciousnesses or a double consciousness, one behind watching and observing and finally controlling and changing the other which is active in front. The other way of beginning the yoga of works is by doing them for the Divine, for the Mother, and not for oneself, consecrating and dedicating them till one concretely feels the Divine Force taking up the activities and doing them for one.
Object of the Integral Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine’s sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine.
Principle of the Integral Yoga ::: The whole principle of Integral Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother all the transcendent light, power, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ānanda of the Supramental Divine.
Central purpose of the Integral Yoga ::: Transformation of our superficial, narrow and fragmentary human way of thinking, seeing, feeling and being into a deep and wide spiritual consciousness and an integrated inner and outer existence and of our ordinary human living into the divine way of life.
Fundamental realisations of the Integral Yoga ::: The psychic change so that a complete devotion can be the main motive of the heart and the ruler of thought, life and action in constant union with the Mother and in her Presence. The descent of the Peace, Power, Light etc. of the Higher Consciousness through the head and heart into the whole being, occupying the very cells of the body. The perception of the One and Divine infinitely everywhere, the Mother everywhere and living in that infinite consciousness.
Results ::: First, an integral realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sāyujya mukti, by which it becomes free even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the sālokya mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda ; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the divine, sādharmya mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect harmony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there is attained the complete release from ego and identification in being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. In integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ānanda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ānanda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
Sādhanā of the Integral Yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation, mantras or others, but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by a self-opening to an Influence, to the Divine Power above us and its workings, to the Divine Presence in the heart and by the rejection of all that is foreign to these things. It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self-opening can come.
The yoga does not proceed by upadeśa but by inner influence.
Integral Yoga and Gita ::: The Gita’s Yoga consists in the offering of one’s work as a sacrifice to the Divine, the conquest of desire, egoless and desireless action, bhakti for the Divine, an entering into the cosmic consciousness, the sense of unity with all creatures, oneness with the Divine. This yoga adds the bringing down of the supramental Light and Force (its ultimate aim) and the transformation of the nature.
Our yoga is not identical with the yoga of the Gita although it contains all that is essential in the Gita’s yoga. In our yoga we begin with the idea, the will, the aspiration of the complete surrender; but at the same time we have to reject the lower nature, deliver our consciousness from it, deliver the self involved in the lower nature by the self rising to freedom in the higher nature. If we do not do this double movement, we are in danger of making a tamasic and therefore unreal surrender, making no effort, no tapas and therefore no progress ; or else we make a rajasic surrender not to the Divine but to some self-made false idea or image of the Divine which masks our rajasic ego or something still worse.
Integral Yoga, Gita and Tantra ::: The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishvara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it.
The Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishvari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it.
This yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulfilment of the object of the yoga.
Integral Yoga and Hatha-Raja Yogas ::: For an integral yoga the special methods of Rajayoga and Hathayoga may be useful at times in certain stages of the progress, but are not indispensable. Their principal aims must be included in the integrality of the yoga; but they can be brought about by other means. For the methods of the integral yoga must be mainly spiritual, and dependence on physical methods or fixed psychic or psychophysical processes on a large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher action. Integral Yoga and Kundalini Yoga: There is a feeling of waves surging up, mounting to the head, which brings an outer unconsciousness and an inner waking. It is the ascending of the lower consciousness in the ādhāra to meet the greater consciousness above. It is a movement analogous to that on which so much stress is laid in the Tantric process, the awakening of the Kundalini, the Energy coiled up and latent in the body and its mounting through the spinal cord and the centres (cakras) and the Brahmarandhra to meet the Divine above. In our yoga it is not a specialised process, but a spontaneous upnish of the whole lower consciousness sometimes in currents or waves, sometimes in a less concrete motion, and on the other side a descent of the Divine Consciousness and its Force into the body.
Integral Yoga and other Yogas ::: The old yogas reach Sachchidananda through the spiritualised mind and depart into the eternally static oneness of Sachchidananda or rather pure Sat (Existence), absolute and eternal or else a pure Non-exist- ence, absolute and eternal. Ours having realised Sachchidananda in the spiritualised mind plane proceeds to realise it in the Supramcntal plane.
The suprcfhe supra-cosmic Sachchidananda is above all. Supermind may be described as its power of self-awareness and W’orld- awareness, the world being known as within itself and not out- side. So to live consciously in the supreme Sachchidananda one must pass through the Supermind.
Distinction ::: The realisation of Self and of the Cosmic being (without which the realisation of the Self is incomplete) are essential steps in our yoga ; it is the end of other yogas, but it is, as it were, the beginning of outs, that is to say, the point where its own characteristic realisation can commence.
It is new as compared with the old yogas (1) Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven and Nir- vana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object.
If there is a descent in other yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent — the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new coosdousness attain- ed by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life ; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life.
(2) Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic acbievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing of a Power of consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
(3) Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods, but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive.
Integral Yoga and Patanjali Yoga ::: Cilia is the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse etc.
It is these that in the Patanjali system have to be stilled altogether so that the consciousness may be immobile and go into Samadhi.
Our yoga has a different function. The movements of the ordinary consciousness have to be quieted and into the quietude there has to be brought down a higher consciousness and its powers which will transform the nature.
Kizil. [alt. Qizil]. A complex of some 230 Buddhist caves from the ancient Central Asian kingdom of KUCHA, located about seventy kilometers northwest of the present-day city of Kucha on the bank of the Muzat River in Baicheng County, in the Uighur Autonomous Region of China's Xinjiang province. The Kizil caves represent some of the highest cultural achievements of the ancient Indo-European petty kingdom of Kucha, an important oasis along the northern SILK ROAD connecting China to the bastions of Buddhist culture in the greater Indian cultural sphere. Construction at the site perhaps began as early as the third century CE and lasted for some five hundred years, until the region succumbed in the ninth century to Islamic control. Given the importance of the Kucha region in the development and transmission of Buddhism along the ancient Silk Road, scholars believe that the DUNHUANG murals were influenced by the art of Kizil. Although no statuary remains at the Kizil site, many wall paintings are preserved depicting events from the life of the Buddha; indeed, Kizil is second only to the Mogao caves of Dunhuang in the number of wall paintings it contains. The layout of many of the intact caves includes a central pillar, forming both a front chamber and a rear chamber, which often contains a PARINIRVĀnA scene. The first modern studies of the site were conducted in the early twentieth century by the German explorers Alfred Grünwedel and Alfred von Le Coq. The nearby site of Kumtura contains over a hundred caves, forty of which contain painted murals or inscriptions. Other cave sites near Kucha include Subashi, Kizilgaha, and Simsim.
knack ::: v. i. --> To crack; to make a sharp, abrupt noise to chink.
To speak affectedly. ::: n. --> A petty contrivance; a toy; a plaything; a knickknack.
A readiness in performance; aptness at doing something; skill; facility; dexterity.
knavery ::: n. --> The practices of a knave; petty villainy; fraud; trickery; a knavish action.
Roguish or mischievous tricks.
Kumārajīva. (C. Jiumoluoshi; J. Kumaraju; K. Kumarajip 鳩摩羅什) (344-409/413). The most influential translator of Buddhist texts into Chinese. He is regarded by tradition as the founder of the Chinese SAN LUN ZONG or "Three Treatises" branch of the MADHYAMAKA school of MAHĀYĀNA philosophy. According to his hagiography, Kumārajīva was born in the Central Asian petty kingdom of KUCHA, where he was related to the royal family on his mother's side. In his youth, he studied SARVĀSTIVĀDA doctrine in Kashmir but was later converted to MAHĀYĀNA at the Central Asian oasis town of Kashgar by the monk BUDDHAYAsAS. When the Chinese general Lü Guang conquered Kucha in 383, he took Kumārajīva back with him to Liangzong near the Chinese outpost of DUNHUANG as a prize, only to lose the eminent scholar-monk to Yaoxing (r. 394-416) when the Latter Qin ruler reconquered the region in 401. During his eighteen years as a hostage, Kumārajīva apparently learned to speak and read Chinese and seems to have been one of the first foreign monks able to use the language fluently. A year later in 402, Yaoxing invited Kumārajīva to the capital of Chang'an, where he established a translation bureau under Kumārajīva's direction that produced some of the most enduring translations of Buddhist texts made in Chinese. The sheer number and variety of the translations made by Kumārajīva and his team were virtually unmatched until XUANZANG (600/602-664 CE). Translations of some seventy-four texts, in 384 rolls, are typically attributed to Kumārajīva, including various sutras, such as the PANCAVIMsATISĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ, SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, and VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, and important sāstras such as the MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ, sATAsĀSTRA, Dvādasamukhasāstra, and the DAZHIDU LUN. Because Kumārajīva was one of the first foreign monks to have learned Chinese well, he produced translations that were readily comprehensible as Chinese, and his translations remain the most widely read in East Asia of any translator's; indeed, where there are multiple translations of a scripture, it is almost inevitably Kumārajīva's that remains part of the living tradition. The accuracy of his translations is said to be attested by the fact that his tongue remained unburned during his cremation. Along with his correspondences with the monk LUSHAN HUIYUAN found in the DASHENG DAYI ZHANG, these translations laid the foundation for Mahāyāna thought, and especially Madhyamaka philosophy, in China. His many famous disciples include DAOSHENG, SENGZHAO, Daorong, and Sengrui, who are known collectively as the "four sages."
Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obs- cured flame that cannot bum upwards to heaven.
light-fingered ::: a. --> Dexterous in taking and conveying away; thievish; pilfering; addicted to petty thefts.
literator ::: n. --> One who teaches the letters or elements of knowledge; a petty schoolmaster.
A person devoted to the study of literary trifles, esp. trifles belonging to the literature of a former age.
A learned person; a literatus.
mesquin [French] ::: petty.
micrology ::: n. --> That part of science which treats of microscopic objects, or depends on microscopic observation.
Attention to petty items or differences.
miff ::: n. --> A petty falling out; a tiff; a quarrel; offense. ::: v. t. --> To offend slightly.
Mind and the Divine Sakti ::: Be on your guard and do not try to understand and judge the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves to subject even the things that arc beyond it to its own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge. The human mind shut in the prison of its half-lit obscurity cannot follow the many-sided freedom of the steps of the Divine Shakti. The rapidity and com- plexity of her vision and action outrun its stumbling comprehen- sion ; the measures of her movement are not its measures. Open rather your soul to her and be content to feel her with the psychic nature and see her with the psychic vision that alone make a straight response to the Truth.
movement ::: 1. The act or an instance of moving; a change in place or position. A particular manner of moving. 2. Usually, movements, actions or activities, as of a person or a body of persons. ::: movement"s, movements, many-movemented.
Sri Aurobindo: "When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm." *The Life Divine
". . . the purest, freest form of insight into existence as it is shows us nothing but movement. Two things alone exist, movement in Space, movement in Time, the former objective, the latter subjective.” The Life Divine
"The world is a cyclic movement (samsâra ) of the Divine Consciousness in Space and Time. Its law and, in a sense, its object is progression; it exists by movement and would be dissolved by cessation of movement. But the basis of this movement is not material; it is the energy of active consciousness which, by its motion and multiplication in different principles (different in appearance, the same in essence), creates oppositions of unity and multiplicity, divisions of Time and Space, relations and groupings of circumstance and Causality. All these things are real in consciousness, but only symbolic of the Being, somewhat as the imaginations of a creative Mind are true representations of itself, yet not quite real in comparison with itself, or real with a different kind of reality.” The Upanishads*
movement ::: “When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm.” The Life Divine
nag ::: n. --> A small horse; a pony; hence, any horse.
A paramour; -- in contempt. ::: v. t. & i. --> To tease in a petty way; to scold habitually; to annoy; to fret pertinaciously.
"Next it [the Gita] insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body. For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic.” Essays on the Gita
“Next it [the Gita] insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body. For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic.” Essays on the Gita
nipper ::: n. --> One who, or that which, nips.
A fore tooth of a horse. The nippers are four in number.
A satirist.
A pickpocket; a young or petty thief.
The cunner.
A European crab (Polybius Henslowii).
nufūs) the individual, the petty self, personal identity, ego; mind; human being; soul, breath (of life). (used in compound terms such as nafs-kushi, which means ego-killing)
OBVIOUSLY we must leave far behind us the current theory of Karma and its shallow attempt to justify the ways of the Cosmic Spirit by forcing on them a crude identity with the summary notions of law and justice, the crude and often savagely primitive methods of reward and punishment, lure and deterrent dear to the surface human mind. There is here a more authentic and spiritual truth at the base of Nature’s action and a far less mechanically calculable movement. Here is no rigid and narrow ethical law bound down to a petty human significance, no teaching of a child soul by a mixed system of blows and lollipops, no unprofitable wheel of a brutal cosmic justice automatically moved in the traces of man’s ignorant judgments and earthy desires and instincts. Life and rebirth do not follow these artificial constructions, but a movement spiritual and intimate to the deepest intention of Nature. A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul’s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law—or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception, — the truth of Karma.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 20, 13 Page: 128, 427
"One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one"s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great, calm, tranquil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome.” Letters on Yoga
“One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one’s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great, calm, tranquil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome.” Letters on Yoga
opuscule ::: n. --> A small or petty work.
paltry ::: utterly worthless; petty, insignificant, trifling; contemptible, despicable; insultingly small.
peccadillo ::: n. --> A slight trespass or offense; a petty crime or fault.
peddling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Peddle ::: a. --> Hawking; acting as a peddler.
Petty; insignificant.
pester ::: v. t. --> To trouble; to disturb; to annoy; to harass with petty vexations.
To crowd together in an annoying way; to overcrowd; to infest.
petit ::: a. --> Small; little; insignificant; mean; -- Same as Petty.
pettichaps ::: n. --> See Pettychaps.
pettifogger ::: n. --> A lawyer who deals in petty cases; an attorney whose methods are mean and tricky; an inferior lawyer.
pettifog ::: v. i. --> To do a petty business as a lawyer; also, to do law business in a petty or tricky way. ::: v. t. --> To advocate like a pettifogger; to argue trickily; as, to pettifog a claim.
pettily ::: adv. --> In a petty manner; frivolously.
pettiness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being petty or paltry; littleness; meanness.
Petty cash- A small amount of money held in reserve (normally used to purchase items of small value where a cheque or other form of payment is not suitable).
Petty cash slip - A document used to record petty cash payments where an original receipt was not obtained (sometimes called a petty cash voucher).
picayunish ::: a. --> Petty; paltry; mean; as, a picayunish business.
pickery ::: n. --> Petty theft.
pigpecker ::: n. --> The European garden warbler (Sylvia, / Currica, hortensis); -- called also beccafico and greater pettychaps.
pigwidgeon ::: n. --> A cant word for anything petty or small. It is used by Drayton as the name of a fairy.
pilferer ::: n. --> One who pilfers; a petty thief.
pilfer ::: v. i. --> To steal in small quantities, or articles of small value; to practice petty theft. ::: v. t. --> To take by petty theft; to filch; to steal little by little.
pilfery ::: n. --> Petty theft.
pimping ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Pimp ::: a. --> Little; petty; pitiful.
Puny; sickly.
politicaster ::: n. --> A petty politician; a pretender in politics.
popeling ::: n. --> A petty or deputy pope.
An adherent of the pope.
princekin ::: n. --> A petty prince; a princeling.
princelet ::: n. --> A petty prince.
princeling ::: n. --> A petty prince; a young prince.
puisne ::: a. --> Later in age, time, etc.; subsequent.
Puny; petty; unskilled.
Younger or inferior in rank; junior; associate; as, a chief justice and three puisne justices of the Court of Common Pleas; the puisne barons of the Court of Exchequer. ::: n.
puisny ::: a. --> Puisne; younger; inferior; petty; unskilled.
puny ::: superl. --> Imperfectly developed in size or vigor; small and feeble; inferior; petty. ::: n. --> A youth; a novice.
pusil ::: a. --> Very small; little; petty.
quartermaster ::: n. --> An officer whose duty is to provide quarters, provisions, storage, clothing, fuel, stationery, and transportation for a regiment or other body of troops, and superintend the supplies.
A petty officer who attends to the helm, binnacle, signals, and the like, under the direction of the master.
questmonger ::: n. --> One who lays informations, and encourages petty lawsuits.
regulus ::: n. --> A petty king; a ruler of little power or consequence.
The button, globule, or mass of metal, in a more or less impure state, which forms in the bottom of the crucible in smelting and reduction of ores.
A star of the first magnitude in the constellation Leo; -- called also the Lion&
Revolving fund – Is a fund where the money that is used it is replaced An example would be the petty cash fund under the imprest method.
royalet ::: n. --> A petty or powerless king.
Sarvāstivāda. (T. Thams cad yod par smra ba; C. Shuo yiqieyou bu/Sapoduo bu; J. Setsuissaiubu/Satsubatabu; K. Sorilch'eyu pu/Salbada pu 一切有部/薩婆多部). In Sanskrit, "Teaching that All Exists," one of the most influential of all the mainstream (that is, non-Mahāyāna) schools of Indian Buddhism, named after its doctrine that all conditioned factors (DHARMA) continue to exist (sarvam asti) throughout all three time periods (TRIKĀLA) of past, present, and future. The Sarvāstivāda had one of the most elaborate ABHIDHARMA canons (ABHIDHARMAPItAKA) in all of Buddhism and the school was especially known for its distinctive and influential dharma theory. The Sarvāstivāda identified seventy-five dharmas that the school held were substantially existent (dravyasat) and endowed with intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA): viz., the five sense organs (INDRIYA), the five sense objects, nonmanifest materiality (AVIJNAPTIRuPA), mind (CITTA), forty-six mental concomitants (CAITTA), fourteen conditioned forces dissociated from thought (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA), and three unconditioned (ASAMSKṚTA) factors. Although the conditioned dharmas always existed, they still were impermanent and thus still moved between temporal periods because of specific "forces dissociated from thought" (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA): the "compounded characteristics" (SAMSKṚTALAKsAnA, CATURLAKsAnA) of origination (JĀTI), continuance (STHITI), "senescence" or decay (JARĀ), and "desinence," viz., extinction (ANITYATĀ). In the Sarvāstivāda treatment of causality, these four characteristics were forces that exerted real power over compounded objects, escorting those objects along the causal path until the force "desinence" finally extinguished them; this rather tortured explanation was necessary in order to explain how factors that the Sarvāstivāda school posited continued to exist in all three time periods yet still appeared to undergo change. Even after enlightenment, those dharmas still continued to exist, although they were then effectively "canceled out" through the force of the "nonanalytical suppressions" (APRATISAMKHYĀNIRODHA), which kept in check the production of all types of dharmas, ensuring that they remained positioned in future mode forever and were never again able to arise in the present. This distinctive dharma theory of the Sarvāstivāda was probably what the MADHYAMAKA philosopher NĀGĀRJUNA was reacting against in his clarion call that all dharmas were devoid of intrinsic existence (NIḤSVABHĀVA) and thus characterized by emptiness (suNYATĀ). The Sarvāstivāda school's elaborate abhidharma was also the inspiration for the still more intricate "Mahāyāna abhidharma" of the YOGĀCĀRA school (see BAIFA), which drew much of its classification scheme and many of its specific dharmas directly from the Sarvāstivāda. In describing the path of the ARHAT, the Sarvāstivāda set forth a five-stage path system (PANCAMĀRGA, of accumulation/equipment, preparation, vision, cultivation, and no further learning) for the ARHAT and asserted that the BODHISATTVA practices six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) in the course of his training. This five-stage path was also adopted by the Yogācāra in its own theory of the bodhisattva MĀRGA. The Sarvāstivāda developed an elaborate view of the Buddha and the events of his life, as represented in the famous LALITAVISTARA. In its view of death and rebirth, Sarvāstivāda accepted the reality of the "intermediate state" (ANTARĀBHAVA) between rebirths, which in the Sarvāstivāda analysis could range from instantaneous rebirth, to rebirth after a week, indeterminate duration, and as many as forty-nine days; the latter figure seems to have become dominant in later traditions, including Mahāyāna, after it was adopted by the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA and the YOGĀCĀRABHuMI. The Sarvāstivāda was one of the main subgroups of the STHAVIRANIKĀYA (School of the Elders), which split with the MAHĀSĀMGHIKA in the first centuries following the Buddha's death. The Sarvāstivāda evolved as one of the three major subdivisions of the Sthaviranikāya, perhaps as early as a century or two following the first schism, but certainly no later than the first century CE. Sarvāstivāda was one of the most enduring and widespread of the mainstream Buddhist schools. It was especially important in northern India in such influential Buddhist regions as KASHMIR and GANDHĀRA and eventually along the SILK ROAD in some of the Indo-European petty kingdoms of the Tarim River basin, such as KUCHA. Its geographical location along the major overland trade routes also led to it becoming the major mainstream school known to East Asian Buddhism. The Sarvāstivāda school includes an important subgroup, the VAIBHĀsIKA ("Followers of the Vibhāsā"), who were the ĀBHIDHARMIKAs associated with the Sarvāstivāda school, especially in Kashmir in northwestern India but also in Gandhāra and even BACTRIA. Because these masters considered their teachings to be elaborations of doctrines found in the encyclopedic Sarvāstivāda abhidharma treatise, the ABHIDHARMAMAHĀVIBHĀsĀ, they typically referred to themselves as Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāsika or simply Vaibhāsika. This group was later also distinguished from the MuLASARVĀSTIVĀDA ("Root Sarvāstivāda"), a distinction that may have originated in a dispute over VINAYA recensions between the northwestern Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāsika school in Kashmir and Gandhāra and the Sarvāstivāda school of MATHURĀ in north-central India. The Mulasarvāstivāda is best known for its massive MuLASARVĀSTIVĀDA VINAYA, one of the oldest and by far the largest (by up to a factor of four) of the major monastic codes (see VINAYAPItAKA) of the mainstream Buddhist schools; because of its eclectic content, it functioned almost as a proto-canon. The Mulasarvāstivāda vinaya is the monastic code still followed today in the Tibetan traditions of Buddhism. See also SAUTRĀNTIKA.
satrap ::: n. --> The governor of a province in ancient Persia; hence, a petty autocrat despot.
scribbler ::: n. --> One who scribbles; a petty author; a writer of no reputation; a literary hack.
A scribbling machine.
sectiuncle ::: n. --> A little or petty sect.
sharking ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Shark ::: n. --> Petty rapine; trick; also, seeking a livelihood by shifts and dishonest devices.
shark ::: v. t. & i. --> Any one of numerous species of elasmobranch fishes of the order Plagiostomi, found in all seas.
A rapacious, artful person; a sharper.
Trickery; fraud; petty rapine; as, to live upon the shark. ::: v. t.
sheepbiter ::: n. --> One who practices petty thefts.
sheepbite ::: v. i. --> To bite or nibble like a sheep; hence, to practice petty thefts.
shirk ::: v. t. --> To procure by petty fraud and trickery; to obtain by mean solicitation.
To avoid; to escape; to neglect; -- implying unfaithfulness or fraud; as, to shirk duty. ::: v. i. --> To live by shifts and fraud; to shark.
snippety ::: a. --> Ridiculously small; petty.
spite ::: n. --> Ill-will or hatred toward another, accompanied with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart; petty malice; grudge; rancor; despite.
Vexation; chargrin; mortification. ::: v. t. --> To be angry at; to hate.
squib ::: a. --> A little pipe, or hollow cylinder of paper, filled with powder or combustible matter, to be thrown into the air while burning, so as to burst there with a crack.
A kind of slow match or safety fuse.
A sarcastic speech or publication; a petty lampoon; a brief, witty essay.
A writer of lampoons.
A paltry fellow.
squireling ::: n. --> A petty squire.
steward ::: n. --> A man employed in a large family, or on a large estate, to manage the domestic concerns, supervise other servants, collect the rents or income, keep accounts, and the like.
A person employed in a hotel, or a club, or on board a ship, to provide for the table, superintend the culinary affairs, etc. In naval vessels, the captain&
Suspense account- A temporary account used to force a trial balance to balance if there is only a small discrepancy (or if an account's balance is simply wrong, and you don't know why). A typical example would be a small error in petty cash. In this case a transfer would be made to a suspense account to balance the cash account. Once the person knows what happened to the money, a transfer entry will be made in the journal to credit or debit the suspense account back to zero and debit or credit the correct account.
tease ::: v. t. --> To comb or card, as wool or flax.
To stratch, as cloth, for the purpose of raising a nap; teasel.
To tear or separate into minute shreds, as with needles or similar instruments.
To vex with importunity or impertinence; to harass, annoy, disturb, or irritate by petty requests, or by jests and raillery; to plague.
tetrarch ::: a. --> A Roman governor of the fourth part of a province; hence, any subordinate or dependent prince; also, a petty king or sovereign.
Four.
— the Grace of the Divine Mother and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender. Let your faith be pure, cancfid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by arabidoo, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for petty satisfaction of the lower nature is a low and smokc-obscurcd flame that cannot bum upwards to heaven. Regard your life as given you only for the divine work and to help in the dirine manifestation.
::: **"This sraddhâ — the English word faith is inadequate to express it — is in reality an influence from the supreme Spirit and its light a message from our supramental being which is calling the lower nature to rise out of its petty present to a great self-becoming and self-exceeding.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“This sraddhâ—the English word faith is inadequate to express it—is in reality an influence from the supreme Spirit and its light a message from our supramental being which is calling the lower nature to rise out of its petty present to a great self-becoming and self-exceeding.” The Synthesis of Yoga
tindal ::: n. --> A petty officer among lascars, or native East Indian sailors; a boatswain&
Tocharian. Generic term for Tocharian A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian) and Tocharian B (West Tocharian, or Kuchean), two related, but probably mutually unintelligible, Indo-European languages in which many Central Asian Buddhist texts from the Tarim River Basin along the SILK ROAD were composed. The languages were written in a variant of the BRAHMĪ script, which was first deciphered in 1908 by the German Indologists Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling. Virtually all the extant Tocharian Buddhist manuscripts are translations of earlier Indian materials, many in bilingual editions that speeded the deciphering process. The languages were unknown until SIR MARC AUREL STEIN (1862-1943) discovered their manuscripts during his expeditions into the Tarim Basin. The name Tocharian derives from the Greek term for the people of this region. Texts in Tocharian A have been discovered in the oasis petty-kingdom of TURFAN and in the vicinity of Shorchuk/Yanqi. Tocharian B texts range much more widely across the Tarim Basin, but are especially prominent in the KUCHA region. Of the two languages, Tocharian B is the older of the two, with manuscripts ranging in age from the fifth through eighth centuries CE, and the most diverse linguistically. Tocharian A is more consistent linguistically and its manuscripts are later than those of its counterpart. The languages may have been spoken as late as the middle of the ninth century, when both became extinct; their peoples assimilated into the Uighurs who now populate the region in present-day Chinese Xinjiang.
toparchy ::: n. --> A small state, consisting of a few cities or towns; a petty country governed by a toparch; as, Judea was formerly divided into ten toparchies.
Transcendent, The ::: On the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent,— transcendent not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself,—against which the universe seems to stand out like a petty picture against an immeasurable background. That supports the universal activity,—or perhaps only tolerates it; It embraces Life with Its vastness,—or else rejects it from Its infinitude.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 20
trivial ::: a. --> Found anywhere; common.
Ordinary; commonplace; trifling; vulgar.
Of little worth or importance; inconsiderable; trifling; petty; paltry; as, a trivial subject or affair.
Of or pertaining to the trivium. ::: n.
triviality ::: the quality of being unimportant and petty or frivolous.
Turfan. Central Asian petty kingdom located along the northern track of the SILK ROAD through the Takla Makhan desert, in what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang. This and other oasis kingdoms in Central Asia served as crucial stations in the transmission of Buddhism from India to China. Buddhism had a strong presence in Turfan from the seventh century through the fourteenth century, with important texts being translated, cave temples built, and works of art produced. The oldest physical manuscripts of the Indian Buddhist tradition are manuscripts in the KHAROstHĪ script (see GĀNDHĀRĪ), dated to the fourth to fifth centuries CE, which were discovered at Turfan. These and other discoveries were made by a team of German researchers led by Albert Grünwedel and Albert von Le Coq in a series of expeditions between 1902 and 1914. Turfan was also the locus where TOCHARIAN A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian) was used; manuscripts in Tocharian A date primarily from the eighth century. Western expeditions into the area led to the discovery of tens of thousands of textual fragments, in a variety of languages and scripts, which came to be known collectively as the "Turfan Collection." These texts belong to a variety of genres and schools, but the SARVĀSTIVĀDA is prevalent, leading to the conclusion that the school was prominent in Turfan. As with other locations in this region, the dry desert air helped to preserve the various materials on which these texts were written. In Turfan were found translations of Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist texts, as well as some original Buddhist poetry and lay literature. Also discovered in Turfan were the Bezaklik rock caves, dating from around the ninth century, which contain the painted images of thousands of buddhas. Albert von le Coq removed many of these and transported them to Berlin, where many were destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War. Although this area was a melting pot of Indian, Chinese, and Central Asian traditions, Buddhist activity in the Turfan region saw a sharp rise in the ninth century, when the Uighur people moved from Mongolia into the Turfan region and many Turfan texts are recorded in the Uighur script. Buddhism seems to have survived in this region until as late as the fifteenth century.
understrapper ::: n. --> A petty fellow; an inferior agent; an underling.
vain ::: superl. --> Having no real substance, value, or importance; empty; void; worthless; unsatisfying.
Destitute of forge or efficacy; effecting no purpose; fruitless; ineffectual; as, vain toil; a vain attempt.
Proud of petty things, or of trifling attainments; having a high opinion of one&
Validate-1. to attest to the correctness and reliability of a financial item. A validity review or test is required by the accountant to satisfy the legitimacy of the item. An example of validation is the examination and approval of an employee's expense request form by a supervisor. Another example is the counting of petty cash to see that it conforms to the amount in the financial records. Or 2. to make something legal or effective. An example is signing one's class="d-title" name to a bill of sale, which closes the deal.
vexed ::: adj. 1. Irritated; annoyed; troubled persistently, especially with petty annoyances. sound-vexed, time-vexed. v. 2. Disturbed, troubled, esp. by motion; stirred up; tossed about.
whigling ::: n. --> A petty or inferior Whig; -- used in contempt.
whirligig ::: n. --> A child&
KEYS (10k)
9 Sri Aurobindo
3 The Mother
1 Zhuangzi
1 Marcus Aurelius
1 J. Tauler: Institutions
1 Jiddu Krishnamurti
1 Carlyle
1 Carl Sagan
1 Aleister Crowley?
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
150 Tom Petty
21 Richard Petty
20 William Shakespeare
16 Heather W Petty
16 Anonymous
15 William Petty
15 Lori Petty
14 Victor Hugo
14 Sherrilyn Kenyon
13 Edgar Albert Guest
10 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
9 Henry David Thoreau
9 George Eliot
9 Anton Chekhov
8 Sri Aurobindo
8 Friedrich Nietzsche
8 Adria Petty
7 Warren Zanes
7 Tom Robbins
6 Mark Manson
1:Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious." ~ Zhuangzi, #KEYS
2:Even his petty world man cannot rule.
We fear, we blame; life wantons her own way, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
3:Silence, the great empire of silence, loftier than the stars, profounder than the kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all the rest is petty. ~ Carlyle, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
4:To waste one's time seeking the satisfaction of one's petty desires is sheer folly. True happiness is possible only when one has found the Divine. 19 February 1972 ~ The Mother, Some Answers From The Mother, #KEYS
5:In the narrow nether centre's petty parts
Its childish game of daily dwarf desires
Was changed into a sweet and boisterous play,
A romp of little gods with life in Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
6:There is a kingship which exceeds the king.
For Vuthsa unworthy, Vuthsa captive, slain,
This is not captive, this cannot be slain.
It far transcends our petty human forms,
It is a nation's greatness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act III,#KEYS
7:358. Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma,#KEYS
8:If to thee nothing appears superior to the Genius which dwells in thee and has made itself master of his own tendencies and watches over his own thoughts and if beside him thoufindest that all the rest is petty and of no worth, then to no other thing give lodging. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
9:The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hestitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 169, #KEYS
10:Man is in truth a compound of eternity and time. The more he is attached to temporal things and rests in them, the farther he grows from things eternal; they seem to him petty, just as great objects appear small when we see them from a distance, and he can never attain to real peace. ~ J. Tauler: Institutions, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
11:To practise black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires.
.
I have been accused of being a 'black magician'. No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practise it. ~ Aleister Crowley?,#KEYS
12:The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
13:Invitation:::
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the Lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
14:So, it is a basic function of education to help you to find out what you really love to do, so that you can give your whole mind and heart to it, because that creates human dignity, that sweeps away mediocrity, the petty bourgeois mentality. That is why it is very important to have the right teachers, the right atmosphere, so that you will grow up with the love which expresses itself in what you are doing. Without this love your examinations, your knowledge, your capacities, your position and possessions are just ashes, they have no meaning; without this love your actions are going to bring more wars, more hatred, more mischief and destruction. All this may mean nothing to you, because outwardly you are still very young, but I hope it will mean something to your teachers-and also to you, somewhere inside. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #KEYS
15:the second aid, the need for effort and aspiration, utsaha :::
The development of the experience in its rapidity, its amplitude, the intensity and power of its results, depends primarily, in the beginning of the path and long after, on the aspiration and personal effort of the sadhaka. The process of Yoga is a turning of the human soul from the egoistic state of consciousness absorbed in the outward appearances and attractions of things to a higher state in which the Transcendent and Universal can pour itself into the individiual mould and transform it. The first determining element in the siddhi is, therefore, the intensity of the turning, the force which directs the soul inward. The power of aspiration of the heart, the force of the will, the concentration of the mind, the perseverance and determination of the applied energy are the measure of that intensity. The ideal sadhaka should be able to say in the Biblical phrase, 'My zeal for the Lord has eaten me up.' It is this zeal for the Lord, -utsaha, the zeal of the whole nature for its divine results, vyakulata, the heart's eagerness for the attainment of the Divine, - that devours the ego and breaks up the petty limitations ...
So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained identity, sayujya, the element of personal effort must normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself, the sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids,#KEYS
16:What do we understand by the term "chance"? Chance can only be the opposite of order and harmony. There is only one true harmony and that is the supramental - the reign of Truth, the expression of the Divine Law. In the Supermind, therefore, chance has no place. But in the lower Nature the supreme Truth is obscured: hence there is an absence of that divine unity of purpose and action which alone can constitute order. Lacking this unity, the domain of lower Nature is governed by what we may call chance - that is to say, it is a field in which various conflicting forces intermix, having no single definite aim. Whatever arises out of such a rushing together of forces is a result of confusion, dissonance and falsehood - a product of chance. Chance is not merely a conception to cover our ignorance of the causes at work; it is a description of the uncertain mele ́e of the lower Nature which lacks the calm one-pointedness of the divine Truth. The world has forgotten its divine origin and become an arena of egoistic energies; but it is still possible for it to open to the Truth, call it down by its aspiration and bring about a change in the whirl of chance. What men regard as a mechanical sequence of events, owing to their own mental associations, experiences and generalisations, is really manipulated by subtle agencies each of which tries to get its own will done. The world has got so subjected to these undivine agencies that the victory of the Truth cannot be won except by fighting for it. It has no right to it: it has to gain it by disowning the falsehood and the perversion, an important part of which is the facile notion that, since all things owe their final origin to the Divine, all their immediate activities also proceed directly from it. The fact is that here in the lower Nature the Divine is veiled by a cosmic Ignorance and what takes place does not proceed directly from the divine knowledge. That everything is equally the will of God is a very convenient suggestion of the hostile influences which would have the creation stick as tightly as possible to the disorder and ugliness to which it has been reduced. So what is to be done, you ask? Well, call down the Light, open yourselves to the power of Transformation. Innumerable times the divine peace has been given to you and as often you have lost it - because something in you refuses to surrender its petty egoistic routine. If you are not always vigilant, your nature will return to its old unregenerate habits even after it has been filled with the descending Truth. It is the struggle between the old and the new that forms the crux of the Yoga; but if you are bent on being faithful to the supreme Law and Order revealed to you, the parts of your being belonging to the domain of chance will, however slowly, be converted and divinised. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #KEYS
17:A God's Labour
I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
My jewelled dreams of you.
I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.
But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
The roots were not deep enough.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river's song,
A home for the deathless fire.
I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began.
For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;
Hoping its lusts to win,
He harbours within him a grisly Elf
Enamoured of sorrow and sin.
The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame
And from all things glad and pure;
Only by pleasure and passion and pain
His drama can endure.
All around is darkness and strife;
For the lamps that men call suns
Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life
Cast by the Undying Ones.
Man lights his little torches of hope
That lead to a failing edge;
A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,
An inn his pilgrimage.
The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose.
All that was found must again be sought,
Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
Through vistas of fruitless lives.
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will.
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
"Thy hope is Chimera's head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.
"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
And bound to life's iron doom?
"This earth is ours, a field of Night
For our petty flickering fires.
How shall it brook the sacred Light
Or suffer a god's desires?
"Come, let us slay him and end his course!
Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
And the curb of his wide white peace."
But the god is there in my mortal breast
Who wrestles with error and fate
And tramples a road through mire and waste
For the nameless Immaculate.
A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate."
I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
On the Dragon's outspread wings.
I left the surface gauds of mind
And life's unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body's alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.
I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart
And heard her black mass' bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.
Above me the dragon murmurs moan
And the goblin voices flit;
I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,
I have walked in the bottomless pit.
On a desperate stair my feet have trod
Armoured with boundless peace,
Bringing the fires of the splendour of God
Into the human abyss.
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.
Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here burn;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yearn
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness' end.
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, 534,#KEYS
18:[the sevenfold ignorance and the integral knowledge:]
We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,-that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, -that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,-that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,-that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,-that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,-that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,-that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.
Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean [1] the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; [2] the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; [3] the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; [4] the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; [5] the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; [6] the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; [7] the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.
But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 680-683 [T1],#KEYS
19:The Supreme Discovery
IF WE want to progress integrally, we must build within our conscious being a strong and pure mental synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life.
Each individual should build up this mental synthesis according to his own tendencies and affinities and aspirations. But if we want it to be truly living and luminous, it must be centred on the idea that is the intellectual representation symbolising That which is at the centre of our being, That which is our life and our light.
This idea, expressed in sublime words, has been taught in various forms by all the great Instructors in all lands and all ages.
The Self of each one and the great universal Self are one. Since all that is exists from all eternity in its essence and principle, why make a distinction between the being and its origin, between ourselves and what we place at the beginning?
The ancient traditions rightly said:
"Our origin and ourselves, our God and ourselves are one."
And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity.
Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to reascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge and all his intuition cannot take him one step forward in this infinite; neither does he know that what he wants to attain, what he believes to be so far from him, is within him.
For how could he know anything of the origin until he becomes conscious of this origin in himself?
It is by understanding himself, by learning to know himself, that he can make the supreme discovery and cry out in wonder like the patriarch in the Bible, "The house of God is here and I knew it not."
That is why we must express that sublime thought, creatrix of the material worlds, and make known to all the word that fills the heavens and the earth, "I am in all things and all beings."When all shall know this, the promised day of great transfigurations will be at hand. When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For, "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."
This indeed is the central thought epitomising all others, the thought which should be ever present to our remembrance as the sun that illumines all life.
That is why I remind you of it today. For if we follow our path bearing this thought in our hearts like the rarest jewel, the most precious treasure, if we allow it to do its work of illumination and transfiguration within us, we shall know that it lives in the centre of all beings and all things, and in it we shall feel the marvellous oneness of the universe.
Then we shall understand the vanity and childishness of our meagre satisfactions, our foolish quarrels, our petty passions, our blind indignations. We shall see the dissolution of our little faults, the crumbling of the last entrenchments of our limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds.
The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it.
In order to do that, he must become conscious of this Divine Presence within him. Some individuals must undergo a real apprenticeship in order to achieve this: their egoistic being is too all-absorbing, too rigid, too conservative, and their struggles against it are long and painful. Others, on the contrary, who are more impersonal, more plastic, more spiritualised, come easily into contact with the inexhaustible divine source of their being.But let us not forget that they too should devote themselves daily, constantly, to a methodical effort of adaptation and transformation, so that nothing within them may ever again obscure the radiance of that pure light.
But how greatly the standpoint changes once we attain this deeper consciousness! How understanding widens, how compassion grows!
On this a sage has said:
"I would like each one of us to come to the point where he perceives the inner God who dwells even in the vilest of human beings; instead of condemning him we would say, 'Arise, O resplendent Being, thou who art ever pure, who knowest neither birth nor death; arise, Almighty One, and manifest thy nature.'"
Let us live by this beautiful utterance and we shall see everything around us transformed as if by miracle.
This is the attitude of true, conscious and discerning love, the love which knows how to see behind appearances, understand in spite of words, and which, amid all obstacles, is in constant communion with the depths.
What value have our impulses and our desires, our anguish and our violence, our sufferings and our struggles, all these inner vicissitudes unduly dramatised by our unruly imagination - what value do they have before this great, this sublime and divine love bending over us from the innermost depths of our being, bearing with our weaknesses, rectifying our errors, healing our wounds, bathing our whole being with its regenerating streams?
For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself, conceals and forgets herself in the heart of all beings and things; she never accuses, she neither judges nor curses nor condemns, but works unceasingly to perfect without constraint, to mend without reproach, to encourage without impatience, to enrich each one with all the wealth he can receive; she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything, excuse and pardon everything, hope and prepare for everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.
How beautiful is this humble role of servant, the role of all who have been revealers and heralds of the God who is within all, of the Divine Love that animates all things....
And until we can follow their example and become true servants even as they, let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love; let us offer Him, without reserve, this marvellous instrument, our physical organism. He shall make it yield its utmost on every plane of activity.
To achieve this total self-consecration, all means are good, all methods have their value. The one thing needful is to persevere in our will to attain this goal. For then everything we study, every action we perform, every human being we meet, all come to bring us an indication, a help, a light to guide us on the path.
Before I close, I shall add a few pages for those who have already made apparently fruitless efforts, for those who have encountered the pitfalls on the way and seen the measure of their weakness, for those who are in danger of losing their self-confidence and courage. These pages, intended to rekindle hope in the hearts of those who suffer, were written by a spiritual worker at a time when ordeals of every kind were sweeping down on him like purifying flames.
You who are weary, downcast and bruised, you who fall, who think perhaps that you are defeated, hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows, he has shared them, he has suffered like you from the ills of the earth; like you he has crossed many deserts under the burden of the day, he has known thirst and hunger, solitude and abandonment, and the cruellest of all wants, the destitution of the heart. Alas! he has known too the hours of doubt, the errors, the faults, the failings, every weakness.
But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace.
You who weep, who suffer and tremble, who dare not expect an end to your ills, an issue to your pangs, behold: there is no night without dawn and the day is about to break when darkness is thickest; there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild, no tear that it will not dry one day, no storm that is not followed by its shining triumphant bow; there is no snow that it does not melt, nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring.
And for you too, there is no affliction which does not bring its measure of glory, no distress which cannot be transformed into joy, nor defeat into victory, nor downfall into higher ascension, nor solitude into radiating centre of life, nor discord into harmony - sometimes it is a misunderstanding between two minds that compels two hearts to open to mutual communion; lastly, there is no infinite weakness that cannot be changed into strength. And it is even in supreme weakness that almightiness chooses to reveal itself!
Listen, my little child, you who today feel so broken, so fallen perhaps, who have nothing left, nothing to cover your misery and foster your pride: never before have you been so great! How close to the summits is he who awakens in the depths, for the deeper the abyss, the more the heights reveal themselves!
Do you not know this, that the most sublime forces of the vasts seek to array themselves in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's yearning with the most royal light!
If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve - for there indeed the divine love and the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness: then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!
You are walking in the depths of night: then gather the priceless treasures of the night. In bright sunshine, the ways of intelligence are lit, but in the white luminosities of the night lie the hidden paths of perfection, the secret of spiritual riches.
You are being stripped of everything: that is the way towards plenitude. When you have nothing left, everything will be given to you. Because for those who are sincere and true, from the worst always comes the best.
Every grain that is sown in the earth produces a thousand. Every wing-beat of sorrow can be a soaring towards glory.
And when the adversary pursues man relentlessly, everything he does to destroy him only makes him greater.
Hear the story of the worlds, look: the great enemy seems to triumph. He casts the beings of light into the night, and the night is filled with stars. He rages against the cosmic working, he assails the integrity of the empire of the sphere, shatters its harmony, divides and subdivides it, scatters its dust to the four winds of infinity, and lo! the dust is changed into a golden seed, fertilising the infinite and peopling it with worlds which now gravitate around their eternal centre in the larger orbit of space - so that even division creates a richer and deeper unity, and by multiplying the surfaces of the material universe, enlarges the empire that it set out to destroy.
Beautiful indeed was the song of the primordial sphere cradled in the bosom of immensity, but how much more beautiful and triumphant is the symphony of the constellations, the music of the spheres, the immense choir that fills the heavens with an eternal hymn of victory!
Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being; since he could commune no more with the transcendent love, that love offered itself in a holocaust and chose each terrestrial being, each human self as its dwelling-place and sanctuary.
That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!
In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory! 28 April 1912 ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, The Supreme Discovery,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 2:Don't sweat the petty things and don't let the sweaty things. ~ george-carlin, @wisdomtrove 3:We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 4:I've found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 5:A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 6:Fill your brain with giant dreams so it has no space for petty pursuits. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 7:I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 8:A brave man scorns to quarrel once a day; Like Hectors in at every petty fray. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 9:I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 10:I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 11:The demands that a great man makes are on himself; those of a petty man are upon others. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 12:Cultivated people foster what is good in others, not what is bad. Petty people do the opposite. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 13:Never get into the petty habit of measuring yourself worth against other people's net worth. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 14:Exemplary persons are steadfast in the face of adversity, while petty persons are engulfed by it. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 15:The Master said, The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 16:The art of giving orders is not to try to rectify the minor blunders and not be swayed by petty doubts. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 17:To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 18:Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 19:We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 20:It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 21:Stay free of petty jealousies, live by no man's code, and hold your judgment for yourself, lest you wind up on this road. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 22:Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 23:Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 24:A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 25:Is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day in human life? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 26:It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 27:The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 28:The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 29:There is two types of Larceny, Petty and Grand. They are supposed to be the same in the eyes of the law, but judges always put a little extra on you for Petty, which is kind of a fine for stupidness. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 30: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, @wisdomtrove 31:The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove 32:It often seems as though the silent, humble servant is secretly wiser and more discerning than the haughty master; yet through dutiful (and sometimes insecure) surrender he continues to serve and carry out petty orders in loyal acquiesce. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 33: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. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 34:... "And for God's sake, never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people's net-worth. As Yogi Ramen preached: & 35:Never be petty. Do not feed resentments against anyone. I prefer good-hearted sinners to so called good people who are intolerant and devoid of compassion. Being spiritual is to have an open mind, understand and forgive, and be friends with everyone. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 36:Great suffering brings with it the power of great endurance. When sorrow is deepest all the forces of patience and courage are banded together to do their duty. So while we are cowards before petty troubles, great sorrows make us brave by rousing our truer manhood. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 37:In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 38:I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things... it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 39:It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political talents can assert themselves only in rare cases, and it is even rarer that the specifically political qualifications survive the petty maneuvers of party politics with its demands for plain salesmanship. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 40:Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 41:Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 42:To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 43:... maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 44:I have found it very important in my own life to try to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me. (Finding My Way Home) ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 45:Never will I pray for the material things of the world. I am not calling to a servant to bring me food. I am not ordering an innkeeper to provide me with room. Never will I seek delivery of gold, love, good health, petty victories, fame, success, or happiness. Only for guidance will I pray, that I may be shown the way to acquire these things, and my prayer will always be answered. ~ og-mandino, @wisdomtrove 46:An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor." ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 47:A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 48:Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions or elegant enjoyments. The greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 49:I want to have a lasting experience with God. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I loose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to leave in this world and enjoy its delights, but also elevate myself to God. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 50:Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it be after his heart. But the intelligent man is he who can convert every work into one that suits his taste. No work is petty. Everything in this world is like a banyan seed, which, though appearing tiny as a mustard seed, has yet the gigantic banyan tree latent with it. He indeed is intelligent who notices this and succeeds in making all work truly great. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 51:All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 52:So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern... Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 53:Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn't seem to get out. You almost didn't want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 54:Even if it be true that all these shapes, and forms, and appearances, and phenomena, and personalities, be but illusion as compared to the inner Reality— what of it? Are you not then assured that the Spirit within Yourself is the Spirit of the Absolute— that the Reality within You is the Reality of the Absolute— that you ARE, because the Absolute IS, and cannot be otherwise? Does not the Peace, and Calm, and Security, and Bliss that comes to you with this Realization, far more than counterbalance the petty nothings that you have discarded? ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 55:In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves. That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 56:A third of the people who rush to psychiatrists for help could probably cure themselves if they could only do as Margaret Yates did: get interested in helping others. My idea? No, that is approximately what Carl Jung said. And he ought to know—if anybody does. He said: About one third of my patients are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. To put it another way, they are trying to thumb a ride through life—and the parade passes them by. So they rush to a psychiatrist with their petty, senseless, useless lives. Having missed the boat, they stand on the wharf, blaming everyone except themselves and demanding that the world cater to their self-centered desires. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 57:The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man. Colin Wilson ~ emanuel-swedenborg, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:A rebel without a clue. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
2:Last dance with Mary Jane ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
3:Petty laws breed great crimes. ~ Ouida, #NFDB
4:If you don't run, you rust. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
5:I got my own way of praying. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
6:The waiting is the hardest part. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
7:Some grow young, some grow cold... ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
8:You belong somewhere you feel free. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
9:Even the losers get lucky sometimes! ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
10:I quit driving, I'm not retired. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
11:You believe what you want to believe ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
12:Guilt is petty; I am above guilt. ~ Susan Cheever, #NFDB
13:certainly strip him of his petty ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
14:Money is the best rule of commerce. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
15:A petty kind of power is still power. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
16:I'm barely prolific and incredibly lazy. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
17:My secrets are petty but humiliating. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
18:If you're not getting older, you're dead. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
19:At twilight time the smog makes a rainbow. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
20:But not me, baby, I've got you to save me. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
21:How about a cheer for all those bad girls! ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
22:Humiliation is the sport of the petty ~ Helen Simonson, #NFDB
23:Humiliation is the sport of the petty, ~ Helen Simonson, #NFDB
24:If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin' ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
25:I'll stand my ground and I won't back down. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
26:I've always had a great love for the blues. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
27:I would never put my songs in a commercial. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
28:There's a freeway running through the yard. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
29:Yeah, the world would swing if I were king. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
30:Most things I worry about never happen anyway. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
31:Honey, don't walk out, I'm too drunk to follow. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
32:Let's get to the point Let's roll another joint ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
33:We could move catalog, if he'd only die quicker. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
34:He don't wanna change, what don't need to change. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
35:I have never been comfortable being the front man. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
36:I'm not exactly a guy who makes new friends easily. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
37:Let your words be petty and actions plenty! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
38:I can't crawl any further. You never crawled for me. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
39:I'm always having fun. Playing is fun. Music is fun. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
40:Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
41:I know I'm petty and I don't care.
- Kenji ~ Tahereh Mafi,#NFDB
42:I think it's important to always offer something new. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
43:Never put a question mark where God puts a Period ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
44:At the end of the day, you're just phonograph records. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
45:Directing is genderless. The only thing...I love men. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
46:"Great wisdom is generous;petty wisdom is contentious." ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
47:I love the music. I'm never, ever tired of playing it. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
48:The poison came in liquid, she was naked all the time. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
49:Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB
50:Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
51:I love history, doesn't matter what era, I'm fascinated. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
52:Petty things don't bother me as much as they used to. ~ Rebecca Lobo, #NFDB
53:Don’t sweat the petty stuff and don’t pet the sweaty stuff. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
54:argument often turns petty, regardless of its import. ~ Robert J Crane, #NFDB
55:Never fear being a petty fool it means you ain't dying ~ Timothy Spall, #NFDB
56:Gonna wind it up on my guitar. Gonna make that silver sing. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
57:I ain't really sure, but it seems I remember the good times ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
58:I like to bond over mutual hatreds and petty grievances. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
59:Redemption comes to those who wait, forgiveness is the key. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
60:Don't be afraid and don't let the past affect your present. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
61:Whatever you're looking for, don't come around here no more. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
62:If 20,000 people start to sing, you tend to go along with it. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
63:When you are actually powerful, you don't need to be petty. ~ Jon Stewart, #NFDB
64:Good manners,’ said Emerson, ‘are made up of petty sacrifices. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
65:Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
66:Vexations may be petty, but they are vexations still. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
67:Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty. ~ Lillian Hellman, #NFDB
68:Beware of those who attribute petty instructions to God. ~ Abdul Sattar Edhi, #NFDB
69:Bit by bit, whatever you see to be petty becomes plenty. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
70:She grew up hard and she grew up fast, in the age of television. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
71:With such and the like fopperies were petty brains troubled. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
72:You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
73:You get in there, you get the job done and you get the hell out. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
74:Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
75:I'd rather be called King than other things I've been called. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
76:Excuse me if I have/some place in my mind/where I go time to time. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
77:Good loving is hard to find, you got lucky babe, when I found you. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
78:Good manners,” said Emerson, “are made up of petty sacrifices. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
79:Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court. ~ Adam Haslett, #NFDB
80:We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
81:Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
82:I don’t have time to worry about something as petty as what I look like ~ Adele, #NFDB
83:I've found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them. ~ Marilyn Monroe, #NFDB
84:There goes your freedom of choice, there goes the last human voice. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
85:Contentions fierce, Ardent, and dire, spring from no petty cause. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
86:I closed my eyes, held my breath and then everything went black. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
87:Sometimes fighting petty was better than not fighting at all, ~ Alyxandra Harvey, #NFDB
88:Where the sky begins, the horizon ends, despite the best intentions. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
89:Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON ~ Brett McKay, #NFDB
90:The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord. ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
91:Sometimes life, will get you down, break your heart, steal your crown. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
92:Any time you're making a living at what you love to do, you're blessed. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
93:The constant winds of petty appetite dissipate the power of response. ~ George Sand, #NFDB
94:If you ain't trying to cheat a little, you ain't likely to win much. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
95:I'm an old rock and roll buff. I love Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. ~ Nick Carter, #NFDB
96:I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
97:Of such things, petty annoyance and aimless thrusts, is history made. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
98:Running down a dream... working on a mystery... going wherever it leads. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
99:Even modern wars are fought like revenge tales from some petty grievance. ~ Jay Roach, #NFDB
100:Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
101:So I started out for God knows where. I guess I'll know when I get there. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
102:I always liked the idea of the guitar - because cowboys played the guitar. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
103:If there are 10 people there, two or three are going to recognize you. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
104:The trade of banks is the buying and selling of interest and exchange. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
105:You need eagles wings to get over things that make no sense in this world. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
106:Buy me a drink, sing me a song; take me as I come, cause I can't stay long. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
107:Fill your brain with giant dreams so it has no space for petty pursuits. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
108:Free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others. ~ Elizabeth Moon, #NFDB
109:I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
110:Killing without reason or gain was a petty pleasure of sadistic fools. ~ Drew Karpyshyn, #NFDB
111:Our natural rights come from an authority beyond the petty rule of man. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
112:She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis, loves horses, and her boyfriend, too. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
113:You cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
114:Lord, please watch over all these lost children born to chase the hurricane. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
115:Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
116:Great necessity elevates man, petty necessity casts him down ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
117:I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings. Coming down is the hardest thing. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
118:In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
119:She wasn't speaking to me - in the juvenile, petty sense of the phrase. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
120:Eddie waited 'til he finished high school, he went to Hollywood, got a tattoo. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
121:I've got a room at the top of the world tonight. I can see everything tonight. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
122:I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
123:No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
124:The petty-minded fools here think surgery and butchery are the same thing. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
125:There was rock and roll across the dial, when I think of her it makes me smile. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
126:We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
127:A brave man scorns to quarrel once a day; Like Hectors in at every petty fray. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
128:Party loyalty lowers the greatest men to the petty level of the masses. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
129:God, it's so painful when something that's so close is still so far out of reach. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
130:I have turned down a lot of money for things that would have made me feel cheesy. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
131:The object of all good literature is to purge the soul of its petty troubles. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
132:The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
133:I didn't miss out on a family life because of racing. I had one because of it. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
134:I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery, #NFDB
135:I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
136:In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow ~ Richard Wagner, #NFDB
137:When I first started racing, my father said, "Win the race as slow as you can. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
138:But you know what?" Neil said before the reporters could respond. "That's petty. ~ Nora Sakavic, #NFDB
139:I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
140:Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman's quality. ~ Pierre Corneille, #NFDB
141:Maybe that’s how one becomes a killer. Not with decision, but with acceptance. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
142:They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries. ~ Tim Sanders, #NFDB
143:Everything about you is a surprise."
"That's what it means to be a stranger. ~ Heather W Petty,#NFDB
144:No one wants to quit when he's losing and no one wants to quit when he's winning. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
145:Petty fortune telling was the field of the wishful. Witches dealt in blood and bones. ~ Ginn Hale, #NFDB
146:You believe what you want to believe. You see, you don't have to live like a refugee. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
147:cav·il v. [intrans.] make petty or unnecessary objections: they caviled at the cost. ~ Erin McKean, #NFDB
148:If I'd had to work at Taco Bell I'd have still been out at night trying to play music. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
149:Oh yeah, alright, take it easy baby, make it last all night. She was an American Girl. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
150:Word For The Day PICAYUNE (PIK uh yoon’) adj. Trivial or petty, small or small-minded. ~ Deb Baker, #NFDB
151:They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries.”72 ~ Tim Sanders, #NFDB
152:We are a wretched, petty species, and we have been given power to destroy ourselves with. ~ Wildbow, #NFDB
153:Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; ~ Georgina Guthrie, #NFDB
154:Never underestimate the human capacity for stupid, illogical, and petty behaviour. ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
155:The demands that a great man makes are on himself; those of a petty man are upon others. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
156:The man of petty ambition if invited to dinner will be eager to be set next his host. ~ Theophrastus, #NFDB
157:Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
158:You can’t let the petty shit stop you from being who you are. And getting what you want. ~ G A Aiken, #NFDB
159:Bring me a girl, they're always the best. You put 'em on stage, and you have 'em undress. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
160:Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman's quality.
~ Pierre Corneille,#NFDB
161:I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
162:My mama was a rocker way back in fifty-three, buys them old records that they sell on TV. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
163:When a person cares for another, he wants to know everything about her all at once. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
164:I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty. ~ John Mellencamp, #NFDB
165:We drove for the sheer fun of driving because there wasn't that much money to be made. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
166:A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
167:The petty small things Eve saw every day drove her far closer to the brink than the large. ~ Kate Quinn, #NFDB
168:The petty man wants to use God for himself; the ambitious man wants God to use him for God. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
169:A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
170:In a world that keeps on pushing me around, I'm gonna stand my ground, and I won't back down. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
171:It’s like Tom Waits said,” Petty remarks. “‘I’m an artist, but I’m still in show business. ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
172:Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty face from day to day. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
173:A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
174:How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts? ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
175:I’d love to have an opportunity to tie the greats in Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt Sr. ~ Jimmie Johnson, #NFDB
176:It's always been great to be onstage. It's really effortless up there. It's not a lot of work. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
177:It just seems to useless to have to work so hard, and nothing ever really seem to come from it. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
178:It wasn’t a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part. ~ David Quammen, #NFDB
179:Most men only commit great crimes because of their scruples about petty ones. ~ Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, #NFDB
180:Never get into the petty habit of measuring yourself worth against other people's net worth. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
181:No man pays double or twice for the same thing, forasmuch as nothing can be spent but once. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
182:The greatest joy a petty soul can taste is to dupe a great soul and catch it in a snare. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
183:Barbara Parkins was so rude and petty all of the time. I just found her behavior to be so silly. ~ Lana Wood, #NFDB
184:God is jealous for your heart, not because he is petty or insecure, but because he loves you. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
185:I'm tired of screwing up. I'm tired of being down. I'm tired of myself. I'm tired of bein' down. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
186:It is in the petty details, not in the great results, that the interest of existence lies. ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB
187:Now they're getting so politically correct you can't even stick your tongue out at somebody. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
188:Cats know, comin' out of four, they better be standin' on it, else they'll be standin' in it. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
189:Exemplary persons are steadfast in the face of adversity, while petty persons are engulfed by it. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
190:Petty things become unimportant when people are impassioned about a purpose higher than self. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
191:The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor. ~ William Feather, #NFDB
192:acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
193:Gypsies at home watching Jerry Falwell on TV, might mean something to you, it ain't nothing to me. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
194:I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty. ~ Imelda Marcos, #NFDB
195:In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
196:Never give in, never give in, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty. ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
197:One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
198:Perhaps wishful thinking was the first sign of madness, and I was in a Wonderland trajectory. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
199:Take back your insurance, baby, nothing is guaranteed. Take back your acid rain, let your TV bleed. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
200:I have very little respect for Nancy Reagan. There is something about her that is very petty. ~ Walter Annenberg, #NFDB
201:I was not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
202:Just wonderin', waitin', worryin' about some silly little things, that just don't add up to nothin'. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
203:I don't think it's a good attitude in your life to feel that you have to be rich to have self-esteem. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
204:Is that the proof, Almighty God, that you are not there, that your saints could be such petty demons? ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
205:I think to be successful you have to work really hard but you also have to have a little bit of luck. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
206:Slavery discourages arts and manufacturing ...[and] every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. ~ George Mason, #NFDB
207:The art of giving orders is not to try to rectify the minor blunders and not be swayed by petty doubts. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
208:Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as I'm concerned, that's success. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
209:I hope no man takes what I said about the living and dieing of men for mathematical demonstration. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
210:It felt petty and wrong, like I was assigning blame to something I was supposed to be grateful for. ~ Nicole Chung, #NFDB
211:Racing has become more show time; we've got to have something new to create interest in the sport. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
212:There was no use pretending, no magic left to hear, all the music gave me was a craving for lite beer. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
213:To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
214:Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse? ~ Ivan Turgenev, #NFDB
215:I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
216:You win when you refuse to fight petty people. Fighting little people reduces you to their size. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
217:A thousand acres that can feed a thousand souls is better than ten thousand acres of no more effect. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
218:Do no evilness because it is a small one; do not leave a small deed undone because it is just a petty one. ~ Liu Bei, #NFDB
219:Grey had seen every ugly, petty, disgusting part of her and that's why he was her best friend. ~ Karen McCullah Lutz, #NFDB
220:I had the radio on, I was driving. Trees flew by, me and Del were singing, Little Runaway, I was flying. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
221:What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? ~ Bharati Mukherjee, #NFDB
222:If I would go up on a high note, Eddie would want a low one. That's how petty the situation had become. ~ Sammy Hagar, #NFDB
223:Even the losers get lucky sometimes. Even the losers keep a little bit of pride. They get lucky sometimes. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
224:Go after what you really love and find a way to make that work for you, and then you'll be a happy person. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
225:An attitude that really works against people is the desire for equality that feeds petty jealousy. For ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
226:If you stretch your imagination, I'll tell you all a tale, about a time when everything wasn't up for sale. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
227:...they're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial. ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
228:For every Seaman of Industry and Ingenuity, is not only a Navigator, but a Merchant, and also a Soldier. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
229:I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it's such a drag when you're livin' in the past ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
230:One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
231:Divorce is a 50-50 thing, and it can be a number of petty things that finally drive you out of your mind. ~ Lee Radziwill, #NFDB
232:One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
233:The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
234:Girls, to me, growing up were very, very petty and didn't want me to succeed and didn't want the best for me. ~ Rachel Zoe, #NFDB
235:I'm so tired of being tired. Sure as night will follow day most things I worry about will never happen anyway. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
236:Revenge—no, nothing as petty as that; justice for the deaths of hundreds of thousands—was the focus now. ~ Christie Golden, #NFDB
237:The death is unfortunate. It is an accident. It is not police atrocity . It is a small and petty matter. ~ Mamata Banerjee, #NFDB
238:Class is considerate of others. It knows that good manners is nothing more than a series of petty sacrifices. ~ Ann Landers, #NFDB
239:I know he hasn't a mean or petty bone in him, but one can err on the side of caution as well as rashness. ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
240:he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
241:I never could have dreamed that her heart was so wicked, but I keep coming back because it's so hard to kick it. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
242:In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
243:Whether the gentleman is capable or not, he is loved all the same; conversely the petty man is loathed all the same. ~ Xunzi, #NFDB
244:Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
245:But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
246:Let it go. That’s my philosophy: learn to not give a fuck, at least about petty shit. Life will be much simpler. ~ Cherrie Lynn, #NFDB
247:We haven't always been boy scouts, but we never lost sight of the music, Let me remind you that this ain't the end. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
248:We should not have a petty regard for God's gifts, though we may and should despise our own imperfections. ~ Ignatius of Loyola, #NFDB
249:I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit. ~ Norton Juster, #NFDB
250:As we celebrate mediocrity, all the boys upstairs want to see. How much you'll pay for what you used to get for free. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
251:By removing that which is petty and self-seeking, we bring forth all that is glorious and mindful of the whole. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #NFDB
252:It has well been said that the arch-flatterer, with whom all petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
253:I've never had any idea that what I like would resonate with the audience, and I'm pleasantly surprised when it does. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
254:The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.” (Analects 4.16) ~ Confucius, #NFDB
255:Way up in the nosebleeds we watched him on the screen, they'd hung between the billboards so cheaper seats could see. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
256:What place indeed is there in the shallow petty frivolous thing called society for noble thoughts and feelings? ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
257:If you listen long enough you can hear my skin grow tough love is painful to the touch must be made of stronger stuff. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
258:I reach for the pettiest thing I can think of because no one has a hard time believing how petty a girl can be. ~ Courtney Summers, #NFDB
259:Man in fact is petty: the problem of death is a human problem. A cow doesn’t think about death. A cow isn’t petty ~ Eug ne Ionesco, #NFDB
260:A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
261:Every verse a diamond, every chorus gold, the sound was my salvation. It was only everything, before money became king. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
262:inspired him to bear witness to a world which was bleeding with injustice and intolerance and petty corruption. ~ David Lagercrantz, #NFDB
263:John Delany had slowly evolved into a working class hero from days of wallowing in the primordial ooze of petty crime ~ Candice Fox, #NFDB
264:these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. ~ Lucille Clifton,#NFDB
265:We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery, #NFDB
266:What I've learned about marriage: You need to have each other's back; you have to be a kind of team going through life. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
267:His voice had the petty, triumphant air of someone who enjoys catching the small and meaningless mistakes of others. ~ Donna Andrews, #NFDB
268:It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
269:It’s my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
270:The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
271:The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.”
(Analects 4.16) ~ Confucius,#NFDB
272:There is no moral distinction between petty thievery and 'from each according to ability, to each according to need.' ~ Leonard Read, #NFDB
273:Time to move on, time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet, baby, grass is growing. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
274:He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
275:I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.” The ~ Norton Juster, #NFDB
276:if your eyes are marred
with petty visions
wash them with tears
your teardrops are healers
as they begin to arrive ~ Rumi,#NFDB
277:Musicians ultimately are who they are, they aren't actors, so as a clipmaker you have a responsibility to protect them. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
278:Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some. Tell me, why you want to lay there, revel in your abandon? ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
279:Stay free of petty jealousies, live by no man's code, and hold your judgment for yourself, lest you wind up on this road. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
280:There was something being settled here, and if it was primal and barbaric and petty and stupid, it was still important. ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
281:We should not have a petty regard for God's gifts, though we may and should despise our own imperfections. ~ Saint Ignatius of Loyola, #NFDB
282:Class divisions as clear as those between Harrington and myself always bring out my best, or at least my most petty. ~ William Lashner, #NFDB
283:How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
284:If everyone in New York took sides over these petty, insignificant arguments, no one would have any friends at all. ~ Candace Bushnell, #NFDB
285:The good Lord doesn't tell you what His plan is, so all you can do is get up in the morning and see what happens next. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
286:The Master said, “The gentleman harmonizes [he] without being an echo. The petty man echoes [tong] and does not harmonize. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
287:Where is the fun of living if you are going to make yourself a slave to all sorts of petty rules?" asked Patty wearily. ~ Jean Webster, #NFDB
288:You just need to fight the petty seductions of management and the command-and-control impulses that accompany seniority. ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
289:A lot of people think my sarcasm comes from insecurity and defensiveness, but I assure you I'm just being petty and cruel. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
290:Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
291:They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
292:your mind a petty tyrant who needs to organize and control the people and environment around you to establish serenity? ~ Penney Peirce, #NFDB
293:Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
294:Petty mindedness instructs eyes to see everything from an unappropriate standpoint, beautifulness could be looked otherwise. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
295:In a place like this, there would be petty despots. Factions. This was a sunless world where madness and depravity reigned. ~ Ann Aguirre, #NFDB
296:I think musicians are perfect at knowing how to get the best out of other musicians. I can really relate to that communion. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
297:it is difficult to throw oneself into other people's petty concerns when one's own are very absorbing and interesting. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
298:Little minds find gratification for their feelings, benevolent or otherwise, by a constant exercise of petty ingenuity. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
299:The music business looks like, you know, innocent schoolboys compared to the TV business. They care about nothing but profit. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
300:There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men. ~ Xunzi, #NFDB
301:There used to be this real sense of community integrity in rock. It has really eroded. Everyone seems to be on their own now. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
302:The worst things, however, are the petty thoughts. Verily, better to have done evilly than to have thought pettily! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
303: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, #NFDB
304:I don't know, my music has always just come from where the wind blew me. Like where I'm at during a particular moment in time. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
305:Even his petty world man cannot rule.
We fear, we blame; life wantons her own way, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#NFDB
306:Most magic is a trick, an illusion. But [when The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show], this was real. Man oh man, was it real. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
307:A good conversation always involves a certain amount of complaining. I like to bond over mutual hatreds and petty grievances. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
308:He [George Harrison] told me he really, really admired John [Lennon]. He probably wanted John's acceptance pretty bad, you know? ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
309:I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests. ~ Paul Feyerabend, #NFDB
310:If you look around at America, that's one of its biggest problems is you have corporations that can never be pleased at a profit. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
311:To come up against someone who appeared not to give a damn about exerting petty power almost restored his faith in the public. ~ Val McDermid, #NFDB
312: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, #NFDB
313:When you get older, your health becomes important to you, things start breaking down, you've always got a different ache or pain. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
314:In democratic society each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
315:That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills. ~ Lisa Jewell, #NFDB
316:Yield not to weakness. It does not suit you. Shake off this petty faintheartedness. Stand up, Scorcher of foes, wake up! ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
317:No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
318:Revenge,' he said softly, 'is the act of a despicable and petty character. Which is no doubt why I've always enjoyed it so much. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
319:The key is to pump up your righteous anger and mute your petty resentment. I'll be happy if I can get that balance to fifty-fifty. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
320:This is where men and women are different, we can put aside petty competition for relationships - they can't. It interferes. ~ Adriana Trigiani, #NFDB
321:To this hour, the great science and duty of politics is lowered by the petty leaven of small and personal advantage. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon, #NFDB
322:What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite. ~ Ivan Turgenev, #NFDB
323:I have a limited amount of faith in humans as a species, and have little problem imagining someone that petty and insane.” Jackson ~ Jana Deleon, #NFDB
324:I'm not interested in the TV much. I quit watching the news a couple years ago and my outlook on life has gotten a whole lot better. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
325:It was petty to hold a grudge against an entire people over the actions of a few, no matter how much injury they had caused, ~ Duncan M Hamilton, #NFDB
326:I think for it to be hip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me, had some sense of hope in them. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
327:The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
328:The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free. ~ Angelina Grimke, #NFDB
329:George Harrison was the kind of guy who wasn’t going to leave until he hugged you for five minutes and told you how much he loved you. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
330:Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
331:The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression. ~ Felix Frankfurter, #NFDB
332:When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
333:Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
334:Fight only in direst need
Not for lust or petty greed
Honor those that do give birth
Respect them well for their full worth ~ Anne McCaffrey,#NFDB
335:There is no doubt about precisely when folks began racing each other in automobiles. It was the day they built the second automobile. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
336:Yeah and it's over before you know it It all goes by so fast Yeah the bad nights take forever And the good nights don't ever seem to last ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
337:You belong among the wildflowers You belong in a boat out at sea You belong with your love on your arm You belong somewhere you feel free ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
338:Don't be so petty. Sometimes you have to do business with people you don't like. It doesn't mean you have to be like them or like them. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
339:Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, #NFDB
340:I don't understand the ones that have no sense of hope and invest in hate. That's not gonna work out, you know? It's a waste of your time! ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
341:You can work hard, do everything that you think is right, but one thing you'll never overcome in life is fate. You can't control fate. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
342:An house is of a double nature, viz., one, wherein it is a way and means of expence, the other as it is an instrument and tool of gain. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
343:Silence, the great empire of silence, loftier than the stars, profounder than the kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all the rest is petty. ~ Carlyle, #NFDB
344:There would be very little to dislike in other people if we refused to bring to them all of our own judgements and petty grievances. ~ Gerald Jampolsky, #NFDB
345:And the days went by like paper in the wind. Everything changed, then changed again. It's hard to find a friend. It's hard to find a friend. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
346:The real purpose of the martial arts must be to purge oneself of petty ambitions and desire, to obtain control of one’s own character. ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
347:I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
348:I had come out of a church that was filled with petty arguments and hatred. I just wanted to meet with some friends and worship with them. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
349:I like making money like anybody else, and I'm paid well, but I think there is a point at which you can out-price your audience or your base. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
350:My sister got lucky, married a yuppie, and took him for all he was worth. Now she's a swinger dating a singer, I can't decide which is worse. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
351:Con? My mother was a con artist married to a copper?" - Mori
"Emily Ferris wasn't just a con artist. She was a master thief." - Alice ~ Heather W Petty,#NFDB
352:He whines, he complains, he ducks out of the most obvious responsibility. He is vain, petty and maddening, but he doesn't ever quit. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
353:I'm pretty committed to being a filmmaker because it incorporates everything I love: music, art direction, story, and you know - everything. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
354:Life punishes those who have things in abundance by making them worry about petty things like: what to wear, or, which car to drive. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
355:The waiting is the hardest part, every day you get one more yard. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart, the waiting is hardest part. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
356:This is payback, isn't it?" Jim glared at me. "Don't be ridiculous," I told him. "As the Consort of the Pack, I'm far above petty revenge. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
357:It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
358:Raising of money may indeed change the species, but with so much loss as the foreign pieces were raised unto, above their intrinsick value. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
359:The music has to be affordable. It's the common man that keeps it going, and if you price it out of his realm, it becomes a thing of the elite. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
360:We need to ascend beyond our own petty Resistance, our own negative self-judgment and self-sabotage, our own "I'm not worthy" mind-set. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
361:Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
362:Still it tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow again writhes in this petty pace from day to day until the last syllable of the recorded time ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
363:so I turned on the radio and of course it was a Tom Petty song—is there ever a time you turn on the radio and don’t hear a Tom Petty song?—so ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
364:That's what they do to whatever I was - 19 or something. You're the baby hooker. You can ask any woman my age and we've all played baby hookers. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
365:You should beware of candidates who need to win to an unhealthy extent because they will be battling you and your colleagues over petty things. ~ Geoff Smart, #NFDB
366:I don't think there's a petty system of heaven and hell. The love of God is much more forgiving. I'm not a believer in a wrathful God at all. ~ Susan Sarandon, #NFDB
367:We have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty, trivial desires. Real freedom is freedom from our petty, trivial desires. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
368:We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
369:Women without prospect, who lead dull earnest lives and rejoice in their petty little pseudo-pleasures, I find quite depressing and despicable. ~ Sei Sh nagon, #NFDB
370:If you have only been around people who use power in cruel and petty ways, then when you hear the very word, you may have a negative reaction. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
371:It is better to lose everything you have to keep the balance of justice level, than to live a life of petty privilege devoid of true freedom. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
372:That some are poorer than others, ever was and ever will be: And that many are naturally querulous and envious, is an Evil as old as the World. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
373:You get into your late fifties, people start falling like flies all around you. I don't take life for granted any more. I'm really glad to be here. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
374:A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him. ~ Napol on Bonaparte, #NFDB
375:Is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day in human life? ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
376:My father was raised with brothers, he was a football player and a boxer, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, he was a man of his times. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
377:There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
378:You were the one who made things different, you were the one who took me in. You were the one thing I could count on, above all, you were my friend. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
379:'Free Fallin'' is a very good song. Maybe it would be one of my favorites if it hadn't become this huge anthem. But I'm grateful that people like it. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
380:What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
381:As far as Kitty could tell, men were just as petty as women, but when they didn’t get their way, they didn’t resort to intrigues—they started wars. ~ Radha Vatsal, #NFDB
382:I'm not any happier anywhere than when I'm in the studio. I'm over the moon about it. It keeps me young, it keeps me feeling like I have some purpose. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
383:Relationships automatically develop resentment when selfish and petty concerns become more important than the emotional connection between you. If ~ Steven Stosny, #NFDB
384:The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale" features Clapton, Nelson, Knopfler, Tom Petty, Albert Lee, John Mayer, Don White and Jim Keltner among others. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
385:There is my favorite quote that I ever heard from her [Lori Petty],... 'Things can happen to you, but they don't have to happen to your soul.' ~ Jennifer Lawrence, #NFDB
386:I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
387:I'm not trying to be cool. I have a problem with lights. I have one eye that's become super-sensitive to lighting, so I do wear sunglasses quite a bit. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
388:What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun, #NFDB
389: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, #NFDB
390:...she was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
391:He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid. ~ Galt Niederhoffer, #NFDB
392:Hmm. Petty? Yes. Ineffectual? Yes. Infuriating and off-putting? Yes. Counterproductive? Yes. It's got to be a product of the French Foreign Ministry. ~ Glenn Reynolds, #NFDB
393:I feel like most people aren't either/or, they're both/and. You're both magnanimous and petty. You're both kind and cruel. You're never just one thing. ~ Greta Gerwig, #NFDB
394:People were strange like that. Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
395:The dreamed outcome of launching a psychic attack can make you feel small and petty. I think for that reason I'm going to refrain from launching any. ~ Heidi Julavits, #NFDB
396: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, #NFDB
397:How sweet the morning air is! ...How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
398:I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
399:It’s not my fault that these are the problems I’ve been put on this earth to deal with, right? They’re petty, they piss me off, and they’re all mine ~ Megan McCafferty, #NFDB
400:Humorists are precisely the kinds of guys who can cut through the orgy of petty indignation that the aging baby boomers are imposing on this great country. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
401:I like a good beer. Of course, I'll drink a bad one too. Let no person thirst for lack of real ale! Thank god for long-necked bottles, the angel's remedy. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
402:I want to be successful. Not just money. Just making a successful record and a successful show... I could feel successful without selling a million records. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
403:Since the things we do determine the character of life, no blessed person can become unhappy. For he will never do those things which are hateful and petty. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
404:The God I believe in is not so fragile that you hurt Him by being angry at him, or so petty that He will hold it against you for being upset with Him. ~ Harold S Kushner, #NFDB
405:The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie must teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
406:But the petty thought is like a fungus: it crawls and cringes and wants to be nowhere—until the whole body is rotten and withered with little fungi. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
407:It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
408:The truth is that if you play on TV there is always a sponsor. There is no way around it. I've already passed on so much money I don't worry about it anymore. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
409:Three minutes, so I turned on the radio and of course it was a Tom Petty song—is there ever a time you turn on the radio and don’t hear a Tom Petty song?— ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
410:How could I alone have invented it or imagined it in my dream? Could my petty heart and fickle, trivial mind have risen to such a revelation of truth? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
411:I am aware that the battle I am fighting is a petty one, but I am also aware that in order to win that which is great, you must first win that which is small. ~ James Frey, #NFDB
412:Peace is not something petty, created by the mind; it is enormously great, infinitely extensive, and it can be understood only when the heart is full. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
413:Am I wrong about love? Is it founded on mutual respect, on like meeting like, not on heart-pounding, stomach-churning nervousness and petty compliments? ~ Jessica Spotswood, #NFDB
414:It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
415:And so I trust that it is not too petty to point out that it was George H. W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan, who was president when Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War. ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
416:He did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated like the rest: ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
417:I'm actually better on the guitar than when I started, I think, because I've had so much time with it and I still practice and I love to do it and I love to sing. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
418:Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
419:Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50 ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
420:Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction and events without reason. Without a purpose life is trivial, petty, and pointless. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
421:The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
422:Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man? ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
423:I think sometimes maybe you're going to connect with the audience more than others, but the journey is about getting all there is to get out of this group of people. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
424:My sons weren’t sure what I was getting at. It doesn’t matter anyway, because it won’t be an option for them. They don’t have a Tom Petty. They’re borrowing mine. ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
425:On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free—free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way. But ~ Brian W Aldiss, #NFDB
426:That's stupid. You couldn't pay me to go. I'm not oversimplifying it. That's what's going on. I don't think it would be any fun without the drugs. It's a drug party. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
427:To just burn out, to give up just because things don't go your way, to assume that there is no God, no infinite light - I think that's pretty petty, personally. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
428:Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction, and events without reason. Without a purpose, life is trivial, petty, and pointless. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
429:Music really isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s all about people relating to each other and doing something that’s really from the soul. It must come from the soul. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
430:Never, give in! Never give in! Never, never, never... In nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions or honor and good sense! ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
431:Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to conviction of honor and good sense. ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
432:The State is not the hope of the world; it is an institution grounded in the threat of violence, whether via capital punishments or petty bureaucratic intrusions. ~ Douglas Wilson, #NFDB
433:Heaven, Mori. When I die, this place will be transported right up into the clouds, so I can flit about the stacks for hours on end, reading into eternity. - Sadie ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
434:It's very easy to be cynical about the hall of fame. But on the other hand, it's really a beautiful thing for someone like me. I dedicated my entire life to this music. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
435:My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature ~ Josephine Hart, #NFDB
436:I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover. ~ Nell Zink, #NFDB
437:Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread—and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
438:We’re all consumed with the petty drama, the minor stuff settled right up at the top, like roses and trash. Not many people realize how easy it is to dig a little deeper. ~ R S Grey, #NFDB
439:I'll just say right here that whoever thought up the idea of paying dead white authors by the word should have a special place in hell with the rest of the sadists. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
440:Jealousy is a childish, petty emotion.” The caliph switched the single shamshir to his left hand in a single, fluid motion. “I don’t feel jealousy. I feel rage.” Tariq ~ Ren e Ahdieh, #NFDB
441:There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark. ~ Jacques Rigaut, #NFDB
442:If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
443:Rich people weren’t responsible for petty crimes. They were responsible for the great crimes that took hundreds of years to commit and were, therefore, unpunishable. ~ Heather O Neill, #NFDB
444:The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions. ~ Norman Mailer, #NFDB
445:Every man may reign secure in his petty tyranny, and spread terror and desolation around him, until the trump of the archangel shall excite different emotions in his soul. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
446:I'd drink your blood if I could and hook you into every memory inside me, every heartbreak, frame of reference, temporary triumph, petty defeat, mystic moment of surrender. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
447:Life's to short to spend it fighting when you could be holding the one you love. And love's to rare to squnder it with petty concerns." The Apolloite groom to Rafael ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
448:Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
449:Evil is evil. Big. Small. Grand. Petty. Well-justified or just because. There’s no lesser or greater of it. Choosing between them does not make your soul any less blackened. ~ C T Phipps, #NFDB
450:If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
451:I wanted to have something good to remember about today,” she replied quietly. “Something that wasn't petty and mean. Sometimes you have to provide such moments yourself. ~ Tamora Pierce, #NFDB
452:Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
453:Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
454:Never give in. 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. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
455:That man is … odd,” I dared say to William. “He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal. Ubertino ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
456:What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor. ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
457:If you're having a bad day already and everybody is just asking you petty questions, it drives people to the edge, or something really small will have a really large effect. ~ Jess Weixler, #NFDB
458:One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
459:She married that politiciansicle, after all.” “Politiciansicle?” Rebecca asked. “Petty. He’s cold, has a stick up his butt, and you’ve got to lick it to get him to do anything. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
460:Terrence Perera @TerrencePerera2
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time" Macbeth ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
461:I always tell my kids, "Find something that you love and within that you'll find some job that you can do and you'll always be happy. You'll go to a job that you want to go to." ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
462:I, of course, had heard of Sherlock Holmes and his secret lab in the basement of the theater. It was just cartoonish enough of an image to spread widely around the school. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
463:Really, though, he'd had very little control. His fear and anger had warped and twisted into petty revenge. For years now, he'd been fueling himself on that need for revenge ~ Stylo Fantome, #NFDB
464:That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty. ~ George Mason, #NFDB
465:The Band was always famous for its retirements we'd go and play and get a little petty cash together, and then not see each other till it was time to fill our pockets up again. ~ Rick Danko, #NFDB
466:Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
467:allow God to settle your accounts, friends. Allow Him to right the wrongs in your life. His vindication and redemption are far superior to any petty revenge you could ever seek. ~ Mandy Hale, #NFDB
468:I now warn you not to drown your soul in these petty anxieties of yours; if you do, the soul will be dulled and will have too little vigour left when the time comes for it to arise. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
469:Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, i.e, of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
470:So here at last were the first lines of the story that was later to come clear, a story of spite and bigotry, too mean and petty to be called tragedy, but tragic for all that. ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
471:This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t. ~ Jeremy Clarkson, #NFDB
472:You and I will meet again, When we're least expecting it, One day in some far off place, I will recognize your face, I won't say goodbye my friend, For you and I will meet again. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
473:Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
474:Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
475:Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority. ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB
476:A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara, #NFDB
477:In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
478:One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. What ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
479:Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
480:At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior. ~ John Carmack, #NFDB
481:But they were as different as fire and ice. Robert Kennedy thought Eugene McCarthy was pompous, petty, and venal. McCarthy thought Kennedy was a spoiled, unintelligent demagogue. ~ Jack Newfield, #NFDB
482:Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks. Some doors are opened, some roads are blocked. Sundowns are golden, then fade away. And if I never do nothing, I'll get you back someday. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
483:All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
484:Here they are, this once-prosperous couple, shocked, altered, dragged before the seat of the conqueror who'd promised it was only the servants and petty thieves who'd suffer. ~ Michael Cunningham, #NFDB
485:I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
486:Labor is rest from the sorrows that greet us; from all the petty vexations that meet us; from the sin-promptings that assail us; from the world-sirens that lure us to ill ~ Frances Sargent Osgood, #NFDB
487:Sherlock shrugged. “I don’t understand the need for power, really. There are more important pursuits.”
“Only those who have never felt powerless can afford to think like you. ~ Heather W Petty,#NFDB
488:Teachers have power. We may cripple them by petty economics; by Government regulations, by the foolish criticism of an uninformed press; but their power exists for good or evil. ~ Winifred Holtby, #NFDB
489:There is a sky full of stars aplenty, and all you can babble about is a cold, little rock we call the moon. This is how it is with petty problems that exist too close to us. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
490:The future of humanity teetered on the brink of extinction, so you put aside whatever petty differences you had and you worked together to ensure the survivors, well, survived. ~ Paul Antony Jones, #NFDB
491:There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
492:We don't really make bad records, though some people might like some more than others. And we have never really done a bad show. So I think in a way maybe we've been taken for granted. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
493:Artists aren't necessarily business people. And they aren't necessarily aware of all the things that go on in their names. Some just want to make some music, but there is a lot of greed ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
494:I don't treat the band like I'm above them or that they're a hired hand for me. We've never worked that way. So I'm a team player. I would be very uncomfortable having to do this alone. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
495:The art of giving orders is not to try to rectify the minor blunders and not to be swayed by petty doubts. Vacillation and fussiness are the surest means of sapping confidence of an army. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
496:The only thing I could figure was most people were so fucking self-righteous they liked to destroy others’ wills so they felt like their own petty lives had some sense of purpose. ~ Andersen Prunty, #NFDB
497:Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
498: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 W Service, #NFDB
499:The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
500:A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
501:It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
502:My given name is James."
"James Moriarty."
...
"Really? Sherlock wishes to discuss odd names with me?"
"And a point to Miss Moriarty."
...
"You're an idiot. Truly. ~ Heather W Petty,#NFDB
503:I think it's odd that grown-ups quarrel so easily and so often and about such petty matters. Up to now I always thought bickering was just something children did and that they outgrew it. ~ Anne Frank, #NFDB
504:Cotton Owens was leading and daddy was second. They came up on me and I moved over to let them pass. Cotton went on, but daddy bumped me in the rear and my car went right into the wall. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
505:I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there. And I think a lot of these young kids are going ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
506:The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
507:we are living in an era when much of the feminism on display to the public is petty, mean-spirited, obsessed with trivialities, man-hating and implacably opposed to free expression. ~ Milo Yiannopoulos, #NFDB
508:The world forgets. We always forget. We say that we won’t forget, but we do. We go about our lives, and the daily petty details wipe our memories of the things we should never forget. ~ Elizabeth C Mock, #NFDB
509:All in the world think themselves great, but the great are not concerned. Indeed, only by not being concerned can they be great. If they cared about being great, they’d eventually become petty. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
510: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, #NFDB
511:Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
512:But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
513:I'll accept your kindness,
I'll accept your insult.
I'll accept whatever you have to give.
Your radiance shines
in every atom of creation
yet our petty desires keep it hidden. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
514:The dead do not squabble as this land’s rulers do. The dead do not fight one another. The dead have no desires, no petty jealousies or ambitions. A world of the dead is a world at peace… ~ Graham McNeill, #NFDB
515:There's obviously some strange correspondence between the general outline of a life and that stream of petty events in which a person is constantly involved and regards as insignificant. ~ Victor Pelevin, #NFDB
516:Wherefore the race being not to the swift, etc. but time and chance happening to all men, I leave the Judgement of the whole to the Candid, of whose correction I shall never be impatient. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
517:In a lot of ways, I'm seeking some sort of peace of mind for myself. I'm a fairly emotionally petty, resentful guy who has an inflated sense of himself, and I needed to take that down a notch. ~ Marc Maron, #NFDB
518:It's a petty thing, but I wouldn't join the Scouts when I was a kid, 'cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I'm just not a royalist. I think it's idiotic, a hereditary principle. ~ Elvis Costello, #NFDB
519:The Shelter is a living organism. It will evolve organically as other natural things do, according to what is best for its people. It is not a crowd that needs to be fenced in by petty rules. ~ J T Lawrence, #NFDB
520:The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. ~ Giorgio De Santillana, #NFDB
521:Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps on this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
522:Where’d you learn to drive? (Steele)
Richard Petty’s School of Driving. Had a great instructor there named Steven Norbert who showed me how to dog the shit out of en engine. Why? (Joe) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
523:You must realize that if you are going to reach the heights you have been called to reach, you may elicit some criticism from those who are jealous, petty or angry because they were left behind. ~ T D Jakes, #NFDB
524:For today the petty people have become lord and master: they all preach submission and acquiescence and prudence and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
525:I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess. ~ Frank Stella, #NFDB
526:It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
527:should it occur again, as we walk on,
that we find ourselves where others of this crew
fall into such petty wrangling and upbraiding.
The wish to hear such baseness is degrading. ~ Dante Alighieri,#NFDB
528:To waste one's time seeking the satisfaction of one's petty desires is sheer folly. True happiness is possible only when one has found the Divine. 19 February 1972 ~ The Mother, Some Answers From The Mother, #NFDB
529:Journalists, bless our black little hearts, are petty and vindictive and love to flog our hallowed journalism ethics whenever there’s some momentary advantage and/or amusement value in doing so. ~ John Scalzi, #NFDB
530:You spend your life dreaming, running 'round in a trance, You hang out forever and still miss the dance, And if you get lucky, you might find someone, To help you get over the pain that will come. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
531:I stood there, on the edge of the bloody bridge, because he was mine. Sherlock was mine and I wanted him. I loved him, and maybe it was wrong, or twisted, but I couldn’t be swayed. Not again. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
532:Other studies suggest that some people are grumpy, insulting, or overbearing primarily because they are insecure about their abilities and prestige. This is a hallmark of petty tyrants, which ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
533:The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
534:We're not going to pay attention to the silliness and the petty comments. And quite frankly, women have joined me in this effort, and so it's not about appearances. It's about effectiveness. ~ Katherine Harris, #NFDB
535:When we have had our lives reframed and see them as they often are --fear-driven, petty, repetitive--we either anesthetize ourselves, distract ourselves, or realize that something has to change. ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
536:If guys don't respect themselves, they don't respect other people. That's times and personalities. And all of them are not that way. But it don't take but one or two to screw up the whole crowd. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
537:If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
538:I’m sure there are better people out there who don’t hold grudges. People who can rise above the petty hurts and forgive and forget when they’ve been slighted or angered. I’m not one of them. ~ Armand Rosamilia, #NFDB
539:Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
540:Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. ~ Jos Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
541:the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters. ~ Nell Zink, #NFDB
542:I couldn’t write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing. ~ Dani Shapiro, #NFDB
543:I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy." [William Petty] ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
544:Like everyone else, I don't want it to get too far away from the racing because as time progresses, we're trying to get new fans and still keep the old fans and we've still got to have the racing. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
545: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, #NFDB
546:He had a great general’s ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. “You can abuse me, you can strike me,” Rockefeller said, “so long as you let me have my own way. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
547:I'm a child of the 80s so I grew up listening to an awesome variety of music. John Cougar Mellencamp, Tom Petty. I've always loved Elvis Presley and Kenny Rogers. Beastie Boys made me start making music. ~ Ty Stone, #NFDB
548: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, #NFDB
549:Causes of Civil War are also, that the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands, and that no certain means are provided to keep all men from a necessity either to beg, or steal, or be Souldiers. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
550:as though the Universe itself were under an obligation to bother itself about them, for it never gets tired of wrapping up God Himself in the petty misery in which its troubles are involved. And ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
551:Girls can be so petty and jealous. I swear they're worse than guys sometimes. Except they're all quiet about it. They sugarcoat it or else they talk behind each other's backs. It's seriously twisted. ~ Melody Carlson, #NFDB
552:Invariably dressed in black, the Countess was one of those dowagers whose natural natural independence of mind, authority of age, and impatience with the petty made her the ally of all irreverent youth. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
553:I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears”. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
554:....he wanted them to regret their treatment of her, but he also selfishly wanted them to see that she was now in a much better place than they were and to h*ll with whoever thought he was being petty. ~ Jordan Silver, #NFDB
555:Odd, but no matter how high you rise in the halls of power, it’s impossible to escape the conviction that our collective fates are largely determined by the petty jealousies of overgrown adolescents. ~ Daniel Polansky, #NFDB
556:Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II? ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
557:What she can't get into her narrow mind is that we're above such things as love. Our whole aim - the whole sense of our life - is to avoid petty illusions that stop us being free and happy. On, on, on! ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
558:A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
559:As lovely as she was, sarcasm did not wear well on her. Still, she was a bright girl, and in our short time together we had built a bond of petty resentments that usually takes a lifetime to develop. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
560: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, #NFDB
561:He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul. ~ Louise Erdrich, #NFDB
562:THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE at the vein, this small and petty creature. This is the bedrock of your life. Father Earth is right to despise you, but do not be ashamed. You may be a monster, but you are also great. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
563:We are the benefactors of too much sacrifice and blood, sweat and tears to allow petty differences and trivial discrepancies to continue to separate and divide US, while we are being used, exploited and conquered. ~ T I, #NFDB
564:You're an intelligent educated man. You can see it's not thieves or fires that destroy the world; it's hatred, hostility, all this petty squabbling...Shouldn't you stop complaining and try to make peace? ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
565:In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
566:It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewiseit is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
567:Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
568:I wouldn't want to get stuck being an oldie-goldie group, but I don't mind. I think all the trouble you go through these days to go to one of these concerts, I think I owe them a bit of what they came to hear. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
569:Remember, I was only in to fighting; I wasn’t a high-ranking underworld figure selling the Crown Jewels! I wasn’t the Merthyr Mafia and I had no connections with the goings on of petty criminal matters. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
570: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, #NFDB
571:You could forge your pain into a sword,” Nyx said, “and persecute your enemies. Triumph. Survive. But fear imprisons you. Fear of breaking rules. Fear of what people will think of you. Petty little fears. ~ Craig Schaefer, #NFDB
572:So then, men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
573:The fewer corpses in the street, the better, Petty decided. He hooked Hug under the arms, and Carrie took his feet. They half carried, half dragged him to the Range Rover and wrestled him into the backseat. ~ Richard Lange, #NFDB
574:Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. ~ Brad Blanton, #NFDB
575:I’m convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, “Dammit, my life doesn’t have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that? ~ Rich Horton, #NFDB
576:Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures. ~ Richard Matheson, #NFDB
577:Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me. ~ Christopher Marlowe,#NFDB
578:The Bachelorette proves that men are as petty and vapid and ridiculous as women are made to seem. They’re just better at hiding it, because they get to be Real Men and sulk and brood and bottle everything up. ~ Samantha Irby, #NFDB
579:Winston Churchill quote, the one where he says, Never give in. 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? ~ Brad Meltzer, #NFDB
580:In your serenity there is a clarity, strength and correctness that is beyond the petty scuffles of the moment — a greater truth. It is the truth of who you are; beautiful, calm, secure, open, willing and safe. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
581:If real rich people in the real world were this obsessed with sex, revenge, back-stabbing, and petty jealousies, how could any of them ever have had the time and intelligence to make any money in the first place? ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
582:I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
583:[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
584:Ageless living is courageous living. It means being undistracted by the petty dramas of life because you have enough experience to know what’s not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
585:A man's eye reveals his quality. It shows how much of a man there is within us. We declare ourselves by the light that gleams under our eyebrows. Petty spirits merely wink; great spirits emit a flash of lightning. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
586:Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
587:Suppose the ambassador from the French comes back:
Tells Harry that the King doth offer him Katherine his daughter;
and with her to dowry some petty and unprofitable dukedoms:
The offer likes not; ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
588:There be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
589:Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
590:In a petty theft you steal money, gold etc.; in an electoral theft you steal the future of a country! The second crime can be committed only by the meanest people! Such a heavy crime results in a heavy price! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
591:In the narrow nether centre’s petty parts
Its childish game of daily dwarf desires
Was changed into a sweet and boisterous play,
A romp of little gods with life in Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#NFDB
592:I should have learned my lesson from Greek myths, really. It so doesn't pay to fall in love with a god. It’s either you get transformed – flower, bull, you name it, the gods can be that petty – or you just get…crushed. ~ Marian Tee, #NFDB
593:Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
594:...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,#NFDB
595:Let's face it: America is full of borderline, petty despots. They gravitate toward work as police officers, security gaurds, & supervisory bureaucrats like firemen, welfare case workers, and school principles. ~ Christian Parenti, #NFDB
596:Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
597:You know, we're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God -- and I believe there is -- that God is there to help. That's what God's job is. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
598:It's all right. It's like stumbling on a rock on the roadside. It's petty...a small thing. The place you want to go...is more distant farther off. So...it's all right. You'll stand up. And you'll start walking. Soon... ~ Kentaro Miura, #NFDB
599:Let's face it: America is full of borderline, petty despots. They gravitate toward work as police officers, security gaurds, & supervisory bureaucrats like firemen, welfare case workers, and school principles. ~ Christian Parenti, #NFDB
600:Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state... ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
601:mere subjects and can engage in petty quarrels about the superiority of our faiths until the end of time; a king, however, has a duty towards his people and must ensure that he supports the growth of all the faiths in his land. ~ Kalki, #NFDB
602:During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
603:History is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish and selfish people, that is, of everyone. All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all these lofty things are worthless. ~ Karel apek, #NFDB
604:I understand now more clearly than ever why neither my mother nor any of the courtiers took me seriously: my body does not lend itself to grandness. Valka, trying to look proud and above me, looks only petty and cross, ~ Intisar Khanani, #NFDB
605:No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty—to the poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive man; and many a brave gentleman who would have faced the labors of Hercules has had his heart broken by its petty miseries. ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB
606:That hurts my pride, Watson. It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter with me now..."
-Sherlock Holmes-
-The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Five Orange Pips- ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
607:We long for freedom, we want to soar, to try the wings God gave us; yet we are losing our power because we do not, cannot, exercise it. We are wasting life, losing strength in petty pursuits and enslaving drudgery. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
608:In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
609:The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
610:A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
611:Contrary to self-fulfilling cliché, the status quo did not perpetuate itself; it was deliberately locked into place by the petty rites of status and rank that formed the panoply of those who were already at the top. ~ Panayotis Cacoyannis, #NFDB
612:It was so strange, coming from Nashville, Tennessee, where I was playing to 15 people, to going to London and playing in this crowded little dive pub. I know Tom Petty had a similar thing - I realize, on a lot larger scale. ~ Caitlin Rose, #NFDB
613:Serena grew angry. How could that representative worry about petty price tags, when the ultimate cost was so much higher? “We will all pay—in blood—if we do not do this. We must strengthen the League and the human species. ~ Brian Herbert, #NFDB
614:The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun. ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
615:It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires SPIRIT. It's ~ Jean Webster, #NFDB
616:Petty vexations may at times be petty, but still they are vexations. The smallest and most inconsiderable annoyances are the most piercing. As small letters weary the eye most, so the smallest affairs disturb us most. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
617:There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
618:It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. But ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
619:We have been segregated and severed, from each other and even from ourselves. We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
620:When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
621:I’m afraid I don’t suffer petty bureaucrats gladly. A very bad habit, but one I find hard to break. Nevertheless, you will find, Dr. Kelly, that humiliation and blackmail, when used judiciously, can be marvelously effective ~ Douglas Preston, #NFDB
622:It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires spirit! ~ Jean Webster, #NFDB
623:People are very hungry for something new. I think they are interested in being called to be a part of something larger than the sort of small, petty, slash-and-burn politics that we have been seeing over the last several years. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
624:The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, culture. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing art to defend their collapsing culture. ~ George Grosz, #NFDB
625:And all of a sudden I saw that if life seems awfully petty most of the time, every now and then there is something noble and beautiful and almost pure that lifts us suddenly out of the pettiness and lets us share in it a little. ~ Laurence Yep, #NFDB
626:As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
627:Indigo’s gaze clung to my face, not unlike a puppy. I glared back, because I was a petty fuck, and because staring competitions were apparently my forte, along with sexually harassing middle-aged charity chairwomen in text messages. ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
628:My fine friends who are perfectionists, each in their own world where they are petty dictators, could write a perfect bill. Those of us who have grown up and matured...understand that we have to work together on the big issues. ~ Newt Gingrich, #NFDB
629:God is jealous for your heart, not because he is petty or insecure, but because he loves you. The reason why God has such a huge problem with idolatry is that his love for you is all-consuming. He loves you too much to share you. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
630:Honestly it wasn’t Susanna I was tired of, not really; it was me, wronged innocent, white knight, cunning investigator, killer, selfish oblivious dick, petty provocateur, take your pick, what does it matter? it’ll all change again ~ Tana French, #NFDB
631:I had everything I could possibly want—yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
632:I'm more interested in what I'm going to leave behind me than in making a big hit record. I've refined what I do for a long time. If getting better at it means it goes over the heads of those who only wanted to party, then so be it. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
633:My process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist. I've never made a video where I didn't talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment. Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
634:The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
635:That's something that I learned when I was homeless. Hotels are awesome because they are going to let you in and you can use the bathroom and when you're young and pretty you can probably use the pool. Somebody might by you a drink. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
636:I had seen him in such moods. Every petty defect of the world enraged him, all the waste and stupidity and slowness of men, and all the irritants of nature too, biting flies and warping wood and the briars that ripped his cloak. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
637:I had everything I could possibly want -- yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
638:I started playing the bass because nobody else would play the bass, and then I got bumped up into singing because no one else really wanted to sing. So I learned how to sing and I wrote the songs, so I tended to get the most attention. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
639:There are long periods when life seems a small, dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence. ~ Queen Elizabeth II, #NFDB
640:Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development. ~ Alexander Herzen, #NFDB
641:Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite. ~ Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Writings (1971), p. 2, #NFDB
642:Petty human squabbles over borders and oil and creed vanish in the knowledge that this living marble surrounded by infinite emptiness is our shared home, and more, a home we share with, and owe to, the most wonderful inventions of life. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
643:The fact of the matter is that poor men do not often steal, and when they do, it is petty theft, something to eat or perhaps an item of clothing to keep them from the cold. Thieves are usually those who have something and want more. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
644:The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
645:Because you have earned it, and I would be a lesser and petty thing to allow my surprise at your resilience, at the power of your love, to lead me to jealousy instead of, perhaps, enlightenment. And I am not a lesser and petty thing. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
646:If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois. ~ Antal Szerb, #NFDB
647:temples can wield great power, for they can motivate the masses to ignore self-preservation in the name of a holy cause. They have moral power, as well, ideally. But most are run by petty people with odd ideas about a civil society. ~ Terry Mancour, #NFDB
648:The end of despots is always odd?exhilarating to those who suffered their tyrannies, and to those who hold despotism in contempt, and anti-climatic at the same time, the discovery that these tyrants were petty, frightened men after all. ~ Fouad Ajami, #NFDB
649:You have been reproaching other people all your life - you have been always sure you yourself are right: it is because you have not a mind large enough to see that there is anything better than your own conduct and your own petty aims. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
650:I don’t know,” he said at last. “Am I afraid of what you might be? Or am I afraid of what I know for certain I would be without the constraints of law?” He looked me straight in the eyes and asked, “Am I more afraid of you or myself? ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
651: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, #NFDB
652:There are long periods when life seems a small dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence.” The ~ Sally Bedell Smith, #NFDB
653:There have,” said I, “been numerous petty thefts.”
Holmes snorted his contempt.
“This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that,” said he. “It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
654:Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
- Macbeth Act V, Scene V ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
655:To mourn deeply for the death of another loosens from myself the petty desire for, and the animal adherence to life. We have gained the end of the philosopher, and view without shrinking the coffin and the pall. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
656:Tom Petty,” Jim Lenahan insists, “is really good at getting people to quit school and join his band. He got Benmont to do it. He got me to do it. He got Mike to do it. He got a lot of people to quit college so they could be in his band. ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
657:..."And for God's sake, never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people's net-worth. As Yogi Ramen preached: 'Every second you spend thinking about someone elses dreams you take time away from your own.'" ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
658:The Cat in the Hat exposes the in-betweenness of it all, the midcentury breakdown in meaning, out of which Tom Petty’s generation emerged, a little starved for something to call their own. It’s the rock and roll of children’s literature. ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
659:God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion. ~ Bono, #NFDB
660:Here we are to remember that in consequence of our opinion that labor is the Father and active principle of wealth, as lands are the Mother, that the state by killing, mutilating, or imprisoning their members do withal punish themselves. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
661:I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
662:it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love. Sit ~ Thomas Harris, #NFDB
663:Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ Such a lovely sentiment, don’t you think? The human Bible is full of little gems like that; their god is a petty, bad-tempered sort with some substantial insecurity issues, but on this he got it right ~ J T Geissinger, #NFDB
664:Are you mad? (Artemis) Yes, I am. Mad at this world where we are nothing to the gods. Mad at the Fates who put us here for no purpose except to toy with us for their petty amusement. I wish all of the gods were dead and gone. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
665:It often seems as though the silent, humble servant is secretly wiser and more discerning than the haughty master; yet through dutiful (and sometimes insecure) surrender he continues to serve and carry out petty orders in loyal acquiescence. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
666:Now, Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
667: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, #NFDB
668:The petty man is eager to make boasts, yet desires that others should believe in him. He enthusiastically engages in deception, yet wants others to have affection for him. He conducts himself like an animal, yet wants others to think well of him. ~ Xunzi, #NFDB
669:Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life, we must adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
670:Beecher, did you ever hear that Winston Churchill quote, the one where he says, Never give in. 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? ~ Brad Meltzer, #NFDB
671:I often think about how, if we were all placed in an apocalyptic situation, you'd realize quickly how stupid, petty things just don't matter anymore. Who you love is who you love, and it doesn't matter. Survival is your primary focus. ~ Alycia Debnam Carey, #NFDB
672:Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way. ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
673:What most people want to keep under wraps (from reporters) is trivial: petty jealousies, professional feuds, etc. By contrast, most of the things they have thought about most seriously all their lives they are perfectly winning to uncover. ~ Thomas Boswell, #NFDB
674:Are you mad? (Artemis)
Yes, I am. Mad at this world where we are nothing to the gods. Mad at the Fates who put us here for no purpose except to toy with us for their petty amusement. I wish all of the gods were dead and gone. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
675:For all that we may sometimes despise our fellows and be driven to rages and petty revenges, I think we are even darker creatures when we are alone. We can learn to fear our own thoughts more than the lash of the whip or the slap in the face. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
676:From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that!” —EDGAR MITCHELL, APOLLO 14 ASTRONAUT, 1974 ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
677:If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don't own other people's crap. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
678:Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
679:Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confidant, by pretty gestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not there as though it were. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
680:The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
681:Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
682:In an interview with a journalist, you look petty taking the pot shot but in a slick ad you can really do damage - including unfair damage - from afar. It is not that much different than waging a war by a drone than by hand-to-hand combat. ~ Greta Van Susteren, #NFDB
683: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. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #NFDB
684:All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass. ~ Robert Higgs, #NFDB
685:People in Parliament occupy themselves with private animosities and petty quarrels, and think little of the national interest. It is impossible to credit the serene indifference with which they consider events outside their own country. ~ William III of England, #NFDB
686:We cannot speak loudly or angrily at such times; we are not apt to be eager about mere worldly things, for our very awe at our quickened sense of the nearness of the invisible world, makes us calm and serene about the petty trifles of today. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
687:Back you fly to your perch, ashamed as well as frustrated. Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable. ~ Glenway Wescott, #NFDB
688:Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts. ~ Sheri S Tepper, #NFDB
689:Did you get the cup?"
I held it up.
"Is it the right one?" she said.
I am not good at nonverbal communication, but I believe I managed to convey the fact that while I might be a petty thief, I do not make errors of observation. ~ Graeme Simsion,#NFDB
690:Isabelle and Sebastian? Hardly. Sebastian’s a nice guy – Isabelle only likes dating thoroughly inappropriate boys our parents will hate. Mundanes, Downworlders, petty crooks…” “Thanks,” Simon said. “I’m glad to be classed with the criminal element. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
691:There is a kingship which exceeds the king.
For Vuthsa unworthy, Vuthsa captive, slain,
This is not captive, this cannot be slain.
It far transcends our petty human forms,
It is a nation’s greatness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act III,#NFDB
692:The silence made our breathing loud, but louder still was the way he looked at me then. A white noise of a look. Everything else fell away and still I became fully aware of every place his body touched mine, of how my hands splayed across his chest. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
693:358. Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma,#NFDB
694:How can it fail to smash and shatter the petty provincialism and narrow nantionalism ... making of this world a tragic mosaic of hostility and hate? How can this fabulous new force in the sky fail to serve the hope of teh world and the peace of the world? ~ Juan Trippe, #NFDB
695:I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to temp us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
696:Isabelle and Sebastian? Hardly. Sebastian’s a nice guy – Isabelle only likes dating thoroughly inappropriate boys our parents will hate. Mundanes, Downworlders, petty crooks…”
“Thanks,” Simon said. “I’m glad to be classed with the criminal element. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
697:Never give in. 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. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
698:When we act pugnaciously, and injuriously, and angrily, and rudely, to what level have we degenerated? To the level of the wild beasts. Well, the fact is that some of us are wild beasts of a larger size, while others are little animals, malignant and petty. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
699:Nobody went out to pasture, and a lot of people are doing their best work. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Sting are at the top of their game. I mean, Tony Bennett is the coolest guy I ever met! We have to figure out how to break out of this age ghetto. ~ Bonnie Raitt, #NFDB
700:Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up. ~ Mike Jay, #NFDB
701:I wanted … people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are the children of the earth, part of the cosmos. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
702:The earth was thus better lighted than the sky, which produces a particularly sinister effect, and the hill, whose contour was poor and mean, was outlined vague and wan against the gloomy horizon. The whole effect was hideous, petty, lugubrious, and narrow. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
703:...the leader must 1) avoid getting swamped in detail; 2) not be petty; 3) not be pompous; 4) know how to select people to fit the task; 5) trust others to do a job without the leader's meddling; 6) be capable of clear decisions; 7) inspire confidence. ~ J Oswald Sanders, #NFDB
704:Idols of power, then, are not only for the powerful. You can pursue power in small, petty ways, by becoming a local neighborhood bully or a low-level bureaucrat who bosses around the few people in his field of authority. Power idolatry is all around us. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
705:... women feel the humiliation of their petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are not socially ostracized, so long as we are politically ostracized as he is not. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
706:It wasn't a lack of attraction to her husband that caused her problems. It was life. It was traffic. It was the Miami Dade Water and Sewer bills, it was trying to get ahead, and trying to be on time. Petty little thing, but zillions of them fused together. ~ Heather Graham, #NFDB
707:I wanted […] people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are the children of the earth, part of the cosmos. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
708:Monsieur Josserand died very quietly - a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings that he had ever loved. ~ mile Zola, #NFDB
709:Ultimately, we lacked the courage to face up to our own true selves—our bare forms noble though petty, everything though nothing, almighty though powerless, filled with all the cruelty of matter and all the infinite kindness of spirit. Human, all too human. ~ Sakyo Komatsu, #NFDB
710: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, #NFDB
711:I always wanted to be a musician, 100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory, I did voice training and piano lessons, and while I was a decent musician, it didn't seem like enough for me. I felt like I wanted to make more than just music. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
712:I had seen Orange Is The New Black show on Netflix and the first thing that came to my mind was, "Why am I not on this show? It's just irritating me right now." So I made some phone calls and told them, "I want to be on your show." And they found a spot for me. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
713:Never be petty. Do not feed resentments against anyone. I prefer good-hearted sinners to so called good people who are intolerant and devoid of compassion. Being spiritual is to have an open mind, understand and forgive, and be friends with everyone. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
714:People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, more spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
715:DMS is energetic and enterprising to a degree that from time to time leaves certain persons (e.g. those burdened with a petty fear of death or torture) uneasy (see my prior speculation as to possibility DMS may have been born with a redundant Y chromosome). ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
716:Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
717:put back all sorrow from your mind; 145 and never forget that I am always by you should it occur again, as we walk on, that we find ourselves where others of this crew fall to such petty wrangling and upbraiding. The wish to hear such baseness is degrading. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
718:There is evil and disorder in the world because people have forgotten that all things emanate from one source. Return to that source and leave behind all self-centered thoughts, petty desires, and anger. Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
719:I am a biological and cultural mongrel and proud of it; in mind and body, I am a product of all classes and races and nations. I don’t pretend to be racially or socially pure like you, or a chauvinist like you, petty fascist of all nations, races, and classes. ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
720:Peter had spent his whole life in a town where fights were either drunken and friendly, or silent and petty. True war was foreign to him. He thought of how scared and confused he had been when the battle broke out in the Nest; he was in a different world now. ~ Jonathan Auxier, #NFDB
721:The Romanticists predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, “petty bourgeois” system — never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
722:The soul, cramped among the petty vexations of Earth, needs to keep its windows constantly open to the invigorating air of large and free ideas: and what thought is so grand as that of an ever-present God, in whom all that is vital in humanity breathes and grows? ~ Lucy Larcom, #NFDB
723:As long asthe audience or the public perceives you to be sincere in your approach and not petty, they will think it's fair and they will wait for the other person's response. But if they sense it's petty or the slightest bit unfair, they'll turn on you right away. ~ Roger Ailes, #NFDB
724:It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
725:Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
726:One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
727:We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
728:I live in Venice Beach so I see this all day, every day. Some people just ignore people with mental illness, pretend they're not there. They don't say "good morning" to them; they don't act like they're human. They'll get locked up, or just ignored. It's just awful. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
729:One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace. ~ Yoshida Shoin, #NFDB
730:Overweight southern senators are easy targets. They too easily become focal points of all evil, allowing the arts community to willfully ignore our own bigotry, our own petty evils, our own intolerance which--evil senators or no--will be the death of the arts. ~ Suzan Lori Parks, #NFDB
731:There was a stir when they climbed up into the chilly morning air, followed by a few boos and even some applause. People were strange like that. Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
732:Well, you might as well begin making friends with Donna Domacetti’s circle. They will be your companions very soon.”
Cass tried to keep a straight face. The thought of marrying Luca was bad enough. Was she expected to transform into a boring, petty gossip as well? ~ Fiona Paul,#NFDB
733:We were on separate paths, parallel for now, but still separate, our arms stretched across the gap to keep us connected. But the gap was still there, widening every day that I saw the innocent glint in Sherlock’s eyes and felt the black ash of rage staining mine. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
734:If to thee nothing appears superior to the Genius which dwells in thee and has made itself master of his own tendencies and watches over his own thoughts and if beside him thoufindest that all the rest is petty and of no worth, then to no other thing give lodging. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
735:Mma Ramotswe was right: evil repaid with retribution, with punishment, had achieved half its goal; evil repaid with kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small, petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB
736:She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
737:Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
738:I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
739:In the gray Poland plundered by the Soviet utopia there was no shortage of cunning petty demons on the party payroll out searching for young souls with ballistic tendencies, souls who dreamed of greatness and despised the trifling daily round of worries and pursuits. ~ Adam Zagajewski, #NFDB
740:It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
741:You can only live on the past for so long, and we kind of stretched our luck on that. We think we're on the way back, but it's just a matter of how quickly things come together. Common sense tells you it's not going to happen overnight because we're trying to catch up. ~ Richard Petty, #NFDB
742:He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed happily, and listened to the wind sweeping down from the mountains, to the chirping of night birds. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
743:But good records seem to get to the people who need them the most. I guess I have to believe that the best marketing tool is still a good song. And that it’s probably better that I put my time into writing one of those than learning how to do social media properly.” Petty ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
744:Great suffering brings with it the power of great endurance. When sorrow is deepest all the forces of patience and courage are banded together to do their duty. So while we are cowards before petty troubles, great sorrows make us brave by rousing our truer manhood. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
745:The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain. ~ Elizabeth Hay, #NFDB
746:During the football scene in the Point Break they were playing, and I wasn't slated to be in the football scene. I was like, "I want to play!" So they said, "Go play." It was just a gas. There was a responsibility of being the leading lady - there's a responsibility to that. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
747:In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
748:In Point Break, I was the only woman in there, so it was pretty easy to feel like a sex symbol. You've got all the naked, wet, Hot Chili Peppers, right? You've got Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves and then the whole crew. It was me and 50 dudes the whole time. It was awesome! ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
749:...a friend of mankind with shaky moral foundation is a cannibal of mankind, to say nothing of his vainglory; insult the vainglory of one of these numberless friends of mankind, and he is ready at once to set fire to the four corners of the world out of petty vengence ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
750:This is the lesson: never give in, 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,#NFDB
751:God forgive us for being chained to petty and purposeless things instead of praying for the persecuted church in chains. May we never stop praying for the persecuted church to be strengthened in Christ’s love, and those who persecute the church to be overwhelmed by Christ’s love. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
752:The Saudis have never shown any respect for human rights, either now or in the past. Even a petty burglar faces having one of his hands chopped off. The liberal press in America prefers to ignore all this, although they don't hesitate to blacken the reputation of Iran. ~ Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, #NFDB
753:Aren’t you sentient human beings? Or are you living like animals for the moment only? In that case by all means indulge in charity and cure each petty suffering that meets your eye; but don’t meddle with the revolution, for its task is to cure all sufferings present and to come. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
754:Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. ~ George Mason, #NFDB
755:Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world. And if you do the latter, you're not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
756:It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political talents can assert themselves only in rare cases, and it is even rarer that the specifically political qualifications survive the petty maneuvers of party politics with its demands for plain salesmanship. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
757:Universities are almost as bad as government.” “It’s hard to tell the difference.” I stifled a yawn, and munched another oatmeal cookie. “Except universities don’t have to be petty and are, while almost no one in government means to be petty, but the results almost always are. ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
758:Working on a ranch is heaven. It’s a hard life, featuring plenty of hard work, and yet at the same time it’s an easy life. You’re outside all the time. Most days it’s just you and the animals. You don’t have to deal with people or offices or any petty bullshit. You just do your job. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
759:If remembering tells us who we are, then forgetting keeps us sane. If we recalled every song we’d ever heard, every touch we’d ever felt, every pain no matter how small, every sadness no matter how petty, every joy no matter how selfish, we could surely lose our minds. ~ Frances de Pontes Peebles, #NFDB
760:Petty unselfishness,” she repeated. “I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn’t care for, to please people they didn’t love; that they never learnt to be sincere—and, what’s as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
761:School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes. ~ John Taylor Gatto, #NFDB
762:A certain degree of solitude seems necessary to the full growth and spread of the highest mind; and therefore must a very extensive intercourse with men stifle many a holy germ, and scare away the gods, who shun the restless tumult of noisy companies and the discussion of petty interests. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
763:Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life. Awe is one of the emotions most closely linked to the hive switch, along with collective love and collective joy. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
764:I thought it couldn't be just an ordinary, empty space. It must be different from a petty vacuum. I looked into it again, feeling mesmerized, as if catching a glimpse of another universe. For no particular reason I felt like disappearing through the dark hole into somewhere else. ~ Yumiko Kurahashi, #NFDB
765:Size Circumscribes—it Has No Room
641
Size circumscribes—it has no room
For petty furniture—
The Giant tolerates no Gnat
For Ease of Gianture—
Repudiates it, all the more—
Because intrinsic size
Ignores the possibility
Of Calumnies—or Flies.
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
766:I'm certainly not a Robin Hood, I'm not that way. I don't want to come through, burn everybody for $200 a ticket and then they can't afford to come see me again. Plus, I just don't think it's right. I don't think we need that much money. I just do what seems like the logical thing to do. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
767:The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
768:Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
769:Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
770:In particular, I’d realized that although I possessed all the elements of a happy life, too often I took my circumstances for granted and allowed myself to become overly vexed by petty annoyances or fleeting worries. I’d wanted to appreciate my life more, and to live up to it better. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
771:To Wrench the human soul from its moorings, to immerse it in terrors, ice, flames, and raptures to such an extent that it is liberated from all petty displeasure, gloom and depression as by a flash of lightening: what paths lead to this goal? And which of them do so most surely? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
772:Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
773:A woman isn't just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift our perspectives as do joy and triumphs. At any moment, on any given day, we can be friends, competitors, or enemies. We can be generous or stingy, loving or petty, helpful or untrustworthy. ~ Lisa See, #NFDB
774:It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands. ~ Dag Hammarskj ld, #NFDB
775:It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands. ~ Dag Hammarskjold, #NFDB
776:If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compar’d with loss of thee will not seem so. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
777:it is a mistake to talk of the twilight of age, or the blurred sight of old people. The long day grows clearer at its close, and the petty fogs of prejudice which rose between us and our fellows in youth melt away as the sun goes down. At last we see God's creatures as they are. ~ Rebecca Harding Davis, #NFDB
778:She had even started thinking of giving up entirely, beginning to agree with those who held that life-tasks weren’t really about accomplishing anything beyond the passing of time before all such tasks, ambitions, goals and aspirations became – supposedly – laughably irrelevant and petty. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
779:Those who lack a central purpose in life fall prey to worries, fears, and petty troubles, and end up stuck in self-pity. They may appear virtuous, because they lack any glaring faults and make no great mistakes, but they take a long, winding route to failure and unhappiness just the same. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
780:Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune... ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
781:Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics? ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
782:[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
783:Battered and bruised but still fighting for dominance his was not the selfish petty pride that made bullies of lesser men but rather the quiet
determined dignity that turned men into heroes and made heroes crawl back to their feet from the bitter dust of defeat and stand tall once more. ~ C L Wilson,#NFDB
784:Love that sets forth the soul like springtime and ripens it like summer. Love as rarely exists in reality, as if a master alchemist has taken it and distilled out all the impurities, every petty disenchantment, every unworthy thought, into a perfect elixir, sweet and deep and all-consuming. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
785:The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. ~ Adam Gopnik, #NFDB
786:It's hard to believe that these self-centered people have nuclear weapons that they can fire at any moment. Even modern wars are fought like revenge tales from some petty grievance. It was definitely tapping into the Dr. Strangelove vibe, which is one of my three top favorite films or all time. ~ Jay Roach, #NFDB
787:Once it was believed that to bring these creatures to manhood it was enough to feed them, clothe them, and look to their everyday needs; but we see now that the result of this has been to turn out petty shopkeepers, village politicians, hollow technicians devoid of an inner life. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
788:You're dealing in magic-it's this intangible thing that has to happen. And to seek it out too much might not be a good idea. Because, you know, it's very shy, too. But once you've got the essence of them, you can work songs and improve them. You see if there's a better word, or a better change. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
789:Einstein appealed to humanity’s higher instincts, asking the world to ignore its petty differences and quarrels in quest of wisdom and happiness instead. “If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise,” he predicted. “If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death. ~ Robert Masello, #NFDB
790:And of these, a great part build so much on their ceremonies and petty traditions of men that they think one heaven is too poor a reward for so great merit, little dreaming that the time will come when Christ, not regarding any of these trifles, will call them to account for His precept of charity. ~ Erasmus, #NFDB
791:But he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
792:The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
793:Man is in truth a compound of eternity and time. The more he is attached to temporal things and rests in them, the farther he grows from things eternal; they seem to him petty, just as great objects appear small when we see them from a distance, and he can never attain to real peace. ~ J. Tauler: Institutions, #NFDB
794:People destroy beauty when they find it. (Acheron) How so? (Artemis) By nature, people are petty and jealous. They envy what they lack and because they don’t know how to acquire something, they try to destroy anyone who has it. Beauty is one of those things they hate most in others. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
795:Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
796:An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
797:A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won't pee away. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
798:Project Hollywood was bringing me out of my solipsistic shell. It was giving me the resources I needed to be a leader; it was teaching me how to walk the tightrope of group dynamics; it was helping me learn to let go of petty things like personal property, solitude, cleanliness, sanity, and sleep. ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB
799:We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself. Greatness of soul will be lost, which can’t stand out unless it disdains as petty what the mob regards as most desirable. —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
800:When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
801:For Star Trek proves, as faulty as individual episodes could be, is that the much-maligned common man and common woman has an enormous hunger for brotherhood. They are ready for the twenty-third century now, and they are light-years ahead of their petty governments and their visionless leaders. ~ Gene Roddenberry, #NFDB
802:Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren't about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy? ~ Ben Shapiro, #NFDB
803:Without the knowledge of the true number of the people, as a principle, the whole scope and use of keeping bills of birth and burials is impaired; wherefore by laborious conjectures and calculations to deduce the number of people from the births and burials, may be ingenious, but very preposterous. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
804:As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish--about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives. ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
805:Awards are not something that I measure my work by. I've been so fortunate and I've gotten to do such terrific things that it seems petty to look back and say, 'Oh, I should have gotten that prize.' I've been so blessed, it's hard to look back and think anything but that, so I have no disappointments. ~ Aaron Tveit, #NFDB
806:If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
807:Have no fear of robbers or murderers. Such dangers are without, and are but petty. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. What matters it what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think only of what threatens our souls. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
808:Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
809:People destroy beauty when they find it. (Acheron)
How so? (Artemis)
By nature, people are petty and jealous. They envy what they lack and because they don’t know how to acquire something, they try to destroy anyone who has it. Beauty is one of those things they hate most in others. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
810:The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hestitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 169, #NFDB
811:When I decided to be a musician I reckoned that that was going to be the way of less profit, less money. I was sort of giving up the idea of making a lot of money. It was what I loved to do. I would have done it anyway. If I'd had to work at Taco Bell I'd have still been out at night trying to play music. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
812:You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive ~ Abraham Verghese, #NFDB
813:When I entered the city
you moved away.
When I left the city
you didn't even look up to say good-bye.
I'll accept your kindness,
I'll accept your insult.
I'll accept whatever you have to give.
Your radiance shines
in every atom of creation
yet our petty desires keep it hidden. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
814:I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed. ~ Stewart O Nan, #NFDB
815:La Boétie, Anti-Dictator, pp. 43–44. Whenever a ruler makes himself dictator . . . all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather around him and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant. 11 ~ Murray N Rothbard, #NFDB
816:Her husband was not malicious, but he did bully, though without anger or animosity, as do petty tyrants who think that giving orders means swearing. In front of any stranger he behaved himself, but in his family he let himself go and pretended to be terrible although he was really scared of everybody. ~ Guy de Maupassant, #NFDB
817:Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. ~ William James, #NFDB
818:Had he thought the power to make folk miserable was a greater power than to play fair with them? That was a mistake common to small-witted people—to think good was a weaker thing than evil. From all that Joliffe had seen, evil—in both its greater ways and in such petty ones as bullying—was the weak man’s ~ Margaret Frazer, #NFDB
819:Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop; to free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery. ~ Samuel Gompers, #NFDB
820:To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
821:We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself. Greatness of soul will be lost, which can’t stand out unless it disdains as petty what the mob regards as most desirable. —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 74.12b–13 ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
822:When I met Elvis, we didn't really have a conversation. I was introduced by my uncle, and he sort of grunted my way. What stays with me is the whole scene. I had never seen a real mob scene before. I was really young and impressionable. Elvis really did look - he looked sort of not real, as if he were glowing. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
823:As for the petty little world of journalism, the media demonstrates how it, more than anyone, is careful to traffic only in authorized ideas and wares; while at the same time it fosters, through its antics, the illusion of a free circulation of ideas and opinions - not unlike jesters in a tyrant's court. ~ Robert Faurisson, #NFDB
824:In the spirit of friendship, I must tell you that I am bitterly jealous of the time you spend in the Janissaries' company. I want you to stop training with them."
"And in the spirit of friendship, I must tell you that I do not care in the slightest about your petty jealousies. I am late for my training. ~ Kiersten White,#NFDB
825:The Art of Peace is medicine for a sick world. There is evil and disorder in the world, because people have forgotten that all things emanate from one source. Return to that source and leave behind all self-centered thoughts, petty desires, and anger. Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything. ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
826:Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably - almost certainly - well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one's own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant, but of much less distressing immediacy. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
827:Rather than, as an actor, I want the audience to like me, I'm going to smile beautifully and I've got everybody's sympathy - what about showing the moments when somebody is unbelievably petty? Or really selfish? The faults, the little things, those are the things that interested me about playing the character. ~ James Callis, #NFDB
828:The stress and sadness of it all had been tough to handle, but there had also been a simmering, irrational resentment on his side. So yes, he had embraced a coping mechanism that he’d known Qhuinn hadn’t approved of or liked. It had been a subversive, petty payback for sins the male wasn’t actually committing. But ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
829:Let us think of everything that can happen as something which will happen. 16. I know that you have really done what I advise you to do; I now warn you not to drown your soul in these petty anxieties of yours; if you do, the soul will be dulled and will have too little vigour left when the time comes for it to arise. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
830:Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
831:It was about the compelling need to make countries get along to prevent war, in contrast with the totally petty and selfish bullshit that drives the individuals who are supposedly in charge of these countries. It's hard to believe that these self-centered people have nuclear weapons that they can fire at any moment. ~ Jay Roach, #NFDB
832:The nearer we come to the full military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous becomes to us the high flood of petty-bourgeois Anarchism. And the struggle against these elements cannot be waged with propaganda and agitation alone. ... The struggle must also be waged by applying force and compulsion. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
833:Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
834:As a kid, I wasn't given the sense that celebrity, or fame, or any of that, was something to be impressed by, or to seek out. It was always impressed upon me that making something well crafted, something respected, was the most important thing to do with your life, and I've tried to do that where I can in my field. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
835:Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing - all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art - at the door. ~ Constantin Stanislavski, #NFDB
836:He was one of that numerous and diverse legion of vulgarians, feeble miscreates, half-taught petty tyrants who make a point of instantly latching on to the most fashionable current idea, only to vulgarize it at once, to make an instant caricature of everything they themselves serve, sometimes quite sincerely. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
837:I must admit watching the great mind of Sherlock Holmes struggle to ask even a single question was perhaps the best part of that wretched day. Other than the kiss itself. I caught my finger touching my lips and turned my back to him, looking over my shoulder briefly to say, "Looked like you needed a distraction. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
838:Nothing matters more than knowing God’s purposes for your life, and nothing can compensate for not knowing them — not success, wealth, fame, or pleasure. Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction, and events without reason. Without a purpose, life is trivial, petty, and pointless. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
839:If you look at things that really affect people's lives - sport, the arts, charities - they were always at the back of the queue for government money - health, social security, defence, pensions were all way ahead. And each of those areas - sports, the arts, the lottery - got relatively petty cash from the government. ~ John Major, #NFDB
840:Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters is what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
841:Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
842:A hallmark of petty tyrants—including many Rule Nazis—is that their power over a narrow domain is coupled with low prestige; they simmer and sulk about the lack of respect they get. This mix of power and low social status creates a deadly brew—it provokes them to take out their frustration and resentment on others. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
843:Let us never fear robbers not murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters is what threatens our heads or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
844:It is always the cunning, not the naïve, who rise to power, and leaders must use artfulness to make any organization whatsoever work well. Yet they must never be guided by cynical and self-serving counsels. If they don’t call upon their higher selves, they will descend further into petty egotism and tyrannical behavior. As ~ Xenophon, #NFDB
845:Sisters are the worst. And they are the best. A sister can be awful and complicated and loving and protective and petty and competitive, and when you die she is the person you want beside you holding your hand. Somebody's gotta organize the potluck after the service and you know your husband's not gonna be up to the job. ~ Cathy Lamb, #NFDB
846:Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
847:We were becoming increasingly conscious of crowd control, security and safety. With up to 80,000 people swilling around it’s like being elected mayor of a small town for the night, with all the attendant responsibilities including car crashes, petty theft, children being born… There’s even some live music if you’re lucky. ~ Nick Mason, #NFDB
848:All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
849:I don't like being in the UK for every other reason aside from the show. It's aesthetically uncomfortable to me on almost every level for reasons that might sound petty but I can't get past. The audiences are far more challenging and while I wouldn't say I prefer it, I certainly need it to ward off my inherent laziness. ~ Doug Stanhope, #NFDB
850:No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
851:No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
852:In essentials, unity. In doubtful questions, liberty. In all things, charity. There is enough of the flesh in every one of us to wreck any local church or any other work of God. Therefore, we must submerge our own petty, personal whims and attitudes, and work together in peace for the glory of God and for common blessing. ~ Susie Larson, #NFDB
853:Let us never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it if something threatens are head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens the soul. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
854:Belgian officials say they have not found any links between the Paris attacks and those they say were being planned in Belgium. But there are many common elements: a clustering of radicals in a small area, the blurred boundary between petty criminality and jihadist violence, and the role of prison as an incubator for extremism. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
855:The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination. ~ Norman Mailer, #NFDB
856:Caldenia smiled. "A Quillonian chef, my dear you shouldn't have. Well you should have months ago, but one mustn't be petty. Finally. I shall be dining in a style to which I am suited. Fantastic. Does he have moral scruples I am reasonably sure this summit will result in at least one murder, and I have never tasted an otrokar. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
857:Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging. ~ Ernst Cassirer, #NFDB
858:Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. ~ Paul Fussell, #NFDB
859:In our society, there are only two respectable types of people: the proletariat—the avant-garde of our society, the beacon of the revoluation—and the peasantry, faithful ally of the proletariat in its struggle for the construction of socialism. The rest is nothing. The merchants, the petty tradespeople, they're only exploiters. ~ D ng Thu H ng, #NFDB
860:But a large part of learning to be an adult is admitting to yourself that nothing is ever perfect. We all have to sacrifice small indulgences from time to time in order to achieve our larger goals, and I would just have to behave like a grown-up and accept that the results were more important than my petty personal gratification. ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
861:Guard your psychological environment. Select friends who are interested in positive things, friends who really do want to see you succeed. Find friends who breathe encouragement into your plans and ideals. If you don’t, if you select petty thinkers as your close friends, you’ll gradually develop into a petty thinker yourself. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
862:Having once thought that most of his parishioners shared the life-changing encounter with blazing beauty, it was all the harder for him to see them day after day preoccupied with petty jealousies, avarice, and lusts, and to endure their sullen expressions and bored irreverence as they went through the forms of weekly worship. ~ George M Marsden, #NFDB
863:I have no idea how to feel about it. It is…a duty. It is the same as sitting through endless councils, hearing the complaints of pashas and the petty disputes of Janissaries and spahis.<...>
And the harem, I— It is not real, Lada. I visit, and they flit about like phantoms, like paintings. None of them are real to me. ~ Kiersten White,#NFDB
864:so aptly put it, “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” This is about believing that we live in a loving, kind and abundant Universe instead of one that’s petty, mean, and likes other people more than it likes you. This is about your faith being greater than your fear. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
865:As French author and fearless truth-seeker, André Gide, so aptly put it, “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” This is about believing that we live in a loving, kind and abundant Universe instead of one that’s petty, mean, and likes other people more than it likes you. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
866:Be practical, Will,” she said, again with that air of motherly annoyance. “You’re not just fighting us, you’re fighting each other. Humans as a species are unworthy of survival. You’re dying, being hunted like dogs, and yet you still find time to indulge in petty violence against one another. Humanity is not worthy of this planet. ~ Sam Sisavath, #NFDB
867:Don't confuse my respect for this family as weakness, Princess. I'm a bad bitch when I need to be and I can promise you, that's not a game you're willing to play." She scofs with an incredulous smile, "I don't pull hair, I break teeth. Choose your next words carefully or I might be provoked to show you just how petty my threats are. ~ Ellie Messe, #NFDB
868:ISIS rules Muslim apostates every day and then beheads them. Poorly educated guys get Islam for Dummies, petty criminals who think they're suddenly changing their lives because they see the light. The best way to fight them is to show them they don't know Islam at all, and that they are in fact working for the other side. ~ Malcolm Wrightson Nance, #NFDB
869:Life in the Army is miserable that way. You fuck up, they scream at you, you fuck up some more and they scream some more, but overlying all the small, petty, stupid, basically foreordained fuckups looms the ever-present prospect of the life-fucking fuckup, a fuckup so profound and all-encompassing as to crush all hope of redemption. ~ Ben Fountain, #NFDB
870:To seek absolution from humanity would be to seek my own folly. One may speak of forgiveness here, and another may actually mean it there, but legions remain who would condemn a starving man to amputation for pinching a crust of bread. We are petty creatures who seek to aggrandize ourselves by feasting on the dignity of our fellows. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
871:He was one of that countless and multifarious legion of vulgar persons, sickly abortions and half-educated petty tyrants who like a flash attach themselves to the current ideas that are most fashionable in order, again like a flash,to vulgarize them, caricaturing the very cause they seek to serve, sometimes with great genuineness. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
872:In a crisis, my family puts aside all its petty differences and hatreds... Because a crisis, is a perfect opportunity to create *new* petty differences and hatreds! My dad's from that era when you lived to 50, your heart exploded and that was that. You know when you cook bacon and you pour the grease into the can? My dad's the can! ~ Christopher Titus, #NFDB
873:They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
874:They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pityings, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
875:To seek absolution from humanity would be to seek my own folly. One may speak of forgiveness here, and another may actually mean it there, but legions remain who would condemn a starving man to amputation for pinching a crust of bread. We are petty creatures who seek to aggrandize ourselves by feasting on the dignity of our fellows. There ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
876:Why are you doing this? (Rafael) Because life’s too short to spend it fighting when you could be holding the one you love. And love’s too rare to squander it with petty concerns. I’m lucky I have Chloe and I have no intention of letting a war I didn’t start rob me of one second of my time with her. Go in peace, Dark-Hunter. (Apollite) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
877:I have been reading Madame Roland's memoirs and have come to the conclusion that she was a very over-rated woman; snobbish, vain, sentimental, envious - rather a German type. Her last days before her execution were spent in chronicling petty social snubs or triumphs of many years back. She was a democrat chiefly from envy of the noblesse. ~ Madame Roland, #NFDB
878:God has enough to think about,” people often say, as though we shouldn’t bother Him with our petty problems. But there is no spot in the universe that isn’t filled, infused, permeated, and lifted up by the divine. Your Creator can’t be left out, except in your thinking. And wherever He is left out in your thinking, He can’t help you. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
879:That was the only tragic thing about books: they changed people. All except the truly evil, who did not become better fathers, nicer husbands more loving friends. They remained tyrants, continued to torment their employees, children and dogs, were spiteful in petty matters and cowardly in important ones, and rejoiced in their victims' shame. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
880:Then come to realize that you're making mountains out of molehills. Realize how petty you've become. Sure, it may feel like you can't get a grip in this town. It may seem that every time someone offers you a hand up, they just let go and you slip further down. But you must stop being so pessimistic, Hannah, and learn to trust those around you. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
881:Songwriting ability is a gift. After a while, you come to realize, "I've really been blessed. I can write these things and it makes me happy, and it makes millions of people happy." It's an obligation, it's bigger than you. It's the only true magic I know. It's not pulling a rabbit out of a hat; it's real. It's your soul floating out to theirs. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
882:That was the only tragic thing about books: they changed people. All except the truly evil, who did not become better fathers, nicer husbands, more loving friends. They remained tyrants, continued to torment their employees, children and dogs, were spiteful in petty matters and cowardly in important ones, and rejoiced in their victims’ shame. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
883:Why are you doing this? (Rafael)
Because life’s too short to spend it fighting when you could be holding the one you love. And love’s too rare to squander it with petty concerns. I’m lucky I have Chloe and I have no intention of letting a war I didn’t start rob me of one second of my time with her. Go in peace, Dark-Hunter. (Apollite) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
884:[Slave] trade ... is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish ... liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman [peddler].... It is a clear truth, that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
885:Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
886:Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. ~ William James, The Sentiment of Rationality (1882)., #NFDB
887:Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims. ~ Felix Frankfurter, #NFDB
888:The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
889:The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
890:The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ~ Dan Barker, #NFDB
891:We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
892:don't worry. Worry brings fear, and fear is crippling. The only thing that could cause worry during this test is trying to do it all yourself. Know that all you have to do is to hold your goal before you. Everything else will take care of itself. Remember also to keep calm and cheerful. Don't let petty things annoy you and get you off course. ~ Earl Nightingale, #NFDB
893:It was not that she was a better-tempered person, she decided detachedly. It was that her anger had learned a terrible patience. What good was wasting words on a petty and tyrannical second mate? He was a little yapping dog. She was a tigress. One did not waste snarls on such a creature. One waited until one could snap his spine with a single blow. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
894:I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
895:But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
896:No, I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves. ~ William Peter Blatty, #NFDB
897:To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
898:When I was in the writers' room, all these writers were like, "Ugh, another star that they gave a writing-producing credit to." But then within like an hour, they were like, "You're really a writer." "Yeah, I really am. I'm a writer, and a director, and a producer, and an actor, and a painter, and I do all that stuff in the Lush Life." It was great. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
899:As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is himself. The consequence is, that his national pride resorts to a thousand artifices, and to all the petty tricks of individual vanity. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
900:I have left a few paltry rupees, a few petty pleasures, for a cosmic empire of endless bliss. How then have I denied myself anything? I know the joy of sharing the treasure. Is that a sacrifice? The shortsighted worldly folk are verily the real renunciates! They relinquish an unparalleled divine possession for a poor handful of earthly toys! ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
901:Is it that our needs grew smaller?” asked Hugh. “Or is it just that the fear and deprivation makes one appreciate simple things more?” “I think our ability to be happy gets covered up by the years of petty rubbing along in the world, the getting ahead,” said Daniel. “But war burns away all the years of decay, like an old penny dropped into vinegar. ~ Helen Simonson, #NFDB
902:The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
903:If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. 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. This is always exhilarating and sublime. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
904:...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
905:To explain that she knew how marriages worked, understood the petty grievances that could build up. She should tell Charlie that it didn’t matter. That if you loved someone, you should do everything you could to make it work because the person you adored more than anyone else in the world could complain of a sore throat one day and be dead the next. ~ Karin Slaughter, #NFDB
906:Eh, she said once, what a fuss for a name: famous or not, it’s only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. She mocked me at length on that point: I untie the ribbon—Elena Greco—and the sack stays there, it functions just the same, haphazardly, of course, without virtues or vices, until it breaks. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
907:If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details. ~ John G Kemeny, #NFDB
908:You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
909:Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
910:If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious - a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
911:Jerome doesn't have a clue. He in fact avoids the poets, with their petty feuds and righteous poverty. Endlessly competitive and introspective, they live in dumpy slum apartments and would knife each other for $5. Jerome prefers the painters and the film-makers who live in Soho and Tribeca. There's money there, at least the things they fight about are real. ~ Chris Kraus, #NFDB
912:The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
913:You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty, skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
914:There are petty-minded people who cannot endure to be reminded of their ignorance because, since they are usually quite blind to all things, quite foolish, and quite ignorant, they never question anything, and are persuaded that they see clearly what in fact they never see at all, save through the darkness of their own dispositions. ~ Madeleine de Souvre marquise de Sable, #NFDB
915:As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination. ~ James Whistler, #NFDB
916:Everybody in the world has to compromise. I don't know one person that gets everything they want, so the politicians are going to have to figure that out and stop pointing out, "He shook hands with a Democrat in 1989. He ate with a Republican last week." It's petty high school, even junior high stuff going on. It's junior high politics going on, so it's a shame. ~ Ice Cube, #NFDB
917:I have never in my life seen a more petty, childish, bitter, soon-to-be ex-president of the United States. Barack Obama is in fact participating in this effort to undermine the Trump transition, the Trump election, and the Trump presidency. And it's unprecedented in U.S. history. Ex-presidents have never engaged in the kind of behavior Obama is engaging in. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
918:I'm an environmentalist, and I don't want you to have a disposable aluminum can. I sure as hell don't want to have a disposable worker and I don't care who you vote for. You've got to have that as a moral position. Otherwise, my concern is, all we are is this petty interest group people who can't say anything back to a petty interest group of white nationalism. ~ Van Jones, #NFDB
919:Shiva is only meant for those whose greed is unlimited, for those who are not willing to settle for life in instalments, for those who want to become one with the very source of existence. If you go to the ultimate power in existence, you must also be going with the petition for the greatest possibility. You cannot be going with petty things to the big man! From ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
920:Note accordingly that in all countries the penalties for petty theft are extremely severe, not only as a means of defending society, but also as a stern admonition to the unfortunate to know their place, stick to their caste, and behave themselves, joyfully resigned to go on dying of hunger and misery down through the centuries forever and ever . . . ~ Louis Ferdinand C line, #NFDB
921:The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level. ~ Andr Breton, #NFDB
922:In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. ~ Theodore J Kaczynski, #NFDB
923:The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level. ~ Andre Breton, #NFDB
924:One with a cubicle and a desk that snags your panty hose and endless memos about the right way to dispose of recyclables. And lots and lots of petty intrigue and small-minded politics, all intended to distract you from the fact that you're getting two percent raises from a company that's returning twenty percent to its stockholders. That's a real grown-up's job. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
925:The Larks were bumbling entrepreneurs and petty thieves, but they were also self-deceived. While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance. ~ Louise Erdrich, #NFDB
926:There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
927:Those who overcome the temptations of mediocrity and achieve everything they want in life have an extraordinarily compelling why that drives them. They have defined a clear life purpose that is more powerful than the collective sum of their petty problems and the countless obstacles they will inevitably face, and they wake up each day and work towards their purpose. ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
928:I guess I'm more interested in why people feel they have to believe in God. Why can't it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we're born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
929:I have found it very important in my own life to try to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me. (Finding My Way Home) ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
930:Making music videos, I try to bring musicians into the logistics of filmmaking, and I try to preserve whatever's of value and achievable in their idea. If it's something I can't achieve, I tell them straight. You want to make sure that the artist really loves the idea and is committed to it, otherwise they're not going to feel great when they're up there miming it. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
931:Then come to realize that you're making mountains out of molehills. Realize how petty you've become. Sure, it may feel like you can't get a grip on this town. It may seem that every time someone offers you a hand up, they just let go and you slip further down. But you must stop being so pessimistic, Hannah, and learn to trust those around you. So I do. One more time. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
932:But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business.… ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
933:...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity.
But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't
want to.
Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
934:When we stop loving, we embrace adharma. We judge, condemn and reject people. Invalidate them in hatred. We stop being generous. Like the Kauravas, we become mean-minded, petty, stingy, clingy and possessive. Or like the Pandavas, we become clueless, confused, in search of direction and wisdom. We forget the path to Madhuvan. We entrap ourselves in Kurukshetra. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
935:JEALOUSY IS A TERRIBLE THING. It keeps you up at night, it demands tremendous energy in order to remain alive, and so you have to want to feed it, nurture it—and by so wanting, you have to acknowledge that you are a bitter, petty person. It changes you. It changes the way you view the world; minor irritations become major catastrophes; celebrations become trials. ~ Melanie Benjamin, #NFDB
936:I have found it very important in my own life to try to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me. (Finding My Way Home) ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
937:It is only the man who carries into his pursuits that great quality which Lucan ascribes to Caesar, Nescia virtus stare loco [his energy could never rest]—who first consults wisely, then resolves firmly, and then executes his purpose with inflexible perseverance, undismayed by those petty difficulties which daunt a weaker spirit—that can advance to eminence in any line. ~ Brett McKay, #NFDB
938:Just imagine if police enforced their zero-tolerance strategy in finance. They would arrest people for even the slightest infraction, whether it was chiseling investors on 401ks, providing misleading guidance, or committing petty frauds. Perhaps SWAT teams would descend on Greenwich, Connecticut. They’d go undercover in the taverns around Chicago’s Mercantile Exchange. ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
939:That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
940:The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
941:Go ahead into life, full-blooded, courageous and leap for the adventure. But you must do it soon—before the summer of your youth has cooled off into caution. You are magnificently charming—and you come like a torrent. But you will be spent on the futility of little things. You are not a watercolor. You are carved out of life—and there can be no petty hesitancies about you. ~ Ruth Reichl, #NFDB
942:It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
943:We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind. ~ Kenzabur e, #NFDB
944:English was so heavy, so desiccated and hardened by meaning, by pain and anger and even the jests and the petty quibbles, everything under the sun that obscured the basic truth. But the sound of his voice as he spoke to her now, she heard the wind in it, the stillness of the night. Stars above. The things that had kept her going. Always in her memory they had been there. ~ Meredith Duran, #NFDB
945:Jealousy is a terrible thing. It keeps you up at night, it demands tremendous energy in order to remain alive, and so you have to want to feed it, nurture it -- and by so wanting, you have to acknowledge that you are a bitter, petty person. It changes you. It changes the very way you view the world; minor irritations become major catastrophes; celebrations become trials. ~ Melanie Benjamin, #NFDB
946:CAG, are you ready to fly?” “Got the Chiefs around the birds, kicking tires and poking engines,” the Vice Commodore replied. “Michael, your Falcons don’t have tires,” Kyle replied. “And poking antimatter engines is a really bad idea.” “Sir, with all due respect, I do not question my Chief Petty Officers when they tell me what they’re doing,” Stanford replied virtuously. “SFG ~ Glynn Stewart, #NFDB
947:If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely
then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are
faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty,
dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious - a petty, shoddy, secondhand
entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The
moment you run away fear begins. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#NFDB
948:I see no reason why a woman should feel herself deserving of a separation from God because of a decision she has to make. The Jesus I love has a nonconformist understanding of his faith. He realizes that the petty rules and laws laid down by the fathers and authorities are meaningless, and that to believe in a loving God is to refuse to stand in judgment of any fellow mortal. ~ Willie Parker, #NFDB
949:If the masses started to accept UFOs, it would profoundly affect their attitude towards life, politics, everything. It would threaten the status quo. Whenever people come to realize that there are larger considerations than their own petty lives, they are ripe to make radical changes on a personal level, which would eventually lead to a political revolution in society as a whole ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
950:If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
951:Kids are real resilient," says Babs, and all the women bob their heads. Bullshit, Marla thinks. Maybe some kids are resilient. But are all of them? Is Tilly? Resilience—the ability to brush off pain—is something Marla herself has only fitfully and imperfectly grown into, over time. The petty miseries of her own early childhood are some of her most vivid memories, even now. ~ Kristen Roupenian, #NFDB
952:You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive. ~ Abraham Verghese, #NFDB
953:I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays. ~ Richard Meale, #NFDB
954:Many bad golfers marry, feeling that a wife's loving solicitude may improve their game. But they are rugged, thick-skinned men, not sensitive and introspective. It is one of the chief merits of golf that non-success at the game induces a certain amount of decent humilty, which keeps a man from pluming himself too much on any petty triumphs he may achieve in other walks of life. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
955:Never will I pray for the material things of the world. I am not calling to a servant to bring me food. I am not ordering an innkeeper to provide me with room. Never will I seek delivery of gold, love, good health, petty victories, fame, success, or happiness. Only for guidance will I pray, that I may be shown the way to acquire these things, and my prayer will always be answered. ~ Og Mandino, #NFDB
956:...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
957:God never places us in any position in which we can not grow. We may fancy that He does. We may fear we are so impeded by fretting, petty cares that we are gaining nothing; but when we are not sending any branches upward, we may be sending roots downward. Perhaps in the time of our humiliation, when everything seems a failure, we are making the best kind of progress. ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, #NFDB
958:it was one of the many petty weaknesses Montaigne cheerfully acknowledged, adding: If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off—though I don’t know. ~ Sarah Bakewell, #NFDB
959:An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor." ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
960:The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ~ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), p. 31, #NFDB
961:A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
962:It were good to know how much hay an acre of every sort will bear; how many cattle the same weight of each sort of hay will feed and fatten; what quantity of grain and other commodities the same acre will bear in one, three or seven years; unto what use each soil is proper; all which particulars I call intrinsic value, for there is also another value merely accidental or extrinsic. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
963:Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it’s not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown! ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
964:And perhaps, as those who do not tum to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come, so those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness t o ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred frqm small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God's. 23 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
965:Isn’t that a little Old Testament for a nun?” “Ex-nun. And let me tell you, that serenity crap from The Sound of Music? Bullshit. Inside the cloister, the sisters are just as petty as people on the outside. There are some you love and some you hate. I did my share of spitting in the Holy Water font before another nun used it. It was totally worth the twenty rosaries I said for penance. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
966:The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties.
Help us to play the man,
Help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces,
Let cheerfulness abound with industry.
Give us to go blithely on our business all this day,
Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured,
And grant us in the end the gift of sleep. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson,#NFDB
967:The world is a much bigger place than Bruner middle school. Those kids who make you feel bad? They're never going to know that. They'll grow up here, stay here, get married here, and have kids here. They'll never find out anything more than the petty grievances they're learning to inflict now.
But you, kiddo? You have bigger fishes to fry. I predict great things for you. ~ Claire Bidwell Smith,#NFDB
968:We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else. ~ John Holt, #NFDB
969:We ought to be very cautious in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty, and may be the origin of a number of petty acts of tyranny if the legislator be not on his guard; for as such an accusation does not bear directly on the overt acts of a citizen, but refers to the idea we entertain of his character. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
970:When I was only in the first episode of Orange Is The New Black, I'm thinking by lunchtime I'm ready for my contract, like, "What's up?" I finally just spoke up and said, "What's the deal? This is the first episode. I'd love to be on your show." And they said, "Oh, Lori, we filmed out of order, we already filmed the whole season two." So I had to wait six whole months to come back again. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
971:By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
972:You are a man with music in his soul. You are capricious, contrary, contradictory. You delight in childish games, and delight even more in winning. For a man of such intense piety, you are surprisingly petty. You are a gentleman, a virtuoso, a scholar, and a martyr, and of those masks, I like the martyr least of all. You are austere, you are pompous, you are pretentious, you are foolish. ~ S Jae Jones, #NFDB
973:In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
974:I really don't know. I guess I'm more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can't it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we're born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
975:Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. ~ Frances A Yates, #NFDB
976:The method I take to do this is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature. ~ William Petty, #NFDB
977:What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time. ~ Rohinton Mistry, #NFDB
978:In fiction, it's as if you enter a dream world that you created, but your characters have their own free will. They don't do what you want them to do - they get into trouble, do drugs, fight over petty things, and do outrageous things that you wouldn't want your children to do. In other words, you can only provide the background, the seeds - in my case the background of the Vietnamese refugee. ~ Andrew Lam, #NFDB
979:The Sage of Toronto... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity. ~ Guy Debord, #NFDB
980:We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. We make mental provisions for the days to come, and everything turns out differently, quite differently. Sufficient unto the day. The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries. ~ Etty Hillesum, #NFDB
981:This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty, skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
982:The masses of China's peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie wish to take an active part in the revolutionary war and to carry it to complete victory. They are the main forces in the revolutionary war, but, being small-scale producers, they are limited in their political outlook (and some of the unemployed masses have anarchist views), so that they are unable to give correct leadership in the war. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
983:When a child my mother taught me the legends of our people; taught me of the sun and sky, the moon and stars, the clouds and storms. She also taught me to kneel and pray to Usen for strength, health, wisdom, and protection. We never prayed against any person, but if we had aught against any individual we ourselves took vengeance. We were taught that Usen does not care for the petty quarrels of men. ~ Geronimo, #NFDB
984:Yes, tell us, Ari. Tell us what you have seen."
Athena.
Dead flowers and flashing emerald beads threaded through her tangled, upswept hair.
A hard swallow went down down my throat, followed by a tightening of every muscle I possessed. All the emotions of my vision boiled over, as fresh and furious as they'd been a few moments ago. "You should know, you petty piece of shit. ~ Kelly Keaton,#NFDB
985:Can you imagine," he went on to say, "what would have been the condition of things eventually if there had been no war, and the South had been allowed to follow its course? Instead of one great, prosperous country with nothing before it but the conquests of peace, a score of petty republics, as in Central and South America, wasting their energies in war with each other pr om revolutions. ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
986:The man of meditation becomes the man of understanding because his energy accumulates. He is not wasting it. He is not interested in trivia; he does not put any energy at all into petty things. So whenever the time arises to give, he has to give. Energy is understanding. Be conscious of it and use your energy very consciously, and use your energy in such a way that you don't simply go on wasting it. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
987:Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions or elegant enjoyments. The greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
988:Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after that. There is no sense of evil in the room, just tiredness and the aftertaste of petty squabbling. Camille drinks quite a lot of Fabre’s brandy. Towards daybreak, a kind of dismal camaraderie sets in. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
989:The most impoverished peasant can be delighted by the opening of the first spring flower, and the most wealthy aristocrat can curse the day he was born because of some petty offense to his sensibilities. She is a very wise woman. To achieve serenity we have to view life not as it is measured by the world around us but as we ourselves measure it. We must accept that the scales are not at all equal. ~ Emma Wildes, #NFDB
990:In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’ ” Many ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
991:Jealousy can’t sour someone to this extreme, can it? (Aiden) It can and it does. Believe me. I’ve seen a lot worse than this in my billion or so years of existence – the first murder man committed was one brother against the other for no other reason than that one petty emotion. Jealousy turns to hatred which then turns to poison. It infects and it destroys until it eats someone alive. (Deimos) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
992:There was a guy with mental illness in the middle of the street just yelling and hollering. I have a number that I can call - it's not 911 - to tell them, "You need to help this man get out of the street." But you have to be that person, you have to pick up the phone, you have to do it; you can't just walk by and act like they're not people. They're somebody's kid, somebody's dad, somebody's brother. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
993:Anyway, when I finished the book, I handed it in, didn't want to read it again, but when it finally was in print I felt like OK, I have to read this. And yeah, I thought God, this is petty, this is silly, too emotional, too raw...and maybe it was then, but now it all seems that it's so much better because all the stuff that felt petty and silly now seems more relevant because Andy was so important. ~ Bob Colacello, #NFDB
994:I have no use for "men's rights," any more than I have any use for "women's rights," but let us ask: Who was it that decided it was a good idea to politicize love, sex and marriage? Who spent the past four decades proclaiming that "the personal is political," so that every office flirtation and every petty domestic quarrel is a federal civil rights violation? The damned feminists, that's who. ~ Robert Stacy McCain, #NFDB
995:Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day’s petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eighths-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn’t have to be true. “Okay,” you say. “Do you want to know how I met you?” I nod. “It was on the carousel. You were on the pink horse, I was on the yellow. You ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
996:To recognize this situation is not to call for a less calculated kind of leadership: It is always the cunning, not the naïve, who rise to power, and leaders must use artfulness to make any organization whatsoever work well. Yet they must never be guided by cynical and self-serving counsels. If they don’t call upon their higher selves, they will descend further into petty egotism and tyrannical behavior. ~ Xenophon, #NFDB
997:His plain-English explanation of Stoicism is as follows: ‘A Stoic can be regarded, perhaps, as someone who continually reminds themselves that their plight is not as bad as it may appear, and that our capacities, to deal with both the petty frustrations of daily life and significant turns of bad fortune, are superior (with philosophy’s aid) to how we usually imagine them’ (Seddon, 2006, p. 78). ~ Donald J Robertson, #NFDB
998:It’s always wonderful to witness the emotional agility that some people with actual feelings can manage, and Vince had just performed a truly acrobatic feat, from concern for my life right to a petty problem he was having at work, all without losing a step. But beyond that, it was interesting in another way. Anderson? Hacking? “Vince, that’s not possible,” I said. “Anderson can barely work his phone. ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
999:Naturally, when a young fellow steps up into a big position, it breeds jealousy among those whom he's left behind and uneasiness among those to whom he's pulled himself up. Between them he's likely to be subjected to a lot of petty annoyances. But he's in the fix of a dog with fleas who's chasing a rabbit -- if he stops to snap at the tickling on his tail, he's going to lose his game dinner. ~ George Horace Lorimer, #NFDB
1000:It is easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion—uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn’t resolve anything, any more than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms. ~ Richard Lloyd Parry, #NFDB
1001:Jealousy can’t sour someone to this extreme, can it? (Aiden)
It can and it does. Believe me. I’ve seen a lot worse than this in my billion or so years of existence – the first murder man committed was one brother against the other for no other reason than that one petty emotion. Jealousy turns to hatred which then turns to poison. It infects and it destroys until it eats someone alive. (Deimos) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1002:war. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
1003:When we get to A League Of Their Own, I have to be Geena Davis' little sister who wants to be like her and wants everything that she has and is jealous and upset and mad. Well, that was easy. I mean, she has an Academy Award. I think I can be upset about that. She's 99 feet tall and she's drop-dead gorgeous and she's all feminine and pretty. I had to pretend I couldn't run as fast as her. That was hard. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
1004:A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1005:How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1006:By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance! ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1007:The education we all receive from the State, at school and after, has so warped our minds that the very notion of freedom ends up by being lost, and disguised in servitude. It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist just because his views on freedom go beyond their petty and narrow concepts of freedom learned in the State school. ~ Peter Kropotkin, #NFDB
1008:You told me he was dead."
Red said through his teeth, "There was no point,for there's no meaner, more petty man in all of God's England."
"At least I'm not a wastrel," the old man snapped.
Red started toward the old man, but Sophia stepped between them. "Red, don't."
He looked as if he might burst into flames, then snapped, "I came to get you, Sophie.Have Mary bring your things, and let's go. ~ Karen Hawkins,#NFDB
1009:Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, "What do you mean by seizing the whole earth; because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor". ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
1010:I want to have a lasting experience with God. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I loose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to leave in this world and enjoy its delights, but also elevate myself to God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1011:To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1012:Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1013:But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic.” Polly laughed. “So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal.” “It’s the same thing,” said her father, putting the groceries away. “All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can’t go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
1014:A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
1015:He never even felt how countless petty circumstances were fusing together to create an imperceptible but powerful stream that would carry him back into that life which he had left as a child in the slums of San Giusto in Trieste, right back into the world of ugly squalor and besetting vice from which he had run with all his strength for thirty years and which, for a long time now, he had believed was behind him. ~ Ivo Andri, #NFDB
1016:The split in his social existence made itself felt in his personality structure as well. Mozart's entire musical activity, his whole training as a virtuoso performer and composer, were shaped by the music canon of the hegemonic court societies of Europe. [...] At the same time, in his personality structure, especially as far as his social relations were concerned, he remained a man of the petty bourgeois ... ~ Norbert Elias, #NFDB
1017:To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1018:We have then, a basic social coin. With awe on one side and shame on the other. The audience senses secret mysteries and powers behind the performance, and the performer senses that his chief secrets are petty ones. As countless folktales and initiation rites show, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there really is no mystery; the real problem is to prevent the audience from learning this too. ~ Erving Goffman, #NFDB
1019:Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it be after his heart. But the intelligent man is he who can convert every work into one that suits his taste. No work is petty. Everything in this world is like a banyan seed, which, though appearing tiny as a mustard seed, has yet the gigantic banyan tree latent with it. He indeed is intelligent who notices this and succeeds in making all work truly great. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1020:Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, Prometheus had told me, the story they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
1021:It is so rare to find someone of true understanding; for the most part they judge purely by their own standards and ignore everyone else. So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look down upon me as a dullard. ~ Murasaki Shikibu, #NFDB
1022:The greatest benefit derived from the study of science is that it lifts you out of and above the littleness of daily trials. We learn to live in the universe as a part of it; we cannot seperate ourselves from it - our every act connects us with it - our every act affects the whole. Standing under the canopy of stars and remembering their presence you could scarcely do a petty deed, or think a wicked thought. ~ Maria Mitchell, #NFDB
1023:The thing is, if people get it right away, I just don't think you're making art. I think you're making something they're comfortable with. You have to challenge people. You know, it has to be new. It has to be something they haven't seen before. Just bring them something they haven't seen before. They aren't going to love it right away because they haven't seen it before. So they have to take a minute, you know? ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
1024:Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden puts his finger on the other longstanding injustices in the Arab world: the conying so. And, tinued occupation of Palestinian land by the Israelis; the enormous, constant Arab anger with the tens of thousands of Iraqi children who are dying under sanctions; the feelings of humiliation of millions of Arabs living under petty dictators, almost all of whom are propped up by the West. ~ Robert Fisk, #NFDB
1025:But the general feeling in the neighborhood was that school was for suckers. The dropouts were the ones who said that the most, and of course they usually looked as if they were having the most fun, wearing the best clothes, and making the most loot from drugs and petty scams. Ma said Kathy was starting to get into the drugs, but I already knew that. She said she’d heard that the 8th Street gang was ~ Michael Patrick MacDonald, #NFDB
1026:It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1027:I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1028:Making music clips, I have a responsibility to depict the artist in a way that suits them, and feels comfortable with how they want to present their music. From there I usually try to tell a story visually that complements the music, that lets the music be the hero element of the project. I just try to do something that feels sincere and creative and a little bit home-brewed so it doesn't feel too plastic or phony. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
1029:I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don’t want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1030:You are reversing the case!” The saint’s face held a mild rebuke. “I have left a few paltry rupees, a few petty pleasures, for a cosmic empire of endless bliss. How then have I denied myself anything? I know the joy of sharing the treasure. Is that a sacrifice? The shortsighted worldly folk are verily the real renunciants! They relinquish an unparalleled divine possession for a poor handful of earthly toys! ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1031:Try to see things more and more from My perspective. Let the Light of My Presence so fully fill your mind that you view the world through Me. When little things don’t go as you had hoped, look to Me lightheartedly and say, “Oh, well.” This simple discipline can protect you from being burdened with an accumulation of petty cares and frustrations. If you practice this diligently, you will make a life-changing discovery: ~ Sarah Young, #NFDB
1032:We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1033:But I'm a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem. We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won't be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally realize our potential. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
1034:I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without our complaints, there was nothing to say. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1035:Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without. ~ Nikolai Gogol, #NFDB
1036:I didn't worry about my career ending, but there were days where I felt pretty beat up by it all and just pretty tired, because they didn't make it easy for me. And coming right off the last lawsuit, it was the last thing I wanted to get involved in. When it was over, we didn't really celebrate, we were just exhausted. I lost all interest in the record business and never wanted to do anything except hand in a record again. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
1037:Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power. Such people produce powerful undercurrents of resentment around them which, if expressed, would limit their expression of pathological power. It is in this manner that the willingness of the individual to stand up for him or herself protects everyone from the corruption of society. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1038:the psyche of the man who is adequately accessing the Warrior is organized around his central commitment. This commitment eliminates a great deal of human pettiness. Living in the light of lofty ideals and spiritual realities such as God, democracy, communism, freedom, or any other worthy transpersonal commitment, so alters the focus of a man’s life that petty squabbling and personal Ego concerns no longer matter much. ~ Robert L Moore, #NFDB
1039:Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power. Such people produce powerful undercurrents of resentment around them which, if expressed, would limit their expression of pathological power. It is in this manner that the willingness of the individual to stand up for him or herself protects everyone from the corruption of society. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1040:There are surprising similarities between this diary and the diary I kept during junior high school. In each, there's a stunning lack of insight and curiosity about myself. In place of deep thought, there are dozens of passages dedicated to my body (weight gain in the recovery piece and lack of breasts in the junior high journal) and silly, petty issues of the day (hating hospital food versus fighting with frenemies). ~ Susannah Cahalan, #NFDB
1041:You cannot live sheltered forever without being exposed, and at the same time be a spiritual adventurer. Be audacious. Be crazy in your own way, with that madness in the eyes of man that is wisdom in the eyes of God. Take risks, search and search again, search everywhere, in every way, do not let a single opportunity or chance that life offers pass you by, and do not be petty and mean, trying to drive a hard bargain. ~ Arnaud Desjardins, #NFDB
1042:A clever enemy would kiss my hand, then stab at my back while I was distracted. (Stryker) A coward’s action. Truly. Don’t insult either one of us with such a suggestion. I don’t believe in petty juvenile attacks. I go after what I want, and when it’s the life of an enemy I don’t want there to be any mistaking my intention. If you’re worth my hatred, then you’re worth my letting you know that I’m coming for you. (Zephyra) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1043:I have been an observer of humanity. Most men are petty, base, and cruel. Most women are fickle, proud, and cunning. Nearly all are shortsighted and tend to view happiness as a crumb worth hoarding. There are a few, however, who stick to a goal and pursue it regardless of obstacles. They are fired with ambition to achieve something at all costs. From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate and the profoundest love. ~ Jeff Wheeler, #NFDB
1044:What the studio didn't understand is that surfing is about a billion times more dangerous than skydiving. They would not allow the boys to skydive, but they allowed us to surf in pipeline in Hawaii. Nine-hundred foot waves. So we're out there in the middle where the greatest surfers in the world surf. They have these long lenses on from the beach, so they can't see anything. They are just shooting our faces in the Point Break. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
1045:When he returns, all the petty human evils, such as the ones visited on your people, will be swept away by his mighty hand. Isn’t that marvelous? And what will become of those of us who are left? The ones who helped him. Think of the rewards. I know you’re a man who believes in such things, and you’re smart enough to make sure they come to you.” Then Suydam handed over two hundred dollars and walked Tester out of his home. ~ Victor LaValle, #NFDB
1046:A God capable of creating our world would not be petty enough to send you to an eternity of flames just because you didn’t praise him enough. She believes God couldn’t care less if you believe in him or not. God doesn’t care which religion you follow. All God cares about is that you try to have a good life, be nice to the people around you, and maybe appreciate the beauty that surrounds us all. Enjoy life as much as you can. ~ Chris Dietzel, #NFDB
1047:We simply forget all this—so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations—and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes "old" again—petty, dark and ultimately meaningless—a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our "enjoying life" it comes to us: horrible, inescapable, senseless. ~ Alexander Schmemann, #NFDB
1048:A clever enemy would kiss my hand, then stab at my back while I was distracted. (Stryker)
A coward’s action. Truly. Don’t insult either one of us with such a suggestion. I don’t believe in petty juvenile attacks. I go after what I want, and when it’s the life of an enemy I don’t want there to be any mistaking my intention. If you’re worth my hatred, then you’re worth my letting you know that I’m coming for you. (Zephyra) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1049:People sometimes ask: Is Putin a clever man? Yes, he's clever in his own way, when it comes to political intrigue, and he's got a good head for numbers. But as soon as he took office, the first thing he did was to institute a new anthem based on the old Soviet one; that was a very major step, not a petty issue. He began at once to appeal to people's basest instincts. It is true that people in Russia are used to obedience. ~ Vladimir Voinovich, #NFDB
1050:If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost. Nothing will save you—certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1051:When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and fix the leaky bathroom sink, all before dinner. For the longest time, I thought he was invincible. Above the petty problems that plagued normal people.
And now he was gone. ~ Rachel Vincent,#NFDB
1052:His first impulse, when he saw the horse and rider ahead, was to honk, both in self-advertisement, warning and greeting, but he remembered in time the seriousness of the occasion and did not do so, reflecting, after it was too late, that Thomas might feel he was snubbed, as if he had passed him in the street without speaking, and he was angry with Thomas for possibly having any such feeling about such petty matters, at such a time. ~ James Agee, #NFDB
1053:To many Native American tribes the Grand Canyon is a sacred place: site of numerous origin myths from the Havasupai to the Zuni; hushed repose of the Hopi dead. If I were forced to choose a religion, that’s the kind of religion I could go for. The Grand Canyon confers stature on a religion, outclassing the petty smallness of the Abrahamics, the three squabbling cults which, through historical accident, still afflict the world. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1054:If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost. Nothing will save you—certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1055:It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquillity of our mundane existence. ~ Joseph Weizenbaum, #NFDB
1056:yarn, n.
Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.
Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eights-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
1057:The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. ~ David Foster, #NFDB
1058:Wyatt avoided the petty gunfights and headed to a saloon and rigged up a bunch of Molotov cocktails. Her firebombs against members of Tom and Vik's posse had destroyed the scenario's promise of so many wonderful gun duels. She'd killed most of their group, too, and shown everyone that she wasn't getting promoted only because of her programming skills. Her dislike of fighting had paradoxically turned her into a lethal killing machine. ~ S J Kincaid, #NFDB
1059:Heaven, God, and his pretty orchestra of angels do not exist. Heaven is probably another word for the other Realms, because the small-minded fools in that day did not have the mental capacity to imagine a place more inaccessible than the clouds. There are many facets of the divine, and the fact that one male-dominated religion came up with a single egocentric male presence who is Lord over her petty little universe is not surprising. ~ Sara King, #NFDB
1060:Here is the final truth of horror movies: The do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber’s leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but bad anxiety . . . for a little while, anyway. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1061:If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It’s about the person who’s being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: Don’t own other people’s crap. The world would be a better place if we all did that. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
1062:Someone replies: Brazil’s always been “the world’s trash can.” Nothing is controlled here and the Bolivians know it. If it were a European country, they’d be afraid to walk down the street and get caught in a “razzia.” Someone replies: There are illegal immigrants all over the world my friend. What about the millions of illegal Brazilians in the US, who even commit petty crimes? He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones! ~ Adriana Lisboa, #NFDB
1063:All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
1064:My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell--dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
1065:My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative. ~ William Graham Sumner, #NFDB
1066:The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate. ~ Timothy Leary, #NFDB
1067:To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1068:But you believe in something?” She frowns, uncertain. “I really don’t know. I guess I’m more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can’t it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we’re born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
1069:It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy . . . great improvement . . . were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
1070:I've learned one thing, and that's to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
1071:She stood and tried hard not to believe in God. It seemed mean and petty to have more belief in God when things were going well than when they were instinct with tragedy; just as it seemed mean and petty to pray to God when you wanted something badly, and not pray when you didn’t. But after all God was Eternal Mind that you couldn’t understand; God was not a loving Father that you could. The less she thought about all that the better. ~ John Galsworthy, #NFDB
1072:The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches—how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that? ~ Xun Zi, “An Exhortation to Learning,” E. Hutton, trans., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 259, #NFDB
1073:KEYS TO POWER Everyone has insecurities. When you show yourself in the world and display your talents, you naturally stir up all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity. This is to be expected. You cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others. With those above you, however, you must take a different approach: When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1074:An aunt, who though not a midwife was expert in that kind of work, helped bring forth the child, cleaning his face with butter and, to save money, powdering his thighs with some flour scraped from a crust of bread in lieu of talcum. "So you see, my boy, you come from humble stock," his Aunt Eudore would say, acquainting him of these petty details, and from an early age Jean didn't dare hope for any kind of good fortune in the future. ~ Joris Karl Huysmans, #NFDB
1075:There may be fewer mighty tyrants commanding the life and death over millions, but there remain thousands of petty tyrants ruling smaller realms, and enforcing their will through indirect power games, charisma, and so on. In every group, power is concentrated in the hands of one or two people, for this is one area in which human nature will never change: People will congregate around a single strong personality like planets orbiting a sun. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1076:If a God, any God, is deemed to represent the Universal & divine truth, then once one finds & truly embraces that truth, he/she becomes in harmony with God. To hold it any other way is to attribute to supposed Gods petty failings like jealousy & bittermess. If that is the case, then why would I hold forth a name embodying that which is in my heart when doing so would only reduce a truth I call divine to a level of mortal frailty? ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
1077:Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1078:In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
1079:People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
1080:The People's democratic dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and the peasants, because these two classes comprise 80 to go per cent of China's population. These two classes are the main force in overthrowing imperialism and the Kuomintang reactionaries. The transition from New Democracy to socialism also depends mainly upon their alliance. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
1081:That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
1082:It isn't the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh - I really think that requires spirit.
It's the kind of character that I am going to develop. I am going to pretend that all life is just a game which I must play as skillfully and fairly as I can. If I lose, I am going to shrug my shoulders and laugh - also if I win. ~ Jean Webster,#NFDB
1083:It’s not my fault if I’m not any good at things like that.” “I’ll differ there,” Coker told her. “It’s not only your fault—it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him—and even her—brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised; ~ John Wyndham, #NFDB
1084:You’ve been off fighting the war in the Outer Rim. You don’t know what it’s been like, dealing with all the petty squabbles and special interests and greedy, grasping fools in the Senate, and Palpatine’s constant, cynical, ruthless maneuvering for power—he carves away chunks of our freedom and bandages the wounds with tiny scraps of security. And for what? Look at this planet, Obi-Wan! We have given up so much freedom—how secure do we look? ~ Matthew Woodring Stover, #NFDB
1085:His [Henry Cavendish's] Theory of the Universe seems to have been, that it consisted solely of a multitude of objects which could be weighed, numbered, and measured; and the vocation to which he considered himself called was, to weigh, number and measure as many of those objects as his allotted three-score years and ten would permit. This conviction biased all his doings, alike his great scientific enterprises, and the petty details of his daily life. ~ George Wilson, #NFDB
1086:The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted. ~ Richard Hofstadter, #NFDB
1087:that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1088:To practise black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires.
.
I have been accused of being a 'black magician'. No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practise it. ~ Aleister Crowley?,#NFDB
1089: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, #NFDB
1090:The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions! ~ Eug ne Delacroix, #NFDB
1091:the writer must resist this temptation [to quote] and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score. ~ Ethel Smyth, #NFDB
1092:In Living in Spanglish I posit the coming of existence of this forwars-looking race that obliterates all races, stripping away Vasaconelos's petty resentment of Anglo culture and patronizing Euro-centrist, and acknowledge a cultural-economic inevitability that is hemispheric in nature.
Note: Jose Vasaconelos wrote 1925 essay "La Raza cosmica" [The Cosmic Race] asserting, "Por mi raza hablara mi espiritu [The Spirit will speak through my race. ~ Ed Morales,#NFDB
1093:Our skin, our borders, all seem petty compared to alien races and the scale of galaxies. Nobody in the Star Wars universe cares about white or black humans, it seems, and what meaning could physical appearance possibly have when there are sentient beings that look like lobsters or like Jabba the Hutt? Unfortunately, in the real world, such hopeful sentiments are regularly refuted by our stubborn insistence on always finding someone to discriminate against. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
1094:The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bonds of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1095:These beliefs were mainly Protestant but not yet petty middle-class puritanism: there remained still an element fairly high stepping and wide gestured in its personal conduct. The petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery, had not yet got altogether the upper hand in that part of the country - in fact, never did except in certain limited areas; but it was making a brave try. ~ Katherine Anne Porter, #NFDB
1096:I certainly do not lament the decadence of knight errantry, nor wish to exchange the protection of the laws for that of the doughtiest champion who ever set lance in rest; but I do, in truth, believe that this knightly sensitiveness of honorable feeling is the best antidote to the petty soul-degrading transactions of every-day life, and that the total want of it is one reason why this free-born race care so very little for the vulgar virtue called probity. ~ Frances Trollope, #NFDB
1097:If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1098:This shallow, mindless nature, which constantly thirsted to subordinate itself to another person’s will, had a need to see orders through — oh, for no other reason, of course, than for the sake of a ‘common’ or ‘great’ cause. But even this didn’t matter, because petty fanatics like Erkel are utterly incapable of understanding service to an idea other than by conflating it with the very individual who, as they understand it, gives expression to this idea. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1099:For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man’s natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1100:Jesus never said, “Worship me,” but he often said, “Follow me.” We have wasted a lot of good energy on “vicarious substitutionary atonement theories” and created a punitive and petty God in the process—a “Father God” who was incapable of forgiving “without blood.”6 Is God that unfree? Remember, the ego likes contests of win and lose and cannot even comprehend anything like win-win. Jesus became our substitute in losing, hoping it would let us off the hook, I guess. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
1101:And then the blood erupted, roared. Don’t rush this! I was the victim suddenly laid waste as if by a phallic god, slammed by the rushing blood against the floor of the universe, the heart pounding, emptying the frail form it sought to protect. And lo, she was dead. Oh, too soon. Crushed lily on the pillow, except she’d been no lily and I’d seen her grimy petty purple crimes as that blood made a fool of me, wasted me, left me warm, indeed hot, all over, licking my lips. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1102:I am of the world.' He nodded at Neville. 'And so was this man. There were thousands like him, in my time. People who could wrap foul deeds in righteous words. Men and women who made it acceptable for others to give voice to their hate and their petty desire to hurt or humiliate or exclude.' His face grew grimmer still. 'You have no idea - none - of the true scale of the evile of which people like Neville Rose are capable. Nor should you. His time has passed. ~ Ambelin Kwaymullina, #NFDB
1103:retired Harrisburg, PA, police chief said he was held up by "'the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania," which may be an understatement. A 19 year old man is under arrest for allegedly robbing John Comparetto at gunpoint -- while the victim was attending a convention of narcotics cops in Harrisburg. After Comparetto gave up his money and cell phone, he and fellow conventioneers chased down the petty hood as he tried to escape in a taxi. He was placed under arrest. ~ Leonard Birdsong, #NFDB
1104:If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
1105:Richter had long ago learned that the first step in dealing with negative emotions was to accept that they were part of you. A basic mistake that people made over and over was to try and deny the worst parts of themselves. ‘I’m not angry, jealous, vindictive, petty, etc.’ Though it was only natural to shy from difficult truths, denial did not give you control over yourself. It merely ignored a part of what you were. That was actually the complete absence of control. ~ Aleron Kong, #NFDB
1106:Underneath the shifting sands of the struggle between two little Greek states [Thucydides] had caught sight of a universal truth. Throughout his book, through the endless petty engagements on sea and land which he relates with such scrupulous care, he is pointing out what war is, why it comes to pass, what it does, and, unless men learn better ways, must continue to do. His History of the Peloponnesian War is really a treatise on war, its causes and its effects. ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
1107:One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance. When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away. Criteria like “was she here at 9?” or “did she take too many breaks today?” or “man, every time I walk by his desk he’s got Facebook up” aren’t even possible to tally. Talk about a blessing in disguise! What ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
1108:Saudi Arabia is the most fragile of all Arab states, though we're not saying so. And, unfortunately, bin Laden puts his finger on the other longstanding injustices in the Arab world: the continued occupation of Palestinian land by the Israelis; the enormous, constant Arab anger with the tens of thousands of Iraqi children who are dying under sanctions; the feelings of humiliation of millions of Arabs living under petty dictators, almost all of whom are propped up by the West. ~ Robert Fisk, #NFDB
1109:All of us in government service were elected to solve the problems that have plagued our nation. We are here to think big, to act boldly, and to rise above the petty, partisan squabbling of Washington, D.C. We are here to take action. It's time to start building our country with American workers and with American iron and aluminum and steel. It's time to put up soaring new infrastructure that inspires pride in our people and our towns. It is time at last to put America first. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
1110:Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1111:Bryce had the same reasons for not being there that everyone who wasn’t there had: they didn’t want to ruin their memories of him, they didn’t want to be sad, they were scared, they didn’t know what to do. Nicole Petty would not stand for that. Because Aaron didn’t want to do any of this, either, but he didn’t have a choice. You don’t get to just come to the wedding and the funeral, but skip the middle part because it might make you too sad. That is against the rules. ~ Nora McInerny Purmort, #NFDB
1112:Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply. “A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do. ~ Nick Cutter, #NFDB
1113:The egg-man looks over my shoulder. “Those wings aren’t the only proof of your heritage. You’re a traitor, sending us all up river so you could save your petty mortal half. You’re nothing short of a—”
“Benedict,” I interrupt between clenched teeth.
Hubert’s eyes narrow—curious and hate-filled.
“Eggs Benedict.” I point to a picture on the menu. “Poached eggs. Canadian bacon. Hollandaise sauce and an English muffin. And I’d like a side of fruit.” ~ A G Howard,#NFDB
1114:At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races... More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class... People began to realise how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what is belied to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself. ~ Vasily Grossman, #NFDB
1115:Above all, avoid lying, especially lying to yourself. Keep watching out for your lies, watch for them every hour, every minute. Also avoid disgust, both for others and yourself: whatever strikes you as disgusting within yourself is cleansed by the mere fact that you notice it.
Avoid fear, too, although fear is really only a consequence of lies. Never be afraid of your petty selfishness when you try to achieve love and don’t be too alarmed if you act badly on occasion. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
1116:Who had the bigger boat, wore the better outfit, got the best table seemed all that mattered. There were decade-old feuds over casual cracks long forgotten by everyone but the principals. They circled each other still—waiting to identify a weakness—looking for somewhere and some way to strike. People jockeyed for position, cut each other’s throats over the most petty, nonsensical shit imaginable. This from the people who, it gradually began to dawn on me, actually ran the world. ~ Anthony Bourdain, #NFDB
1117:Each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations yet to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. ~ Dean R Koontz, #NFDB
1118:At dusk in the Temple Gardens the barrier between past and present turned fluid and ghosts walked. Here and there if Buckler looked closely he caught a glimpse of knights filing toward the ancient round Church, heads bowed in penitence…Buckler didn’t mind the spirits. In fact, he preferred their company to that of the general run of human. For the ghosts reminded him that man’s petty cares, so all consuming in life, would one day become nothing more than fit matter for an amusing story. ~ S K Rizzolo, #NFDB
1119:Or let’s say you have an anger problem. You get pissed off at the stupidest, most inane stuff, and you have no idea why. And the fact that you get pissed off so easily starts to piss you off even more. And then, in your petty rage, you realize that being angry all the time makes you a shallow and mean person, and you hate this; you hate it so much that you get angry at yourself. Now look at you: you’re angry at yourself getting angry about being angry. Fuck you, wall. Here, have a fist. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1120:Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1121:The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1122:Stealing equipment from a small-town fire station is such an easy, petty crime,” Nick said. “It feels anticlimactic after starting the day in New York selling three stolen Rembrandts and outwitting the FBI.”
“We could break into the International Bluegrass Music Museum,” she said. “I hear that it’s the Louvre of northwest Kentucky.”
That got Nick’s attention. “What have they got to see?”
“I was kidding! I was being sarcastic.”
“Sarcasm isn’t one of your strengths,” he said. ~ Janet Evanovich,#NFDB
1123:At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1124:The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions - anger, jealousy, etc - to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1125:So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
1126:When you fully comprehend that there is more to life than just here and now, and you realize that life is just preparation for eternity, you will begin to live differently. You will start living in light of eternity, and that will color how you handle every relationship, task, and circumstance. Suddenly many activities, goals, and even problems that seemed so important will appear trivial, petty, and unworthy of your attention. The closer you live to God, the smaller everything else appears. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
1127:You can’t just go into the mind and erase the impressions. But they get themselves erased at one point. When? When you succeed in going within and realizing the peace and joy of your own Self. The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun. You lose all interest in them permanently. That is the highest non-attachment. ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
1128:Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.
This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief.
As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too. ~ Anne Lamott,#NFDB
1129:In his description of the melancholic, Freud says that such patients are particularly perceptive with respect to their self-image:
When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself: we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind. ~ Sigmund Freud,#NFDB
1130:She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.-To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1131:The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1132:Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1133:The gods of the Disc—and here is meant the great consensus gods, who really do exist in Dunmanifestin, their semi-detached Valhalla on the world’s impossibly high central mountain, where they pass the time observing the petty antics of mortal men and organizing petitions about how the influx of the Ice Giants has lowered property values in the celestial regions—the gods of Disc have always been fascinated by humanity’s incredible ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. They ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1134:It never, however, drove him to the extremity of trying to find a regular job. As he makes clear in Mein Kampf, he had the petty bourgeoisie’s gnawing fear of sliding back into the ranks of the proletariat, of the manual laborers—a fear he was later to exploit in building up the National Socialist Party on the broad foundation of the hitherto leaderless, ill-paid, neglected white-collar class, whose millions nourished the illusion that they were at least socially better off than the “workers. ~ William L Shirer, #NFDB
1135:For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1136:The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lie. The failures, the disappointment,the regrets,they stay raw as the moment they happened. A pretty girls smile, never acted on. A petty wrong we let another take the blame for. A nameless shoulder that knocked us in a crowd and left us stewing for days, for months. For ever. This is the stuff the past is made of. The wretched moments that make us what we are. "(less) (less) ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1137:Once you decide something put all your petty fears away. Your decision should vanquish them. I will tell you time and time again, the most effective way to live is as a warrior. Worry and think before you make any decision, but once you make it, be on your way free from worries or thoughts; there will be a million other decisions still awaiting you. That's the warrior's way.
A warrior thinks of his death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that tempers our spirit. ~ Carlos Castaneda,#NFDB
1138:Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such — and those living more peaceably around them — we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
1139:I’d always worried about being practically empty, about having no serious reason for living. And now, confronted with the facts, I was sure of my individual nullity. In that environment, too different from the one where my petty habits were at home, I seem to have disintegrated, I felt very close to nonexistence. I discovered that with no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into irresistible boredom, a terrifying, sickly sweet torpor. Nauseating. ~ Louis Ferdinand C line, #NFDB
1140:The London criminal is certainly a dull fellow. Look out of this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloudbank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.
There have been numerous petty thefts.
This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that. It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
1141:The Call To Service
These are the days when little thoughts
Must cease men's minds to occupy;
The nation needs men's larger creeds,
Big men must answer to her cry;
No longer selfish ways we tread,
The greater task lies just ahead.
These are the days when petty things
By all men must be thrust aside;
The country needs men's finest deeds,
Awakened is the nation's pride;
Men must forsake their selfish strife
Once more to guard their country's life.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1142:In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is constantly acting a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native character are refined away or softened down by the levelling influence of what is termed good-breeding, and he practises so many petty deceptions and affects so many generous sentiments for the purposes of popularity that it is difficult to distinguish his real from his artificial character. ~ Washington Irving, #NFDB
1143:The first panel misquotes the preamble and conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, leaving out five words from within its selected excerpts. The architect requested the omissions so the text would fit better! Surely this memorable text should not be altered for so petty a reason. We know Jefferson would not approve, for whenever he sent correspondents a copy of the Declaration he took pains to show what the Continental Congress had added to his draft and what it had cut. The altered text reads, ~ James W Loewen, #NFDB
1144:Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn't seem to get out. You almost didn't want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1145:It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book. ~ Alice Miller, #NFDB
1146:I’d remembered something my Lock had said to me once. That we were our own army. That none could stand before us. In Regent’s Park, for a brief shining moment, I’d thought he and I were finally going to become that. I’d thought maybe we’d belong to each other. At least for a while. That maybe he could keep me from becoming a monster while slaying one. But it was a stupid, stupid thought. Because as much as we wanted that fantasy to be our reality, even an attempt to make it happen ended only in disaster. ~ Heather W Petty, #NFDB
1147:The Strongman continued his mental review. “And the petty little saints in the town were . . . obscure, don’t you see, far from help, far from the mainstream, alone amid the rolling farmlands . . . unknown. It was a perfect place to begin the process.” His beastly face grew tight and bitter. “Until they started praying. Until they ceased being so comfortable and started weeping before God! Until they began to reclaim the power of the . . .” The Strongman sealed his lips. “The Cross?” the aide volunteered. ~ Frank E Peretti, #NFDB
1148:When I would work freelance in production in Chicago, there were a lot of times when I was working for cheap, bad people, and I was working for slave wages anyway, so there were some times when I might have filled out a couple of blank taxi receipts and kept some petty cash. But like I say, I was very selective. It was only people that I thought were assholes. The people that I liked I went far and above saving them money, much less taking it. But that's it. I'm pretty moral. I don't even like stealing jokes. ~ Andy Richter, #NFDB
1149:Science is not a matter of belief. Science does not care whether you believe in it or not. Science will continue to do what science will do, free from morality, free from ethical concerns, and most of all, free from the petty worry that it will not be believed. Belief has shaped the history of human accomplishment—we believe we can, and so we do—but belief has never changed the natural world. The mountain does not vanish because we believe it should. The unicorn does not appear because we believe it will. ~ Mira Grant, #NFDB
1150:She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1151:Spinoza , for example, thought that insight into the essence of reality, into the harmonious structure of the eternal universe, necessarily awakens love for this universe. For him, ethical conduct is entirely determined by such insight into nature, just as our devotion to a person may be determined by insight into his greatness or genius. Fears and petty passions, alien to the great love of the universe, which is logos itself, will vanish, according to Spinoza, once our understanding of reality is deep enough. ~ Max Horkheimer, #NFDB
1152:Life arises naturally; where life is, death is, joy is, pain is. Where joy and pain are, ecstacy and horror are, all part of the pattern. They occur as night and day occur on a whirling planet. They are not individually willed into being and shot at persons like arrows. Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day’s receipts… ~ Sheri S Tepper, #NFDB
1153:There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
1154:She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1155:I can't convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained and confined mentalities by far prefer the petty and parochial prisons of the kind of sense they have been trained and rewarded for making out of their lives (and are punished for deviating from them). What it costs them ultimately to be such slaves and infants and ideological zombies is a thought too monstrous and rending and spiky for them even to want to glance at. ~ Kenny Smith, #NFDB
1156:I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book. ~ Philip Pullman, #NFDB
1157:I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part of the action. It isn’t sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill. ~ P D James, #NFDB
1158:I was keeping Bubba from committing a felony. No offense, but ‘he’s a zombie, Your Honor, don’t electrocute me’ isn’t a viable excuse. Believe me, I know. My dad’s doing three life sentences ‘cause he killed, and I quote, ‘a crap load of demons who were trying to kill me and if I hadn’t killed them, Your Honor, they’d have taken over the city and enslaved all you petty, pathetic humans.’ They wouldn’t even let my dad plead insanity because of it. So trust me, ‘zombies needed killing’ isn’t a legit defense. (Nick) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1159:Any beautiful mind, full of ideas, would always express itself in the most natural, simple and straightforward way, anxious to communicate its thoughts to others (if this is at all possible) and thus relieve the solitude that he must experience in a world such as this: but conversely, intellectual poverty, confusion and wrong-headedness, clothe themselves in the most laboured expressions and obscure turns of phrase in order to conceal petty, trivial, bland or trite thoughts in difficult and pompous expressions. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1160:giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It’s okay. He invited me to a world that wasn’t secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive. ~ Abraham Verghese, #NFDB
1161:Sometimes “inner work” requires an act of loyalty rather than an effort at transformation. Knowing what makes us happy (Venus), expressing this to others (Mercury), and standing firm in the face of opposition (Mars) may seem very petty against the more profound concerns of the outer world. Yet in their own way, these things are equally profound, for it is these small acts of self-affirmation that define the ego and ultimately the capacity to mediate the heavy planets with their destructive and transformative potentials. ~ Liz Greene, #NFDB
1162:You need to give me a break. I’m an eighteen-year-old girl, and you’re my first boyfriend . . . and you just happen to be stupidly hot. So what if I get petty and jealous?” She shrugged. “I’m allowed. I bet if a guy looked at me like that, you’d probably feel the same.”
I let her words sink in before speaking. “A, if a guy looked at you in any way, I’d probably beat his ass. B, I didn’t know I was your boyfriend.”
Her eyes went wide. “I just assumed—”
“Good,” I interrupted. “Assume away, girlfriend. ~ Jay McLean,#NFDB
1163:It doesn't matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter anymore if I'm either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There's so little difference between one human being and the next, it's just hypotheses, human ideas about life and the world and words that mean nothing, about definitions that mean nothing to Earth, to nature, to the universe. Boys and girls and intersex people and me--we're just ideas, and when we're dead, the ideas will go with us. It all means nothing. ~ Abigail Tarttelin, #NFDB
1164:Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity! ~ Nicolas Chamfort, #NFDB
1165:There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up. But ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
1166:There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a women. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren't needed, and that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
1167:You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
1168:As a bachelor seeing the married life of others––their petty cares, their disputes, their jealousies––he used mentally to smile contemptuously. In his future married life he was to have nothing of this kind, and even the external forms of his married life would be quite unlike other people’s. And now, behold! his life with his wife had not shaped itself differently, but was made up of all those petty trifles which he had formerly so despised, but which now, against his will, assumed an unusual and incontestable importance. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1169:Growing older is an opportunity for you to increase your value and competence as the neural connections in your hippocampus and throughout your brain increase, weaving into your brain and body the wisdom of a life well lived, which allows you to stop living out of fear of disappointing others and being imperfect. Ageless living is courageous living. It means being undistracted by the petty dramas of life because you have enough experience to know what’s not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
1170:The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
1171:Only in love can I find you, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breathe a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and anxious self-assertion, which make me a prisoner of my own poverty emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out toward you, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in you, since by your love you are the inmost center of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself. ~ Karl Rahner, #NFDB
1172:The memories of our glories fade,’ he whispered, ‘and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard’s lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened. A pretty girl’s smile, never acted on. A petty wrong we let another take the blame for. A nameless shoulder that knocked us in a crowd and left us stewing for days, for months. For ever.’ He curled his lip. ‘This is the stuff the past is made of. The wretched moments that make us what we are. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1173:Ghosh, in giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It’s okay. He invited me to a world that wasn’t secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive. ~ Abraham Verghese, #NFDB
1174:Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him -- illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind -- and everything is all right. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1175:Arthur is no fit king. Uther's bastard, Merlin's pawn, he is lowborn and a fool. He is wanton and petty and cruel. A glutton and a drunkard, he lacks all civilized graces. In short, he is a sullen, ignorant brute.
All these things and more men say of Arthur. Let them. When all the words are spoken and the arguements fall exhausted into silence, this single fact remains: we would follow Arthur to the very gates of Hell and beyond if he asked it. And that is the solitary truth.
Show me another who can claim such loyalty. ~ Stephen R Lawhead,#NFDB
1176:If we want to strengthen the EU, then we urgently need a two-pronged approach. First, we can save a lot of money if we finally move to harness synergy effects in military spending. The parallel structures in the individual armies still remain far too costly, and we could save a lot by making joint purchases. Second, we cannot only think in terms of conventional military logic, but instead have to be far better prepared to thwart cyberattacks. Most importantly, we can no longer allow the EU to become bogged down in petty details. ~ Martin Schulz, #NFDB
1177:I really support criticism as a craft and as a vocation. People who devote as much time to thinking about sound through writing as I do practicing and forming it, the whole system of journalism seems to not yield rewards sustainable as a craft. So few can spend enough time to be serious about it and approach it with confidence and a kind of depth. And that's good on one level, because you have some leveling, that's kind of maybe leveled the petty fiefdoms of undeserving people but it's also made it hard to make a living as a writer. ~ Tim Hecker, #NFDB
1178:It was like the first time I'd ever seen Hollywood just really not do the right thing. We filmed Free Willy in Mexico. I'd come in a really nice car from my hotel, and we'd have to drive around all the crew that was sleeping in the parking lot. People making their breakfast on the ground. It was because there was a whale there that was in a little tank. It just felt gross. It felt really bad. They didn't free that whale for, damn... at least 10 years later. The poor whale had horrible psoriasis all over him, and his fin didn't work. ~ Lori Petty, #NFDB
1179:Pierre and I refused to allow my mother to visit her son in prison. She remained in the house with Cathie and little Jacques, but we went ourselves, and I felt as if I were back again in the theater foyer… My brother was still the perfect dandy, dressed as though for a reception, with a clean shirt and neckerchief brought to him every day by one of his servers from the boutique in the Palais-Royal, along with wine and provisions, which he shared out with his fellow prisoners—a mixed bunch of debtors, rogues, and petty thieves. ~ Daphne du Maurier, #NFDB
1180:The memories of our glories fade,” he whispered, “and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard’s lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened. A pretty girl’s smile, never acted on. A petty wrong we let another take the blame for. A nameless shoulder that knocked us in a crowd and left us stewing for days, for months. Forever.” He curled his lip. “This is the stuff the past is made of. The wretched moments that make us what we are.” Friendly ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1181:To make matters worse, the Accuser intended to pull every trick of legal hairsplitting, explore every petty technicality, and appeal every tedious legal procedure that he possibly could, in order to drag this thing out as long as possible. He felt confident and prepared as he took his place as prosecutor in the court. A battery of defenders stepped out, across from the Accuser and Semjaza’s Watchers. They took their places to counter the accusations of the lawsuit. They were the prince archangels: Mikael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1182:In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiff, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1183:Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives? ~ Christopher Fowler, #NFDB
1184:You’re not supposed to be here. I paid one of your ladies-in-waiting. She told me you planned to spend the afternoon in the library.”
“One of my servants reports to you?”
“It seems that the general’s daughter, despite her reputation for being so very clever, thinks she’s immune to all the petty espionage a court is capable of. Not really that smart, is she?”
“Certainly smarter than someone who decides to reveal that he has her maid in his employ. Why don’t you tell me which maid, Verex, and make your mistake complete? ~ Marie Rutkoski,#NFDB
1185:In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors—or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
1186:All he wanted was enough time to consider all his options without being dragged into his household’s petty squabbles or being nagged by his wife about that damnable pilgrimage. Was that so much to ask?
Apparently so, for he’d yet to find a peaceful moment at Caen, not with Marguerite sulking and Aimar lurking and Will acting put-upon and Geoff wanting to lay plans and Richard strutting around as if he were the incarnation of Roland and poor Tilda grieving over Maman’s absence and his father refusing to heed any voice but his own. ~ Sharon Kay Penman,#NFDB
1187:WHAT a pace one lives at through the season! And, when one is fresh to it, before one knows that its pleasant, frothy, syllabub surface is only a cover to intrigues, petty spites, jealousies, partisanships, manoeuvres; alike in St Stephen’s as in Belgravia; among uncompromising patriots as among poor foreigners farming private banks round about St James’s-street; among portly aristocratic mothers, trotting out their innocent daughters to the market, as among the gauze-winged, tinselled, hard-worked deities of the coulisses; — how agreeable it is! ~ Ouida, #NFDB
1188:So you don't ever get angry at him?"
Jem laughed out loud. "I would hardly say that. Sometimes I want to strangle him."
"How on earth do you prevent yourself?"
"I go to my favorite place in London," said Jem, "and I stand and look at the water, and I think about the continuity of life, and how the river rolls on, oblivious of the petty upsets in our lives."
Tessa was fascinated. "Does that work?"
"Not really, but after that I think about how I could kill him while he slept if I really wanted to, and then I feel better. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
1189:You’d all really rather sleep in your own rooms because you’re mad at me, and suffer through those nightmares, than to have to share a bed with me? I thought you were simply being petty, but you must truly hate me to knowingly put yourselves through that,” I say on a strained whisper. “All because I wandered off to try and learn more about myself while the four of you plotted your own plan behind my back? Do you not see the hypocrisy, or do you just find my thoughts and needs to be completely irrelevant? Am I still really that insignificant? ~ Kristy Cunning, #NFDB
1190:A mistake? The most passionate night of his life was a mistake? Her first time and that’s what she thought. That grated on him in the worst way. “Is that what you think, Beth?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why, Beth?”
“You know I hate that name.”
“Oh, so sorry, Beth. I do apologize, Beth.” He was being petty and he knew it, but he didn’t give a damn. She’d always brought out the very worst in him.
She reached up and twisted his ear. “Ow!”
“Out of my way, Robert Lemonade,” she said casually, pissing him off in the worst way. ~ R L Mathewson,#NFDB
1191:It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1192:I'm not so worried anymore, because now I know nobody knows what they are doing in life, and nobody knows what to do when bad things happen, to themselves or to other people. We make it up as we go, and sometimes we are big and generous and sometimes we are small and petty. We say the wrong things, we obsess over all the ways we got it wrong and all the ways that other people did, too. The only thing I know for sure it that it is okay not to know everything, to try and fail and to sometimes suck at life, as long as you try to get better. ~ Nora McInerny Purmort, #NFDB
1193:Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to themselves and hatch little schemes and plots to their hearts' content. The trouble was that while in humans this sort of behaviour tended to manifest itself in practical jokes, petty jealousies, silly misunderstandings and instances of tragically unrequited love, with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to try to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already did know about ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1194:There it lies, I think, Damien … possession; not in wars, as some tend to believe; not so much; and very rarely in extraordinary interventions such as here … this girl … this poor child. No, I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves … for ourselves. ~ William Peter Blatty, #NFDB
1195:Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
1196:We've already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these numerous friends of humanity, and he's ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge—like all the rest of us, though, in that, to be fair; like myself, vilest of all, for I might well be the first to bring the fuel and run away myself. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1197:Perhaps we should have represented him otherwise
Than in the form of a dove. As fire, yes, but that is beyond us.
For even when it consumes logs on a hearth
We search in it for eyes and hands. Let him then be green,
All blades of calamus, on footbridges over meadows,
Running, with a tramp of his bare feet. Or in the air
Blowing a birchbark trumpet so strongly that further down
There tumbles from its blast a crowd of petty officials,
Their uniforms unbuttoned and their women’s combs
Flying like chips when the ax strikes. ~ Czes aw Mi osz,#NFDB
1198:Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
1199:... it is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it. ~ Frances Trollope, #NFDB
1200:Saying that “life is short” is such a cliche. And it’s true.
In fact, we only have five minutes to be here. In the really big scheme of things, not even that long. We humans don’t even have the lifespan of fruit flies if you look at the bigger picture.
In other words, we don’t have a second—not even a second—to waste on petty drama, on living fake, shallow lives, on swallowing our truth, or on hiding our light.
We only dance around the flame of this gorgeous human existence for moments and the one thing important at all is loving beautifully. ~ Jacob Nordby,#NFDB
1201:The five former bodyguards immediately expanded the organization from overseeing pickpocketing and snatch-and-grab petty theft to extortion, counterfeiting, and drug distribution. The former Tigers infantry officers became the head of the Wild Tigers, Con Ho Hoang Da, and they trafficked heroin from the nearby Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand into Hong Kong and Singapore, produced and smuggled fake designer goods internationally, and illegally transported workers and immigrants across the border of Cambodia and into Thailand from Vietnam. ~ Mark Greaney, #NFDB
1202:Invariably dressed in black, the Countess was one of those dowagers whose natural independence of mind, authority of age, and impatience with the petty made her the ally of all irreverent youth. She would not only abide, but enjoyed when her grandson would interrupt polite conversation to question the standing of the church or the ruling class. And when her guest grew red and responded in a huff, the Countess would give Mishka a conspiratorial wink, as if they stood arm in arm in the battle against boorish decorum and the outmoded attitudes of the times. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
1203:That sense – the only true patriotism – comes slowly and springs from the heart: it is founded upon respect for the family and love for the soil. Premature ‘liberty’ of this kind would have been a disaster: we should have been torn to pieces by petty squabbles before we had ever reached political maturity, which, as things were, as made possible by the long quiet years under monarchical government; for it was that government which, as it were, nursed our strength and enabled us ultimately to produce sound fruit from liberty, as only a politically adult nation can. ~ Livy, #NFDB
1204:Nineteenth-century America was gone; twentieth-century America was alien. “All that I thought American in a true sense is gone, and I see nothing but vain-glory, crassness and a total ignorance . . . ,” she wrote. She began to reconsider the old, lost world. What had seemed once petty and insular now seemed valuable and dignified; the rules, she saw, had been founded on moral principle. “I am steeping myself in the nineteenth century,” she wrote, “. . . such a blessed refuge from the turmoil and mediocrity of today—like taking sanctuary in a mighty temple. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
1205:All in all, most of the customers, both vampire and human, had read far too many novels. They had watched the vampire media and they took their cues from there. They indulged in black leather, took to kinky sex, and did their best to imitate a Laurel K Hamilton book. Half of the audience routinely tried ceremonies, Black Masses, dark rituals, but they typically ended up as sex orgies -less Satan, more basic hedonism. Everyone else had pastimes that generally included drinking blood from drug addicts, petty theft, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. ~ Declan Finn, #NFDB
1206:It was a tide Shenkt had often observed in politics. There is a brief spell after a new leader comes to power, however it is achieved, during which they can do no wrong. A golden period in which people are blinded by their own hopes for something better. Nothing lasts for ever, of course. In time, and usually with alarming speed, the leader’s flawless image grows tarnished with their subjects’ own petty disappointments, failures, frustrations. Soon they can do no right. The people clamour for a new leader, that they might consider themselves reborn. Again. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1207:My personal life may be crowded with small petty incidents, altogether unnoticeable and mean; but if I obey Jesus Christ in the haphazard circumstances, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God, and when I stand face to face with God I will discover that through my obedience thousands were blessed. When once God's Redemption comes to the point of obedience in a human soul, it always creates. If I obey Jesus Christ, the Redemption of God will rush through me to other lives, because behind the deed of obedience is the Reality of Almighty God. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
1208:Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion. ~ Charles Robert Maturin, #NFDB
1209:Freud’s life, as embellished by the legend, shows romantic features; Freud’s way of life was that of an aristocrat of the mind who had identified himself with Charcot and Goethe; Adler lived as a petty bourgeois who had identified his cause with that of the people.
When Freud heard of Adler’s death, he wrote to Arnold Zweig: “For a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb to die in Aberdeen is an unheard-of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on.”
Could Freud have forgotten that he himself had been “a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb”? ~ Henri F Ellenberger,#NFDB
1210:I saw a spirit world so intricate and vast, so thoroughly laced through our existence here on earth, that the rivers of departing souls have no choice but to turn back to it. They were not lost, these spirits. They did not wander. They did not wail. They did not cry out for guidance or the resolution of some petty mystery that had plagued them in mortal life. They returned. They returned with hunger. They returned with joy. They sought no greater realm. And what could that mean but there is no greater realm than this, Ramses. And so why would I wish to ever leave? ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1211:More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn't at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time - the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism - because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
1212:ISABELLA Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder; Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven, Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens, Would all themselves laugh mortal. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1213:I’m sorry, my dears, that time doesn’t allow me to continue your education. Just remember that your parents—or ‘mentors,’ whoever they’ll be—will try to ‘bring you up right,’ but they’ll have no concept of what that is. They’ll raise you to be functional and to imitate them and indulge in petty little successes. Resist them with all your might. “They won’t ready you for the time when reality rears its head. They’ve worn blinders for so long they’ve become a part of their heads. Maybe that’s what they desired all along—to have their vision restricted, expurgated. ~ Gregg Hurwitz, #NFDB
1214:according to Fukuyama, modern liberal democracies produced men composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest…. It is not an accident that people in democratic societies are preoccupied with material gain and live in an economic world devoted to the satisfaction of the myriad small needs of the body…. The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
1215:He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1216:I was angry that Trujillo had shot down my idea, but impressed that his own idea made so much sense, and then angry again that he would dare to be so good at something I considered my own personal domain. And then I was embarrassed for feeling so petty about it, and I was worried if I was right, and I was frustrated we hadn’t found anything solid yet, and I was mad at Nathan, and scared for Brooke, and fascinated by this new killer—and all I wanted to do was get out, and away, and be by myself, even if it was just for a minute. Even just half a minute. Maybe just forever. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
1217:We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected. We want union, we want connection, we need it the way we need other forms of nutrition, and denied it we delve into the lower impulses for sanctuary. We have been segregated and severed, from each other and even from ourselves. We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
1218:A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's. ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB
1219:The Director looked at Mr. Jones. His beard did not conceal the smile. Fair man? His delusion knows no bounds. The program thrived from the self-centeredness of these old men, the infection of false entitlements that comes from money and power. Their universe revolved around their petty concerns and anything that affected them. They couldn’t see the bigger picture, they couldn’t see opportunity when they looked in only one direction. Stay open to life, gentlemen. Let it unfold and the universe will provide you with endless paths on your journey. Fact is, they got lucky. ~ Tony Bertauski, #NFDB
1220:She knew him for what he was, an imperious, swaggering pirate of a man who went his own way; reaching out decisively for what he wanted, rejecting, without a moment's hesitation what he didn't want. Superbly, arrogantly free of petty fear or petty disapproval; neither a gentle man nor a patient one, his temper would create a small hell for her should she ever arouse it.
Yet she loved him — and beneath her fear, thrilling along her nerves, there suddenly sprang into being a primitive gladness that she awaited his coming, that she wore his ring—that she belonged to him. ~ Violet Winspear,#NFDB
1221:Very early on I realized,” Petty says, “that I had to teach myself everything just to exist at the level I wanted to live my life. I felt there was more to be known, more to be understood than I was going to get from the household I was in. I kind of knew that much from very early on. Exactly why, I’m not sure, but I got that maybe what my parents pictured for me wasn’t at all what I was going to go with. I knew I didn’t want to grow up and be an insurance salesman. That looked really dull to me. And I think it was television that saved my life, that raised and educated me. ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
1222:This was a cruelty made by history. Long after serfdom had been abolished the land captains exercised their right to flog the peasants for petty crimes. Liberals rightly warned about the psychological effects of this brutality. One physician, addressing the Kazan Medical Society in 1895 said that it 'not only debases but even hardens and brutalizes human nature'. Chekhov, who was also a practising physician, denounced corporal punishment, adding that 'it coarsens and brutalizes not only the offenders but also those who execute the punishments and those who are present at it'. ~ Orlando Figes, #NFDB
1223:Greatness
We can be great by helping one another;
We can be loved for very simple deeds;
Who has the grateful mention of a brother
Has really all the honor that he needs.
We can be famous for our works of kindness —
Fame is not born alone of strength or skill;
It sometimes comes from deafness and from blindness
To petty words and faults, and loving still.
We can be rich in gentle smiles and sunny:
A jeweled soul exceeds a royal crown.
The richest men sometimes have little money,
And Croesus oft's the poorest man in town.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1224:From constant telling, she came almost to believe in her own badness, her own intrinsic inferiority. She felt that she ought always to be in a state of slinking disgrace, if she fulfilled what was expected of her. But she rebelled. She never really believed in her own badness. At the bottom of her heart she despised the other people, who carped and were loud over trifles. She despised them, and wanted revenge on them. She hated them whilst they had power over her.
Still she kept an ideal: a free, proud lady absolved from the petty ties, existing beyond petty considerations. ~ D H Lawrence,#NFDB
1225:Lord Bacchus, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me."
Bacchus dropped his hands and nodded.
"You have never killed a Druid all by yourself, and you never will. Only with hordes of Bacchants and Roman legionnaires and the aid of Minerva have you ever managed to slay a single one of us. Your lackeys may get me eventually, and I know that I will never be able to slay you, but admit to yourself now that you, alone, will never prove my equal. The earth obeys me, son, not some petty god of grape and goblet." I switched to English for a postscript, "So suck on that, bitch. ~ Kevin Hearne,#NFDB
1226:The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies. ~ Kevin Spacey, #NFDB
1227:When Sister Ibinabo was talking to Christie, with that poisonous spite she claimed was religious guidance, Ifemelu had looked at her and suddenly seen something of her own mother. Her mother was a kinder and simpler person, but like Sister Ibinabo, she was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires. Suddenly, the last thing Ifemelu wanted was to be in that small room full of shadows. It had all seemed benign before, her mother’s faith, all drenched in grace, and suddenly it no longer was. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
1228:It is also an absolute mistake to believe that the State can be anything other than a civitas diaboli if it does not resurrect itself as Imperium, and it is also a mistake to want to build the Imperium on the basis of economic, military, industrial or even 'intellectual' or nationalist factors. The Imperium, according to the primordial conception rooted in Tradition, is something transcendent, and it can only be attained by those who have the power to transcend the lives of petty men and their appetites, their sentimentalisms, their national prides, their 'values', and their phobias. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
1229:It was as if we’d been caught in a surreal photograph—the two of them looked so out of place there, in a room dedicated to superficialities. And yet it occurred to me that, in a way similar to what had been done to the people on the walls, we’d overlaid the humanity of the holy ones with a garment of fame. We looked at each of them and saw something more than a human being: a reflection of our own potential for greatness, maybe, spiritual greatness. We made them larger than life in order to remind ourselves that some part of us existed beyond the petty meanness of the ordinary day. ~ Roland Merullo, #NFDB
1230:Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle ; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow. Be near me when the sensuous frame Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust, And time, a maniac, scattering dust, And life, a Fury, slinging flame. Be near me when my faith is dry, And men the flies of latter spring, That lay their eggs, and sting and sing, And weave their petty cells and die. Be near me when I fade away, To point the term of human strife, And on the low dark verge of life The twilight of eternal day. ~ Alfred Tennyson, #NFDB
1231:In the penal system, where many of these people would eventually end up, the rapidly growing problem of petty crime had already led to pressure for harsher, more deterrent policies in the state prisons. Administrators and prison experts had argued in the last years of the Weimar Republic for the indefinite imprisonment or security confinement of habitual criminals whose hereditary degeneracy, it was assumed, rendered them incapable of inprovement. Security confinement was increasingly thought to be the long-term answer to the buden thse offenders supposedly imposed on the community. ~ Richard J Evans, #NFDB
1232:Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. “But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently. ~ Karan Mahajan, #NFDB
1233:No, that’s not quite it,” says Petty. “My adrenaline would go so high during a show I wouldn’t come down for hours. I’m kind of delicate mentally. People would be talking to me backstage, and I couldn’t take in much of anything they’re saying to me. You start to feel hypocritical. I’d be in such a different place than the folks coming back to see me. But, on another level, imagine if I rolled into some guy’s office, sat down next to his desk, and said, ‘Let’s get drunk! Let’s smoke one, whaddya say? I got some people I want you to meet!’ Right? When I’m playing a show, I’m at the office. ~ Warren Zanes, #NFDB
1234:Well, I started out down a dirty road Started out all alone And the sun went down as I crossed the hill And the town lit up, the world got still I'm learning to fly but I ain't got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Well, the good ol' days may not return And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn I'm learning to fly but I ain't got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Well, some say life will beat you down Break your heart, steal your crown So I've started out for God knows where I guess I'll know when I get there I'm learning to fly around the clouds But what goes up must come down ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
1235:Ancient Rome began as a small city-state. Its citizens were tough and stoic. They were famous for their pragmatism. But as they moved from being a republic to an empire and their power expanded, everything reversed itself. Their citizens’ minds hungered for newer and newer forms of escape. They lost all sense of proportion—petty political battles consumed their attention more than much larger dangers on the outskirts of the empire. The empire fell well before the invasion of the barbarians. It collapsed from the collective softness of its citizens’ minds and the turning of their back on reality. ~ 50 Cent, #NFDB
1236:Funding for the Special Operations Network comes directly from the government. Most work is centralized, but all of the SpecOps divisions have local representatives to keep a watchful eye on any provincial problems. They are administered by local commanders, who liaise with the national offices for information exchange, guidance and policy decisions. Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
1237:Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. 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. This is always exhilarating and sublime. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1238:Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her with the wretched conviction, that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul, but shed its justice, and its mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see, that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage-window, so comes a love-beam of God's care and pity, for every separate need. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1239:PLATONOV. Because I respect you! I respect my respect for you so deeply that I should be sorry to part with it! My friend, Pm a free man, Pm not opposed to having a good time, Pm not opposed to forming an intimacy with a woman, Pm not even opposed to well-conducted petty intrigues, but... to carry on a petty intrigue with you, to make you the object of my frivolous fancies, you, an intelligent, a handsome, a free woman... No! That’s too much to expect of me! Far better banish me out of your sight! To live stupidly together a month or two, then shamefacedly part company... it’s not to my liking! ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1240:Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. “But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently. ~ Karan Mahajan, #NFDB
1241:Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Published in London on July 9, 1955, the manifesto was a stark declaration of the menace posed by the prospect of thermonuclear war, and at the same time, a dire prophecy of what might occur if the people of all nations did not find some way to live together in peace. In its closing, Einstein appealed to humanity’s higher instincts, asking the world to ignore its petty differences and quarrels in quest of wisdom and happiness instead. “If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise,” he predicted. “If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death. ~ Robert Masello, #NFDB
1242:...she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀, she who in the midst of our closed petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, 'Boys, the tagliatelle I would make for you!', a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀s scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1243:The single and peculiar mind is bound
With all the strength and armor of the mind
To keep itself from noyance, but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it; or it is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1244:This world is beautiful but badly broken. St. Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning. I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and the comedies of history. I love it with all of its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers. I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children encountering their first butterfly. I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story. And like every good story, there will be an ending. I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be. I ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
1245:The story of evolution is more dramatic, more compelling, more intricate than any creation myth. Yet like any creation myth, it is a tale of transformations, of sudden and spectacular changes, eruptions of innovation that transfigured our planet, overwriting past revolutions with new layers of complexity. The tranquil beauty of our planet from space belies the real history of this place, full of strife and ingenuity and change. How ironic that our own petty squabbles reflect our planet's turbulent past, and that we alone, despoilers of the Earth, can rise above it to see the beautiful unity of the whole. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
1246:I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943) ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
1247:I have seen people with a particularly acute sensitivity to petty tyranny and over-aggressive competitiveness restrict within themselves all the emotions that might give rise to such things. Often they are people whose fathers were excessively angry and controlling. Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value, however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and mayhem is balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against oppression, speak truth, and motivate resolute movement forward in times of strife, uncertainty and danger. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1248:[...] but just as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed petty and insignificant in comparison with the darkness that overshadowed all existence, so now they seemed as petty and insignificant in comparison with the brilliant sunshine in which the future was bathed. He went on with his work but now he felt that the centre of gravity of his attention had shifted, making him look at his work quite differently and with greater clarity. Formerly this work had been an escape from life: he used to feel that without it life would be too gloomy. Now he needed it so that life might not be too uniformly bright. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1249:I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie.
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart. ~ John Fowles,#NFDB
1250:I have seen people with a particularly acute sensitivity to petty tyranny and over-aggressive competitiveness restrict within themselves all the emotions that might give rise to such things. Often they are people whose fathers were excessively angry and controlling. Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value, however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and mayhem are balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against oppression, speak truth, and motivate resolute movement forward in times of strife, uncertainty and danger. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1251:I have seen people with a particularly acute sensitivity to petty tyranny and over-aggressive competitiveness restrict within themselves all the emotions that might give rise to such things. Often they are people whose fathers were excessively angry and controlling. Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value, however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and mayhem is balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against oppression, speak truth, and motivate resolute movement forward in times of strife, uncertainty and danger. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1252:I have seen people with a particularly acute sensitivity to petty tyranny and over-aggressive competitiveness restrict within themselves all the emotions that might give rise to such things. Often they are people whose fathers were excessively angry and controlling. Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value, however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and mayhem are balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against oppression, speak truth, and motivate resolute movement forward in times of strife, uncertainty and danger. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1253:Universal meaninglessness gives way to ecstatic inebriation, an orgy of irrationality. Since the world has no meaning, let us live! Without definite aims or accessible ideals, let us throw ourselves into the roaring whirlwind of infinity, follow its tortuous path in space, burn in its flames, love its cosmic madness and total anarchy! To live infinity, as well as to meditate a long time upon it, is the most terrifying lesson in anarchy and revolt one can ever learn. Infinity shakes you to the roots of your being, disorganizes you, but it also makes you forget the petty, the contingent, and the insignificant. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
1254:The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
1255:I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self- important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life and death decisions and struggles... surely a kind of transcendence would be found there? ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
1256:Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day. ~ Alfred Tennyson,#NFDB
1257:Del, muttering as she struggled to untangle thongs, followed me out of doors. “I am not carrying your foul-tasting aqivi.” “I have the aqivi. You have the water.” She glared up at me as I mounted the stud. “Equitable arrangement. I have more botas than you.” “Extra water,” I agreed. “I thought at some point in time you might want to wash your face.” I swung the stud as she mounted, grinning to myself as she rubbed surreptitiously at her face. She is not a woman for vanity, though the gods have blessed her threefold, but I’ve never yet known a woman not to fall for the implication. We all have our petty revenge. ~ Jennifer Roberson, #NFDB
1258:Emerson was not the poet he had in mind in “The Poet.” In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied an American poetry free of “legendary lays,” “old traditions,” “supernatural beings,” masks, and personifications. Americans led “petty” and “insipid” lives, “crowded with paltry interests”: their lives were “anti-poetic.” The only subject possible for an American poet was humankind; luckily, as Tocqueville wrote, “the poet needs no more.” Emerson, who spent most of his life cultivating the aura of an elder, called for “a brood of Titans” who would “run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love. ~ The New Yorker, #NFDB
1259:Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a Party is not to our Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.
So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake.
Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause -- united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future -- and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance. ~ John F Kennedy,#NFDB
1260:What are you looking for?” he asked. A car alarm was going off in the distance, and he cringed as if the sound were deafening.
“A ride,” she answered. Some of the cars were too new, others too old. She finally stopped in front of a black sedan, nice enough, but not one of the models with fancy security and keyless entry.
“Break that for me,” she said, nodding at the driver’s side door.
“The window?” asked August, and she gave him a look that said yes, obviously the window, and he gave her a look that said I don’t commit petty crimes very often before he slammed his elbow into the glass to shatter it. ~ Victoria Schwab,#NFDB
1261:If you know “I am stupid,” then you will not attach too much importance to your thought and you will start looking at life. If you start looking at life more, your intelligence will definitely flower. Then, thought is not a process, thought is not a problem, because not much thought will be there. If you don’t pay any attention to your thought, it will just die. Don’t pay attention to it. But you cannot stop paying attention to it unless you think or see that your thoughts are so petty and quite stupid compared to the rest of the existence. Without a single thought on their mind, an ant, a bird, and a bee all just know what to do. ~ Sadguru, #NFDB
1262:the impact of the rape, pillage and anarchy that marked the fifth century as the Goths, Alans, Vandals and Huns rampaged across Europe and North Africa is hard to exaggerate. Literacy levels plummeted; building in stone all but disappeared, a clear sign of collapse of wealth and ambition; long-distance trade that once took pottery from factories in Tunisia as far as Iona in Scotland collapsed, replaced by local markets dealing only with exchange of petty goods; and as measured from pollution in polar ice-caps in Greenland there was a major contraction in smelting work, with levels falling back to those of prehistoric times. ~ Peter Frankopan, #NFDB
1263:Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
~ Countee Cullen,#NFDB
1264:He was tall and slim and had dark hair and young women found him fascinating.
This sort of thing happens often enough, even with boys as mortal as dirt. There’s always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him.
Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt’s so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction. It’s part of a dance as old as the jackalopes themselves. ~ Ursula Vernon,#NFDB
1265:It's just... I know we don't believe in soulmates," she says. "There are so many people in this world that can be right for each other. If there weren't, then cheating would never be an issue. Everyone would find their one true love and life would be great - relationships would be a piece of cake. But that's not how it is in reality, and I realize this. So... it just hurts, okay? It hurts me to know that there are other women out there in the world that could make you happy. I know it's immature and I was being petty and jealous, but... I just want to be your only one. I want to be your soulmate, even if I don't believe in them. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
1266:I’ll never understand why some people can’t just let others live their lives, you know,” Danial said. “You don’t have to understand. You don’t have to agree. Just leave people alone. When I look at the moon and planets and stars, all that narrow-mindedness and hate seem so petty. The universe is such a big place. One hundred thousand light years just from one end of the Milky Way to the other. One hundred. Thousand. Light years. In the time it’s taken for light to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other, thousands of generations have passed. It really makes you realize how small we are, doesn’t it? How short our time on earth is. ~ J H Trumble, #NFDB
1267:Of course, about a dozen steps from the Stall I was regretting my nobility, but I refused to go back and ask for the rain gear. I could be petty that way.
And hey, no objection to seeing Karish with his shirt soaked through. It was clingy while in the Stall, but a few drops of rain had it completely plastered to his shoulders, chest, back and stomach. His black hair was slicked close to his head. Rain streamed over his face and throat and clung to his eyelashes. He made a beautiful drowned rat.
Unfortunately, Karish’s shirt wasn’t the only garment to be quickly soaked through. I couldn’t carry off the look with the same panache. ~ Moira J Moore,#NFDB
1268:Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it then openly arrogates itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity” —St. Augustine, City of God. 4-4. ~ Jack Donovan, #NFDB
1269:And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1270:Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late.
Instead people died. Tens of thousands of them. ~ Randy Shilts,#NFDB
1271:The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
1272:gender benders I’m only guessing, of course, as usual but here goes: when the ladies gather over cocktails they talk about how their husbands tend to stifle them, smother their creative instinct, their natural joy, their ultimate female selves. without their husbands they would float free and thrive and grow without limit as they were meant to do. but ladies, I will tell you this: when men gather they never talk about their wives. we discuss the Dallas Cowboys or the new barmaid at The Bat Cove Tavern or about how Tyson would kick Holyfield’s ass … unconcerned with petty argument we have floated free … giant macho soaring balloons! WHEE! ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1273:One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1274:A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1275:Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scoped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1276:Trehan &Lothaire
“My Bride poisoned me so that I would lose a match against the demon male she loves.”
Lothaire hiked his shoulders. “So?”
“Did you not hear me? She dumped toxins into a goblet of blood, then handed it to me, urging me to drink”
“Who doesn’t have petty spats during courtship? So fucking what?”
“So she doesn’t fucking want me!”
Lothaire roared back, “She doesn’t get a godsdamned say in the matter!”
“Trehan’s brows drew together. “What are you advising “advising—that I abduct her? As you recently did the Forbearer king? And your Bride before him?”
Lothaire snapped his fingers. “Exactly ~ Kresley Cole,#NFDB
1277:The cross is not a picture of payment; the cross is a picture of forgiveness. Good Friday is not about divine wrath; Good Friday is about divine love. Calvary is not where we see how violent God is; Calvary is where we see how violent our civilization is. The justice of God is not retributive; the justice of God is restorative. Justice that is purely retributive changes nothing. The cross is not where God finds a whipping boy to vent his rage upon; the cross is where God saves the world through self-sacrificing love. The only thing God will call justice is setting the world right, not punishing an innocent substitute for the petty sake of appeasement. ~ Brian Zahnd, #NFDB
1278:Is this a council of morons?” said Molech. “The Seed of Eve, the Seed of Abraham, is coming up our holy mountain. And I am listening to fools quibbling over petty details of insignificance! Don’t just sit there! Say something, Belial.” Belial finally spoke up. “The mole god is correct. The Nazarene has been deliberately understated in order to fool us.” Molech felt smugly vindicated, though simultaneously insulted by the derogatory mole reference. But it was classic Belial. “I have sent some spirits to spy on Jesus. If they have an army of the heavenly host approaching, they will alert us. In the meantime, we must arm ourselves and prepare for battle. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1279:If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.
What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment. ~ William Barrett,#NFDB
1280:When our eyes met in the compartment our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears--oh, how unhappy we were!--I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1281:Because when you give too many fucks—when you give a fuck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty, skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1282:The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters:
They are individuals who cause trouble for sport - inciting opposition
to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty.
Usually these people have good performance - that's their cover - and so
they are endured or appeased.
A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on.
First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour
and demanding it change.
Usually it won't. Disrupters are a personality type.
If that's the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their
jobs.
They're poison. ~ Jack Welch,#NFDB
1283:No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say “D as in David,” because “David” was a Jewish name. The caller had to use “Dora.” “Samuel” became “Siegfried.” And so forth. “There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the Jews,” Consul General Messersmith told Undersecretary Phillips in a long letter dated September 29, 1933. He wrote, “It is definitely the aim of the Government, no matter what it may say to the outside or in Germany, to eliminate the Jews from German life. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
1284:whatever has been or is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by being considered a parable; so that if any bad habits and ugly consequences are brought into view, the reader may have the relief of regarding them as not more than figuratively ungenteel, and may feel himself virtually in company with persons of some style. Thus while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader's imagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords; and the petty sums which any bankrupt of high standing would be sorry to retire upon, may be lifted to the level of high commercial transactions by the inexpensive addition of proportional ciphers. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1285:Because when you give too many fucks—when you give a fuck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty, skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere. The ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1286:Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1287:He did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated like the rest: he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at "His Grace," was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and he was almost tempted to retort "citizen." He was assailed by a fancy for peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but which was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of the Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably, the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1288:The boarders cheered and followed him. “Boarders away!” shouted the petty officers, and everywhere the Marguerite’s men grabbed up weapons and came pouring over into the Castilla, yelling like madmen in their excitement. Here and there resistance was offered to them. Somebody banged off a weapon apparently right at Hornblower, but the bullet missed him miraculously, although his left hand bore for the rest of his days the ingrained stain of the burning powder. Most of the Spaniards — raw recruits without a shred of discipline to hold them together — broke and ran before the attack, scuttling below to safety. Only on the high poop did the officers attempt a last ~ C S Forester, #NFDB
1289:When Paul drank more than a diabetic should or we argued about petty domestic things, I would employ a kind of preemptive nostalgia, filing the episodes away under the heading A Couple's Early Years. This general retrospective of the present leaped ahead to forgive our moments of anger and doubt, and the occasional day when the frustration and recriminations between us became grinding. It helped alleviate my sense of having been duped into believing Paul would be the person to deliver me from my family, rather than imitate it. And really it was okay, and most often better than that, being the object of his desire, sensing he would never leave me. That we were safe. ~ Adam Haslett, #NFDB
1290:It seemed now to Balint that both parties in Parliament were fighting instinctively, but without a clear understanding either of their motives or of the inevitable results of their policies and strategy. While Tisza battled to strengthen the army, he could have no inkling that, once strengthened, it would be used to suppress the very independence it was designed to assure – and when the opposition delayed the implementation of Tisza’s policy by petty arguments about shoulder-flashes and army commands, they were unaware that, inadvertently, they were providing ammunition for those very arguments that in the near future would threaten the integrity of the constitution. ~ Mikl s B nffy, #NFDB
1291:The place reeked of vice and corruption and the dregs of Parisian society in all its rottenness gathered there: cheats, conmen and cheap hacks rubbed shoulders with under-age dandies, old roués and rogues, sleazy underworld types once notorious for things best forgotten mingled with other small-time crooks and speculators, dabblers in dubious ventures, frauds, pimps, and racketeers. Cheap sex, both male and female, was on offer in this tawdry meat-market of a place where petty rivalries were exploited, and quarrels picked over nothing in an atmosphere of fake gallantry where swords or pistols at dawn settled matters of highly questionable honour in the first place. ~ Guy de Maupassant, #NFDB
1292:The Squanderer
God gave him passions, splendid as the sun,
Meant for the lordliest purposes; a part
Of nature's full and fertile mother heart,
From which new systems and new stars are spun.
And now, behold, behold, what he has done!
In Folly's court and carnal Pleasures' mart
He flung the wealth life gave him at the start.
(This, of all mortal sins, the deadliest one.)
At dawn he stood, potential, opulent,
With virile manhood, and emotions keen,
And wonderful with God's creative fire.
At noon he stands, with Love's large fortune spent
In petty traffic, unproductive, meanA pauper, cursed with impotent desire.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB
1293:Obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a general hypnosis. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1294:They will tremble with awe because of all the good and all the peace I will bring about for them. Jeremiah 33:9 God does not minimize the things that break our hearts. He is not looking down on us, thinking how petty we are because things have hurt us. If we are so “heavenly minded” that we grow out of touch with earthly hardships, we've missed an important priority of Christ. God left our bare feet on the hot pavement of earth so we could grow through our hurts, not ignore and refuse to feel our way through them. So surrender your hurt to Him, withholding nothing, and invite Him to work miracles from your misery. Be patient and get to know Him through the process of healing. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
1295:A Voltairian of good stock,” he murmured.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I growled.
“To believe a little in God and much in the devil!”
“Well, yes, Mister Hilmacher, and if the devil is not a part in this business, let him take me to Hell!”
“Mister Burgomaster, you insult the devil. He who undervalues the devil belittles God. I fail to see why the Almighty would occupy Himself with our most insignificant actions and thoughts, like a good old woman during the endless tea hours, and I would find the role of Old Nick singularly petty indeed should he amuse himself with a giant pleasantry that sends a herd and its guardians into the mortal mud of the swamp. ~ Jean Ray,#NFDB
1296:Then many strange people will be philosophers, for the lovers of sights seem to be included, since they take pleasure in learning things. And the lovers of sounds are very strange people to include as philosophers, for they would never willingly attend a serious discussion or spend their time that way, yet they run around to all the Dionysiac festivals, omitting none, whether in cities or villages, as if their ears were under contract to listen to every chorus. Are we to say that these people— and those who learn similar things or petty crafts— are philosophers?
No, but they are like philosophers.
And who are the true philosophers?
Those who love the sight of truth. ~ Plato,#NFDB
1297:It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self. . . . Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students. ~ John Holt, #NFDB
1298:To tell the truth we had a bit of a . . . disagreement, let’s call it. Before I left.” “Oh, right.” I kept my voice neutral. I never know what to say in these situations. I hate people prying into my business, so I assume others will feel the same way. But sometimes they want to spill, it seems, and then you look cold and odd, backing away from their confidences. I try to be completely nonjudgmental—not pushing for secrets, not repelling confessions. And in truth, although part of me really doesn’t want to hear their petty jealousies and weird obsessions, there’s another part of me that wants to egg them on. It’s that part of me that stands there nodding, taking notes, filing it all away. ~ Ruth Ware, #NFDB
1299:The real measure of 'truth' in any novel is not whether the characters, places and events portrayed exist beyond the pages of the book, but, rather, whether they seem authentic to us as readers. When we open the pages of a novel, we enter into a pact with it. We want to immerse ourselves in its milieu. We want to engage with the characters, to find their actions psychologically plausible. We invest a little bit of ourselves in the narrative and, while never quite forgetting that it is fiction, experience the disappointments, humiliations and petty successes of the characters as if they were our own. A novel is, in Sartre's phrase, 'neither true nor false'; but it must feel real. ~ Graeme Macrae Burnet, #NFDB
1300:The twentieth century, Churchill wrote, had witnessed ‘with surprise, not merely the promulgation of these ferocious doctrines, but their enforcement with brutal vigour by the Government and by the populace.’ The Jews were the chief victims of these doctrines. ‘No past services, no proved patriotism, even wounds sustained in war, could procure immunity for persons whose only crime was that their parents had brought them into the world. Every kind of persecution, grave or petty, upon the world-famous scientists, writers, and composers at the top down to the wretched little Jewish children in the national schools, was practised, was glorified, and is still being practised and glorified. ~ Martin Gilbert, #NFDB
1301:It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
1302:Though he [Levin] had imagined his ideas about family life to be most exact, he, like all men, had involuntarily pictured it to himself as merely the enjoyment of love––which nothing should be allowed to hinder and from which one should not be distracted even by petty cares. He should, he thought, do his work, and rest from it in the joys of love. She should be loved––and that was all. But, like all men, he forgot that she too must work; and was surprised how she, the poetic, charming Kitty, could, during the very first weeks and even in the first days of married life, think, remember, and fuss about table-cloths, furniture, spare-room mattresses, a tray, the cook, the dinner, and so forth. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1303:THE ONENESS OF ALL BELIEVERS Ephesians 4:4-6 Believers are one in Our unity is experienced in Body The fellowship of believers—the church Spirit The Holy Spirit, who activates the fellowship Hope That glorious future to which we are all called Lord Christ, to whom we all belong Faith Our singular commitment to Christ Baptism Baptism—the sign of entry into the church God God, who is our Father who keeps us for eternity Too often believers are separated because of minor differences in doctrine. But Paul here shows those areas where Christians must agree to attain true unity. When believers have this unity of spirit, petty differences should never be allowed to dissolve that unity. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1304:In Memoriam A. H. H.: 50. Be Near Me When My Light
Is Low
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
1305:Every man's penis is the prettiest thing in the world to him. From the day he's born until the day he dies. It never loses its endless fascination. And, I kid you not, baby, the same is true of every woman and her pussy. It's the closest thing to a real, blind, helpless love and religious adoration that most people ever achieve. But they'd rather die than admit it. Homosexuality, the urge to kill, petty spites and treacheries, fantasies of sadism, masochism, transvestism, any weird thing you can name, they'll confess all that in a group therapy session. But that deep submerged constant narcissism, that perpetual mental masturbation, is the earliest and most powerful block. They'll never admit it. ~ Robert Shea, #NFDB
1306:You know how this wine is blended? Different types of Pharisee have been harvested, trodden, and fermented together to produce its subtle flavour. Types that were most antagonistic to one another on earth. Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany. How they hated each other up there where the sun shone! ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1307:You go too far,” Soren said, biting off each word. “You make choices you later regret and then blame anyone but yourself for what you suffer at your own hand. You don’t need me to hurt you. You do that to yourself. You can blame me and you can punish me for all my crimes, real and imagined. But you leave Eleanor out of this petty plan of yours to get your revenge on me. She is my heart. If anything happens to her because of you, I will castrate you. I know how much you want children. I will take that dream from you with my bare hands and a rusty knife. You know what I’m capable of. And you know I know how, because I have done it before. My father survived the procedure. You’ll be lucky if you do. ~ Tiffany Reisz, #NFDB
1308:Sonnet Lxxvi. To A Young Man Entering The World
GO now, ingenious youth!--The trying hour
Is come: The world demands that thou shouldst go
To active life: There titles, wealth, and power,
May all be purchased--Yet I joy to know
Thou wilt not pay their price. The base control
Of petty despots in their pedant reign
Already hast thou felt;--and high disdain
Of tyrants is imprinted on thy soul-Not, where mistaken Glory, in the field
Rears her red banner, be thou ever found:
But, against proud Oppression raise the shield
Of patriot daring--So shalt thou renown'd
For the best virtues live ; or that denied
May'st die, as Hampden or as Sydney died!
~ Charlotte Smith,#NFDB
1309:Today he was being reminded yet again of the obvious: The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no. To the outside world, Adam looked the same, acted the same, felt the same. We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1310:Martha sat back. She felt her chest heaving, and in the silence that followed, she looked into Julia’s eyes and saw, past the challenging stance, the self-loathing, the effects of the wine, Lynnie. And Martha knew, as she hadn’t until now, why she couldn’t tell Julia the whole story. It wasn’t only because Martha wanted to restrain herself from teaching Julia a harsh lesson or because she wanted Julia to be grateful for her sacrifices. It was because Julia’s low regard for herself had taken her into misguided friendships, petty crime, and, now, bigoted words. Maybe someday she’d be ready for the truth, but not when she thought so disparagingly, so dismissively, about people like her very own parents. ~ Rachel Simon, #NFDB
1311:At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1312:Islamic tradition does not recognize such presumptuous and conceited preoccupation as "reviewing", which is now widely practised among scholars who regard highly this legacy of the Western tradition modern scholarship. a Muslim scholar, with the work of another before him, would either - according to Islamic tradition - refute it (radd), or elaborate it further in commentary (sharh) as the occasion demands. there is no such thing as "reviewing" it, whether the "review" is termed as such or as any other term which describes it. If there are petty mistakes they turn a blind eye to them; if there are obscurities they explain them in commentary - they polish a positive work and make it shine. ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib al Attas, #NFDB
1313:The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1314:I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1315:Swipers use their scythes a little differently,” Elysia continued. “They open up small windows into the ether—just large enough for them to reach through—and take supplies that generally go unnoticed from places like large warehouses, back rooms of grocery stores, Laundromats—”
“Laundromats?”
“You should see our sock inventory,” Driggs said. “Massive.”
Elysia nodded. “We’re pretty isolated out here, so it’s a really efficient system.”
Lex was dumbfounded. “I had no idea petty theft was such a noble endeavor.”
“Well,” said Zara, “when you think about the gracious services we provide to the citizens of this world, it’s only fair. People should be thankful we don’t charge more ~ Gina Damico,#NFDB
1316:The differences in Europe between France and Germany seemed trivial, petty, easy to be adjusted by a little good sense and charity. But the differences between Democrat and Republican in the United States! Here were really grave quarrels. He could not understand why the French should not be more forgiving to their beaten enemy; nor why the American Republicans should not expect cold comfort from a Democratic Administration. His gaze was fixed with equal earnestness upon the destiny of mankind and the fortunes of his party candidates. Peace and goodwill among all nations abroad, but no truck with the Republican Party at home. That was his ticket and that was his ruin, and the ruin of much else as well. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1317:But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. ~ Claire Messud, #NFDB
1318:The desirable thing is to possess sufficient Individuality and Initiative to be your own bellwether – to be a law unto yourself, so far as other men are concerned. The great men – the strong men – care nothing for the flock, which so obediently trots along after them. They derive no satisfaction from this thing, which pleases only inferior minds, and gratifies only petty natures and ambitions. The big men – the great spirits of all ages – have derived more satisfaction from that inward conviction of strength and ability which they felt unfolding into activity within themselves, than in the plaudits of the mob, or in the servility of those imitative creatures who sought to follow in their footsteps. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1319:Anyway, we did it," Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression.
"Hiked Maine, I mean."
I looked at him. "Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin."
He dismissed this as a petty quibble. "Another mountain," he said. "How many do you need to see, Bryson?"
I snorted a small laugh. "Well, that's one way of looking at it."
"It's the only way of looking at it," Katz went on and quite earnestly. "As far as I'm concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked
it in the South and I hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson."
"We missed out a lot of it, you know."
"Details," Katz sniffed. ~ Bill Bryson,#NFDB
1320:My desire to live a meaningful life was getting forestalled by the petty, day-to-day demands of all my stuff.
As I stood in my garage, I realized that it was not just that all the stuff created a mess, requiring valuable time to clean up. That was true, but that wasn't the worst of it. I realized it was not the clutter, the over accumulation of things, but rather the things themselves that were taking my attention away from what mattered in my life. Camping gear was getting my attention, not being outside. Tools were taking up my time, not using them to be creative. Toys were distracting me from the fun of playing. My things were not doing what they were meant to do: serve a greater purpose than possession alone. ~ Dave Bruno,#NFDB
1321:I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me.
To wait with openess and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with the conviction that God molds us in love, holds us in tenderness, and moves us away from the sources of fear. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,#NFDB
1322:Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I've ever read. It said "What is to give light must endure burning." It's by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I've been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it's why we all suffer. It's the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it's amazing beyond words. ~ Damien Echols, #NFDB
1323:Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy: “You said, ‘I shall go to another land to another sea Another city will be found better than this. My every effort is a written indictment And my heart—like the dead—is buried. How long will my mind be in this decay,’ “and so on like that, it’s the same old song we know so well—if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor friend, “New lands you will not find, you won’t find other seas. The city will follow you. The streets you roam will be the same. There is no boat for you, there is no street. In the same way your life you destroyed here In this petty corner, you have spoiled it in the entire universe. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1324:These operations were victorious but also extremely humbling; the takeaways—both good and bad—vast. The Battle of Ramadi provided a litany of lessons learned, which we were able to capture and pass on. The greatest of these was the recognition that leadership is the most important factor on the battlefield, the single greatest reason behind the success of any team. By leadership, we do not mean just the senior commanders at the top, but the crucial leaders at every level of the team—the senior enlisted leaders, the fire team leaders in charge of four people, the squad leaders in charge of eight, and the junior petty officers that stepped up, took charge, and led. They each played an integral role in the success of our team. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
1325:A third of the people who rush to psychiatrists for help could probably cure themselves if they could only do as Margaret Yates did: get interested in helping others. My idea? No, that is approximately what Carl Jung said. And he ought to know—if anybody does. He said: “About one third of my patients are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.” To put it another way, they are trying to thumb a ride through life—and the parade passes them by. So they rush to a psychiatrist with their petty, senseless, useless lives. Having missed the boat, they stand on the wharf, blaming everyone except themselves and demanding that the world cater to their self-centered desires. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
1326:There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained?...how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?...If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire...why not get better at fulfilling desire? I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to achieve the grand prize - they safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1327:Can it be, thought I, that my sole mission on earth is to destroy the hopes of others? Ever since I began to live and act, fate has somehow associated me with the last act of other people's tragedies, as if without me no one could either die or give way to despair! I have been the inevitable character who comes in at the final act, involuntarily playing the detestable role of the hangman or the traitor. What has been fate's object in all this? Has it destined me to be the author of middle-class tragedies and family romances--or a purveyor of tales for, say, the Reader's Library? Who knows? Are there not many who begin life by aspiring to end it like Alexander the Great, or Lord Byron, and yet remain petty civil servants all their lives? ~ Mikhail Lermontov, #NFDB
1328:What rubbish, mon père. Does he think God actually answers prayers? God has no time to listen to petty grievances. Did he think that God would drop everything to look into his little life? Did he hope for divine intervention every time something went wrong? You see, this is the problem, mon père. People take things too literally. They expect the universe to revolve around their little preoccupations. They have no sense of the scale of things, no sense of their own insignificance. So God didn’t answer your prayers? Do not imagine you are alone. God doesn’t care that you are alone, or that you are suffering. If God made the stars, then why would He care whether or not you fast for Lent, or whether you drink alcohol, or even if you live or die— ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
1329:The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1330:Is there any of the usual social occasions which it is not difficult to avoid? But if you decide that you cannot very well ignore your worldly obligations, and that you will therefore carry them out properly, the demands on your time will multiply, bringing physical hardship and mental tension; in the end, you will spend your whole life pointlessly entangled in petty obligations.
‘The day is ending, the way is long; my life already begins to stumble on its journey.’ The time has come to abandon all ties. I shall not keep promises, nor consider decorum. Let anyone who cannot understand my feelings feel free to call me mad, let him think I am out of my senses, that I am devoid of human warmth. Abuse will not bother me; I shall not listen if praised. ~ Yoshida Kenk,#NFDB
1331:The belief that they were special, that they had the stones to endure what others couldn't, was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadness six generations deep, a Homeric shield against the petty jealousies and lethal injustices that so occupied white folks' free time, their oppressive and intrusive gaze into every aspect of black life - from what you eat to who you marry to the clothes you wear to the music you play to the way you wear your hair to how you address them on the street. The Mathews family recognized it for what it was: a fevered obsession that didn't really have anything to do with them, a preoccupation that weakened a man looking anywhere but at himself. ~ Attica Locke, #NFDB
1332:I've taped a list to my bathroom mirror. It's my Most Violated List. . . Anger. I gave the finger to an ATM. You see, the ATM charged me a $1.75 fee for withdrawl. A dollar seventy-five? That's bananas. So I flipped off the screen. As Julie tells me, when you start making rude gestures to inanimate objects, it's time to work on your anger issues. Mine is not the shouting, pulsing-vein-in-the forehead rage. Like my dad, I rarely raise my voice. My anger problem is more one of long-lasting resentment. It's a heap of real or perceived slights that eventually build up into a mountain of bitterness. . . get some perspective. . . I ask myself the question God asked Jonah. 'Do you do well to be angry?'. . .The world will not end. . . Mute your petty resentment. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
1333:Today he was being reminded yet again of the obvious: The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no. To the outside world, Adam looked the same, acted the same, felt the same. We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. But we don’t care. We don’t see. We just keep pushing. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1334:Invitation:::
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the Lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#NFDB
1335:We were convinced of the inherent madness of codified inequity. All cooperation involves some measure of surrender. And coercion. But the alternative, being anarchy, is itself no worthy virtue. It is but an excuse for selfish aggression, and all that seeks justification from taking that stance is, each and every time, cold-hearted. Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin. [...] We rejected civilization, but so too we rejected anarchy for its petty belligerence and the weakness of thought it announced. By these decisions, we made ourselves lost and bereft of purpose. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
1336:How many husbands and wives,” Merrin uttered sadly, “must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds. Ah, dear God!” He shook his head. And then he nodded. “There it lies, I think, Damien … possession; not in wars, as some tend to believe; not so much; and very rarely in extraordinary interventions such as here … this girl … this poor child. No, I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves … for ourselves. ~ William Peter Blatty, #NFDB
1337:There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self All I’m really.’ getting at is that if you want to improve your life and live with all that you deserve you must run your own race. It doesn’t matter what other people say about you. What is important is what you say to yourself. Do not be concerned with the judgment of others as long as you know what you are doing is right. You can do whatever you want to do as long as it is correct according to your conscience and your heart. Never be ashamed of doing that which is right; decide on what you think is good and then stick to it. And for God’s sake, never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people’s net worth. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
1338:Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and more commodities—are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for the deepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination. ~ Murray Bookchin, #NFDB
1339:Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary, beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridges, roads, and railways. Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence; I saw no positive results of charitable efforts. But whenever I expressed skepticism about the economy, the unemployment, the potholes, or the petty thievery, people in Maputo said, as Africans elsewhere did, 'It was much worse before.' In many places, I knew, it was much better before. It was hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down city like Maputo to seem like an improvement. ~ Paul Theroux, #NFDB
1340:This world is beautiful but badly broken. St. Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning. I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and the comedies of history. I love it with all of its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers. I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children encountering their first butterfly. I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story. And like every good story, there will be an ending. I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be. I love it because it spins and tilts, because it’s dizzying, because of the night sky and the swirling lights. But I have run too far ahead. We should be more . . . philosophical. ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
1341:I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe. But who will explain for us the family of all these beings, and the ranks and relations and distinguishing features and functions of each? What do they do? What places do they inhabit? The human mind has always sought the knowledge of these things, but never attained it. Meanwhile I do not deny that it is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world, lest the intellect, habituated to the petty things of daily life, narrow itself and sink wholly into trivial thoughts. But at the same time we must be watchful for the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
1342:Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
1343:The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.
But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.
Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche - even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium. ~ Vasily Grossman,#NFDB
1344:looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men's heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1345:Sorry, but I have to be who I am. Everyone else is taken... So be your self! Speak your truth - if there are people around you who tempt you with non-existence blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Do not drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other people's ancient superstitions, unbeliefs, aggressions, culture and crap! No! Be a flare! We were born that way. Born perfectly happy being inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, cry, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream... We are, in essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we're born, how we grow and develop. I choose to inconvenience the irrational. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
1346:This is Glesca.... Any time you're confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact: this is Glesca. We don't do subtle, we don't do nuanced, we don't do conspiracy. We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter. We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy's heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny. We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago. We do bam-on-bam. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious. We do cannaemisswhodunit. When you hear hoofbeats on Sauchiehall Street, it's gaunny be a horse, no' a zebra...'. ~ Christopher Brookmyre, #NFDB
1347:The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. “Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? “No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1348:Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. ~ Vasily Grossman, #NFDB
1349:You don't like my dress?"
The vines of Reed's couture streched toward the tutor, the rose's petal-mouths chomping.
It isn't that, Your Imperial Viciousness. The earthlings will not understand you. Not understanding you, they will be frightened and send their petty authorities to apprehend you."
Ha!"
Of course they'll fail. That isn't the point. But you'll have to wast engery dealing with them instead of concentrating on your niece's destruction. I doubt that the way to achive your aim is to spread your strength across many fronts so that, when it's time to battle Alyss, you many not be at the peak of your powers. Your niece, I gather, shouldn't be underestimated."
Vollrath hadn't graduated from the Tutor Corps for nothing. "I don't like when sound reasoning counters my wishes," Redd hissed. ~ Frank Beddor,#NFDB
1350:Franklin’s inquisitive mind craved stimulation, consistently gravitating toward whatever community of intellects asked the most intriguing questions; his expansive temperament sought souls that resonated with his own generosity and sense of virtue. In five years in England he had found more of both than in a lifetime in America. “Of all the enviable things England has,” he told Polly Stevenson, “I envy most its people. Why should that petty island, which compared to America is but like a stepping stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island enjoy in almost every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests?” He left such people reluctantly and, he trusted, temporarily. ~ H W Brands, #NFDB
1351:Teach Me I Am Forgotten By The Dead
Teach me I am forgotten by the dead
And that the dead is by herself forgot
And I no longer would keep terms with me.
I would not murder, steal, or fornicate,
Nor with ambition break the peace of towns
But I would bury my ambition
The hope & action of my sovereign soul
In miserable ruin. Nor a hope
Should ever make a holiday for me
I would not be the fool of accident
I would not have a project seek an end
That needed aught
Beyond the handful of my present means
The sun of Duty drop from his firmament
To be a rushlight for each petty end
I would not harm my fellow men
On this low argument, 'twould harm myself.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Teach Me I Am Forgotten By The Dead
,#NFDB
1352:Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
1353:So, it is a basic function of education to help you to find out what you really love to do, so that you can give your whole mind and heart to it, because that creates human dignity, that sweeps away mediocrity, the petty bourgeois mentality. That is why it is very important to have the right teachers, the right atmosphere, so that you will grow up with the love which expresses itself in what you are doing. Without this love your examinations, your knowledge, your capacities, your position and possessions are just ashes, they have no meaning; without this love your actions are going to bring more wars, more hatred, more mischief and destruction. All this may mean nothing to you, because outwardly you are still very young, but I hope it will mean something to your teachers—and also to you, somewhere inside. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
1354:So, it is a basic function of education to help you to find out what you really love to do, so that you can give your whole mind and heart to it, because that creates human dignity, that sweeps away mediocrity, the petty bourgeois mentality. That is why it is very important to have the right teachers, the right atmosphere, so that you will grow up with the love which expresses itself in what you are doing. Without this love your examinations, your knowledge, your capacities, your position and possessions are just ashes, they have no meaning; without this love your actions are going to bring more wars, more hatred, more mischief and destruction. All this may mean nothing to you, because outwardly you are still very young, but I hope it will mean something to your teachers-and also to you, somewhere inside. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
1355:I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction--who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did--without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
1356:Keep your eyes on your own paper. It’s hard when so-and-so is doing the thing you want to do. And it’s worse when you realize you are rooting for them to fail because you’re jealous. Jealousy is a terrible feeling. Jealousy is how we morph into the worst, most petty versions of ourselves (and inevitably why we end up owing a few apologies).
Never have I gone down the rabbit hole of creeping on somebody’s work or life or Instagram and come away feeling good…But it happens, and we’re human, and it’s easy to think that if you can chart out someone else’s trajectory to the top, you’ll learn what it takes to be them – or beat them. Every time I’ve acted out of jealousy, I’ve told myself it was an act of control or reclamation. And every time after the fact, I’ve felt spectacularly unhinged and out of control. ~ Anne T Donahue,#NFDB
1357:Moreover, men take up that profession, not in order to help others out of their miseries, but to enrich themselves. It is one of the avenues of becoming wealthy and their interest exists in multiplying disputes. It is within my knowledge that they are glad when men have disputes. Petty pleaders actually manufacture them. Their touts, like so many leeches, suck the blood of the poor people. Lawyers are men who have little to do. Lazy people, in order to indulge in luxuries, take up such professions. This is a true statement. Any other argument is a mere pretension. It is the lawyers who have discovered that theirs is an honourable profession. They frame laws as they frame their own praises. They decide what fees they will charge and they put on so much side that poor people almost consider them to be heaven-born. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1358:One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual dinner-hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton—a pound and a half of the worst end of the neck—when Charlotte being called out of the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole, being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalising young Oliver Twist. Intent upon this innocent amusement, Noah put his feet on the table-cloth; and pulled Oliver’s hair; and twitched his ears; and expressed his opinion that he was a ‘sneak’; and furthermore announced his intention of coming to see him hanged, whenever that desirable event should take place; and entered upon various topics of petty annoyance, like a malicious and ill-conditioned charity-boy as he was. But, ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1359:Negativity poisons my mind, and positivity restores it. I have a choice whether to join in the darkness of the world, its petty judgments, and constant blame. When I do so I inject my psyche with poison, and today I choose a healthy mind. I replace all negativity with a positive attitude, in which I seek to find, and to articulate, the good in every heart. If I disagree, I will disagree with honor. If I debate a point, I will debate with respect. If I need to draw a line for the sake of justice, I will do so with an honor for the dignity of all. I will no longer be careless with the working of my mind. Rather, I will use it as it was created by God to be used, as a conduit for love and a gateway to peace. May everyone, including myself, feel the tenderness of my approval and not the harshness of my unkindness. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1360:What led Germany to this strange pass was itself strange. After the war, many were happy to wipe away the old order and rid themselves of the kaiser. But when the old monarch at last left the palace, the people who had clamored for his exit were suddenly lost. They found themselves in the absurd position of the dog who, having caught the car he was so frantically chasing, has no idea what to do with it-- so he looks about guiltily and then slinks away. Germany had no history of democracy and no idea how it worked, so the country broke apart into a riot of factions, with each faction blaming the others for everything that went wrong. This much they knew: under the kaiser there had been law and order and structure; now there was chaos. The kaiser had been the symbol of the nation; now there were only petty politicians. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
1361:We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale. We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
1362:William the Testy. On the contrary, he conceived that the true wisdom of legislation consisted in the multiplicity of laws. He accordingly had great punishments for great crimes, and little punishments for little offences. By degrees the whole surface of society was cut up by ditches and fences, and quickset hedges of the law, and even the sequestered paths of private life so beset by petty rules and ordinances, too numerous to be remembered, that one could scarce walk at large without the risk of letting off a spring-gun or falling into a man-trap. In a little while the blessings of innumerable laws became apparent; a class of men arose to expound and confound them. Petty courts were instituted to take cognizance of petty offences, pettifoggers began to abound, and the community was soon set together by the ears. ~ Washington Irving, #NFDB
1363:There is perhaps no passage in the entire Bible in which the personality of the Holy Spirit comes out more tenderly and touchingly than in Eph. iv. 30, “And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.” Here grief is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a blind, impersonal influence or power that comes into our lives to illuminate, sanctify and empower them. No, He is immeasurably more than that, He is a holy Person who comes to dwell in our hearts, One who sees clearly every act we perform, every word we speak, every thought we entertain, even the most fleeting fancy that is allowed to pass through our minds; and if there is anything in act, or word or deed that is impure, unholy, unkind, selfish, mean, petty or untrue, this infinitely holy One is deeply grieved by it. ~ R A Torrey, #NFDB
1364:People always tend to idealize the departed. But I want the boys to understand their father was a wonderful, mortal man with flaws, not an unapproachable saint. Otherwise, they'll never really know him."
"What flaws?" West asked gently.
Her lips pursed as she considered the question thoughtfully. "He was often elusive. In the world, but not of it. Part of that was because of his illness, but he also didn't like unpleasantness. He avoided anything that was ugly or upsetting." She turned to face him. "Henry was so determined to think of me as perfect that it devastated him when I was petty or cross or careless. I wouldn't want-" Phoebe paused.
"What?" West prompted after a long moment.
"I wouldn't want to live with such expectations again. I'd rather not be worshipped, but accepted for all that I am, good and bad. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1365:In short, the superhuman beings and laws that petty human beings see as the source of their socio-political organization must do more than simply provide rules. They must also justify those rules, explain why they are good even though they feel uncomfortable, how they are conducive to happiness, indeed why there is so much unhappiness to overcome and why those who live by the rules rarely seem to be any less unhappy than the rest; and this almost invariably involves explaining why the world exists, what humans are doing in it, how their society relates to it, how and why they should go on, or alternatively how and why they ought to get out of it all again. The more complex a society, the more elaborate its belief system will be, obviously because the more variety there is in the human condition, the more there is to explain. ~ Patricia Crone, #NFDB
1366:It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1367:A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.
Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. ~ Chinua Achebe,#NFDB
1368:More than once have I thought, Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? I consider that to murder a brother, a mother, a wife, is a thing worthy of some petty Asiatic king, not a Roman Cæsar; but if that position were mine, I should not write justifying letters to the Senate. But Nero writes. Nero is looking for appearances, for Nero is a coward. But Tiberius was not a coward; still he justified every step he took. Why is this? What a marvellous, involuntary homage paid to virtue by evil! And knowest thou what strikes me? This, that it is done because transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous. ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz, #NFDB
1369:We shrink therefore from God, knowing that He wants to enrich our being, rather than our having—that He wishes to elevate our nature, not to submerge and lose it in trifles. He has called us to the superior vocation of being His children, of partaking of His nature, and of being related to Him as branches to a vine. Few of us completely want that elevation; it is our petty desire to have more,not to share the glory of being more.We want the poor shadows, not the light—the sparks, and not the sun—the arc, and not the circle. As the desire for the world and things increases in us, God makes less and less appeal. We hold back, our fists closed about our few pennies, and thus lose the fortune He holds out to us. That is why the initial step of coming to God is so hard. We cling to our nursery toys and lose the pearl of great price. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
1370:Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence Ð that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1371:At HQ, meantime, the Dispatcher of Inspectors is cackling hatefully as he cuddles his Bradshaw's Railway Guide, for the train the inspectors will catch at Victoria has a restaurant car but it is too late for what British Rail jestingly calls "breakfast" and too early for a life-giving drink. Heh, heh! At Eastbourne, they [the bank inspectors] stamp into the bank's Market Street branch, flourishing many a dread credential and reciting an Ogden Nash-like poem which goes after this fashion:
Keys,
Please.
Then they glance swiftly around to observe which cashier has gone green about the gills, which teller is slipping his pocket-money back into the petty-cash box and feeding the racing pages of the Daily Mirror into the shredding machine, which assistant manager is sidling out in the general direction of Gatwick Airport. ~ Kyril Bonfiglioli,#NFDB
1372:an aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed. The suggestion that this also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service, though in fact this was typical of an era when many of the great rich families withdrew from the new restless grab for money of a modernizing America, and having already made their particular fortunes, turned to the public arena as a means of exercising power. They were viewed as reformers, though the reforms would be aimed more at the newer seekers of wealth than at those who already held it. (“First-generation millionaires,” Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes, “give us libraries, second-generation millionaires give us themselves.”) ~ David Halberstam, #NFDB
1373:I shall die soon ... Here at this Dros. And what will I have achieved in my life? I have no sons nor daughters. No living kin... Few friends. They will say, 'Here lies Druss. He killed many and birthed none'."
"They will say more than that," said Virae suddenly. "They'll say, 'Here lies Druss the Legend, who was never mean, petty nor needlessly cruel. Here was a man who never gave in, never compromised his ideals, never betrayed a friend, never despoiled a woman and never used his strength against the weak.' They'll say 'He had no sons, but many a woman asleep with her babes slept more soundly for knowing Druss stood with the Drenai.' They'll say many things, whitebeard. Through many generations they will say them, and men with no strength will find strength when they hear them."
"That would be pleasant," said the old man, smiling. ~ David Gemmell,#NFDB
1374:Silent, still, dark, and distant. Far more manageable, less troublesome. People are small; they can be ignored.” He raised his head toward the invisible horizon. “The whole world is small at a height like this. Almost makes sense the way it lays out, like watching an ant hive. You never look at one of those and consider the politics, the petty prejudices, and all the vanities that drive them, but it’s the same everywhere. The queen has her favorites, her courtiers. The bigger ants lord over the smaller, the more productive over the weak, and the fortunate over the unlucky. We just can’t hear their squabbles. We’re too far above. Instead, they seem so pure of purpose, so simple, so happy. Maybe that’s how we all look to Maribor and the rest of the godly pantheon.” He peered up at the stars. “Perhaps that’s why they never think to help. ~ Michael J Sullivan, #NFDB
1375:This victory over the nobility marked another break with the West that would prove important in the centuries to come. In those decentralized, shifting kingdoms, there was no one to stand against the encroaching power of the aristocracy, and the gains of strong individual kings vanished as soon as they vacated the stage. The great landowning nobility sapped the strength of numerous kings over the centuries, drowning any potential unity in a sea of petty squabbles. Caught between the warring sides as always were the poor, crushed in the grip of feudal lords and bound ever more tightly to their land. Constantinople, by contrast, to its great benefit, managed largely to keep its aristocracy in check, ensuring a surprising degree of social and economic mobility for its citizens that added immeasurably to the prosperity and strength of the empire. ~ Lars Brownworth, #NFDB
1376:Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was “bogus” and nothing, Vidia said, like his own. Things Fall Apart was a fine book, but Achebe’s refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. Heart of Darkness was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. “One gives away so much in trust,” Vidia said. “One expects a certain discretion. It’s painful, it’s painful. But that’s quite all right. Others will be written. The record will be corrected.” He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb. The ~ Teju Cole, #NFDB
1377:pulled out an 8" x 10" black-and-white photo, a mug shot of a shady-looking character who gave every indication of being a veteran criminal. Bolick went on, “Guy’s name is Jack Leeper, a ten-time loser. Distant cousin to May Finnemore, even more distant to April. He grew up around here, drifted away a long time ago, became a career thug, petty thief, drug dealer, and so on. Got busted in California for kidnapping ten years ago, sentenced to life with no parole. Escaped two weeks ago. This afternoon we get a tip that he might be in this area.” Theo looked at the sinister face of Jack Leeper and felt ill. If this thug had April, then she was in serious trouble. Bolick continued, “Last night around seven thirty, Leeper here walks into the Korean Quick Shop four blocks away, buys cigarettes and beer, gets his face captured on the surveillance cameras. ~ John Grisham, #NFDB
1378:Waiting periods, counseling, ultrasounds, transvaginal ultrasounds, sonogram storytelling—all of these legislative moves are invasive, insulting, and condescending because they are deeply misguided attempts to pressure women into changing their minds, to pressure women into not terminating their pregnancies, as if women are so easily swayed that such petty and cruel stall tactics will work. These politicians do not understand that once a woman has made up her mind about terminating a pregnancy, very little will sway her. It is not a decision taken lightly, and if a woman does take the decision lightly, that is her right. A woman should always have the right to choose what she does with her body. It is frustrating that this needs to be said, repeatedly. On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a woman's choices should not merit measure. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1379:The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1380:I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.
"Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?
No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB
1381:We often pity the poor, because they have no leisure to mourn their departed relatives, and necessity obliges them to labor through their severest afflictions: but is not active employment the best remedy for overwhelming sorrow--the surest antidote for despair? It may be a rough comforter: it may seem hard to be harassed with the cares of life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labor when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labor better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope--if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful project, or escaping some further annoyance. ~ Anne Bront, #NFDB
1382:Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband and wife. Both of these arrangements rest on a sedulous devotion the one to the interests of the other. The master and husband protect and provide; the wife and servant obey. Above masters, above husbands, God rules all. He counts up our petty rebellions, our human follies. He reaches out his long arm, hand bunched into a fist.
It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries: not to count and measure her harbor defenses and border walls, but to estimate her capacity for self-rule. It is time to say what a king is, and what trust and guardianship he owes his people: what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what freedom from the pretensions of those who would like to tell an Englishman how to speak to his God. ~ Hilary Mantel,#NFDB
1383:author class:Sri Aurobindo
Part Three
Baroda and Bengal
Circa 1900 - 1909
Poems from
Ahana and Other Poems
Invitation
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorl and I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Invitation
,#NFDB
1384:Their obese emperors from New York are suave smiling assassins who buy silk, nylon, cigars petty tyrants and dictators. They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, distant regions where the poor hoard their corn like misers their gold: Standard Oil awakens them, clothes them in uniforms, designates which brother is the enemy. The Paraguayan fights its war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle with its machine gun. A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum, a million-acre mortgage, a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified, a new prison camp for subversives, in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots beneath a petroliferous moon, a subtle change of ministers in the capital, a whisper like an oil tide, and zap, you’ll see how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds, above the seas, in your home, illuminating their dominions. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1385:Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely amiable by nature; he is always amiable as if on command, out of calculation. If, for instance, he sees the necessity of being fantastic, original, out of the ordinary, then his fantasy, being most stupid and unnatural, assembles itself out of a priori accepted and long-trivialized forms. The natural Frenchman consists of a most philistine, petty, ordinary positiveness--in short, the dullest being in the world. In my opinion, only novices, and Russian young ladies in particular, are attracted to Frenchmen. Any decent being will at once notice and refuse to put up with this conventionalism of the pre-established forms of salon amiability, casualness, and gaiety. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1386:Impulsively, I threw up a new wall in my head. And suddenly I saw the situation for what it really was. Dante had me backed up against a tree, all right, but I did not want to make out with him.
“Demonstration finished,” Dante said, his smile a bit too cocky for my liking.
“Next time choose a more appropriate demonstration,” I said tensely. “Patch would kill you if he found out about this.”
His smile didn’t fade. “That’s a figure of speech that doesn’t work very well with Nephilim.”
I wasn’t in the mood for humor. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to set him off. This petty feud between the two of you will blow up to a whole new level if you mess with me. Patch is the last person you want to antagonize. He doesn’t hold grudges, because the people who cross him tend to disappear quickly. And what you just did? That was crossing him. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
1387:So are you,” we say, and we push the tape into place over his mouth and go back to work, winding up into well-earned bliss as the climax of our sharp symphony blares up out of the cheerful growing moonlight, and the music takes us higher and higher until finally, slowly, carefully, joyfully, it comes to its final triumphant chord and releases everything into the warm wet night: everything. All the anger, unhappiness and tension, all the cramped confusion and frustration of the everyday pointless life we are forced to trudge through just to make this happen, all the petty meaningless blather of trying to blend with bovine humanity—it is all gone, all of it shooting up and out and away into the welcoming darkness—and with it, trailing along like a battered and beaten puppy, all that might have been left inside the wicked, tattered husk of Steve Valentine. Bye-bye, Puffalump. ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
1388:Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast
Is open? or will God incense his ire
For such a petty trespass? and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of death denounced, whatever thing death be,
Deterred not from achieving what might lead
To happier life, knowledge of good and evil;
Of good, how just? of evil, if what is evil
Be real, why not known, since easier shunned?
God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;
Not just, not God: not feared then, nor obeyed:
Your fear itself of death removes the fear.
Why then was this forbid? Why, but to awe;
Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant,
His worshippers? He knows that in the day
Ye eat thereof, your eyes, that seem so clear,
Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Opened and cleared, and ye shall be as gods,
Knowing both good and evil, as they know. ~ John Milton,#NFDB
1389:British elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as 'fairness' and 'investment' — and the never-ending substitution of the word 'community' for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous 'Ask not what your country can do for you' line in a British political context because nobody would understand what he was talking about. ~ Charles C W Cooke, #NFDB
1390:There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.’ All I’m really getting at is that if you want to improve your life and live with all that you deserve, you must run your own race. It doesn’t matter what other people say about you. What is important is what you say to yourself. Do not be concerned with the judgment of others as long as you know what you are doing is right. You can do whatever you want to do as long as it is correct according to your conscience and your heart. Never be ashamed of doing that which is right; decide on what you think is good and then stick to it. And for God’s sake, never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people’s net worth. As Yogi Raman preached: ‘Every second you spend thinking about someone else’s dreams, you take time away from your own.’” It ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
1391:When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
1392:Browder told a Russian lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, who worked for a Moscow-based law firm called Firestone and Duncan, to follow the trail. It turned out the investment companies were being illegally signed over by the cops to petty criminals, who would then ask for tax rebates on the companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which were then granted by corrupt tax officials, signed off on by the same cops who had taken the documents in the first place, and wired to two banks owned by a convicted fraudster, an old friend of the aforementioned cops and tax officials. Officially the tax officials and cops only earned a few thousand a year, but they had property worth hundreds of thousands, drove Porsches, and went on shopping trips to Harrods in London. And this was happening year after year. The biggest tax fraud scheme in history. Magnitsky thought he had caught a few bad apples. ~ Peter Pomerantsev, #NFDB
1393:The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1394:A man's voice was saying, "Odette seems a little off tonight."
"You think?" answered a woman.
"Less confident than last night's," said the man. "I wonder if she's injured." A loud put-upon sigh. "Not to mention that the swans sound more like a herd of elephants."
Oh, come on, Grigori wanted to say: You spoiled, spoiled people. The dancer was wonderful, just like the swan-girls, doing their best to deliver them magnificence. If she was "slightly off", it was nothing Grigori had been able to notice. These people - himself included - were all so thoroughly indulged, could they not simply accept the wonder of it, sitting in this lush, gilded theater while a live orchestra accompanied so much physical exquisiteness? And this man thought he had the right to be disappointed! That these people expected so much, that they could expect that much, and not be ashamed of their petty disappointments. ~ Daphne Kalotay,#NFDB
1395:The grenade hit him in the chest and bounced onto the deck [here, the Navy term for floor]. He immediately leapt to his feet and yelled “grenade” to alert his teammates of impending danger, but they could not evacuate the sniper hide-sight in time to escape harm. Without hesitation and showing no regard for his own life, he threw himself onto the grenade, smothering it to protect his teammates who were lying in close proximity. The grenade detonated as he came down on top of it, mortally wounding him. Petty Officer Monsoor’s actions could not have been more selfless or clearly intentional. Of the three SEALs on that rooftop corner, he had the only avenue of escape away from the blast, and if he had so chosen, he could have easily escaped. Instead, Monsoor chose to protect his comrades by the sacrifice of his own life. By his courageous and selfless actions, he saved the lives of his two fellow SEALs. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
1396:Therefore, in a time of Perfect Virtue, the gait of men is slow and ambling; their gaze is steady and mild. In such an age, mountains have no paths or trails, lakes no boats or bridges. The ten thousand things live species by species, one group settled close to another. Birds and beasts form their flocks and herds; grass and trees grow to fullest height. So it happens that you can tie a cord to the birds and beasts and lead them about or bend down the limb and peer into the nest of the crow and the magpie. In this age of Perfect Virtue, men live the same as birds and beasts, group themselves side by side with the ten thousand things. Who then knows anything about “gentleman” or “petty man”? Dull and unwitting, men have no wisdom; thus their Virtue does not depart from them. Dull and unwitting, they have no desire; this is called uncarved simplicity. In uncarved simplicity, the people attain their true nature. ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
1397:Attack the silence of Pythagoras, and the Orphic beans, and that preposterous brag, "Himself has spoken." Attack the "Ideas" of Plato, and the transbodiment and circulation of our souls, and the reminiscences, and the unlovely loves of lovely bodies, though directed to the beloved's soul. Attack the atheism of Epicurus, and his atoms, and his doctrine of pleasure, unworthy of a philosopher; or Aristotle's petty Providence, and his artificial system, and his discourses about the mortality of the soul, and the exclusively human focus his teaching. Attack the haughtiness of the Stoa, or the greed and vulgarity of the Cynic. Attack for me the emptiness that is full of absurdities - all that stuff about the gods and the sacrifices and the idols and the demons, whether beneficent or malignant, and all the tricks that people play with divination, the calling up of gods or of souls, and the power of stars. ~ Gregory of Nazianzus, #NFDB
1398:We come from different worlds,” I said, “but each has so much to teach the other. There will be moments of dissonance, when people struggle to understand each other’s ways, but once we get past our misconceptions, imagine the reward.
“The dancers will perform in the market of Wyvern’s Court; they will be beside avian poets, singers, philosophers and storytellers or we cannot hope to succeed. Merchants will haggle prices and barter goods as they have in both our markets throughout history. Scholars will work to impart their valuable knowledge to their students. Artists will create beauty. And our children will grow up together, playing the same games, taught by the same teachers, living side by side until as adults, I pray, they laugh at the petty arguments we had in this nest while we designed their world.”
“And ravens will dance, and serpents will fight for the lives of falcons. ~ Amelia Atwater Rhodes,#NFDB
1399:So often older people, by their negative approach, are apt to foster, even from very early years, a sense of wrong-doing with children. The emphasis is constantly laid on petty little things, which may be annoying but are not basically wrong. To the child they are, however, being blown up and represented out of all proportion. Psychologically this must have an adverse effect on the child's character, developing a warped sense of values, and an attitude of defensive resistance towards its elders. Instead of a purely negative attitude, one should reason with a child, explaining relative values and the reasons for the state of affairs, and the natural consequence of actions. In this way the elementary principles of the Law of Cause and Effect should also be introduced, and it will be found that such explanations will inevitably evoke response and build self-respect, confidence and responsibility. ~ Aart Jurriaanse, Bridges (1978), #NFDB
1400:It was clear that Kotler was expected to grant this absolution even though Tankilevich offered no repentance. But why should he? Since Tankilevich was in need, since he was in the subordinate position, he must be the injured party. And since Kotler was in the dominant position, since the power now rested in his hands, it was mean and petty of him to demand repentance, an admission of guilt. After all, guilt and innocence were not fixed marks. There were extenuating circumstances. Wasn’t this the governing logic of the times? That cause and effect could not be easily disambiguated? That all was up for revision and nobody durst speak of an absolute truth? By this logic, in granting absolution, Kotler would be remediating a wrong. A wrong he had perpetuated by virtue of holding power. Saying I forgive you, he would actually be saying Please forgive me. Or, at least, Please forgive me for not forgiving you sooner. ~ David Bezmozgis, #NFDB
1401:I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate? ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1402:God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead—and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you.
Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,#NFDB
1403:Car salesman turned governor.
How it fried Dick Artemus to hear himself described like that--the snotty implication being that all car salesman were cagey and duplicitous, unworthy of holding public office.
At first Dick Artemus had fought back, pridefully pointing out that his dealership sold only Toyotas, the most popular and reliable automobile on the face of the planet! A quality vehicle, he'd said. Top rated by all the important consumer magazines!
But the governor's media advisers told him he sounded not only petty, but self-promotional, and that folks who loved their new Camry did not necessarily love the guy who'd sold it to them. The media advisers told Dick Artemus that the best thing he could do for his future political career was to make voters forget he'd ever been a car salesman (not that the Democrats would ever let them forget). Take the high road, the media advisers told him. Act gubernatorial. ~ Carl Hiaasen,#NFDB
1404:After The Interval
About three months ago, when first
Upon our open, unprotected
And freezing garden snowstorms burst
In sudden fury, I reflected
That I would shut myself away
And in seclusion write a section
Of winter poems, day by day,
To supplement my spring collection.
But nonsense piled up mountain-high,
Like snow-drifts hindering and stifling
And half the winter had gone by,
Against all hopes, in petty trifling.
I understood, alas, too late
Why winter-while the snow was falling,
Piercing the darkness with its flakesFrom outside at my house was calling;
And while with numb white-frozen lips
It whispered, urging me to hurry,
I sharpened pencils, played with clips,
Made feeble jokes and did not worry.
While at my desk I dawdled on
By lamp-light on an early morning,
The winter had appeared and goneA wasted and unheeded warning.
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
1405:The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life--all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.
A mind hearing this pitiless warning--a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate--would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away forever.
Great examples come to your mind and you see clearly that you are a lost soul, your life is being frittered away on petty pleasures and pains and trifling talk. "Shame! Shame!" you cry, and bite your lips. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis,#NFDB
1406:To begin with, at home I spent most of my time reading. I wanted to stifle all that was continuously boiling up inside me through external impressions. Out of all external impressions, reading was the only one possible for me. Of course, reading helped a lot - it excited, delighted and tormented me. But at times it bored me to death. For all that I still wanted to be doing things and I would suddenly plunge into dark, subterranean, vile, not so much depravity as petty dissipation. My mean, trivial, lusts were keen and fiery as a result of my constant, morbid irritability. The surges were hysterical, always accompanied by tears and convulsion. Apart from reading I had nowhere to turn - I mean, there was nothing in my surroundings that I could respect then or to which I might have been attracted. Moreover, dreadful ennui was seething within me, a hysterical craving for contradictions and contrasts would make its presence felt [...]. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1407:That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess;
I found Him not in world or sun,
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye;
Nor thro' the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun:
If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,
I heard a voice `believe no more'
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd `I have felt.'
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro' nature, moulding men. ~ Alfred Tennyson,#NFDB
1408:Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes- scowling, poor dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of heaven!- and strove hard to send up a prayer through the dense grey pavement of clouds. Those mists had gathered , as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer to heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed it's justice , and it's mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. It's vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every separate need ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1409:1072
United States
He shall be great who serves his country well.
He shall be loved who ever guards her fame.
His worth the starry banner long shall tell,
Who loves his land too much to stoop to shame.
Who shares the splendor of these sunny skies
Has freedom as his birthright, and may know
Rich fellowship with comrades brave and wise;
Into the realms of manhood he may go.
Who writes, 'United States' beside his name
Offers a pledge that he himself is true;
Gives guarantee that selfishness or shame
Shall never mar the work he finds to do.
He is received world-wide as one who lives
Above the sordid dreams of petty gain,
And is reputed as a man who gives
His best to others in their hours of pain.
This is the heritage of Freedom's soil:
High purposes and lofty goals to claim.
And he shall be rewarded for his toil
Who loves his land too much to stoop to shame.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1410:Shopping malls rarely have any windows on the outside. There is a good reason for this: if you could see the world beyond the window you would be able to orientate yourself and might not get lost. Shopping malls have maps that are unreadable even to the most skilled cartographer. There is a good reason for this: if you could read the map you would be able to find your way to the shop you meant to go without getting lost. Shopping malls look rather the same whichever way you turn. There is a reason for this too: shopping malls are built to disorientate you, to spin you around, to free you from the original petty purpose for which you came and make you wander like Cain past rows and rows of shops thinking to yourself, "Ooh! I should actually go in there and get something. Might as well seeing as I'm here." And this strange mental process, this freeing of the mind from all sense of purpose or reason, is known to retail analysts as the Gruen transfer. ~ Mark Forsyth, #NFDB
1411:He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
1412:Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm. Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1413:What drew him towards the outside was not the student, not the goat, not even the man in the down-at-heel shoes who joined them. Simply the street, like a blanched life-drained cadaver, fettered his whole attention. Never before had he seen it look so monstrously real, lit by the tired face of the moon, quiet and grave. There was about it, as it were, a sort of despairing dignity. You might have thought that the street had been killed by the weight of its suffering, that it had that moment died after long agony. It was old, the street, hobbling and twisted with age. Some of its houses were already crumbling in ruins. For years now it had sheltered the petty life of men. And now they had elected it to express the extent of their weariness. Naked beneath the prodigious brightness of the moon, it revealed all that men hid in the depths of their beings, the little hopes, the hates so huge. No longer could it hide anything; it cried out its despair from every corner. ~ Albert Cossery, #NFDB
1414:Tragedy happens - "tragic mistakes" happen - when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encourages them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion. The tragedy of the street vendor Amadou Diallo is that he came as an innocent to the slaughter, made vulnerable by poverty and by the color of his skin. And the tragedy of America is that a nation which sees itself as leading the world toward a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1415:Indeed, as I interviewed all twenty-four of the guests, this issue and sound problems came up all but three times. Of this small sample, nearly nine out of ten of the first-time guests did not return because they struggled with either the sound or lighting in the worship service. As I conducted hundreds of consultations over the next three decades, I heard many first-time guests mention the issues of light and sound. And while it’s not a challenge in all churches, the issue was sufficiently pervasive to deem it important. Sound and lighting. Color me surprised. In the event you are wondering why guests are hesitant to mention their problems with sound and lighting, I asked them. And they told me clearly. There were two common responses. First, they felt petty by mentioning it. Here is my best recollection of the words from my first interview with Linda. “I hate even saying it,” she began. “But I just have trouble worshipping when it’s so dark I can’t even see my Bible. ~ Thom S Rainer, #NFDB
1416:Remind yourself daily that there is no way to happiness; rather, happiness is the way. You may have a long list of goals that you believe will provide you with contentment when they’re achieved, yet if you examine your state of happiness in this moment, you’ll notice that the fulfillment of some previous ambitions didn’t create an enduring sense of joy. Desires can produce anxiety, stress, and competitiveness, and you need to recognize those that do. Bring happiness to every encounter in life, instead of expecting external events to produce joy. By staying in harmony on the path of the Tao, all the contentment you could ever dream of will begin to flow into your life—the right people, the means to finance where you’re headed, and the necessary factors will come together. “Stop pushing yourself,” Lao-tzu would say, “and feel gratitude and awe for what is. Your life is controlled by something far bigger and more significant than the petty details of your lofty aspirations. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1417:The nouveau riche flaunt their wealth, but the old rich scorn such gauche displays. Minor officials prove their status with petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful show their strength through gestures of magnanimity. People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response. ~ Avinash K Dixit, #NFDB
1418:I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit."
The Humbug dropped his needle and stared in disbelief while Milo and Tock began to back away slowly.
"Don't try to leave," he ordered, with a menacing sweep of his arm, "for there's so very much to do, and you still have over eight hundred years to go on the first job."
"But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them.
"Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin - if he could grin at all. "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting. ~ Norton Juster,#NFDB
1419:Everyone in Washington’s a lawyer, dear.” He winked and turned toward the stairs that led up to his room, knowing that no offense would be taken. She understood that discretion was his first duty. “Good night, Mrs. Pettygrove. Thanks again.” Reggie served as President William Silver’s personal aide, or body man as most referred to him. It was a unique role. On the one hand, he was a servant, a valet. On the other, Reggie enjoyed virtually unparalleled intimacy with both the great man and the highest office. Only Brock Sparkman, the president’s new chief of staff, was as tapped into the psyche of the commander-in-chief. Reggie went everywhere the president went, mentally two steps ahead while physically three steps behind. His job was to anticipate Silver’s personal needs and attend to them. With Reggie relieving him of petty problems and everyday worries, America’s chief executive was free to dedicate his big brain to the nation’s business. Officially, Reggie knew little of import. ~ Tim Tigner, #NFDB
1420:Love is about control and loss of control. In love, we give ourselves up to each other. We lose control or, rather, we cede control to another, trusting in a way we would never otherwise trust, letting the other person hold the deepest part of our being in their hands, with the capacity to hurt it mortally. This cession of control is a deeply terrifying thing, which is why we crave it and are drawn to it like moths to the flame, and why we have to trust it unconditionally. In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother’s breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other’s nakedness…
And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. ~ Andrew Sullivan,#NFDB
1421:drive through hell the people are weary, unhappy and frustrated, the people are bitter and vengeful, the people are deluded and fearful, the people are angry and uninventive and I drive among them on the freeway and they project what is left of themselves in their manner of driving— some more hateful, more thwarted than others— some don’t like to be passed, some attempt to keep others from passing —some attempt to block lane changes —some hate cars of a newer, more expensive model —others in these cars hate the older cars. the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it’s humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place they hated and going to another they hate just as much or more. the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives. when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it’s ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1422:Did you wish upon a star and take the time to try to make your wish come true?
Did you try to paint the sunrise and find the gift of life within?
Did you write a song just for the joy of it?
Or write a poem just to feel the pain?
Did you find a reason to ignore the petty injustices, the spoken barbs, or the envies, jealousies and greed that crossed your path?
Did you wake up this morning and whisper inside, “Today, I’ll find every reason to smile, and ignore the excuses to frown.”
Today will be the day I’ll whisper nothing snide, I’ll say nothing cruel. I’ll be kind to my enemy, I’ll embrace my friends, and for this
one day, I’ll forget the slights of the past.
Today will be the day I’ll live for the joy of it, laugh for the fun of it, and today, I’ll love whether it’s returned, forsaken, or simply
ignored.
And if you did, then your heart has joined the others who have as well, uniting, strengthening, and in a single heartbeat you’ve created
a world of hope. ~ Lora Leigh,#NFDB
1423:He shrugged. “You know I was in the dark about all that as much as you were. This time it’s straightforward. And sanctioned.” “Sanctioned by whom?” He looked at me. “By the proper authorities.” “All right,” I said, taking a sip from the porcelain demitasse. “Tell me.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “After nine-eleven, Congress took the shackles off the Agency. There’s a new spirit in the place. We’re pushing the envelope again, going after the bad guys—” “The few, the proud?” He frowned. “Look, we’re really making a difference now—” “Be all that you can be?” His jaw clenched. “Do you just enjoy pissing me off?” “A bit, yes.” “It’s petty.” I took another sip of espresso. “What’s your point?” “I wish you’d just listen.” “So far I’ve listened to five clichés, including something about shackled envelopes. I’m waiting for you to actually say something.” He flushed, but then nodded and even managed a chuckle. I smiled at his composure. He had matured since I had last seen him. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1424:Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene. ~ Chad Harbach, #NFDB
1425:Give me bullet power. Give me power over angels. Even when you’re standing up
you look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to
tie your arms down?
Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary
like it’s just another petty theft? It makes me tired, Henry. Do you see what I mean?
Do you see what I’m getting at?
You swallowing matches and suddenly I’m yelling Strike me. Strike anywhere.
I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search
my body for the scars, thinking
Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in? I know you want me to say it, Henry,
it’s in the script, you want me to say Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted
and worth dying for too
but I think I’d rather keep the bullet this time. It’s mine, you can’t have it, see,
I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s
as good as anything. ~ Richard Siken,#NFDB
1426:It is not enough to overthrow governments, masters, tyrants: one must overthrow his own preconceived ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. We must abandon the hard-fought trenches, we have dug ourselves into and come out into the open, surrender our arms, our possessions, our rights as individuals, classes, nations, peoples. A billion men seeking peace cannot be enslaved. We have enslaved ourselves, by our own petty, circumscribed view of life. It is glorious to offer one's life for a cause, but dead men accomplish nothing. Life demands that we offer something more—spirit, soul, intelligence, good-will. Nature is ever ready to repair the gaps caused by death, but nature cannot supply the intelligence, the will, the imagination to conquer the forces of death. Nature restores and repairs, that is all. It is man's task to eradicate the homicidal instinct which is infinite in its ramifications and manifestations. It is useless to call upon God, as it is futile to meet force with force. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1427:The Traveller
Reply to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’
Who travels alone with his eye on the heights,
Though he laughs in the day time oft weeps on the nights;
For courage goes down at the set of the sun,
When the toil of the journey is all borne by one.
He speeds but to grief though full gaily he ride
Who travels alone without love at his side.
Who travels alone without lover of friend
But hurries from nothing, to naught at the end.
Though great be his winnings and high be his goal,
He is bankrupt in wisdom and beggared in soul.
Life’s one gift of value to him is denied
Who travels alone without love at his side.
It is easy enough in this world to make haste
If one live for that purpose – but think of the waste;
For life is a poem to leisurely read,
And the joy of the journey lies not in its speed.
Oh! vain his achievement and petty his pride
Who travels alone without love at his side.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB
1428:What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity -- the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, 'and if it had,' she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, 'if it had there are worse evils than love.' The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church -- Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but -- Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: 'Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no sorrow like my sorrow,' although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
1429:In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit: 124. That Which We Dare
Invoke
That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess;
I found Him not in world or sun,
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye;
Nor thro' the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun:
If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,
I heard a voice, "Believe no more,"
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep,
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd, "I have felt."
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro' nature, moulding men.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
1430:Are you ready to go home, Catherine?” he asked. “It’s warm inside the house. I kept a fire going for you.”
I continued looking at him, unsure how to respond. “Thanks,” I managed to say and then glanced in the direction of his house—our house.
“Well, you are my wife. And I know you don’t like the cold.”
I’m his wife, I thought to myself. He had said the words as if that simple fact made it necessary to be both thoughtful and kind. As if having gained a wife or husband meant having also gained her or his concerns, and hence the need to consider the person’s needs, wants, and preferences as strongly as one’s own. It struck me as a perfect description of what marriage ought to be. An agreeable notion that had not entered into my petty way of viewing matrimony. I would have assumed it to be above Thaddeus’ egotistical mindset as well.
“Catherine?” he said again, watching me regard him with a quizzical expression. “Are you ready to go home?”
I nodded, which made him smile. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
1431:Myself I cannot see the persistence of the artist type. I see no need for the individual man of genius in such an order. I see no need for martyrs. I see no need for vicarious atonement. I see no need for the fierce preservation of beauty on the part of a few. Beauty and Truth do not need defenders, nor even expounders. No one will ever have a lien on Beauty and Truth; they are creations in which all participate. They need only to be apprehended; they exist externally. Certainly, when we think of the conflicts and schisms which occur in the realm of art, we know that they do not proceed out of love of Beauty or Truth. Ego worship is the one and only cause of dissension, in art as in other realms. The artist is never defending art, but simply his own petty conception of art. Art is as deep and high and wide as the universe. There is nothing but art, if you look at it properly. It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1432:No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only … and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1433:If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at each opportunity, and if Woden or Shiva or Buddha or that Christian fellow--what's his name?--cannot respect that, then I'll accept their wrath. At least I will have tasted the banquet that they have spread before me on this rich, round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1434:When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it's always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are the people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies. My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that's confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we've done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs, and little remarks such as "We saved your ass in World War II." Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are "We're number two! ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1435:The Peaks Of Valor
These are the peaks of valor; keeping clean your father's name,
Too brave for petty profit to risk the brand of shame,
Adventuring for the future, yet mindful of the past,
For God, for country and for home, still valorous to the last.
These are the peaks of valor: a speech that knows no lie,
A standard of what's right and wrong which no man's wealth can buy,
All unafraid of failure, to venture forth to fight,
Yet never for the victory's sake to turn away from right.
Ten thousand times the victor is he who fails to win,
Who could have worn the conqueror's crown by stooping low in sin;
Ten thousand times the braver is he who turns away
And scorns to crush a weaker man that he may rule the day.
These are the peaks of valor: standing firm and standing true
To the best your father taught you and the best you've learned anew,
Helpful to all who need you, winning what joys you can,
Writing in triumph to the end your record as a man.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1436:If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at each opportunity, and if Woden or Shiva or Buddha or that Christian fellow—what's his name?—cannot respect that, then I'll accept their wrath. At least I will have tasted the banquet that they have spread before me on this rich, round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.” Alobar ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1437:Prove now you are worthy of your Scriptural claims. If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ Or are you not God’s new Melchizedek?” His sarcasm carried particular venom when he mocked Jesus’s phrase, “it is written.” Jesus swallowed and replied, “On the other hand, it is also written, ‘You shall not put Yahweh your god to the test.’” Belial scoffed, “Oh, how petty.” Another gust of wind blew from below. Jesus’s cloak flew up and obscured his vision. When it came down, he saw he was on the precipice of a deep ridge back in the desert. Had he ever left? The gust of desert wind suddenly went still. Jesus found it difficult to breathe in the stifling deadness of the heat. Was he dizzy from the height or from his malnutrition? Now, he heard whispering voices of malignant evil all around him. The cacophony was enough to make a human go insane. But Jesus was no mere human. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1438:Balzac has incomparably described how the example of Napoleon electrified an entire generation in France. To Balzac the brilliant rise of the insignificant Lieutenant Bonaparte to the rank of emperor of the world meant not only the triumph of an individual, but the victory of the idea of youth. That one did not have to be born a prince or a duke to achieve power at an early age, that one might come from any humble and even poor family and yet be a general at twenty-four, ruler of France at thirty and of the entire world, caused hundreds, after this unique success, to abandon petty vocations and provincial abodes. Lieutenant Bonaparte had fired the minds of an entire generation of youth. He drove them to aspire to higher things, he made the generals of the Grande Armée the heroes and careerists of the comédie humaine. It is always an individual young person who achieves the unattainable for the first time in any field, and thus encourages all the youngsters around him or who come after him, by the mere fact of his success. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
1439:He died at forty-two.
I was there to collect his talent.
I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just forty-four, her liver destroyed by drinking; I was there inside the hotel room of Charlie Parker, my singular jazz saxophonist, who died in his midthirties, but whose body was so ravaged by drugs the coroners thought he was sixty.
Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader, choked in his sleep when he was fifty-one, too deep in pills to awaken. Johnny Allen Hendrix (you called him Jimi) swallowed a handful of barbiturates and expired. He was twenty-seven.
It is not new, this idea that a purer art awaits you in a substance. But it is naive. I existed before the first grapes were fermented. Before the first whiskey was distilled. Be it opium or absinthe, marijuana or heroin, cocaine or ecstasy or whatever will follow, you may alter your state, but you will not alter this truth: I am Music. I am here inside you. Why would I hide behind a powder or a vapor?
Do you think me so petty? ~ Mitch Albom,#NFDB
1440:Of all her siblings, Gabriel was the one to whom Phoebe had always felt closest. In his company, she could make petty or sarcastic remarks, or confess her foolish mistakes, knowing he would never judge her harshly. They knew each other's faults and kept each other's secrets.
Many people, if not most, would have been flabbergasted to learn that Gabriel had any faults at all. All they saw was the remarkable male beauty and cool self-control of a man so elegantly mannered that it never would have occurred to anyone to call him a lunkhead. However, Gabriel could sometimes be arrogant and manipulative. Beneath his charming exterior, there was a steely core that made him ideally suited to oversee the array of Challon properties and businesses. Once he decided what was best for someone, he took every opportunity to push and goad until he had his way.
Therefore, Phoebe occasionally found it necessary to push back. After all, it was an older sister's responsibility to keep her younger brother from behaving like a domineering ass. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1441:Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
1442:I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie,–how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and we need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; for does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1443:But if a man finds himself in possession of great mental faculties, such as alone should venture on the solution of the hardest of all problems—those which concern nature as a whole and humanity in its widest range, he will do well to extend his view equally in all directions, without ever straying too far amid the intricacies of various by-paths, or invading regions little known; in other words, without occupying himself with special branches of knowledge, to say nothing of their petty details. There is no necessity for him to seek out subjects difficult of access, in order to escape a crowd of rivals; the common objects of life will give him material for new theories at once serious and true; and the service he renders will be appreciated by all those—and they form a great part of mankind—who know the facts of which he treats. What a vast distinction there is between students of physics, chemistry, anatomy, mineralogy, zoology, philology, history, and the men who deal with the great facts of human life, the poet and the philosopher! ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1444:In my hands is power. The power to hear or to destroy. To grant life or to cause death. I revere this gift, have honed it over time an art as magnificent and awesome as any painting in the Louvre.
I an art, I am science. In all ways that matter, I am God.
God must be ruthless and far-sighted. God studies his creations and selects. The best of these creations must be cherished, protected, sustained. Greatness rewards perfection.
Yet even the flawed have purpose.
A wise God experiment, considers, uses what comes into his hands and forges wonders. Yes, often without mercy, often with a violence the ordinary condemn.
We who hold power cannot be detracted by the condemnations of the ordinary, by the petty and pitiful laws of simple man. They are blind, their minds are closed with fear-fear of pain, fear of death. They are too limited to comprehend that death can be conquered.
I have nearly done so.
If my work was discovered, they, with their foolish laws and attitudes, would damn me.
When my work is complete, they will worship me. ~ J D Robb,#NFDB
1445:Ever since he saw the swarming of the multitudes and recognized the flow of the cosmic current, the petty well-being of his own person has ceased to appear to him the central concern of the universe, and is no longer of paramount importance to him. He no longer believes now that he is the only person in the world, there to enjoy himself and grow greater. Countless others, all around him, also have the right to be happy and successful. He sees them struggling on all sides; and he can discern, infinitely more important than any private undertakings, the development of a vast work that calls for all his good will and fills him with enthusiasm. He has, quite literally, shifted the axis of his life outside himself; he has, one might say, de-centred himself; in some way it is no longer himself that he cherishes in himself, but the great thing of which he is a constituent particle and an active element; it is the immanent Goddess of the World that rests her foot on him for a moment, to rise, with his support, a little higher still. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, #NFDB
1446:That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment-these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves. Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions. ~ Michael McDowell, #NFDB
1447:I’m looking for Fat Hoochie Prom Queen,” I declared.
He did not respond.
“It’s a book,” I said. “Not a person.”
Nope. Nothing.
“At the very least, can you tell me the author?”
He looked at his computer, as if it had some way to speak to me without any typing on his part.
“Are you wearing headphones that I can’t see?” I asked.
He scratched at the inside of his elbow.
“Do you know me?” I persisted. “Did I grind you to a pulp in kindergarten, and are you now getting sadistic pleasure from this petty revenge?
Stephen Little, is that you? Is it? I was much younger then, and foolish to have nearly drowned you in that water fountain. In my defense, your
prior destruction of my book report was a completely unwarranted act of aggression.”
Finally, a response. The information desk clerk shook his shaggy head.
“No?” I said.
“I am not allowed to disclose the location of Fat Hoochie Prom Queen,” he explained. “Not to you. Not to anyone. And while I am not Stephen
Little, you should be ashamed of what you did to him. Ashamed. ~ Rachel Cohn,#NFDB
1448:Fine
Isn't it fine when the day is done,
And the petty battles are lost or won,
When the gold is made and the ink is dried,
To quit the struggle and turn aside
To spend an hour with your boy in play,
And let him race all of your cares away?
Isn't it fine when the day's gone well,
When you have glorious tales to tell,
And your heart is light and your head is high.
For nothing has happened to make you sigh,
To hurry homewards to share the joy
That your work has won with a little boy?
Isn't it fine, whether good or bad
Has come to the hopes and the plans you had,
And the day is over, to find him there,
Thinking you splendid and just and fair,
Ready to chase all your griefs away,
And soothe your soul with an hour of play?
Oh, whether the day's been long or brief,
Whether it's brought to me joy or grief,
Whether I've failed, or whether I've won,
It shall matter not when the work is done;
I shall count it fine if I end each day
With a little boy in an hour of play.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1449:Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light.
For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable; the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside.
Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine thousand pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality. ~ Tom Robbins,#NFDB
1450:In reality, Kabila was no more than a petty tyrant propelled to prominence by accident. Secretive and paranoid, he had no political programme, no strategic vision and no experience of running a government. He refused to engage with established opposition groups or with civic organisations and banned political parties. Lacking a political organisation of his own, he surrounded himself with friends and family members and relied heavily for support and protection on Rwanda and Banyamulenge. Two key ministries were awarded to cousins; the new chief of staff of the army, James Kabarebe, was a Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up in Uganda; the deputy chief of staff and commander of land forces was his 26-year-old son, Joseph; the national police chief was a brother-in-law. Whereas Mobutu had packed his administration with supporters from his home province of Équateur, Kabila handed out key positions in government, the armed forces, security services and public companies to fellow Swahili-speaking Katangese, notably members of the Lubakat group of northern Katanga, his father’s tribe. ~ Martin Meredith, #NFDB
1451:He told me his story, a South African story that was all too familiar to me: The man grows up under apartheid, working on a farm, part of what’s essentially a slave labor force. It’s a living hell but it’s at least something. He’s paid a pittance but at least he’s paid. He’s told where to be and what to do every waking minute of his day. Then apartheid ends and he doesn’t even have that anymore. He finds his way to Johannesburg, looking for work, trying to feed his children back home. But he’s lost. He has no education. He has no skills. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know where to be. The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it. So what does he do? He takes shit. He becomes a petty thief. He’s in and out of jail. He gets lucky and finds some construction work, but then he gets laid off from that, and a few days later he’s in a shop and he sees some PlayStation games and he grabs them, but he doesn’t even know enough to know that he’s stolen something of no value. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
1452:Leeper, a ten-time loser. Distant cousin to May Finnemore, even more distant to April. He grew up around here, drifted away a long time ago, became a career thug, petty thief, drug dealer, and so on. Got busted in California for kidnapping ten years ago, sentenced to life with no parole. Escaped two weeks ago. This afternoon we get a tip that he might be in this area.” Theo looked at the sinister face of Jack Leeper and felt ill. If this thug had April, then she was in serious trouble. Bolick continued, “Last night around seven thirty, Leeper here walks into the Korean Quick Shop four blocks away, buys cigarettes and beer, gets his face captured on the surveillance cameras. Not the smartest crook in the world. So, we know he’s definitely in the area.” “Why would he take April?” Theo blurted, his mouth dry with fear, his knees ready to buckle. “According to authorities in California, they found some letters from April in his prison cell. She was his pen pal, probably felt sorry for the guy ’cause he’s never supposed to get out of prison. So she strikes up a correspondence. We’ve ~ John Grisham, #NFDB
1453:Q: I don’t really know what it means to live beautifully. In fact, I really know nothing except a few mechanical things connected with my job; I see by talking to you that my life is pretty dull, or rather my mind is. So how can I wake up to this sensitivity, to this intelligence that makes life extremely beautiful to you?
Krishnamurti: First one has to sharpen the senses by looking, touching, observing, listening not only to the birds, to the rustle of the leaves, but also to the words that you use yourself, the feeling you have – however small and petty – for all the secret intimations of your own mind. Listen to them and don’t suppress them, don’t control them or try to sublimate them. Just listen to them. The sensitivity to the senses doesn’t mean their indulgence, doesn’t mean yielding to urges or resisting those urges, but means simply observing so that the mind is always watchful as when you walk on a railway line; you may lose your balance but you immediately get back on to the rail. So the whole organism becomes alive, sensitive, intelligent, balanced, taut. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#NFDB
1454:To A Politician
There was a moment when of you
A splendid hope I had to tell,
Believing 'Here is one man who
Will serve our waiting country well.'
I saw you sedulous and keen,
I heard the burning words you spoke.
It seemed that you were hard and clean,
And rapier sharp your every stroke.
Then came success, and in a night
An impish thing you stood apart,
All empty-handed for the fight,
With worse, alas! an empty heart.
Success had spoiled you, said your friends,
It was not so, for naught was there
To spoil but means to petty ends.
At last men saw you bleak and bare.
In those who give you grudging aid
These days, may we the spirits see
Who for the love of men would raid
The strongholds of iniquity?
Are these the heroes high and true,
Who, seeing right with honest eyes,
Will risk their all in putting through
Democracy's stern Enterprise?
You had no wealth of love. You failed
For that. Your heart may never cling
To men upon their crosses nailed,
To brothers sadly travailing.
~ Edward George Dyson,#NFDB
1455:Man is made of thought, of will and of love: he can think truth or error, he can will good or evil, he can love beauty or ugliness. Now thought of the true — or knowledge of the real — demands on the one hand willing of the good and on the other love of the beautiful, hence virtue, for virtue is none other than beauty of soul; that is why the Greeks, who were aesthetes as well as thinkers, included virtue within philosophy. Without beauty of soul, all willing is sterile, it is petty and closes itself to grace; and in an analogous manner: without effort of will, all spiritual thought ultimately remains superficial and ineffectual and leads to pretension. Virtue coincides with a sensibility proportioned — or conformed — to the Truth, and that is why the soul of the sage soars above things and thereby above itself, if one may put it thus; whence the disinterestedness, nobleness and generosity of great souls. Quite clearly, the consciousness of metaphysical principles cannot go hand in hand with moral pettiness, such as ambition and hypocrisy : "Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
1456:1071
United
Forgotten petty difference now,
The larger purpose glows,
The storm is here, a common fear
Its deadly lightning shows.
The Ship of State must bear us all
And danger makes us kin,
As one, we all shall rise or fall,
So shall we strive to win.
Our banner's flying at the mast,
Our course lies straight ahead;
The ocean's trough is deep and rough,
The waves are stained with red.
The bond of danger tighter grows,
We serve a common plan;
Send o'er the sea the word that we
Are all American.
One hundred million sturdy souls
Once more united stand,
As one, you will find them all behind
The banner of our land.
And side by side they work to-day
In silken garb or rag,
And once again our troops of men
Are brothers of the flag.
And from the storm that hovers low,
And from the angry sea
Where dangers lurk and hate's at work.
Shall come new victory.
The flag shall know not race nor creed,
Nor different bands of men;
A people strong round it shall throng
To ne'er divide again.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1457:From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there are words one believes and words one distrusts: it is possible to draw a speculative line between the truth and the lies; at least the cui bono principle to some extent operates, and it is usually safe to assume, if the accusation is theft and there is no question of insurance, that something has at least been stolen. But here one could make no such assumption; one could draw no lines. He had known police officers who nerves broke down in the effort to separate a single grain of incontestable truth; they ended, some of them, by striking a witness, they were pilloried in the local Creole papers and were invalided home or transferred. It woke in some men a virulent hatred of a black skin, but Scobie had long ago, during his fifteen years, passed through the dangerous stages; now lost in the tangle of lies he felt an extraordinary affection for these people who paralysed an alien form of justice by so simple a method. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
1458:When we remember we are queens from another kingdom, then the kings in this one will wake up at last and honor our presence and open the gates. We won't storm the castle walls; we will melt the castle walls. Kings will then set a table for us to feast at instead of tossing us bones. They will recognize us when we recognize ourselves. We come bearing gifts from another realm. We bring illumination when our minds are illuminated. We are only visiting here, but our visit is an honor, a mitzvah, and the entire earth kingdom is blessed by our presence. Wake up, damn it, and thank the stars. We have been playing so small and the crown is so huge. We will not wear it until we expand our heads.
Don't your get it? Can't you see? As we change our minds, we will change the world. And until we do, we will remain where we are. And all the laws and all the bashing and all the silly, childish, petty political arguments will continue for years, and for more years beyond, until women remember, followed by men, that a woman is a miracle and her heart lies in God. She is here to love God, passionately and truly... ~ Marianne Williamson,#NFDB
1459:She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan's frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice- that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang "Greensleeves" in the dark, and she'd asked: "Why are you singing 'Greensleeves' when my nightgown is blue?" Then Gillian had changed the song to "Bluesleeves," and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss- because of it- Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light. ~ Allegra Goodman, #NFDB
1460:Blossom Of Life
SO now she lies silent and sweet
With white flowers at her head and feet,
And she, the fairest flower, between.
The bud that with her bosom's swell
In dear delight once rose and fell
Now wafts her all it has to tell,
And wonders why she sleeps serene.
And yet in life how small a part,
With pretty face and petty heart,
She played! And in that form so fair
There never dwelt a deep desire,
Her bosom never thrilled a-fire:
She loved too lightly e'en to tire—
And all my heart was meant for her.
Was there a soul within those eyes
That seemed to speak my dear surmise,
That with no tears were ever wet?
Through life she laughed her careless way,
She knew not sorrow or dismay—
And I have sorrowed day by day,
While those pale lips are smiling yet!
And so she lies on her small bed,
With white flowers at her feet and head,
And she, the fairest flower between!
In life how false the little rôle —
The peerless face, the paltry soul!
But she is perfect now—the whole
Pale blossom of the Might-Have-Been.
~ Arthur Henry Adams,#NFDB
1461:What is a good life? What is its opposite? These are questions to which no two men will give the same answers. In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain—hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause—will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiffs, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. We are so divided, so hostile to one another, so driven by sanctimony and scorn, so lost in cynicism, that we call our pomposity idealism, so disenchanted with our rulers, so willing to jeer at the institutions of our state, that the very word goodness has been emptied of meaning and needs, perhaps, to be set aside for a time, like all the other poisoned words, spirituality, for example, final solution, for example, and (at least when applied to skyscrapers and fried potatoes) freedom. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1462:The deeply irrational attitude of each sex toward women may be seen in novels, particularly in bad novels. In bad novels by men, there is the woman with whom the author is in love, who usually possesses every charm, but is somewhat helpless, and requires male protection; sometimes, however, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, she is an object of exasperated hatred, and is thought to be deeply and desperately wicked. In portraying the heroine, the male author does not write from observation, but merely objectifies his own emotions. In regard to his other female characters, he is more objective, and may even depend upon his notebook; but when he is in love, his passion makes a mist between him and the object of his devotion. Women novelists, also, have two kinds of women in their books. One is themselves, glamorous and kind, and object of lust to the wicked and of love to the good, sensitive, highsouled, and constantly misjudged. The other kind is represented by all other women, and is usually portrayed as petty, spiteful, cruel, and deceitful. It would seem that to judge women without bias is not easy either for men or for women. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1463:We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself. Greatness of soul will be lost, which can’t stand out unless it disdains as petty what the mob regards as most desirable. —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 74.12b–13 What we consider to be harmless indulgences can easily become full-blown addictions. We start with coffee in the morning, and soon enough we can’t start the day without it. We check our email because it’s part of our job, and soon enough we feel the phantom buzz of the phone in our pocket every few seconds. Soon enough, these harmless habits are running our lives. The little compulsions and drives we have not only chip away at our freedom and sovereignty, they cloud our clarity. We think we’re in control—but are we really? As one addict put it, addiction is when we’ve “lost the freedom to abstain.” Let us reclaim that freedom. What that addiction is for you can vary: Soda? Drugs? Complaining? Gossip? The Internet? Biting your nails? But you must reclaim the ability to abstain because within it is your clarity and self-control. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
1464:Nykyrian stared down at her apologetic face and wanted to curse. He couldn’t believe she’d found his files. Bitter, agonizing memories tore through him. All the times in his life he’d needed someone to talk to, to hold him, flashed before his mind and he felt like crying. What was the use? He was nothing but a piece of shit. But as he stared at the pain on Kiara’s face as she watched him, he didn’t see her scorn or condemnation. In her beautiful eyes, he saw the sincere caring he’d always craved. She looked at him like he was human. Something inside him shattered under the weight of her expression. How easy it would be to trust just this one person. He wanted to be able to trust someone. Just once. But he knew better. Look at what Mara had done to Syn. People weren’t trustworthy. They’d kill for a single credit. Would mutilate another person’s entire life over something as petty as hurt feelings. People were vicious and they were cold. He knew that firsthand and yet he didn’t listen to the voice inside him and all the warnings it shouted. For the first time in his life, he listened to his heart. And he reached out to touch her. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1465:Past the woodshed, past the creek that ran behind our inn, deep in the wild heart of the forest, was a circle of alder trees we called the Goblin Grove. The trees grew in such a way as to suggest twisted arms and monstrous limbs frozen in an eternal dance, and Constanze liked to tell us that the trees had once been humans- naughty young women- who displeased Der Erlkönig. As children we had played here, Josef and me, played and sang and danced, offering our music to the Lord of Mischief. The Goblin King was the silhouette around which my music was composed, and the Goblin Grove was the place my shadows came to life.
I spied a scarlet shape in the woods ahead of me. Käthe in my cloak, walking to my sacred space. An irrational, petty slash of irritation cut through my dread and unease. The Goblin Grove was my haunt, my refuge, my sanctuary. Why must she take everything that was mine? My sister had a gift for turning the extraordinary into the ordinary. Unlike my brother and me- who lived in the ether of magic and music- Käthe lived in the world of the real, the tangible, the mundane. Unlike us, she never had faith. ~ S Jae Jones,#NFDB
1466:In Memoriam A. H. H.: 105. To-Night Ungather'D Let
Us Leave
To-night ungather'd let us leave
This laurel, let this holly stand:
We live within the stranger's land,
And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.
Our father's dust is left alone
And silent under other snows:
There in due time the woodbine blows,
The violet comes, but we are gone.
No more shall wayward grief abuse
The genial hour with mask and mime;
For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use.
Let cares that petty shadows cast,
By which our lives are chiefly proved,
A little spare the night I loved,
And hold it solemn to the past.
But let no footstep beat the floor,
Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
For who would keep an ancient form
Thro' which the spirit breathes no more?
Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute be blown;
No dance, no motion, save alone
What lightens in the lucid east
Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
Long sleeps the summer in the seed;
Run out your measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
1467:You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you’re so anxious. Now you’re becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you’re anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where’s the whiskey?
Or let’s say you have an anger problem. You get pissed off at the stupidest, most inane stuff, and
you have no idea why. And the fact that you get pissed off so easily starts to piss you off even more.
And then, in your petty rage, you realize that being angry all the time makes you a shallow and mean person, and you hate this; you hate it so much that you get angry at yourself. Now look at you: you’re angry at yourself getting angry about being angry. Fuck you, wall. Here, have a fist.
Or you’re so worried about doing the right thing all the time that you become worried about how much you’re worrying. Or you feel so guilty for every mistake you make that you begin to feel guilty about how guilty you’re feeling. Or you get sad and alone so often that it makes you feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it.
..Welcome to the feedback loop from hell. ~ Mark Manson,#NFDB
1468:Mister Rob Anybody and sundry others?" said one of the figures in a dreadful voice.
"There's naebody here o' that name!" shouted Rob Anybody. "We dinna know anythin'!"
"We have here a list of criminal and civil charges totaling nineteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three separate offenses-"
"We wasna there!" yelled Rob Anybody desperately. "Isn't that right, lads?"
"-including more than two thousand cases of Making an Affray, Causing a Public Nuisance, Being Found Drunk, Being Found Very Drunk, Using Offensive Language (taking into account ninety-seven cases of Using Language That Was Probably Offensive If Anyone Else Could Understand It), Committing a Breach of the Peace, Malicious Lingering-"
"It's mistaken identity!" shouted Rob Anybody. "It's no' oour fault! We wuz only standing there an' someone else did it and ran awa'!"
"-Grand Theft, Petty Theft, Burglary, Housebreaking, Loitering with Intent to Commit a Felony-"
"We wuz misunderstood when we was wee bairns!" yelled Rob Anybody. "Ye're only picking on us 'cause we're blue! We always get blamed for everythin'! The polis hate us! We wasna even in the country! ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
1469:The state must answer these questions, too, but whatever it does, it does it without being subject to the profit-and-loss criterion. Hence, its action is arbitrary and necessarily involves countless wasteful misallocations from the consumer’s viewpoint. Independent to a large degree of consumer wants, the state-employed security producers instead do what they like. They hang around instead of doing anything, and if they do work they prefer doing what is easiest or work where they can wield power rather than serving consumers. Police officers drive around a lot, hassle petty traffic violators, spend huge amounts of money investigating victimless crimes that many people (i.e., nonparticipants) do not like but that few would be willing to spend their money on to fight, as they are not immediately affected by them. Yet with respect to what consumers want most urgently—the prevention of hardcore crime (i.e., crimes with victims), the apprehension and effective punishment of hard-core criminals, the recovery of loot, and the securement of compensation of victims of crimes from the aggressors—the police are notoriously inefficient, in spite of ever higher budget allocations. ~ Hans Hermann Hoppe, #NFDB
1470:Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1471:The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.
Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes. ~ Gillian Flynn,#NFDB
1472:Realizing the seriously ruthless, venomous habits and agendas of evil always instills a more fierce passion and longing for a closer God. Men, out of pride, may claim their own authorities over what constitutes good and evil; they may self-proclaim a keen knowledge of subjective morality through religion or science. But that is only if they are acknowledging the work of evil as a cartoon-like, petty little rain cloud in the sky that merely wants to dampen one's spirits. On the contrary, a man could be without a doubt lit with the strength, the peace, and the knowledge of the gods, his gods, but when or if the devils grow weary in unsuccessful attempts to torment him, they begin tormenting his loved ones, or, if not his loved ones, anyone who may attempt to grasp his philosophies. No matter how godly he may become, God is, in the end, his only hope and his only grace for the pressures built around him - it is left up to a higher authority and a more solid peace and a wider love to eclipse not just one's own evils but all evils for goodness to ultimately matter. If all men were gods, each being would dwell in a separate prison cell, hopeless, before finally imploding into nothingness. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1473:Selfishness
Search history, my boy, and see
What petty selfishness has done.
Find if you can one victory
That little minds have ever won.
There is no record there to read
Of men who fought for self alone,
No instance of a single deed
Splendor they may proudly own.
Through all life's story you will find
The miser—with his hoarded gold—
A hermit, dreary and unkind,
An outcast from the human fold.
Men hold him up to view with scorn,
A creature by his wealth enslaved,
A spirit craven and forlorn,
Doomed by the money he has saved.
No man was ever truly great
Who sought to serve himself alone,
Who put himself above the state,
Above the friends about him thrown.
No man was ever truly glad
Who risked his joy on hoarded pelf,
And gave of nothing that he had
Through fear of needing it himself.
For selfishness is wintry cold,
And bitter are its joys at last,
The very charms it tries to hold,
With woes are quickly overcast.
And only he shall gladly live,
And bravely die when God shall call,
Who gathers but that he may give,
And with his fellows shares his all.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1474:The Big Deeds
We are done with little thinking and we're done with little deeds,
We are done with petty conduct and we're done with narrow creeds;
We have grown to men and women, and we've noble work to do,
And to-day we are a people with a larger point of view.
In a big way we must labor, if our Flag shall always fly.
In a big way some must suffer, in a big way some must die.
There must be no little dreaming in the visions that we see,
There must be no selfish planning in the joys that are to be;
We have set our faces eastwards to the rising of the sun
That shall light a better nation, and there's big work to be done.
And the petty souls and narrow, seeking only selfish gain,
Shall be vanquished by the toilers big enough to suffer pain.
It's a big task we have taken; 'tis for others we must fight.
We must see our duty clearly in a white and shining light;
We must quit our little circles where we've moved in little ways,
And work, as men and women, for the bigger. better days.
We must quit our selfish thinking and our narrow views and creeds,
And as people, big and splendid, We must do the bigger deeds.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1475:Our Little Needs
A LITTLE more of loving, a little less of pain,
A little more of sunshine, a little less of rain;
A little more of friendship, a little less of strife—
These are what we 're wanting to make the perfect life.
little
little
little
little
more
more
more
more
of laughter and fewer, fewer sighs,
of twinkling, than sorrow in our eyes;
forbearance, a little less of hate,
of patience, less quarreling with Fate.
A little more of kindness, a little less severe,
A little more of sweetness, a little less austere,
A little more of honor and less of business greed,
See, brother, see how little it is we really need!
little
little
little
little
more
more
more
more
of
of
of
of
silence and less of hasty speech,
practice and less desire to preach;
smiling, with fewer drooping chins,
virtues, with fewer petty sins.
A little more of praising, a little less of blame,
More thought for all our loved ones and less for future fame;
A little more of doing than talking of the deed,
See, brother, see how little it is we really need.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1476:But since Catt was more realist than fabulist, she understood her actual death at the hands of her killer would be something much slower. It would be a classical feminine death, like a marriage…Raised by meek working-class parents, she despised petty groveling and had no talent for making shit up. She wanted to be a “real” intellectual moving with dizzying freedom between high and low points in the culture. And to a certain extent, she’d succeeded. Catt’s semi-name attracted a following among Asberger’s boys, girls who’d been hospitalized for mental illness, sex workers, Ivy alumnae on meth, and always, the cutters. With her small self-made fortune, Catt saw herself as Moll Flanders, out-sourcing her visiting professorships and writing commissions to younger artists whose work she believed in. But she’d reached a point lately where the same young people she’d helped were blogging against her, exposing the ‘cottage industry’ she ran out of her Los Angeles compound facing the Hollywood sign … the same compound these bloggers had lived in rent-free after arriving from Iowa City, Alberta, New Zealand. Loathing all institutions, Catt had become one herself. Even her dentist asked her for money. ~ Chris Kraus, #NFDB
1477:Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1478:And even though it may offend you, I feel bound to say that the majority also of English people are uncouth and unrefined, whereas we Russian folk can recognise beauty wherever we see it, and are always eager to cultivate the same. But to distinguish beauty of soul and personal originality there is needed far more independence and freedom than is possessed by our women, especially by our younger ladies. At all events, they need more experience. For instance, this Mlle. Polina—pardon me, but the name has passed my lips, and I cannot well recall it—is taking a very long time to make up her mind to prefer you to Monsieur de Griers. She may respect you, she may become your friend, she may open out her heart to you; yet over that heart there will be reigning that loathsome villain, that mean and petty usurer, De Griers. This will be due to obstinacy and self-love—to the fact that De Griers once appeared to her in the transfigured guise of a marquis, of a disenchanted and ruined liberal who was doing his best to help her family and the frivolous old General; and, although these transactions of his have since been exposed, you will find that the exposure has made no impression upon her mind. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1479:Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines.18 Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside—neither of which the sovereign state finds in its interest.19 The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicitous silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance from the historical record. ~ James C Scott, #NFDB
1480:Kierkegaard had his own formula for what it means to be a man. He put it forth in those superb pages wherein he describes what he calls "the knight of faith." This figure is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; not task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant's parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch others' lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1481:The Chip On Your Shoulder
You'll learn when you're older, that chip on your shoulder
Which you dare other boys to upset
And stand up and fight for, and struggle and smite for,
Has caused you much pain and regret.
When Time, life's adviser, has made you much wiser,
You won't be so quick with the blow;
You won't be so willing to fight for a shilling,
And change a good friend to a foe.
You won't be a sticker for trifles, and bicker
And quarrel for nothing at all;
You'll grow to be kinder, more thoughtful, and blinder
To faults which are petty and small.
You won't take the trouble your two fists to double
When some one your pride may offend;
When with rage now you bristle you'll smile or you'll whistle,
And keep the good will of a friend.
You'll learn when you're older, that chip on your shoulder
Which proudly you battle to guard,
Has frequently shamed you and often defamed you,
And left you a record that's marred!
When you've grown calm and steady, you won't be so ready
To fight for a difference that's small
For you'll know, when you're older, that chip on your shoulder
Is only a chip after all.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1482:This Is No Case Of Petty Right Or Wrong
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.
~ Edward Thomas,#NFDB
1483:When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone. ~ Elan Mastai, #NFDB
1484:What are all these?” Charlie plucked a book of psalms from the unruly pile on the desk. “Have you two robbed a church since I left this morning?”
“No,” said Jackaby. “Not personally. We had to delegate that task. Pilfering parish property has fallen to Miss Cavanaugh this week.”
Charlie rubbed his neck as he dropped the book back on the stack. “Because if there’s one thing New Fiddleham needs right now, it’s a bit more paranormal petty crime.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I submitted, “the pastor more or less asked us to. He was rather insistent that we should find something in one of his Bibles.”
“You’re certain he won’t go storming into the station house tomorrow to tell the duty officer how he’s been robbed by a ghost?”
I swallowed.
“Not unless he is one himself,” said Jackaby. “He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Quite dead. He’s up in the attic if you would like to check for yourself.”
“Why do you have a dead preacher in your attic?”
“Because we found it easier to carry him up to the coffin than to maneuver it down to him.”
Charlie looked suddenly very tired.
“Enough about our morning,” I said. “You had a difficult patch yourself? ~ William Ritter,#NFDB
1485:Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.
As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,
At once so wicked, foolish and insane,
As to produce men when He might refrain!
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
While air of Space and Time's full river flow
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:
It may be wearing out, but who can know?
Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.
Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
Then grinds him back into eternal death. ~ James Thomson,#NFDB
1486:The peasant starved, yet centuries of an unequal struggle against his environment had taught him to endure, and even in poverty and starvation he had a certain calm dignity, a feeling of submission to an all-powerful fate. Not so the middle classes, more especially the new petty bourgeoisie, who had no such background. Incompletely developed and frustrated, they did not know where to look, for neither the old nor the new offered them any hope. There was no adjustment to social purpose, no satisfaction of doing something worthwhile, even though suffering came in its train. Custom-ridden, they were born old, yet they were without the old culture. Modern thought attracted them, but they lacked its inner content, the modern social and scientific consciousness. Some tried to cling tenaciously to the dead forms of the past, seeking relief from present misery in them. But there could be no relief there, for, as Tagore has said, we must not nourish in our being what is dead, for the dead is death-dealing. Others made themselves pale and ineffectual copies of the west. So, like derelicts, frantically seeking some foothold of security for body and mind and finding none, they floated aimlessly in the murky waters of Indian life. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru, #NFDB
1487:At The Door
He wiped his shoes before his door,
But ere he entered he did more;
'Twas not enough to cleanse his feet
Of dirt they'd gathered in the street;
He stood and dusted off his mind
And left all trace of care behind.
'In here I will not take,' said he,
'The stains the day has brought to me.
'Beyond this door shall never go
The burdens that are mine to know;
The day is done, and here I leave
The petty things that vex and grieve;
What clings to me of hate and sin
To them I will not carry in;
Only the good shall go with me
For their devoted eyes to see.
'I will not burden them with cares,
Nor track the home with grim affairs;
I will not at my table sit
With soul unclean, and mind unfit;
Beyond this door I will not take
The outward signs of inward ache;
I will not take a dreary mind
Into this house for them to find.'
He wiped his shoes before his door,
But paused to do a little more.
He dusted off the stains of strife,
The mud that's incident to life,
The blemishes of careless thought,
The traces of the fight he'd fought,
The selfish humors and the mean,
And when he entered he was clean.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1488:Safe Conduct
There isn't any danger in the kindly things you say,
There isn't any sorrow in the fine and manly deed,
No deep regret awaits you at the ending of the day,
There's always joy in knowing that you've played the friend in need.
There isn't any anguish in the cheerful words you speak,
The happy salutation never leaves a bitter sting,
No man has met dishonor being gentle with the weak
And unselfishness has never caused an hour of sorrowing.
It's the petty little failures which disturb us most at night,
The little acts of meanness and the trivial things we do;
The conscience never troubles us when we have done what's right,
It's when we've failed to be our best that shame begins to brew.
Oh, most of us are honest in the larger fields of life
And most of us are brave enough in times of stress and woe.
And most of us are fine enough in days of cruel strife.
But it is in the little things the worst begins to show.
The danger of our peace of mind lies in our selfishness,
In cruel little bits of speech which thoughtlessly we say,
In pressing on so eager to achieve our own success.
That we neglect the kindly folks we pass along the way.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1489:Unless death is made a lesson for the living, the life lived is wasted.
Why should life come into existence only to be destroyed? One dies and another is born—for what? A few miserable hours of life—then oblivion!
With this recognition of the finality of death, no one should willingly withhold acts that would bring benefits, joy or happiness to others. In death, the hesitant act can no longer be performed—the word of praise is as impossible as yesterday's return.
What perversity justified inflicting pain, suffering and death upon others who have done no wrong? If death ends all, why fight while we are living? Why shorten life with unnecessary pain and suffering? How futile are the petty problems of individuals, with their hates and jealousies, when all vanish with death?
All the prayers in the world cannot wipe out one injustice.
Every wrong is irreparable.
The dead cannot forgive.
All the tears and sighs are of no avail.
Forgiveness cannot be granted when lips cannot move.
Praise cannot be heard when ears cannot hear; joy cannot be experienced when the heart no longer beats; and the happiness of an affectionate embrace can no longer be felt when arms are limp and the eyes are forever closed. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
1490:Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: “Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally around the bold, gallant and lionhearted Cushing. He will lead you to victory and to glory!” They promised pay of $7 to $10 a month, and spoke of a federal bounty of $24 and 160 acres of land. But one young man wrote anonymously to the Cambridge Chronicle: Neither have I the least idea of “joining” you, or in any way assisting the unjust war waging against Mexico. I have no wish to participate in such “glorious” butcheries of women and children as were displayed in the capture of Monterey, etc. Neither have I any desire to place myself under the dictation of a petty military tyrant, to every caprice of whose will I must yield implicit obedience. No sir-ee! As long as I can work, beg, or go to the poor house, I won’t go to Mexico, to be lodged on the damp ground, half starved, half roasted, bitten by mosquitoes and centipedes, stung by scorpions and tarantulas—marched, drilled, and flogged, and then stuck up to be shot at, for eight dollars a month and putrid rations. Well, I won’t. . . . Human butchery has had its day. . . . And the time is rapidly approaching when the professional soldier will be placed on the same level as a bandit, the Bedouin, and the Thug. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1491:I can never be interested in an idea to the same extent. I could never shoot myself.
In spite of which, he commits suicide, although he has no hopes from suicide:
I know it will be another delusion, a delusion in an infinite series of delusions.
Nothing is real—consequently he has nothing to live for and no reason for dying:
My love will be as petty as I am myself.... I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like some loathsome insect....
Always in Dostoevsky there is this comparison of men to insects: half a dozen passages spring to mind. It is the Hemingway position, ‘Most men ... die like animals’, or the comparison of Catherine Barkely’s death with that of ants on a burning log. There is no belief. Men’s lives are futile, and they die ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. And when they are inspired by a belief, it depends on their blinding themselves with their emotions. This is Stavrogin’s position, and he hates it. He would like to breathe clean air and feel a sensation of power. But how? To do good? That is out of the question; he sees it as a game of emotional profit, self-flattery, nothing more. Then evil ? His ‘confession’ is an account of his attempt to do evil. It is a deliberate sensation-seeking ~ Colin Wilson,#NFDB
1492:The Child World
The child world is a wondrous world,
For there the flags of hate are furled,
And there the imps of wickedness
Cause neither sorrow nor distress.
And there is never strife for gold,
There petty gossip's never told,
There all is joy and wondrous mirth,
The child earth is a glorious earth.
The land of childhood is aglow
With smiles, and there pink roses grow
Upon the cheeks of boys and girls;
The golden rod is yellow curls,
And eyes of brown and eyes of blue
Are daisies and the violets, too;
And warm and true is every hand
That clings to yours in Childhood Land.
Who owns a spot on childhood's globe
Envies no king his ermine robe;
Envies no sage his manners wise,—
His world is rich with glad surprise,
The quaintest of all speech he hears,
The truest smiles, the sweetest tears
Are his possessions every day
However troubled be his way.
Who knows the joys of Childhood Land,
The pressure of a tiny hand,
The joy that's in a babe's caress,
The soft embrace of happiness,
The sweet good-nights, the shouts of glee
That greet the morning lustily,
Has riches, those who childless live
To know, would all their fortunes give.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1493:Returning From Greece
Well, we're nearly there, Hermippos.
Day after tomorrow, it seems - that's what the captain said.
At least we're sailing our seas,
the waters of our own countries - Cyprus, Syria, Egypt waters we know and love.
Why so silent? Ask your heart:
didn't you too feel happier
the further we got from Greece?
What's the point of fooling ourselves?
That wouldn't be properly Greek, would it?
It's time we admitted the truth:
we're Greeks also - what else are we?but with Asiatic tastes and feelings,
tastes and feelings
sometimes alien to Hellenism.
It isn't correct, Hermippos, for us philosophers
to be like some of our petty kings
(remember how we laughed at them
when they used to come to our lectures?)
who through their showy Hellenified exteriors
(Macedonian exteriors, naturally)
let a bit of Arabia peep out now and then,
a bit of Media they can't keep back.
And to what laughable lengths the fools went
trying to cover it up!
No, that's not at all correct for us.
For Greeks like us that kind of pettiness won't do.
We simply can't be ashamed
of the Syrian and Egyptian blood in our veins;
we should really honour it, delight in it.
~ Constantine P. Cavafy,#NFDB
1494:I'm Perfect at Feelings,
so I have no problem telling you
why you cried over the third lost
metal or the mousetrap. I knew
that orgasms weren't your fault
and that feeling of keeping solid
in yourself but wanting an ecstatic
black hole was just bad beauty.
Certain loves were perfect
in the daytime and had every
right to express carnally behind
the copy machine and there are
no hard feelings for the boozy
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,
whenever it felt right for you.
And when the moment of soft
levitation with erasing hands
made you feel dirty, like
the main person to think up love
in the first place, I knew that.
It's okay, you're an innocent
with the brilliance of an animal
stuffing yourself sick on a kill.
Don't, don't feel like the runt alien
on my ship: I get you. I know
the dimensions of your wishing
and losing and don't think you
a glutton with petty beefs. But
even I, who know your triggers,
your emblematic sacs of sad fury,
I understand why the farthest fat trees
sliver down with your disappointment
and why the big sense of the world,
wrong before you, shrugs but
somewhere grasps your spinning,
stunning, alone. But you have me. ~ Brenda Shaughnessy,#NFDB
1495:There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.
These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade.
(This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)
There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: You will do as I say or I will hurt you.
. . . Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its won, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity -- but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers. ~ Charles Stross,#NFDB
1496:I stared at the little white agates in my hand, delicate as moon drops. The mystery of God's love as I understand it is that God loves the man who was being mean to his dog just as much as he loves babies; God loves Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons, as much as he loves Desmond Tutu. And he loved her just as much when she was releasing the handbrake of her car that sent her boys into the river as he did when she first nursed them. So of course, he loves old ordinary me, even or especially at my most scared and petty and mean and obsessive. Loves me; chooses me.
Remembering this helped, but here is what in fact saved me: Sam came over to see what I held in my palm, glared contemptuously at my small white pebbles, and then without missing a beat slapped the bottom of my hand so that the agates scattered. He ran off down the beach, laughing with glee. It surprised me so, this small meanness, that it made me catch my breath. Boy, I thought, is he going to be hard to place.
When I was young I would have felt, What’s the point of trying to be good if the people who aren’t even trying get to be equally loved? Now I just picked up my pace and tried to catch up with that rotten Sam, because I don’t know much of anything for sure. Only that I am loved – as is ~ Anne Lamott,#NFDB
1497:This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.
Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior. ~ Lewis Mumford,#NFDB
1498:It was the first time the chief of police, a kindly family man whose name was Hook, had ever been required to visit a girls' camp; his daughters had not gone in much for that sort of thing, and Mrs. Hook distrusted night air; it was also the first time that Chief Hook had ever been required to determine facts. He had been allowed to continue in office this long because his family was popular in town and the young men at the local bar liked him, and because his record for twenty years, of drunks locked up and petty thieves apprehended upon confession, had been immaculate. In a small town such as the one lying close to the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen, crime is apt to take its form from the characters of the inhabitants, and a stolen dog or broken nose is about the maximum to be achieved ordinarily in the sensational line. No one doubted Chief Hook's complete inability to cope with the disappearance of a girl from the camp.
'You say she was going somewhere?' he asked Betsy, having put out his cigar in deference to the camp nurse, and visibly afraid that his questions would sound foolish to Old Jane; since Chief Hook was accustomed to speaking around his cigar, his voice without it was malformed, almost quavering.
("The Missing Girl") ~ Shirley Jackson,#NFDB
1499:The Fishing Cure
There's nothing that builds up a toil-weary soul
Like a day on a stream,
Back on the banks of the old fishing hole
Where a fellow can dream.
There's nothing so good for a man as to flee
From the city and lie
Full length in the shade of a whispering tree
And gaze at the sky.
Out there where the strife and the greed are forgot
And the struggle for pelf,
A man can get rid of each taint and each spot
And clean up himself;
He can be what he wanted to be when a boy,
If only in dreams;
And revel once more in the depths of a joy
That's as real as it seems.
The things that he hates never follow him there —
The jar of the street,
The rivalries petty, the struggling unfair —
For the open is sweet.
In purity's realm he can rest and be clean,
Be he humble or great,
And as peaceful his soul may become as the scene
That his eyes contemplate.
It is good for the world that men hunger to go
To the banks of a stream,
And weary of sham and of pomp and of show
They have somewhere to dream.
For this life would be dreary and sordid and base
Did they not now and then
Seek refreshment and calm in God's wide, open space
And come back to be men.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
1500:Can such a man, you ask, be a leader of the masses? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. The masses — by which I mean not the proletariat, but the anonymous collective body into which all of us, high and low, amalgamate at certain moments — react most strongly to someone who least resembles them. Normality coupled with talent may make a politician popular. But to provoke extremes of love and hate, to be worshipped like a god or loathed like the devil, is given only to a truly exceptional person who is poles apart from the masses, be it far above or far below them. If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from some sort of “beyond.” The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines, and the hangman’s yard. From their different “beyonds” they both drew ~ Sebastian Haffner, #NFDB
142 Integral Yoga
36 Poetry
13 Philosophy
13 Occultism
8 Christianity
4 Fiction
4 Baha i Faith
3 Yoga
3 Psychology
3 Education
1 Philsophy
1 Mythology
1 Mysticism
121 Sri Aurobindo
93 The Mother
55 Satprem
15 Nolini Kanta Gupta
11 Robert Browning
8 Friedrich Nietzsche
7 William Wordsworth
7 Saint Augustine of Hippo
7 James George Frazer
6 Aleister Crowley
4 Sri Ramakrishna
4 Baha u llah
3 Saint Teresa of Avila
3 H P Lovecraft
2 Rudolf Steiner
2 Paul Richard
2 Jordan Peterson
2 Henry David Thoreau
34 The Synthesis Of Yoga
11 Browning - Poems
10 Savitri
9 Essays On The Gita
8 The Life Divine
8 Record of Yoga
8 Essays Divine And Human
7 Wordsworth - Poems
7 The Golden Bough
7 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
5 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
5 Questions And Answers 1954
5 Questions And Answers 1953
5 Prayers And Meditations
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
5 Agenda Vol 11
5 Agenda Vol 09
5 Agenda Vol 07
5 Agenda Vol 02
5 Agenda Vol 01
4 Questions And Answers 1956
4 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
4 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
4 On the Way to Supermanhood
4 Liber ABA
4 Letters On Yoga IV
4 City of God
4 Agenda Vol 13
4 Agenda Vol 06
4 Agenda Vol 04
4 Agenda Vol 03
3 Vedic and Philological Studies
3 Twilight of the Idols
3 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
3 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
3 The Book of Certitude
3 Some Answers From The Mother
3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
3 Questions And Answers 1955
3 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
3 On Education
3 Lovecraft - Poems
3 Collected Poems
3 Agenda Vol 08
2 Words Of The Mother II
2 Words Of Long Ago
2 Walden
2 The Way of Perfection
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
2 Maps of Meaning
2 Magick Without Tears
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
2 Agenda Vol 12
2 Agenda Vol 05
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
One day, soon after, Narendra requested Sri Ramakrishna to pray to the Divine Mother to remove his poverty. Sri Ramakrishna bade him pray to Her himself, for She would certainly listen to his prayer. Narendra entered the shrine of Kali. As he stood before the image of the Mother, he beheld Her as a living Goddess, ready to give wisdom and liberation. Unable to ask Her for petty worldly things, he prayed only for knowledge and renunciation, love and liberation. The Master rebuked him for his failure to ask the Divine Mother to remove his poverty and sent him back to the temple. But Narendra, standing in Her presence, again forgot the purpose of his coming. Thrice he went to the temple at the bidding of the Master, and thrice he returned, having forgotten in Her presence why he had come. He was wondering about it when it suddenly flashed in his mind that this was all the work of Sri Ramakrishna; so now he asked the Master himself to remove his poverty, and was assured that his family would not lack simple food and clothing.
This was a very rich and significant experience for Narendra. It taught him that Sakti, the Divine Power, cannot be ignored in the world and that in the relative plane the need of worshipping a Personal God is imperative. Sri Ramakrishna was overjoyed with the conversion. The next day, sitting almost on Narendra's lap, he said to a devotee, pointing first to himself, then to Narendra: "I see I am this, and again that. Really I feel no difference. A stick floating in the Ganges seems to divide the water; But in reality the water is one. Do you see my point? Well, whatever is, is the Mother — isn't that so?" In later years Narendra would say: "Sri Ramakrishna was the only person who, from the time he met me, believed in me uniformly throughout. Even my mother and brothers did not. It was his unwavering trust and love for me that bound me to him for ever. He alone knew how to love. Worldly people, only make a show of love for selfish ends.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is true that you must get rid of these ignorant and petty
movements; but at the same time, you may be sure that I appreciate and love your work immensely. I have great admiration for
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But if it is often difficult for the mental life to accommodate itself to the dully resistant material activity, how much more difficult must it seem for the spiritual existence to live on in a world that appears full not of the Truth but of every lie and illusion, not of Love and Beauty but of an encompassing discord and ugliness, not of the Law of Truth but of victorious selfishness and sin? Therefore the spiritual life tends easily in the saint and Sannyasin to withdraw from the material existence and reject it either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine either in a far-off heaven or beyond where there is no world and no life. It separates itself inwardly, if not also physically, from the world's impurities; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless isolation. This withdrawal renders an invaluable service to the material life itself by forcing it to regard and even to bow down to something that is the direct negation of its own petty ideals, sordid cares and egoistic self-content.
But the work in the world of so supreme a power as spiritual force cannot be thus limited. The spiritual life also can return upon the material and use it as a means of its own greater fullness. Refusing to be blinded by the dualities, the appearances, it can seek in all appearances whatsoever the vision of the same Lord, the same eternal Truth, Beauty, Love, Delight. The
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some element or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefa thers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He in a petty coastal traffic plies,
His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"No work is petty ... He who can properly prepare a chilam (pipe of tobacco) can also properly meditate."
These are luminous life-giving mantras and the world and humanity of today, sore distressed and utterly confounded, have great need of them to live them by and be saved.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
old petty habits which do not allow me to be free.
The character can change and must change, but it is a long
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
luminous force floods our consciousness with a vast and luminous peace which prevails over all petty reactions and prepares
us for union with the Divine - the very purpose of individual
--
To waste one's time seeking the satisfaction of one's petty
desires is sheer folly. True happiness is possible only when one
0 1955-09-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother suddenly everything seems to have crystallizedall the little revolts, the little tensions, the ill will and petty vital demandsforming a single block of open, determined resistance. I have become conscious that from the beginning of my sadhana, the mind has led the gamewith the psychic behind and has held me in leash, helped muzzle all contrary movements, but at no time, or only rarely, has the vital submitted or opened to the higher influence. The rare times when the vital participated, I felt a great progress. But now, I find myself in front of this solid mass that says No and is not at all convinced of what the mind has been imposing upon it for almost two years now.
Mother, I am sufficiently awakened not to rebel against your Light and to understand that the vital is but one part of my being, but I have come to the conclusion that the only way of convincing this vital is not to force or stifle it, but to let it go through its own experience so it may understand by itself that it cannot be satisfied in this way. I feel the need to leave the Ashram for a while to see how I can get along away from here and to realize, no doubt, that one can really brea the only here.
0 1956-09-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I would have been incapable of speaking, words seemed so petty, narrow, ignorant.
I saw (how shall I put it?) the successive preparations which took place, in certain anterior beings, in order to achieve this.
0 1958-04-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
We are still in Kataragama, and we shall only go up to northern Ceylon, to Jaffna, around the 15th, then return to India towards the beginning of May if the visa problems are settled. Only in India, at the temple of Rameswaram, can I receive the orange robe. I am living here as a sannyasi, but dressed in white, like a Hindu. It is a stark life, nothing more. I have seen however, that truth does not lie in starkness but in a change of consciousness. (Desire always finds a means to entrench itself in very small details and in very petty and stupid, though well-rooted, avidities.)
Mother, I am seeing all the mean pettiness that obstructs your divine work. Destroy my smallness and take me unto you. May I be sincere, integrally sincere.
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
And then, more and more, I felt that if what I saw, as I saw it, could be realized I saw two things: a journeynot at all a pilgrimage as it is commonly understooda journey towards solitude in arduous conditions, and a sojourn in a very severe solitude, facing the mountains, in arduous physical conditions. The contact with this majesty of Nature has a great influence upon the ego at certain moments: it has the power to dissolve it. But all this complication, all these organized pilgrimages, all that it brings in the whole petty side of human life which spoils everything
Yes, that whole journey was odious
0 1960-12-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Its fairly easy to manage and control this in the realm of thought, but when it comes to those reactions that rise up from the very bottom theyre so petty that you can barely express them to yourself. For example, if someone mentions that so-and-so ate such-and-such a thing, immediately something somewhere starts stealing in: Ah, hes going to get a stomach-ache! Or you hear that someone is going somewhereOh, hes going to have an accident! And it applies to everything; its swarming down below. Nothing to do with thought as such!
Its quite a nasty habit, for it keeps the most material state in a condition of disharmony, disorder, ugliness and difficulty.
0 1961-02-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, mon petit. Sri Aurobindo always said the greatest obstacle to true understanding and participation in the Work is common sense. He said thats why Nature creates madmen from time to time! They are people not strong enough to bear the dismantling of this petty stupidity called common sense.
Its time to go now. Do you have anything to say?
0 1961-05-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had continued to work in the same way. But now its as if everything has been engulfed. And the number of ugly things, petty movements, nasty reactionseverywhere, everywhere, in everyone, oh! I am swamped with letters, and such letters! Such letters!
And I dont see, I really do not see why all that needs to manifest in order to disappear. Because before, when it didnt manifest, it faded away by itself; but now it creates problems and problems and problems. (For me they are not problems but stupidities; they are problems and complications for others.) And its so useless! So much time is lost, so much time coping with stupid reactions. I dont know why.
0 1961-06-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was the same thing yesterday, the same Experience, only less strong and less continuous. But all these petty imageries dont interest me.
So I dont ask him anything.
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Take the experience of Mind, for example: Mind, in the evolution of Nature, gradually emerging from its involution; well and this is a very concrete experience these initial mentalized forms, if we can call them that, were necessarily incomplete and imperfect, because Natures evolution is slow and hesitant and complicated. Thus these forms inevitably had an aspiration towards a sort of perfection and a truly perfect mental state, and this aspiration brought the descent of already fully conscious beings from the mental world who united with terrestrial formsthis is a very, very concrete experience. What emerges from the Inconscient in this way is an almost impersonal possibility (yes, an impersonal possibility, and perhaps not altogether universal, since its connected with the history of the earth); but anyway its a general possibility, not personal. And the Response from above is what makes it concrete, so to speak, bringing in a sort of perfection of the state and an individual mastery of the new creation. These beings in corresponding worlds (like the gods of the overmind,4 or the beings of higher regions) came upon earth as soon as the corresponding element began to evolve out of its involution. This accelerates the action, first of all, but also makes it more perfectmore perfect, more powerful, more conscious. It gives a sort of sanction to the realization. Sri Aurobindo writes of this in SavitriSavitri lives always on earth, with the soul of the earth, to make the whole earth progress as quickly as possible. Well, when the time comes and things on earth are ready, then the divine Mother incarnates with her full powerwhen things are ready. Then will come the perfection of the realization. A splendor of creation exceeding all logic! It brings in a fullness and a power completely beyond the petty shallow logic of human mentality.
People cant understand! To put oneself at the level of the general public may be all very well5 (personally I have never found it so, although its probably inevitable), but to hope that they will ever understand the splendor of the Thing. They have to live it first!
0 1961-12-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was a truly stupendous experience, petty though the object is (she is insignificant, without any great substance or powera very minor incarnation; she does have certain not quite human capacities, but they are so veiled by a tiny human personality that scarcely anyone but I can see them).
And in the experience there was no difference between my physical and my inner being (actually, its that way more and more for me); even physically, externally, there was a kind of love full of adoration, and so spontaneousnot even any sense of wonder! And there was such a formidable Power in it, formidable from the standpoint of the entire earth. It lasted one hour. After an hour, the experience slowly began to fade (it had to fade for purely practical reasons). But it left me so confident of a radical changenot a total change, for it wasnt permanent but so radical that even outwardly, way down below in me, something was saying, Ah, how will the meditations with X be now? I caught Myself not thinking, not myself: someone thought like that, somewhere way down below. This pulled me out of the experience and I wondered, Thats strange, whos thinking like that? It was one of the personalities4 (in terms of work, its the one that gives each action its proper place), someone way down below, spontaneously feeling: But thats going to change the meditations! What will they be like now? When I returned and began to look at things with the usual discernment, I told myself that perhaps there actually will be a change.
0 1962-02-03, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And so according to your mission in the world, you have to find for yourself the right proportion between this work and external, intellectual or organizational work; and then there are the bodys needs, which can be met in the same way, trying to make it possible for the Lord to take delight in them. I have seen this for trivial things: for example, making your bath a pleasant experience, or caring for your hair, or whatever (of course, its been a long time since there have been any of those stupid, petty ideas of personal pleasure), so that these things arent done indifferently, out of habit and necessity, but with a touch of beauty, a touch of charm and delight for the Lord.
There, thats all.
0 1962-02-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At that time, I had the sense of a higher way of living: I used to make a distinction between different ways of life. Now this so-called higher way of living seems so miserable to meso petty, mean, narrow that I very often find myself in the same position as those who ask, But is there really something to it? And I understand them (even though I have a different will and vision of something to come that is not yet here), I understand the feeling of those who came into contact with spiritual life and asked, What good is itwhat good is it? Is there anything worth living in it? We are NECESSARILY hemmed in, bound to live in narrowness and pettiness simply to keep alive, for the sake of all the bodys needs.
It takes such an effort to bring Light into this poverty, to bring a Force, a Reality, a Power, something, good Lord, something TRUE! Through constant effort and will, constant tension, suddenly, ah! I get two or three seconds and then it all ebbs away again.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You say that what is needed is maddening enthusiasm, to fill the country with emotional excitement. In the time of the Swadeshi [fight for independence, boycott of English goods] we did all that in the field of politics, but what we did is all now in the dust. Will there be a more favorable result in the spiritual field? I do not say there has been no result. There has been. Any movement will produce some result, but for the most part in terms of an increase of possibility. This is not the right method, however, to steadily actualize the thing. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement or any intoxication of the mind the base. I wish to make a large and strong equanimity the foundation of the yoga. I want established on that equality a full, firm and undisturbed Shakti in the system and in all its movements. I want the wide display of the light of Knowledge in the ocean of Shakti. And I want in that luminous vastness the tranquil ecstasy of infinite Love, Delight and Oneness. I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God. I have no faith in the customary trade of the guru. I do not wish to be a guru. If anybody wakes and manifests from within his slumbering godhead and gets the divine lifebe it at my touch or at anothersthis is what I want. It is such men that will raise the country.
You must not think from all this lecture that I despair of the future of Bengal. I too hope, as they say, that this time a great light will manifest itself in Bengal. Still I have tried to show the other side of the shield, where the fault is, the error, the deficiency. If these remain, the light will not be a great light and it will not be permanent.
0 1962-11-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theyre falling into a stupor, lulling themselves with their non violence, their petty morality. Humanity isnt ready.
Its a pity.
0 1963-03-23, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These last few days, while walking in meditation, I said to the Lord, What do I have? I have no certainty, no foreknowledge, no absolute power, I have nothing. (I dont mean I, I mean the bodythis body.) The body was saying: Do you see my condition? I am still full of (it was complaining bitterly), oh, full of the silliest movements. petty movements of apprehension, petty movements of uncertainty, petty movements of anxiety, petty movements of all kinds of very, very petty thingsthose who live a normal life dont take any notice, they dont know, but when you observe whats going on deep down with that discernment oh, mon petit! Its so petty, so petty, so petty.
Only one thing (which is not even absolute): a sort of equality that has come into the bodynot an equality of soul (laughing): an equality in the cells! It has come into the body. There is no longer that clash of joy and painalways and for everything, every minute, every reaction, You, Lord, to You, Lord. As though the cells were chanting, To You Lord, to You Lord, to You Lord. And well, thats how it is.
0 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Why not? It doesnt occur to him [X] because hes used to sitting and writing on the ground. Its the same as if I thought it impossible to meditate unless I sat cross-legged and bolt upright! Fortunately, I lived with Sri Aurobindo, who never used to sit cross-legged. He told me right away that it was all a question of habitssubconscious habits. It has no importance whatsoever. And how well he explained: if a posture is necessary for you, it will come by itself. And its perfectly true, for instance, that when necessary, the body will suddenly sit up straightit comes spontaneously. As he said, the important thing is not the external frame but the inner experience, and if there is a physical necessity and your inner experience is entirely sincere, that physical necessity will come ALL BY ITSELF.2 This is something I am absolutely sure of. And he gave me his own example (I had mine, too) of certain things considered dangerous or bad, which we both did independently and spontaneously, and which were a great help to us! Consequently, all those stories of posture and so on are the petty mechanical bounds of the human mind.
It came to me while I was walking [for the japa]. I had a kind of vision of you squatting askew and writing. And I thought, But thats awful! Hell ruin his health!
0 1963-07-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What seems bizarre to those who have gone beyond the petty, purely terrestrial limitshuman terrestrial limitsis that belief in a SINGLE divine manifestation on the earth; all the religions are based on that, everyone says, Christ was the only one, or Buddha was the only one, or elsewhere Mohammed was the only one, and so forth. Well, that only one is something IMPOSSIBLE as soon as you rise a little above the ordinary earth atmosphere it appears childish. You can understand the thing and accept it only as a sort of recurrent movement of the divine Consciousness on the earth.
Of course, officially there is only Christ; maybe for this man [Paul VI], he is still the greatest, but I would be surprised if he thought Christ was the only one. Only, Christ has to be the only oneyoud cut out your own tongue rather than say hes not!
0 1963-08-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, to get out of that chaos of ideas, wills, conceptionsits all so petty, so dry, so hollow, and at the same time so irritating in its instability.
And it seems to be reflected in circumstances: everyone seems to be, if not at the peak of his difficulties, at least a good way up (!) Disharmony, conflict, chaos appear to have reached their highest (I hope they wont rise any higher, because as it is its hardly bearable). From morning till night, without letup, quarrels, discontent, demands oh, dissatisfaction, grumblings, all the time, all the time, with a sort of simmeringa simmering of disorder and dissatisfaction. (Mother points to a stack of letters): see all thatwhich I am supposed to answer, naturally.
0 1964-08-29, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Regarding the definitive break between Satprem and his Tantric guru, with whom he had worked for six years. The occasion for this break was a sort of repetition of what had happened two years earlier, i.e., a swarming little horde of businessmen and "disciples" in search of petty powers, against whom, once again, Satprem wanted to warn X, for he loved him in spite of everything. This break nearly cost Satprem his life, as will be seen later. Thus is it said that those things are fire.)
I see in a very clear way that even in circumstances in which you seem to have made a mistake, even with things that betrayed a hope and give you proof that what you expected wasnt legitimate, even in such a case, there isnt one circumstance, not one encounter, not one event that isnt EXACTLY whats necessary to lead you to the victory as rapidly as possible.
0 1964-09-23, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a whole part of the most material consciousness, the utterly physical consciousness (precisely the one that participates in incalculable, minuscule activity of every day) which, of course, is very hard to bear. In ordinary life, its tolerable, its bearable because you take interest in it and sometimes pleasureall that life on the surface that makes you you see a pretty thing, it gives you pleasure; you have something tasty in your mouth, it gives you pleasure; anyway, all these little pleasures that are so futile, but help people bear existence. Those who dont have the inner consciousness and the contact with whats behind all that wouldnt be able to live if they didnt have little pleasures. So a host of tiny little problems crop up, problems of material existence, which explain perfectly well that those who no longer had any desire, and therefore no longer took any pleasure in anything, had one single idea: Whats the use of it all! And indeed, if we didnt have the feeling that all that must be borne because it leads to something else of an altogether different nature and expression, it would be so insipid and puerile, so petty that it would become quite unbearable. Thats certainly what explains the aspiration for Nirvana and the flight from this world.
So there is this problem, a problem of every second, which I must solve every second by the corresponding attitude that leads to the True Thing; and at the same time, there is the other attitude of acceptance of all that is for instance, of what leads to disintegration: the acceptance of disintegration, defeat, decomposition, weakening, decayall things that, naturally, to the ordinary man, are detestable and against which he reacts violently. But since you are told that everything is the expression of the divine Will and must be accepted as the divine Will, there comes this problem, which crops up almost constantly and every minute: if you accept those things as the expression of the divine Will, quite naturally things will follow their habitual course towards disintegration, but what is the TRUE ATTITUDE that can give you that perfect equanimity in all circumstances, and at the same time give a maximum of force and power and will to the Perfection that must be realized?
0 1965-06-18 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But in my night activities, its perfectly natural, I dont give it a thought I dont stand there, observing with the petty idiotic understanding of habit: its all perfectly natural.
There, weve chatted long enough!
0 1965-09-22, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Their common ground is petty schemes and petty biases, preconceived and MICROSCOPIC ideas on the usefulness of divisions among countries so that no one country may dominate the othersnothing but absolutely superficial things, and completely false, moreover. And no sincerity, no mental honesty, no sincere goodwillnothing. They decided in advance that Pakistan was right and India was wrong.
Unfortunately, those phantoms seem to strike terror into the people in Delhi.
0 1965-10-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, theres a whole work going on at night. Oh! The whole petty subconscious working of habits, with all the gradations of the importance it assumes in the general consciousness, and, very interestingly, according to the proportion of the importance, it gives the scale. There was the whole scale, from the little manias people have, which of course are very superficial and mere habits, to the known maniacs or half-mad the whole scale, along with the whole working. And then, the perception that its just a question of dosage: we all belong to the same substance! It was seen so concretely that it was quite interesting. And in conclusion, one saw how to put that under the direct Influence of the supreme Force and Consciousness so as to break the inescapable chain of habits. It was very interesting.
Those are all the things that are considered unimportant, and its all that, the whole mass of all that, which prevents the physical transformation.
0 1965-10-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That is to say, a petty self engrossment that wants satisfactions. I am telling you bluntly because its no use making sentences.
(silence)
0 1966-01-31, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When one does the work I am doing and is in contact with all the petty reactions of the physical body, of the most material consciousness mon petit, it would be absolutely disheartening and sickening to anyone having an ideal. But that thats how it is, so thats how it is: it must changewe are here so that it will become different. And as long as we arent conscious of it, it will never change. Therefore one must rejoice when one is conscious, thats all.
All discoveries are always graceswonderful graces. When you discover that you cant do anything, when you discover that you are a fool, when you discover that you have no capacity, when you discover that you are so petty and mean and stupid, well Oh, Lord, I thank You so much, how good You are to show me all this! And then, its over. Because the minute you discover it, you say, Now this is up to You. You will do what has to be done for all this to change. And the best part of it is that it does change! It does change. When you do like this (gesture of offering to the Heights), sincerely: Oh, take it, take it, take it, rid me of it, let me be only You
Its wonderful.
0 1966-04-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Men are still worse than childrenworse. So small, so petty, with stupid biases.
Just this simple thing of being impartial, neutral and perfectly sincere, without bias towards experiences, towards life, towards thingsjust that they cant have! There is always a sort of petty bias, of preference in the background.
And all that is accumulated in the subconscient, and it comes back in the form of dreams. And naturally (thats quite a common experience, which is known to all those who are even slightly familiar with the play of occult forces), when someone in your dream comes and gives you blows and attacks you, its absolutely sure that youve had bad thoughts for himbad thoughts or bad feelings. Thats what comes back to you in that form. But they will say on the contrary: See, I was right to have bad thoughts for him: he comes and attacks me!
0 1966-07-27, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, a few days ago the consciousness was under attack. All that is petty, sordid, ugly, oh poor, helpless, all thatit was such an avalanche! This poor body, it cried over its incapacity to express anything superior. And then, the answer was very simpleit was very clear, very strong and the experience came: the only solution the only way out of the difficulty is to BECOME divine Love. And the experience was there at the same time for a few moments (it lasted long enough, maybe more than half an hour). Then you understand that everything you have to go through, all these ordeals, all this suffering, all these miseries, is nothing in comparison with the experience of what will be (and what is). But we are still incapable, meaning that the cells havent the strength yet. They are beginning to have the capacity to be, but not the strength to keep ThatThat cannot stay yet.
And That has such an extraordinary power to transform what is! All our notions (and this had become visible), our notions of miracle, of marvelous change, all the stories of miracles that have been told, all of it becomes a childs prattleits nothing! Nothing. All that we try to have, all that we aspire to have, all that is childishness.
0 1966-09-07, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In that letter which he never sent, Satprem ingenuously tried to make the secretaries understand that these conversations with Mother might have import for the whole world, and that if Mother was an hour late for her conversations with Satprem and tired by a heap of trifles and petty personal matters, the atmosphere was not conducive for her to recapture the thread of her experience. But Satprem clearly saw the uselessness of stressing these obvious facts and saw that he would have quite simply been assumed to be indulging in "self-promotion." So be it. (This footnote was written in 1966.)
One lakh = 100,000 rupees (about 6,000 U.S. dollars in 1990).
0 1966-11-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its the first time this year it has happened to me. Previously, it used to happen fairly often, but its the first time this year. It shows that, all the same, things are improving. Oh, but it was terrible, people cant imagine what it is! It takes hold of everyone and everybody, every circumstance and everything, and it gives shape to disintegrationquite like this Gentleman (I think hes the one!), quite like him. But it doesnt have the poetic form [of Savitri], of course, its not a poet: it has all the meanness of life. And it insists on that a great deal. These last few days it insisted on it a great deal. I said to myself, See, all that is written and said is always in a realm of beauty and harmony and greatness, and, anyway, the problem is put with dignity; but as soon as it becomes quite practical and material, its so petty, so mean, so narrow, so ugly! Thats the proof. When you get out of it, its all right, you can face all problems, but when you come down here, its so ugly, so petty, so miserable. We are such slaves to our needs, oh! For one hour, two hours, you hold on, and after And its true, physical life is uglynot everywhere, but anyway I always think of plants and flowers: thats really lovely, its free from that; but human life is so sordid, with such crude and imperious needsits so sordid. Its only when you begin to live in a slightly superior vision that you become free from that; in all the Scriptures, very few people accept the sordidness of life. And of course, thats what this Gentleman insists on. I said, Very well. This bodys answer is very simple: We certainly arent anxious that life should continue as it is. It doesnt find it very pretty. But we conceive of a lifea life as objective as our material lifewhich wouldnt have all these sordid needs, which would be more harmonious and spontaneous. Thats what we want. But he says its impossiblewe have been told its not only possible but certain. So theres the battle.
Then comes the great argument: Yes, yes, one day it will be, but when? For the time being you are still swamped in all this and you plainly see it cant change. It will go on and on. In millennia, yes, it will be. Thats the ultimate argument. He no longer denies the possibility, he says, All right, because you have caught hold of something, youre hoping to realize it now, but thats childishness.
0 1967-04-05, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Till the birth of Sri Aurobindo, religions and spiritualities were always centered on past figures, and they were showing as the goal the negation of life upon earth. So, you had a choice between two alternatives: either a life in this world with its round of petty pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings, threatened by hell if you were not behaving properly; or an escape into another world, heaven, nirvana, moksha [liberation].
Between the two there is nothing much to choose from, they are equally bad.
0 1967-06-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Things are somewhat better. There is still some friction. Traitors, enemies, oh! Now they say that Indonesia and Pakistan are up to something. And with EVERYTHING, you know, from the biggest to the smallest, from what seems the most important (what disturbs the most things, at any rate) to the least little physical discomfort, its like that: a very small, such a very small consciousness, petty and limited like that, and narrow, which makes a mountain out of a molehill.
There you are.
0 1967-10-11, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
She stayed here while I was bathing, and she told me, See, you can do all this, and not for a minute, not for a second do you lose the contact with That, with the supreme wonder. And we who are full of power, and of without any of your petty miseries, any of your petty difficulties, we are so used to our way of being that we dont see the value of it, its something obvious, almost inevitable. And she said (Mother smiles), We never think of the Divine, because we ARE the Divine. So there isnt that will to progress, that thirst for ever better, ever morewe totally lack it.
It was really interesting. I am putting it into words (of course, she didnt speak to me in French!), but it was very simple, the contact was very simple (gesture of inner exchange), and very natural, very spontaneous. At one point I even asked her (laughing), Do you enjoy all this worship people give you? She said no. No, I dont care. She is too used to it, she doesnt care.
--
You know, its so wonderful, in fact. Where That manifests doesnt matter in the least; whether It manifests here, there, or there, doesnt matter in the least, its always the same thing manifesting everywhere. And wherever That chooses to manifest, which is where That must necessarily best manifest, there That manifests. The only thing the only thingis not to allow illusion and deceit to mix in, to hold them ruthlessly in their place, otherwise None of the egos mischiefwe dont want any of it; because its petty, mean, stupid, useless and a waste of time, and because it causes unnecessary turmoil in the atmosphere. But apart from that whether That manifests here or there or there
(silence)
0 1968-02-17, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Well, its the story of little R. whom they educate with music and caresses. Its the same story. But still, the city of love, damn! Auroville should be something that impels you towards other concepts than these petty things. I went there one day, and, you know, that place is moving
Oh, its beautiful.
0 1968-03-02, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont care. What I find quite petty is when they dont tell me and do it on the sly. To hope I wont know is childishness, and the tendency to hide things from me isnt very-nice.
But on the whole, it went off well.
0 1968-06-08, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But now, I see its quite spontaneous. Here in India, with the notion of guru, of Avatar, you may recognize him, admit him, but he is there exclusively to satisfy all demandsnot because he has put on a human body, but because he is the representative of the supreme Power, and you accept the supreme Power, you pretend to obey it, you surrender to it, but with, at the back of your mind, He is there only to satisfy my desires. The quality of desires depends on the individual: for some, its the most petty personal desires; for others its big desires for all humanity, or even for greater realizations, but anyhow it amounts to the same thing. That seems to be the condition for surrendering (!)
To emerge from that, one must emerge from the human consciousness, that is, from the active, acting consciousness.
0 1968-07-20, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I thought of certain things I might say, but everything is so shallow. High-sounding sentences are useless, I detest them. Everything is so shallow and so petty.
Ill see if something comes.
0 1968-09-21, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its well veiled, in the sense that I cant manage to find precisely what it is. But its Ill give you an example: no later than yesterday evening or this morning (or in the night, I dont know), the body said, But what have I done that everything keeps grating like this all the time? And then, that (who? I dont know) shows me things from my life. This time, it showed me something rather recent, that is, from my life in India (not things from the beginning but from my life with Sri Aurobindo), and in what a manner! A manner in which all I did, all I thought, my whole way of acting, it all becomes so ugly, mon petit! So egoistic, so narrow, so petty, so ugly Then, the immediate conclusion: The state you are in is quite natural! It was something like that.
What is it?
0 1969-08-16, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When one is assailed by the vision of this disorder and this confusion, there is only one thing to do, its to go into the consciousness in which one knows that there is only ONE Being, ONE Consciousness, ONE Powerthere is only ONE Onenessand all those things take place within this Oneness. And that all our petty vision, our petty knowledge, our petty judgments, our petty all of it is nothing, its microscopic in comparison with the Consciousness that rules over the Whole. And then, if one has in the least the sense of why separate individualities exist, maybe its only to enable aspiration the existence of aspiration, of this movement, this movement of self-giving and surrender, of trust and FAITH. The faith that there lies the raison dtre of the makeup of individuals, and the aspiration to become THAT in all ones intensity and all ones sincerity Thats the only thing needed.
Thats the only thing needed, the ONLY thing; the only thing that subsists. All the rest phantasmagoria.
0 1970-01-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But you surely understand that if R. has adopted Paolos idea, it means he admires Paolos intelligence, otherwise he wouldnt have. So why one side like this and the other side? We dont want any more of those petty things.
But when Paolo showed me this plan, I felt something very beautiful. Ill tell you what I felt: I felt I was witnessing the birth of Auroville.
--
You see, N. has spent his time speaking ill of R. as much as he could, saying all his plans are bad and his work couldnt succeed. R. has spent his time saying, N. has ruined all my work! And another says, This fellow and this fellow says, That fellow and they are all like that! So I see in a definite way that IF the work is to be done, FIRST they have to overcome all this mean, petty humanity. They see, they have ideas (they have lots of ideas), they have ideas and they see; others see other things and have other ideas, and then, Oh, thats worthless, my idea is the right one. Theyre all like that! And my whole action is like this: a PRESSURE on them to make them abdicate their little person. Until it abdicates, the work CANNOT be done.
As a matter of fact, they seek all kinds of reasons so as not to see the true one.
0 1970-03-14, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I remembered the time when Sri Aurobindo was here. You see, the inner part of the being used to enter into a consciousness that felt and saw things according to the higher consciousness they were quite different; then, when Sri Aurobindo fell ill, in fact, when there were all those things, first that accident (he broke his leg2) then the body, the BODY used to say constantly, Those are dreams, those are dreams, its not for us; for us bodies, this is how it is. (gesture underground) It was frightful. Then all that left. It left completely after so many yearsall those years of effortit left: the body itself would feel the divine Presence, and its impression was that everything necessarily had to change. So then, these last few days, that formation which had left (a terrestrial formation, of all mankind, which means that those who have the vision or perception of, or even just the aspiration to, that higher Truth, when they come back into the [material] Fact, they are in front of this dreadfully painful thing, this perpetual negation by all circumstances), that formation, from which the body had completely freed itself, came back. It came back, but when it came back, when the body saw it, it saw it AS ONE SEES A FALSEHOOD. And I understood how much it had changed, because when it saw the formation, its impression it looked at it with a smile and the impression: ah, an old formation now devoid of truth. It was an extraordinary experience: that thing, its time is over. Its time is over. And this Pressure of the Consciousness is a pressure for things as they wereso miserable and so petty and so obscure and so apparently inescapable at the same timeall of it was (Mother gestures above her shoulder) behind, like an antiquated past. So then, I really sawsaw, understood that the work of this Consciousness (which is PITILESS, its not concerned whether its difficult or not, probably not even much concerned about apparent damage) is for the normal state to cease to be this thing which is so heavy, so obscure, so uglyso lowand for the dawn to come you know, something dawning on the horizon: a new Consciousness. That something truer and more luminous.
What Sri Aurobindo says here about diseases is just the point: the power of habit, of all constructions, of what appears inescapable and irrevocable in diseases. With all that, experiences seem to multiply in order to show in order for one to learn that its simply a question of attitude the attitude of going beyond beyond this mental prison humanity has locked itself in, and of breathing up above.
0 1970-05-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You seem to forget that, by the very fact that you live in the Ashram, you work neither for yourselves nor for an employer, but for the Divine. Your life must be a consecration to the divine Work and cannot be governed by petty human considerations.
Would you like to publish it, or have it posted up?
0 1970-08-01, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But among themselves theyre worse than hooligans! They quarrel in a very petty manner, and thats what makes the work difficult.
But Ive learned things about the Tibetans. The Tibetans are with us, but a Tibetan boy who came here recounted some frightful things. They fled from their country and had settled near the border (they lived in huts near the border, with his father, mother and grandfa ther). A Tibetan came and asked them for shelter. They took him and put him up. But after some time (I dont know how many days), a group of other Tibetans came to find that man, saying he was an enemy. So those Tibetans (I thought they were all the victims of the Chinese they are the victims of their own division), they came and killed the father, mother and grandfa ther; they tried to kill the son but missed: he escaped and is now here. Incredible stories! So theyre all like that, arguing and quarreling among themselvesnaturally, if they continue they open the door to everything.
0 1970-10-21, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Listen, Mother, for about two years I have worked a lot for him. And every time I received dozens of letters in which a sort of microscopic mental possession increasingly revealed itself, something very petty, very ugly, always clinging to I cant say, its like a mental dwarf in him, full of venom, full of bitterness. There s a point there that isnt pretty. So whenever I tried to send him a little (what shall I say?) balm to help him, every time he sent me back a letter full of venom. After a year or two, I realised I was only encouraging this sort of reaction. So one day I wrote to him and said, Now its in Mothers hands, I cant do anything more for you.
What is it about?
0 1971-05-15, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Great History tells us that India must again be one, and that particular current of history is so imperative that twice already Destiny has managed to put India before the possibility of her reunification. The first time was in 1965 when Pakistans foolish aggressiveness enabled India to counterattack and carry the battle right into the suburbs of Lahore and up to Karachi had she but had the courage to seize boldly her destiny. The hour was indeed for a decisive choice. The Mother declared categorically: India is fighting for the triumph of Truth, and She must fight until India and Pakistan become ONE again, for such is the truth of their being. At Tashkent, we yielded on the crest of a petty compromise which was to lead us into a second, more bloody and painful reef, Bangladesh. There too destiny graciously arranged to enable India to hasten to the aid of her massacred brethreneven the famous skyjacking incident of January4 was, as it were, arranged by the Grace so as to spare India from delaying her intervention until it was too late (or to spare her the shame of not intervening at all and allowing Pakistans planes to fly over her head loaded with weaponry and murderers to slaughter her brothers). But there again, yielding to the demands of the moment and to the small, shortsighted interests, we refused to accept the challenge of the Great Direction of our History, and we now find ourselves on the brink of a new compromise which will lead us inevitably to a third and even more disastrous and bloody reef. For one day India must inevitably face that which twice she has fled. Only each time the conditions are more disastrous for her and for the worldperhaps so disastrous that the whole earth will even be engulfed in another general conflict, while the whole story could have been resolved at the little symbolic point that is Bangladesh, at the right hour, with the right gesture and a minimum of suffering.
For let there be no doubt about it, the Bangladesh affair is not an Indian event, it is a world event. The division of India is not a local incident, it is a terrestrial Falsehood which must disappear if the division of the world is to disappear. And here again we hear the voice of Sri Aurobindo, six months before his passing, referring to yet another phenomenon which then seemed of such slight importance, so remote, a trifling local affair at the other end of the world: the invasion of South Korea in 1950, twenty-one years ago. And yet that small Korean symbol, like the small symbol of Bangladesh (or the one of Czechoslovakia in 1938), contained in seed the whole fatal course which is still carrying the world toward a sinister destiny: The affair of Korea, wrote Sri Aurobindo, is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of South East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the rest of the continentin passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India. Now, twenty-one years later, we see that Tibet and the whole of South East Asia have been swallowed up and the gate into India has truly been opened wide by the wound of the Pakistani Falsehoodalready, or very shortly, the Chinese are, or will be, in Khulna, some eighty miles from Calcutta, to help Yahya Khan to pacify Bengal. And Sri Aurobindo added, If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps until they are ready to deal with America.
This is where we are today. That which we want to avoid returns upon us with tenfold force. The hour for political calculation, for the pros and cons of our petty mathematics of expediency (which always goes awry) is past. The time has come to rediscover the Great Direction of India, which is really the Great Direction of the world, and to place our faith in the Spirit that guides her Destiny, rejecting petty fears of a phantom world opinion and doing away with the little supports which only lend support to the Enemy. Tomorrow America will perhaps resume her economic aid to Pakistan on the pretext of counteracting the Chinese presence. The Bangladesh slaughter will be honorably justified by a pseudoregime which will operate with the blessings of the international community. But one does not cheat the tide of history: for the third time our little compromises will crumble and we will find ourselves confronted with a terrible ordeal, its intensity nourished by our own successive failures in the past. The sooner not only India, but America and Russia too, understand the unreality of Pakistan and the magnitude of what is at stake at the borders of India, the sooner may the looming catastrophe be halted before it becomes totally and definitely irrevocable. One thing is certain, wrote Sri Aurobindo a few months before his passing, that if there is too much shilly-shallying and if America gives up now her defence of Korea [we could say even more: the defense of Bangladesh] she may be driven to yield position after position until it is too late: at one point or another she will have to stand and face the necessity of drastic action even if it leads to war.
For the battle of India is the battle of the world. This is where the worlds tragic destiny is brewing, or its last-minute burst of hope into a new world of Truth and Light, for it is said that the deepest darkness lies nearest the most luminous light.
0 1971-10-27, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Humanity is really petty.
Oh, yes! It has descended very, very low.
0 1972-02-07, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the depths of our being, in the silence of contemplation, a luminous force permeates our consciousness with a vast and luminous peace which prevails over all petty reactions and prepares us for union with the Divine, the meaning of individual existence.
Thus, the purpose and goal of life is not suffering and struggle but an all-powerful and happy realization.
0 1972-02-23, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To waste time seeking the gratification of ones petty desires is sheer folly. True happiness can be attained only by finding the Divine.
There were others after this one.1
0 1972-04-02b, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(To N. and U.:) You and you, you must agree. You are here for that. You have come to this place at this time for that. We must give to the world the example of what must be, not petty egoistic movements, but an aspiration towards the manifestation of Truth. Voil.
(silence)
0 1972-04-05, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The following conversation makes it necessary to explain the physical conditions Mother was living in. Alas, at the time I was still half-blind to these conditions, for Mother had wrapped me in such a cocoon of light that I could not really see what was happeningshe knew my impetuous nature, she knew I would never have tolerated the situation in her room nor peoples petty intrigues had I known what was really happening there. But gradually I did become aware of certain things.
Unknowingly, I was a witness to a tragedy.
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here also in the vital three ranges can be distinguished the lower becoming more and more turbid and turbulent and fierce or more and more self-centred and selfish. These levels can best be seen by their impact on our vital being and formations there. The first, the highest one, the meeting or confluence of the Mind and the Vital is the Heart, the centre of emotion, the knot of the external or instrumental vehicle, of the frontal consciousness, behind which is born and hides the true individualised consciousness, the psyche. The mid-region is the Higher Vital consisting of larger (egoistic) dynamisms, such as high ambition, great enterprise, heroic courage, capacity for work, adventure, masterfulness, also such movements as sweeping violences, mighty hungers, and intense arrogances. The physical seat of this movement is, as perhaps the Tantras would say, the domain ranging between the heart and the navel. Lower down ranges the Lower Vital which consists of small desires, petty hankerings, blind cravingsall urges and impulses that are more or less linked up with the body and move to gross physical satisfactions.
But always the Consciousness is driving towards a yet greater disintegration and fragmentation, obscuration and condensation of self-oblivion. The last step in the process of transmutation or involution is Matter where consciousness has wiped itself out or buried itself within so completely and thoroughly that it has become in its outward form totally dark, dense, hard, pulverised into mutually exclusive grains. The supreme luminous Will of Consciousness in its gradual descent and self obliteration finally ends in a rigid process of mere mechanised drive.
--
All this is comprised within what we term the Higher or the Middle Vital. In the lower vital, we have said, consciousness has become still more circumscribed, dark, ignorantly obstinate, disparately disintegrated. It is the seed-bed of lust and cruelty, of all that is small and petty and low and mean, all that is dirt and filth. It is here that we place the picas, djinns, ghouls and ghosts, and vampires, beings who possess the possessed.
Further down in the scale where life-force touches Matter, where Life is about to precipitate as Matter, appear beings of a still lower order, of smaller dimensions and magnitudes Imps, elfs, pixies, goblins, gnomes, fairies or dryads and naiads. There are even creatures or entities so close to Matter that they come into being and pass away with the building up and breaking of a definite pattern of material organisation. This individualisation of consciousness as beings or persons seems to disappear altogether when we enter the strictly material plane. There is here only an agglomeration of uniform dead particles.
02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her giant energy tied to petty forms
In the slow tentative motion of her power
02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This petty state resembled our human days
But fixed to eternity of changeless type,
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The small conspiracies of this petty reign
Amused with the small contrivings, the brief hopes
--
Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates
And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion's starts,
--
In a little drama on a petty stage;
In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life
--
Out of its traffic in petty dreams shall rise.
47.27
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Nor can socialism remedy all the ills society suffers from, if it merely or mainly means the abolition of private enterprise and the assumption by the State of the entire economic and even cultural or educational apparatus of the society. Even as an economic proposition State Socialism, which is only another name of Totalitarianism, is hardly an unmixed good. First of all, however selfish and profiteering the individual may be, still, one must remember that it is always the individual who is adventurous and inventive, it is he who discovers, creates new things and beautiful things. A collective or global enterprise makes for massiveness and quantity, but it means also uniformity, often a dead uniformity: for variety, for originality, as well as for the aesthetic tone and the human touch, the personal element is needed, seems to be indispensable. Education in such a system would mean a set routine and pattern, an efficient machine to bring out consistently and continuously uniform types of men who are more or less 'automatons, mechanical and regimented in their make-up and behaviour. An all-out socialistic Government will bear down and entomb the deeper springs of human consciousness, the magic powers of initiative and creativity that depend upon individual liberty and the free play of personal choice. We do not deny that Socialism is an antidote to another malady in the social body the parcellation, the fragmentation into a thousand petty interestsall aggressive and combative-of the economic strength of a community, and also the stupendous inequality and maldistribution of wealth and opportunity. But it brings in its own poison.
It is a great illusion, as has been pointed out by many, that a collective and impersonal body cannot be profiteers and war-mongers. A nation as a whole can very well be moved by greed and violence and Sieglust (passion for conquest)Nazism has another name, it is also called National Socialism. Everything depends not upon the form, but the spirit that animates the form. It is the spirit, man's inner nature that is to be handled, dealt with and changed; outer systems and forms have only a secondary importance.
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But when we say that India is spiritual, we do not mean that all or most Indians, or even a very large minority among them, are adepts in spirituality, or that the attachment to life, the passion for earthly possessions, the sway of the six ripus are in any way less prevalent in the Indian character. On the contrary, it may well seem to the casual onlooker whose eyes are occupied with the surface actualities of the situation, that the Indian nature, as it is today, shut out from this world's larger spaces, cut off from its deeper channels and movements of greater magnitude, has been given over more and more to petty worldlinesses that hardly fill the same space even in the life of peoples who are notorious for their worldly and unspiritual temperament.
It is not so much a question of concrete realisation, of attainment and achievement arrived at by the Indian people in their work-a-day life, but primarily and above all a question of ultimate valuation, of what they hold as the supreme ideal, of what they cherish in their heart of hearts, and of the extent to which that standard has obtained general currency among them. It is not a fact with which we are concerned, but the force behind the fact, and the special nature and purpose of that force. It is the power that we discover in the general atmosphere, or that emerges in the stress and rhythm of the cultural life of the people, in the level of its inner consciousness, in the expression of its highest and most wide-spread aspirations, in the particular stamp of its soul.
04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
--
Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is the meaning of human life, the significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a dire debate, a fierce question, a constant struggle between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will or aspiration to be and the will of inertia not to be the friction, to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, arani out of which the flame is to leap forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusionare symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its petty innocent-looking moments and events are the steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the immortal godhead in man.
II
04.18 - To the Heights-XVIII, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For, the aberration of our petty minds knows no limits!
But thou sufferest all
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Its petty pleasures and its petty cares,
Its press of troubles and haggard horde of ills,
--
So has he built the petty heart of man.
Only by force and ruse can man survive:
07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the narrow nether centre's petty parts
Its childish game of daily dwarf desires
08.17 - Psychological Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have till now, then, four elements. The fifth one I wish to add is Endurance. For, if you are not capable of facing your difficulties without getting disheartened, without abandoning your effort because it is too difficult, and if you are not able to bear blows, pocket them and go on never minding for the blows come because of your faults and mistakesyou cannot go very far: at the first turning where you lose sight of your petty habitual life, you despair and give up the game.
Endurance in its physical expression is perseverance. That is to say, you must be prepared to do a thousand times, if necessary, the same thing over and over again. You take a step forward, you think you are firmly placed; but there will always crop up something or other which brings back the old difficulty. You think you have solved the problem, you will have to solve it again: it will come in a slightly different form, but it is the same problem. You must be ready to face the problem, go through the same difficulties a million times. That is how you are sure to arrive at the goal.
08.26 - Faith and Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You must be sincere in your aspiration, you need not even know that you are aspiring: you should become the aspiration. When you can do that, you feel an extraordinary strength. One minute of such an experience prepares you for years of progress. When you are no longer a person, an ego that is always looking at itself, when you are the very action you doespecially in the act of aspirationwell, I say nothing can be better than that. When it is not a person that aspires, when the aspiration shoots up in a concentrated momentum, one can go very far. Otherwise there is a mixture of vanity, self-sufficiency, even self-pity, all kinds of petty movements which spoil the affair.
What are the conditions for a descent of faith?
08.27 - Value of Religious Exercises, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But if you take a truly divine being, that is not the thing he likes or appreciates. He does not like to be worshipped; worship does not give him special pleasure. But if he sees anywhere a fine intuitive sense, a good feeling, a movement of unselfishness or spiritual enthusiasm, he considers that as infinitely more valuable than prayers and Pujas. I tell you seriously, if you place a true god upon a chair and compel him to remain there all the time you are doing him Puja, he can amuse himself by letting you do it, but surely it gives him no happiness, none! He feels neither flattered nor satisfied nor glorified by your Puja. You must get that idea out of your head. There is an entire region between the spiritual world and the material, belonging to the vital beings and it is this region that is full of such things as are liked by them, because they are their food. They are happy, they feel important when men call them, pray to them, make their offerings to them: the being that has the largest number of adorers is the most satisfied, the most glorified, the most puffed up. How can you imagine that a true god, a god even of the Overmindalthough those of this region are already somewhat touched by human frailties that is to say, one who has the higher consciousness, would get any pleasure out of these things? I repeat, an act of real kindness, intelligence, unselfishness or fine understanding or sincere aspiration is for him an altogether higher and more valuable thing than any petty religious ceremony. There is no comparison. You speak of religious ceremonies. There is, for example, a being called Kali; there are many Kalis, of many varieties, installed in temples and homes. All of them almost are vital beings and forces, some are ugly and terrible. I have known people who had such a fear of Kalitheir household Kali that they trembled at the thought of offending her in any way, of committing the least fault that would displease her; for that means Kali's vengeance. I know, I know very well these entities: they are beings of the vital world, they are vital formations the forms are given by the human mind and what forms! To think that men worship such terrible and demoniac things!
From this standpoint it is good that for a time humanity should come out of the religious atmosphere, full of fear and blind superstitious submission by which the adverse forces have profited so monstrously. The age of negation, of atheism and positivism is from this view quite indispensable for man's liberation from sheer ignorance. It is only when you have come out of this, this abject submission to the evil forces of the Vital that you can rise to truly spiritual heights and then become there collaborators and right instruments of the forces of the Truth and Consciousness and Power. The superstitions of the lower levels you must leave far behind to rise high.
09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All wonderful things are there around you: You do not see them, or see them occasionally only, at a moment when you are a little more receptive, or perhaps in sleep, when you are less exclusively occupied with your petty affairs. Then a light comes to you of something; you see, you feel something. But generally, as soon as you wake up, all that is obliterated by the formidable ego that is full of itself.
If you look at yourself closely you will see that it is always like that. Your vision of the universe is this: that you are at the centre and the universe is around you. It is not the universe that you see but you see yourself in the universe. So there is no room for any other thing.
10.01 - A Dream, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Horrified by this sight Harimohon looked at the boy and exclaimed, Why, Keshta! I used to think this man the happiest of all! The boy replied, Just there lies my power. Tell me now which of the two is mightierthis Tinkari Sheel or Sri Krishna, the master of Vaikuntha? Look, Harimohon, I too have the police, sentinels, government, law, justice, I too can play the game of being a king; do you like this game? No, my child, answered Harimohon, it is a very cruel game. Why, do you like it? The boy laughed and declared, I like all sorts of games; I like to whip as well as to be whipped. Then he continued. You see, Harimohon, people like you look at the outward appearance of things and have not yet cultivated the subtle power of looking inside. Therefore you grumble that you are miserable and Tinkari is happy. This man has no material want; still, compared to you, how much more this millionaire is suffering! Can you guess why? Happiness is a state of mind, misery also is a state of mind. Both are only mind-created. He Who possesses nothing, whose only possessions are difficulties, even he, if he wills, can be greatly happy. But just as you cannot find happiness after spending your days in dry piety, and as you are always dwelling upon your miseries so too this man who spends his days in sins which give him no real pleasure is now thinking only of his miseries. All this is the fleeting happiness of virtue and the fleeting misery of vice, or the fleeting misery of virtue and the fleeting happiness of vice. There is no joy in this conflict. The image of the abode of bliss is with me: he who comes to me, falls in love with me, wants me, lays his demands on me, torments mehe alone can succeed in getting my image of bliss. Harimohon went on eagerly listening to these words of Sri Krishna. The boy continued, And look here, Harimohon, dry piety has lost its charm for you, but in spite of that you cannot give it up, habit4 binds you to it; you cannot even conquer this petty vanity of being pious. This old man, on the other hand, gets no joy from his sins, yet he too cannot abandon them because he is habituated to them, and is suffering hells own agonies in this life. These are the bonds of virtue and vice; fixed and rigid notions, born of ignorance, are the ropes of these bonds. But the sufferings of that old man are indeed a happy sign. They will do him good and soon liberate him.
So far Harimohon had been listening silently to Sri Krishnas words. Now he spoke out, Keshta, your words are undoubtedly sweet, but I dont trust them. Happiness and misery may be states of mind, but outer circumstances are their cause. Tell me, when the mind is restless because of starvation, can anyone be happy? Or when the body is suffering from a disease or enduring pain, can any one think of you? Come, Harimohon, that too I shall show you, replied the boy.
10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the poor petty life of animal Man.
In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep
10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In his petty passions and joys it finds a taste,
A taste in tears and torture of broken hearts,
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,
Freedom forgotten and the Eternal's path?
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of performing these small ceremonies regularly, and being as nearly accurate as possible with regard to the times. You must not mind stopping in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare lorries or no lorries and saying the Adorations; and you must not mind snubbing your guest or your host if he or she should prove ignorant of his or her share of the dialogue. It is perhaps because these matters are so petty and trivial in appearance that they afford so excellent a training. They teach you concentration, mindfulness, moral and social courage, and a host of other virtues.
Like a perfect lady, I have kept the tit bit to the last. It is absolutely essential to begin a magical diary, and keep it up daily. You begin by an account of your life, going back even before your birth to your ancestry. In conformity with the practice which you may perhaps choose to adopt later, given in Liber Thisarb, sub figura CMXIII, paragraphs 27-28, Magick, pp. 420-422, you must find an answer to the question: "How did I come to be in this place at this time, engaged in this particular work?" As you will see from the book, this will start you on the discovery of who you really are, and eventually lead you to your recovering the memory of previous incarnations.
1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Your spirits would be so transported by His Word as to throw into commotion the Greater World-how much more this small and petty one! Thus have the showers of My bounty been poured down from the heaven of My loving-kindness, as a token of My grace, that ye may be of the thankful.
56
1.01 - MAXIMS AND MISSILES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
The perfect woman perpetrates literature as if it were a petty vice: as
an experiment, _en passant,_ and looking about her all the while to
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
13:The development of the experience in its rapidity, its amplitude, the intensity and power of its results, depends primarily, in the beginning of the path and long after, on the aspiration and personal effort of the Sadhaka. The process of Yoga is a turning of the human soul from the egoistic state of consciousness absorbed in the outward appearances and attractions of things to a higher state in which the Transcendent and Universal can pour itself into the individual mould and transform it. The first determining element of the siddhi is, therefore, the intensity of the turning, the force which directs the soul inward. The power of aspiration of the heart, the force of the will, the concentration of the mind, the perseverance and determination of the applied energy are the measure of that intensity. The ideal Sadhaka should be able to say in the Biblical phrase, "My zeal for the Lord has eaten me up." It is this zeal for the Lord, utsaha, the zeal of the whole nature for its divine results, vyakulata, the heart's eagerness for the attainment of the Divine, -- that devours the ego and breaks up the limitations of its petty and narrow mould for the full and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the largest and highest individual self and nature.
14:But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure successive. There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained identity, sayujga, the element of personal effort must normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself, the Sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga. In the end his own will and force become one with the higher Power; he merges them in the divine Will and its transcendent and universal Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an impartial wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth's spiritual progression or its transformation.
1.01 - The Mental Fortress, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
--
Around your little self and petty things?...
A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is this banquet that she prepared for man and which man refused? It is nothing else than the Life Divine here below the life of the Gods enjoying immortality, full of the supreme light and power, love and delight. Man refused because for him it is something too high, too great. Being a creature earthbound and of small dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his petty power, in his blind self-sufficiency. Furthermore, besides ignorance and arrogance there is an element of revolt in him, for in his half wakefulness with his rudimentary consciousness, if ever he came in contact with something that is above and beyond him, if a shadow of another world happens to cross his threshold, he is not at peace, does not want to recognise but denies and even curses it.
The Divine Mother brings solace and salvation. For the Grace it is such a small and easy thing, it is a wonder how even such a simple, natural, inconspicuous thing could be refused by anybody.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
You have just received unexpected information, but of a different order of magnitude than the petty
anomalies, irritations, threats and frustrations that disturbed your equilibrium in the morning. You have just
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature must make an integral surrender; it must offer itself in every part and every movement to that which seems to the unregenerated sensemind so much less real than the material world and its objects. Our whole being-soul, mind, sense, heart, will, life, body must consecrate all its energies so entirely and in such a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine. This is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that "That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore." Every vital fibre has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence. Mind has to cease to be mind and become brilliant with something beyond it. Life has to change into a thing vast and calm and intense and powerful that can no longer recognise its old blind eager narrow self or petty impulse and desire. Even the body has to submit to a mutation and be no longer the clamorous animal or the impeding clod it now is, but become instead a conscious servant and radiant instrument and living form of the spirit.
8:The difficulty of the task has led naturally to the pursuit of easy and trenchant solutions; it has generated and fixed deeply' the tendency of religions and of schools of Yoga to separate the life of the world from the inner life. The powers of this world and their actual activities, it is felt, either do not belong to God at all or are for some obscure and puzzling cause, Maya or another, a dark contradiction of the divine Truth. And on their own opposite side the powers of the Truth and their ideal activities are seen to belong to quite another plane of consciousness than that, obscure, ignorant and perverse in its impulses and forces, on which the life of the earth is founded. There appears at once the antinomy of a bright and pure kingdom of God and a dark and impure kingdom of the devil; we feel the opposition of our crawling earthly birth and life to an exalted spiritual God-consciousness; we become readily convinced of the incompatibility of life's subjection to Maya with the soul's concentration in pure Brahman existence. The easiest way is to turn away from all that belongs to the one and to retreat by a naked and precipitous ascent into the other. Thus arises the attraction and, it would seem, the necessity of the principle of exclusive concentration which plays so prominent a part in the specialised schools of Yoga; for by that concentration we can arrive through an uncompromising renunciation of the world at an entire self-consecration to the One on whom we concentrate. It is no longer incumbent on us to compel all the lower activities to the difficult recognition of a new and higher spiritualised life and train them to be its agents or executive powers. It is enough to kill or quiet them and keep at most the few energies necessary, on one side, for the maintenance of the body and, on the other, for communion with the Divine.
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
the path to higher knowledge unless we guard our thoughts and feelings in just the same way we guard out steps in the physical world. If we see a wall before us, we do not attempt to dash right through it, but turn aside. In other words, we guide ourselves by the laws of the physical world. There are such laws, too, for the soul and thought world, only they cannot impose themselves on us from without. They must flow out of the life of the soul itself. This can be attained if we forbid ourselves to harbor wrong thoughts and feelings. All arbitrary flitting to and fro in thought, all accidental ebbing and flowing of emotion must be forbidden in the same way. In so doing we do not become deficient in feeling. On the contrary, if we regulate our inner life in this way, we shall soon find ourselves becoming rich in feelings and creative with genuine imagination. In the place of petty emotionalism and capricious flights of thought, there appear significant emotions and thoughts that are fruitful. Feelings and thoughts of this kind lead the student to orientation in the spiritual world. He gains a right position in relation to the things of the spiritual world; a distinct and definite result comes into effect in his favor.
p. 44
1.02 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the _Nation_ have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether _they_ do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our _lives_ to improve _them_, who will build railroads?
And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season?
--
Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. 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. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that there was a kings son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his fathers ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul, continues the Hindoo philosopher, from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be _Brahme_. I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that _is_ which _appears_ to be.
If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the Mill-dam go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
If the movement is rooted in the physical mind the best thing is not to give it any importance. The physical is very obstinate; whereas a movement that takes place in the vital or the mental is very subtle and creates new forms. These difficulties persist to the very end. You must clearly distinguish between various movements in the lower being. We do not want to leave out in our Yoga the common and even the petty things.
4 AUGUST 1924
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The mind rides on a swirl of natural forces, balances on a poise between several possibilities, inclines to one side or another, settles and has the sense of choosing: but it does not see, it is not even dimly aware of the Force behind that has determined its choice. It cannot see it, because that Force is something total and to our eyes indeterminate. At most mind can only distinguish with an approach to clarity and precision some out of the complex variety of particular determinations by which this Force works out her incalculable purposes. Partial itself, the mind rides on a part of the machine, unaware of nine-tenths of its motor agencies in Time and environment, unaware of its past preparation and future drift; but because it rides, it thinks that it is directing the machine. In a sense it counts: for that clear inclination of the mind which we call our will, that firm settling of the inclination which presents itself to us as a deliberate choice, is one of Nature's most powerful determinants; but it is never independent and sole. Behind this petty instrumental action of the human will there is something vast and powerful and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater than our individual choice. And in this total Truth, or even beyond and behind it, there is something that determines all results; its presence and secret knowledge keep up steadily in the process of Nature a dynamic, almost automatic perception of the right relations, the varying or persistent necessities, the inevitable steps of the movement. There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.
This divine Will is not an alien Power or Presence; it is intimate to us and we ourselves are part of it: for it is our own highest Self that possesses and supports it. Only, it is not our conscious mental will; it rejects often enough what our conscious will accepts and accepts what our conscious will rejects.
1.03 - The Armour of Grace, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:To walk through life armoured against all fear, peril and disaster, only two things are needed, two that go always together - the Grace of the Divine Mother and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender. Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven. Regard your life as given you only for the divine work and to help in the divine manifestation. Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness, calm, Ananda of the divine consciousness and its insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realisation on earth and in you and in all who are called and chosen and the conditions needed for its creation and its victory over all opposing forces.
2:Let your sincerity and surrender be genuine and entire. When you give yourself, give completely, without demand, without condition, without reservation so that all in you shall belong to the Divine Mother and nothing be left to the ego or given to any other power.
1.03 - The House Of The Lord, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
After this, till 3 or 4 p.m. Sri Aurobindo was all alone. Then his first meal would come; in between he sometimes took a glass of plain water. Now, what could he be doing at this time wrapped in a most mysterious silence? None except the Mother could throw any precise light on it. We were only told that he had a special work to do and must be left alone unless, of course, some very urgent business needed his attention. All that was visible to our naked eye was that he sat silently in his bed, afterwards in the capacious armchair, with his eyes wide open just as any other person would. Only he passed hours and hours thus, changing his position at times and making himself comfortable; the yes moving a little, and though usually gazing at the wall in front, never fixed trak-like at any particular point. Sometimes the face would beam with a bright mile without any apparent reason, much to our amusement, as a child smiles in sleep. Only it was a waking sleep, for as we passed across the room, there was a dim recognition of our shadow-like movements. Occasionally he would look towards the door. That was when he heard some sound which might indicate the Mother's coming. But his external consciousness would certainly not be obliterated. When he wanted something, his voice seemed to come from a distant cave; rarely did we find him plunged within, with his eyes closed. If at that time, the Mother happened to come for some urgent work or with a glass of water, finding him thus indrawn, she would wait, usually by the bedside till he opened his eyes. Then seeing her waiting, he would exclaim "Oh!" and the Mother's lips would part into an exquisite smile. He had told us that he was in the habit of meditating with open eyes. We kept ourselves ready for the call, sitting behind the bed at our assigned places or someone cleaning the furniture or doing other work in the room. One regular call was for a peppermint lozenge which he took some time before his meal. If the meal was late in coming he would ask for a second one. When our chatting became too animated and made us feel uneasy, one better informed would exclaim, "Do you think he is disturbed by such petty bubbles? He must be soaring in a consciousness where I wonder if even a bomb explosion would make any impression." At other relaxed moments he would take cognizance of incidental noises.
What could he be doing then with so much God-like ease and natural mastery? He once wrote to me that when he had Some special work to do he had to concentrate. This, I think, gives the clue. For his cosmic work, this was the only time he had to himself. Whether to bring down the Supramental Light, or to dive deep into the nether Hell, to send his force for some world purpose, the war in Spain, World War II, helping the Allies or to solve some difficulties of the Ashram, even of individuals, must have been the nature of his special work. One day, after his concentration, I remember him saying, apropos of nothing, "I was seeing how Nishikanto was." At that time Nishikanto was not keeping well. I shall not speculate further on this intricate problem, lest I hear his taunting voice, "Nirod is weaving his romantic fancy!" How he was performing all these operations is beyond my grey matter!
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:For on the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent, - transcendent not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself, - against which the universe seems to stand out like a petty picture against an immeasurable background. That supports the universal activity, - or perhaps only tolerates it; It embraces Life with Its vastness, - or else rejects it from Its infinitude.
3:If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure and eternal Knowledge.
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
11:We recognise, then, that it is possible for the consciousness in the individual to enter into a state in which relative existence appears to be dissolved and even Self seems to be an inadequate conception. It is possible to pass into a Silence beyond the Silence. But this is not the whole of our ultimate experience, nor the single and all-excluding truth. For we find that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action without. This possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness, was perhaps the real gist of the Buddha's teaching, - this superiority to ego and to the chain of personal workings and to the identification with mutable form and idea, not the petty ideal of an escape from the trouble and suffering of the physical birth. In any case, as the perfect man would combine in himself the silence and the activity, so also would the completely conscious soul reach back to the absolute freedom of the Non-Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe. It would thus reproduce in itself perpetually the eternal miracle of the divine Existence, in the universe, yet always beyond it and even, as it were, beyond itself. The opposite experience could only be a concentration of mentality in the individual upon Non-existence with the result of an oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal Being.
12:Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it does not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.
1.04 - Sounds, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed.
All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
1.04 - The Conditions of Esoteric Training, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
cannot develop themselves under their conditions of life. Now, many may find it desirable for other reasons to change their conditions of life, but no one need do so for the purpose of esoteric training. For the latter, a person need only do as much as possible, whatever his position, to further the health of body and soul. Every kind of work can serve the whole of humanity; and it is a surer sign of greatness of soul to perceive clearly how necessary for this whole is a petty, perhaps even an offensive employment than to think: "This work is not good enough for me; I am destined for something better." Of special importance for the student is the striving for complete health of mind. An unhealthy life of thought and feeling will not fail to obstruct the path to higher knowledge. Clear, calm thinking, with stability of feeling and emotion, form here the basis of all work. Nothing should be further removed from the student than an inclination toward a fantastical, excitable life, toward nervousness, exaggeration, and fanaticism. He should acquire a healthy outlook on all circumstances of life; he should meet the demands of lie with steady assurance, quietly letting all things make their impression on him
p. 119
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice,the final & conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Mahachamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic & Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter & material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar & Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality & vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manasei ther in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted & enlightened by buddhipredominates & by the laws of mind determines the life & movements of the existences which inhabit it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya,not unknown to the Vedaconstitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyaktalost for us in the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain & only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength & being. Between the upper hemisphere & the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge & pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, the wide & immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth & right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth & ideal knowledge.
We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers & knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know.Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knowsas it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively & know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole & therefore in the part, in the mass & therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first & reasons afterwards,to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled & frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them & thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth & error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt,about the past & the present.Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past & present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition & his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations & perceptions & it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements & the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world & end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed & firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible & persistent, mare indications that pure Truth exists.We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts & creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless & self-regarding emotions & disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions & her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth & distorts & misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kants pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited & seen & understood. Therefore error maintains & even extends her reign. At last come the logician & modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason & intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon & thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation & a rigid logic. To live on these dry & insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind & sensesuntil man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts & either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening & upward march.
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For it is behind the mystery of the presence of personality in an apparently impersonal universeas in that of consciousness manifesting out of the Inconscient, life out of the inanimate, soul out of brute Matter that is hidden the solution of the riddle of existence. Here again is another dynamic Duality more pervading than appears at first view and deeply necessary to the play of the slowly self-revealing Power. It is possible for the seeker in his spiritual experience, standing at one pole of the Duality, to follow Mind in seeing a fundamental Impersonality everywhere. The evolving soul in the material world begins from a vast impersonal Inconscience in which our inner sight yet perceives the presence of a veiled infinite Spirit; it proceeds with the emergence of a precarious consciousness and personality that even at their fullest have the look of an episode, but an episode that repeats itself in a constant series; it arises through experience of life out of mind into an infinite, impersonal and absolute Superconscience in which personality, mind-consciousness, life-consciousness seem all to disappear by a liberating annihilation, Nirvana. At a lower pitch he still experiences this fundamental impersonality as an immense liberating force everywhere. It releases his knowledge from the narrowness of personal mind, his will from the clutch of personal desire, his heart from the bondage of petty mutable emotions, his life from its petty personal groove, his soul from ego, and it allows them to embrace calm, equality, wideness, universality, infinity. A Yoga of works would seem to require Personality as its mainstay, almost its source, but here too the impersonal is found to be the most direct liberating force; it is through a wide egoless impersonality that one can become a free worker and a divine creator. It is not surprising that the overwhelming power of this experience from the impersonal pole of the Duality should have moved the sages to declare this to be the one way and an impersonal Superconscience to be the sole truth of the Eternal.
But still to the seeker standing at the opposite pole of the Duality another line of experience appears which justifies an intuition deeply-seated behind the heart and in our very life-force, that personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their source. A multiple innumerable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
He is thus remote, alone, lost in dreams, reveries, aspira- tions and holiness" - brooding upon cosmic things, far above and beyond the petty mean things of earth. Here, too, is attri buted the highest of the Chakras, the Sahasrara, which in the enlightened sage is likened to a beautiful lotus of one thousand and one petals.
In the descent towards manifestation and matter, the
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The reason why sensible love even of the highest object cannot unite the soul to its divine Ground in spiritual essence is that, like all other emotions of the heart, sensible love intensifies that selfness, which is the final obstacle in the way of such union. The damned are in eternal movement without any mixture of rest; we mortals, who are yet in this pilgrimage, have now movement, now rest. Only God has repose without movement. Consequently it is only if we abide in the peace of God that passes all understanding that we can abide in the knowledge and love of God. And to the peace that passes understanding, we have to go by way of the humble and very ordinary peace which can be understood by everybodypeace between nations and within them (for wars and violent revolutions have the effect of more or less totally eclipsing God for the majority of those involved in them); peace between individuals and within the individual soul (for personal quarrels and private fears, loves, hates, ambitions and distractions are, in their petty way, no less fatal to the development of the spiritual life than are the greater calamities). We have to will the peace that it is within our power to get for ourselves and others, in order that we may be fit to receive that other peace, which is a fruit of the Spirit and the condition, as St. Paul implied, of the unitive knowledge-love of God.
It is by means of tranquillity of mind that you are able to transmute this false mind of death and rebirth into the clear Intuitive Mind and, by so doing, to realize the primal and enlightening Essence of Mind. You should make this your starting-point for spiritual practices. Having harmonized your starting-point with your goal, you will be able by right practice to attain your true end of perfect Enlightenment.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
evil as a cosmic force and our petty transgressions and self-betrayals. We believe that in reducing the
scope and importance of our errors, we are properly humble; in truth, we are merely unwilling to bear the
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about petty troubles, such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces. One morning I heard
someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to the
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evil of banality. Our petty weaknesses accumulate, and multiply, and become the great evils of state. As
our technological power expands, the danger we pose increases and the consequences of our voluntary
1.06 - Dhyana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
24:It will be conceded that we have given a very rational explanation of the greatness of great men. They had an experience so overwhelming, so out of proportion to the rest of things, that they were freed from all the petty hindrances which prevent the normal man from carrying out his projects.
25:Worrying about clothes, food, money, what people may think, how and why, and above all the fear of consequences, clog nearly every one. Nothing is easier, theoretically, than for an anarchist to kill a king. He has only to buy a rifle, make himself a first-class shot, and shoot the king from a quarter of a mile away. And yet, although there are plenty of anarchists, outrages are very few. At the same time, the police would probably be the first to admit that if any man were really tired of life, in his deepest being, a state very different from that in which a man goes about saying he is tired of life, he could manage somehow or other to kill someone first.
1.06 - Magicians as Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country
in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us be transparent so that the light within us may fully illumine the thoughts we want to observe, analyse, classify. Let us be impartial and courageous so as to rise above our own little preferences and petty personal conveniences. Let us look at the thoughts in themselves, for themselves, without bias.
And little by little, if we persevere in our work of classification, we shall see order and light take up their abode in our minds. But we should never forget that this order is but confusion compared with the order that we must realise in the future, that this light is but darkness compared with the light that we shall be able to receive after some time.
1.06 - Quieting the Vital, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The Limitations of Morality There is an area of our being which is a source of both great difficulty and great power. A source of difficulty, because it blurs all the communications from outside or above by frantically opposing our efforts to silence the mind and bogging down the consciousness at its own level of petty occupations and interests, thus hindering its free movement toward other regions. A source of power, because it is the outcropping of the great force of life in us. This is the region located between the heart and the sex center, which Sri Aurobindo calls the vital.
It is a place full of every possible mixture: pleasure is inextricably mixed with suffering, pain with joy, evil with good, and make-believe with truth. The world's various spiritual traditions have found it so troublesome that they have preferred to reject this dangerous zone altogether, allowing only the expression of so-called religious emotions and strongly advising the neophyte to reject everything else.
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There in the supramental Gnosis is the fulfilment, the culminating height, the all-embracing extent of the inner adoration, the profound and integral union, the flaming wings of Love upbearing the power and joy of a supreme Knowledge. For supramental Love brings an active ecstasy that surpasses the void passive peace and stillness which is the heaven of the liberated Mind and does not betray the deeper greater calm which is the beginning of the supramental silence. The unity of a love which is able to include in itself all differences without being diminished or abrogated by their present limitations and apparent dissonances is raised to its full potentiality on the supramental level. For there an intense oneness with all creatures founded on a profound oneness of the soul with the Divine can harmonise with a play of relations that only makes the oneness more perfect and absolute. The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hesitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life.
For it is the very nature of the supramental experience that it can perpetuate the play of difference without forfeiting or in the least diminishing either the divine union or the infinite oneness. For a supramentalised consciousness it would be utterly possible to embrace all contacts with men and the world in a purified flame-force and with a transfigured significance, because the soul would then perceive always as the object of all emotion and all seeking for love or beauty the One Eternal and could spiritually use a wide and liberated life-urge to meet and join with that One Divine in all things and all creatures.
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or at least a certain predominant Will-in-Life has the appearance of something impure, accursed or fallen in its very essence. At its contact, wrapped in its dull sheaths or caught in its iridescent quagmires, the divinities themselves become common and muddy and hardly escape from being dragged downwards into its perversions and disastrously assimilated to the demon and the Asura. A principle of dark and dull inertia is at its base; all are tied down by the body and its needs and desires to a trivial mind, petty desires and emotions, an insignificant repetition of small worthless functionings, needs, cares, occupations, pains, pleasures that lead to nothing beyond themselves and bear the stamp of an ignorance that knows not its own why and whither.
This physical mind of inertia believes in no divinity other than its own small earth-gods; it aspires perhaps to a greater comfort, order, pleasure, but asks for no uplifting and no spiritual deliverance. At the centre we meet a stronger Will of life with a greater gusto, but it is a blinded Daemon, a perverted spirit and exults in the very elements that make of life a striving turmoil and an unhappy imbroglio. It is a soul of human or Titanic desire clinging to the garish colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy or stirring melodrama of this mixed flux of good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture.
1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
15:But be on your guard and do not try to understand and judge the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves to subject even the things that are beyond it to its own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge. The human mind shut in the prison of its half-lit obscurity cannot follow the many-sided freedom of the steps of the Divine Shakti. The rapidity and complexity of her vision and action outrun its stumbling comprehension; the measures of her movement are not its measures. Bewildered by the swift alternation of her many different personalities, her making of rhythms and her breaking of rhythms, her accelerations of speed and her retardations, her varied ways of dealing with the problem of one and of another, her taking up and dropping now of this line and now of that one and her gathering of them together, it will not recognise the way of the Supreme Power when it is circling and sweeping upwards through the maze of the Ignorance to a supernal Light. Open rather your soul to her and be content to feel her with the psychic nature and see her with the psychic vision that alone make a straight response to the Truth. Then the Mother herself will enlighten by their psychic elements your mind and heart and life and physical consciousness and reveal to them too her ways and her nature.
16:Avoid also the error of the ignorant mind's demand on the Divine Power to act always according to our crude surface notions of omniscience and omnipotence. For our mind clamours to be impressed at every turn by miraculous power and easy success and dazzling splendour; otherwise it cannot believe that here is the Divine. The Mother is dealing with the Ignorance in the fields of the Ignorance; she has descended there and is not all above. Partly she veils and partly she unveils her knowledge and her power, often holds them back from her instruments and personalities and follows that she may transform them the way of the seeking mind, the way of the aspiring psychic, the way of the battling vital, the way of the imprisoned and suffering physical nature. There are conditions that have been laid down by a Supreme Will, there are many tangled knots that have to be loosened and cannot be cut abruptly asunder. The Asura and Rakshasa hold this evolving earthly nature and have to be met and conquered on their own terms in their own longconquered fief and province; the human in us has to be led and prepared to transcend its limits and is too weak and obscure to be lifted up suddenly to a form far beyond it. The Divine Consciousness and Force are there and do at each moment the thing that is needed in the conditions of the labour, take always the step that is decreed and shape in the midst of imperfection the perfection that is to come. But only when the supermind has descended in you can she deal directly as the supramental Shakti with supramental natures. If you follow your mind, it will not recognise the Mother even when she is manifest before you. Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at appearances; trust the Divine Power and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of Divine Nature.
1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
to lead us beyond samsara, not just to cater to our petty worldly problems.
Sometimes we invoke protectors and ask for help but dont do our part.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:THE KNOWLEDGE on which the doer of works in Yoga has to found all his action and development has for the keystone of its structure a more and more concrete perception of unity, the living sense of an all-pervading oneness; he moves in the increasing consciousness of all existence as an indivisible whole: all work too is part of this divine indivisible whole. His personal action and its results can no longer be or seem a separate movement mainly or entirely determined by the egoistic "free" will of an individual, himself separate in the mass. Our works are part of an indivisible cosmic action; they are put or, more accurately, put themselves into their place in the whole out of which they arise and their outcome is determined by forces that overpass us. That world action in its vast totality and in every petty detail is the indivisible movement of the One who manifests himself progressively in the cosmos. Man too becomes progressively conscious of the truth of himself and the truth of things in proportion as he awakens to this One within him and outside him and to the occult, miraculous and significant process of its forces in the motion of Nature. This action, this movement, is not confined even in ourselves and those around us to the little fragmentary portion of the cosmic activities of which we in our superficial consciousness are aware; it is supported by an immense underlying environing existence subliminal to our minds or subconscious, and it is attracted by an immense transcending existence which is superconscious to our nature. Our action arises, as we ourselves have emerged, out of a universality of which we are not aware; we give it a shape by our personal temperament, personal mind and will of thought or force of impulse or desire; but the true truth of things, the true law of action exceeds these personal and human formations. Every standpoint, every man-made rule of action which ignores the indivisible totality of the cosmic movement, whatever its utility in external practice, is to the eye of spiritual Truth an imperfect view and a law of the Ignorance.
2:Even when we have arrived at some glimpse of this idea or succeeded in fixing it in our consciousness as a knowledge of the mind and a consequent attitude of the soul, it is difficult for us in our outward parts and active nature to square accounts between this universal standpoint and the claims of our personal opinion, our personal will, our personal emotion and desire. We are forced still to go on dealing with this indivisible movement as if it were a mass of impersonal material out of which we, the ego, the person, have to carve something according to our own will and mental fantasy by a personal struggle and effort. This is man's normal attitude towards his environment, actually false because our ego and its will are creations and puppets of the cosmic forces and it is only when we withdraw from ego into the consciousness of the divine Knowledge-Will of the Eternal who acts in them that we can be by a sort of deputation from above their master. And yet is this personal position the right attitude for man so long as he cherishes his individuality and has not yet fully developed it; for without this view-point and motiveforce he cannot grow in his ego, cannot sufficiently develop and differentiate himself out of the subconscious or half-conscious universal mass-existence.
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
:::The relations of the Soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away-means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it-one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear.
:::If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the Soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the Soul is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.5
1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In truth, a cultivated and illumined vital can be as noble and heroic and disinterested as it is now spontaneously vulgar, egoistic and perverted when it is left to itself without education. It is enough for each one to know how to transform in himself the search for pleasure into an aspiration for the supramental plenitude. If the education of the vital is carried far enough, with perseverance and sincerity, there comes a time when, convinced of the greatness and beauty of the goal, the vital gives up petty and illusory sensorial satisfactions in order to win the divine delight.
Bulletin, February 1953
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It may happen that the very nature of your occupation makes it your duty to report what is taking place in a particular department, undertaking or communal work. But then the report should be confined to the work alone and not touch upon private matters. And as an absolute rule, it must be wholly objective. You should not allow any personal reaction, any preference, any like or dislike to creep in. And above all, never introduce your own petty personal grudges into the work that is assigned to you.
In all cases and as a general rule, the less one speaks of others, even to praise them, the better. It is already so difficult to know exactly what is happening in oneselfhow can one know with certainty what is happening in others?So you must totally abstain from pronouncing upon anybody one of those final judgments which cannot but be foolish if not spiteful.
1.08 - The Supreme Discovery, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then we shall understand the vanity and childishness of our meagre satisfactions, our foolish quarrels, our petty passions, our blind indignations. We shall see the dissolution of our little faults, the crumbling of the last entrenchments of our limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds.
The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and mans mission is to manifest it.
1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and intangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights, will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion or drive of propensity in us (rajogun.a) and is extinguished with the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something profounder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher and deeper state that may perhaps be called "soulhood", - for the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the more dignified constructions of the larger ideative reason that imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the limited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind's partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul's supreme fulfilment.
7:At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attri butes (gunas) that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
It is this progress in the internal rapidity which renders some capable of living, in the course of their brief minutes, not the petty and very limited number of experiences to which existence is ordinarily reduced, but the equivalent of several successive lives. Far from being confined in the narrow circle of a given environment they seem to belong to all places and all times and participate in all the modes of human existence. In them successive traditions and contrary tendencies rejoin and become unified. And it is by the increasing acceleration of its course that the mind embracing an always vaster circle of the universal mounts from synthesis to synthesis towards the unity of the universal.
But if each instant of its course associates it a little more with the movement of the Infinite, each instant also, if it arrests the torrent of the becoming which sweeps it onward, enables it to enjoy the repose of the immutable and communicate in its absolute silence with the silence of the Absolute. For in every moment there is That towards which tends its infinite progress.
1.09 - A System of Vedic Psychology, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nevertheless a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the paralysis that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second & third hand & reassert its right to judge and inquire with a perfect freedom into the meaning of its own Scriptures. When that day comes, we shall, I think, discover that the imposing fabric of Vedic theory is based upon nothing more sound or lasting than a foundation of loosely massed conjectures. We shall question many established philological myths,the legend, for instance, of an Aryan invasion of India from the north, the artificial & unreal distinction of Aryan & Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity of the homogeneous Indo-Afghan race; the strange dogma of a henotheistic Vedic naturalism; the ingenious & brilliant extravagances of the modern sun & star myth weavers, and many another hasty & attractive generalisation which, after a brief period of unquestioning acceptance by the easily-persuaded intellect of mankind, is bound to depart into the limbo of forgotten theories. We attach an undue importance & value to the ephemeral conclusions of European philology, because it is systematic in its errors and claims to be a science.We forget or do not know that the claims of philology to a scientific value & authority are scouted by European scientists; the very word, Philologe, is a byword of scorn to serious scientific writers in Germany, the temple of philology. One of the greatest of modern philologists & modern thinkers, Ernest Renan, was finally obliged after a lifetime of hope & earnest labour to class the chief preoccupation of his life as one of the petty conjectural sciencesin other words no science at all, but a system of probabilities & guesses. Beyond one or two generalisations of the mutations followed by words in their progress through the various Aryan languages and a certain number of grammatical rectifications & rearrangements, resulting in a less arbitrary view of linguistic relations, modern philology has discovered no really binding law or rule for its own guidance. It has fixed one or two sure signposts; the rest is speculation and conjecture.We are not therefore bound to worship at the shrines of Comparative Science & Comparative Mythology & offer up on these dubious altars the Veda & Vedanta. The question of Vedic truth & the meaning of Veda still lies open. If Sayanas interpretation of Vedic texts is largely conjectural and likely often to be mistaken & unsound, the European interpretation can lay claim to no better certainty. The more lively ingenuity and imposing orderliness of the European method of conjecture may be admitted; but ingenuity & orderliness, though good helps to an enquiry, are in themselves no guarantee of truth and a conjecture does not cease to be a conjecture, because its probability or possibility is laboriously justified or brilliantly supported. It is on the basis of a purely conjectural translation of the Vedas that Europe presents us with these brilliant pictures of Vedic religion, Vedic society, Vedic civilisation which we so eagerly accept and unquestioningly reproduce. For we take them as the form of an unquestionable truth; in reality, they are no more than brilliantly coloured hypotheses,works of imagination, not drawings from the life.
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1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
_Sainte-Beuve._--There is naught of man in him; he is full of petty
spite towards all virile spirits. He wanders erratically; he is subtle,
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finds reasons for cooling his petty passion for revenge. If he is a
Christian, I repeat, he finds these reasons in himself. The Christian
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opposite of all wretched European petty-statism and neuras thenia,
which the foundation of the German Empire has brought to a crisis. The
1.09 - The Pure Existent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:WHEN we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm. We instinctively act and feel and weave our life thoughts as if this stupendous world movement were at work around us as centre and for our benefit, for our help or harm, or as if the justification of our egoistic cravings, emotions, ideas, standards were its proper business even as they are our own chief concern. When we begin to see, we perceive that it exists for itself, not for us, has its own gigantic aims, its own complex and boundless idea, its own vast desire or delight that it seeks to fulfil, its own immense and formidable standards which look down as if with an indulgent and ironic smile at the pettiness of ours. And yet let us not swing over to the other extreme and form too positive an idea of our own insignificance. That too would be an act of ignorance and the shutting of our eyes to the great facts of the universe.
2:For this boundless Movement does not regard us as unimportant to it. Science reveals to us how minute is the care, how cunning the device, how intense the absorption it bestows upon the smallest of its works even as on the largest. This mighty energy is an equal and impartial mother, samam brahma, in the great term of the Gita, and its intensity and force of movement is the same in the formation and upholding of a system of suns and the organisation of the life of an ant-hill. It is the illusion of size, of quantity that induces us to look on the one as great, the other as petty. If we look, on the contrary, not at mass of quantity but force of quality, we shall say that the ant is greater than the solar system it inhabits and man greater than all inanimate Nature put together. But this again is the illusion of quality. When we go behind and examine only the intensity of the movement of which quality and quantity are aspects, we realise that this Brahman dwells equally in all existences. Equally partaken of by all in its being, we are tempted to say, equally distributed to all in its energy. But this too is an illusion of quantity. Brahman dwells in all, indivisible, yet as if divided and distributed. If we look again with an observing perception not dominated by intellectual concepts, but informed by intuition and culminating in knowledge by identity, we shall see that the consciousness of this infinite Energy is other than our mental consciousness, that it is indivisible and gives, not an equal part of itself, but its whole self at one and the same time to the solar system and to the ant-hill. To Brahman there are no whole and parts, but each thing is all itself and benefits by the whole of Brahman. Quality and quantity differ, the self is equal. The form and manner and result of the force of action vary infinitely, but the eternal, primal, infinite energy is the same in all. The force of strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in silence as in sound.
3:Therefore the first reckoning we have to mend is that between this infinite Movement, this energy of existence which is the world and ourselves. At present we keep a false account. We are infinitely important to the All, but to us the All is negligible; we alone are important to ourselves. This is the sign of the original ignorance which is the root of the ego, that it can only think with itself as centre as if it were the All, and of that which is not itself accepts only so much as it is mentally disposed to acknowledge or as it is forced to recognise by the shocks of its environment. Even when it begins to philosophise, does it not assert that the world only exists in and by its consciousness? Its own state of consciousness or mental standards are to it the test of reality; all outside its orbit or view tends to become false or non-existent. This mental self-sufficiency of man creates a system of false accountantship which prevents us from drawing the right and full value from life. There is a sense in which these pretensions of the human mind and ego repose on a truth, but this truth only emerges when the mind has learned its ignorance and the ego has submitted to the All and lost in it its separate self-assertion. To recognise that we, or rather the results and appearances we call ourselves, are only a partial movement of this infinite Movement and that it is that infinite which we have to know, to be consciously and to fulfil faithfully, is the commencement of true living. To recognise that in our true selves we are one with the total movement and not minor or subordinate is the other side of the account, and its expression in the manner of our being, thought, emotion and action is necessary to the culmination of a true or divine living.
1.10 - Harmony, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, it is magic. The seeker repeats the same experience ten, a hundred times. And he begins to stare in fascination. He begins, through a tiny experience, to ask himself a stupendous why?... Oh, the world's secrets are not concealed in thunder and flames! They are here, just waiting for a consenting look, a simple way of being that does not constantly put up its habitual barriers, its possibles or impossibles, its you-can'ts and you-mustn'ts, its buts and more buts, its ineluctables, and the whole train of its iron laws, the old laws of an animal-man who goes round and round in the cage built with his own hands. He looks about himself, and the experience multiplies, as if it were thrust before his very eyes, as if that simple little effort for truth sparked innumerable answers, precipitated circumstances, encounters, demonstrations, as if it were saying, Look, look, this is how it works. A consciousness beyond words lays its finger of light upon each encounter. The true picture emerges from behind appearances. A breath of truth here elicits the same truth in each thing and each movement. And he sees.... He does not see miracles or rather, he sees sordid little miracles blindly contrived by blind magicians. He sees poor humans in droves weaving the pretty bubble, patiently and tirelessly inflating it, each day adding their little breath of defeat or desire or helplessness, their miasma of self-doubt, their little noxious thoughts, stretching and nurturing the iridescent bubble of their knowledge and petty triumphs, the implacable bubble of their science, the bubble of their charity or virtue. And they go on, prisoners of a bubble, entangled in the network of force they have carefully woven, accumulated, piled up day after day. Each act results from that thrust; each circumstance is the obscure gravitation of that attraction, and everything moves mechanically, ineluctably, mathematically as we have willed it in a black or yellow or decrepit little bubble. And the more we kick and strain and struggle and draw this force inside to break the pretty or not so pretty wall, the harder it becomes, as if our ultimate effort still brought to it an ultimate strength. And we say we are the victims of circumstances, victims of this or that; we say we are poor, sick, ill-fated; we say we are rich, virtuous, triumphant. We say we are thousands of things under thousands of colors and bubbles, and there is nothing of the kind, no rich, no poor, no sick, no virtuous or victim; there is something else, oh, radically different, which is awaiting its hour. There is a secret godhead smiling.
And the bubble grows. It takes in families, peoples, continents; it takes in every color, every wisdom, every truth, and envelops them. There is that breath of light, that note of beauty, the miracle of those few lines caught in architecture or geometry, that instant of truth that heals and delivers, that lovely curve glimpsed in a flash which links that star to this destiny, this asymptote to that hyperbola, this man to that song, this gesture to that effect and more men come, men by the thousands, who come puffing and inflating the little bubble, creating pink and blue and everlasting religions, infallible salvations in the great bubble, summits of light that are the sum of their compounded little hopes, abysses of hell that are the sum of their cherished fears; who come adding this note and that idea, this grain of knowledge and that healing second, this conjunction and that curve, that moment of effectiveness beneath the dust of the myriads of galaxies, chromatic temples, devising unquestionable medicines under the great bubble, irreducible sciences, implacable geometries, charts of illness, charts of recovery, charts of destiny. And everything twists and turns as the doctor willed it under the great fateful Bubble, as the scientist willed it, as that moment of coincidence among the countless myriads of lines in the universe has decided it for the eternity of time. We have seized a minute of the world and made it into the huge amber light that blinds and suffocates us in the great mental bubble. And there is nothing of the kind not one single law, not one single illness, not one single medical or scientific dogma, not one single temple is true,, not one perpetual chart, not one single destiny under the stars there is a tremendous mental hypnotism, and behind, far, far behind, and yet right here, so much here, immediately here, something impregnable, unseizable by any snare, unrestricted by any law, invulnerable to every illness and every hypnotism, unsaved by our salvations, unsullied by our sins, unsullied by our virtues, free from every destiny and every chart, from every golden or black bubble a pure, infallible bird that can recreate the world in the twinkling of an eye. We change our look, and everything changes. Gone is the pretty bubble. It is here if we want.
1.10 - On slander or calumny., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
I have seen some committing the gravest sins in secret and without exposure, and in their supposed purity they have harshly inveighed against persons who have had a petty fall in public.
To judge others is a shameless arrogation of the Divine prerogative; to condemn is the ruin of ones soul.
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We should realise that these so-called Sciences of Comparative Philology and Comparative Mythology on which the European interpretation of Veda is founded are not true Sciences at all. They are, rather, if Sciences at all, then pseudo-Sciences. All the European mental sciences, not excluding Psychology, though that is now proceeding within certain narrow limits by a sounder method, belong to a doubtful class of branches of research which have absorbed the outward method of Science, without its inward spirit. The true scientists in Germany, the home of both Science & Philology, accustomed to sound methods, certain results, patient inquiry, slow generalisations, have nothing but contempt for the methods of Philology, its patchiness, its haste, its guesswork, and profess no confidence in its results; the word Philologe is even, in their mouths, a slighting & discourteous expression. This contempt, itself no doubt excessive, is practically admitted to be just by the great French thinker, Renan, who spent the best part of his life in philological & kindred researches, when he described apologetically his favourite pursuits as petty conjectural sciences. Now, a Science that is conjectural, a Science that proceeds not by fixed laws and certain methods, but by ingenious inference & conjecture, & this is in truth the nature of Comparative Philology & Comparative Mythology,is no science at all; it is a branch of research, a field of inquiry & conjecture in which useful discoveries may be made; it may even contain in itself the germs of a future science, but it is not yet itself worthy of that name & its results have no right to cloak themselves falsely in the robe of authority which belongs only to the results of the true Sciences. So long as a science is conjectural, its results are also conjectural, can at any moment be challenged and ought at all times even in its most brilliant & confident results to be carefully and sceptically scrutinised.
Among such branches of research which can even now be used in spite of new & hostile conclusions as a sort of side support to the modern theory of the Veda stand in a curious twilit corner of their own the researches of the ethnologists. There is no more glaring instance of the conjectural and unsubstantial nature of these pseudo-Sciences than the results of Ethnology which yet claims to deduce its results from fixed and certain physical tests and data. We find the philological discovery of the Aryan invasion supported by the conclusions of ethnologists like Sir Herbert Risley, who make an ethnological map of India coloured in with all shades of mixed raciality, Dravidian,Scytho-Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian, Scytho-Aryan. More modern schools of ethnology assert positively on the strength of [the] same laws & the same tests that there is but one homogeneous Indo-Afghan race inhabiting the whole peninsula from theHimalayas to Cape Comorin. What are we to think of a science of which the tests are so pliant and the primary results so irreconcilable? Or how, if the more modern theory is correct, if a distinct homogeneous race inhabits India, can we fail to doubt strongly as a philological myth the whole story of the Aryan invasion & colonisation of Northern India, which has been so long one of the most successful & loudly proclaimed results of the new philology? As a result perhaps of these later conclusions we find a tendency even in philological scholarship towards the rise of new theories which dispute the whole legend of an Aryan invasion, assert an indigenous or even a southern origin for the peoples of the Vedic times and suppose Aryanism to have been a cult and not a racial distinction. These new theories destroy all fixed confidence in the old without themselves revealing any surer foundations for their own guesses; both start from conjectural philology & end in an imaginatively conjectural nation-building or culture-building. It is exceedingly doubtful whether the Vedic terms Aryan & unAryan at all refer to racial or cultural differences; they may have an entirely different and wholly religious & spiritual significance & refer to the good and evil powers & mortals influenced by them. If this prove to be the truth, and the close contiguity & probable historical connection between the Vedic Indians & the Zoroastrian Persians gives it a great likelihood, then the whole elaborate edifice built up by the scholars of an Aryan invasion and an Aryan culture begins to totter & seek the ground, there to lie in the dust amid the wrecks of other once confident beliefs and triumphant errors.
1.10 - The Three Modes of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Another action becomes possible, commences, grows, culminates, a working more truly right, more luminous, natural and normal to the deepest divine interplay of Purusha and Prakriti although supernatural and supernormal to our present imperfect nature. The body conditioning the physical mind insists no longer on its tamasic inertia that repeats always the same ignorant movement: it becomes a passive field and instrument of a greater force and light, it responds to every demand of the spirit's force, holds and supports every variety and intensity of new divine experience. Our kinetic and dynamic vital parts, our nervous and emotional and sensational and volitional being, expand in power and admit a tireless action and a blissful enjoyment of experience, but learn at the same time to stand on a foundation of wide self-possessed and self-poised calm, sublime in force, divine in rest, neither exulting and excited nor tortured by sorrow and pain, neither harried by desire and importunate impulses nor dulled by incapacity and indolence. The intelligence, the thinking, understanding and reflective mind, renounces its sattwic limitations and opens to an essential light and peace. An infinite knowledge offers to us its splendid ranges, a knowledge not made up of mental constructions, not bound by opinion and idea or dependent on a stumbling uncertain logic and the petty support of the senses, but self-sure, au thentic, all-penetrating, all-comprehending; a boundless bliss and peace, not dependent on deliverance from the hampered strenuousness of creative energy and dynamic action, not constituted by a
The Three Modes of Nature
1.11 - The Change of Power, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
If we can catch that painful elf for it is pain itself just before it buries itself completely, it exhibits a whole daily, material and imperceptible mechanism. This is the great resistance to the change of power, the molehill trying to stay the law of Harmony. Therefore it is where the battle is taking place at this moment, in the microcosm and the macrocosm. It is like a caricature (or the more exact face) of all the polished and civilized activities of the brilliant elf of the higher levels: doubt, fear, avidity, self-centeredness, all the contractions, prehensions and apprehensions of the mental pseudopod. It is a minuscule and ridiculous functioning, and, if by chance we notice it, we shrug it off or attach no importance to it. But we are wrong. We look at everything from atop our mental arrogance, as if those trifles were inconsequential. But they have staggering consequences. We do not see it because we live in our logical and symmetrical clouds. But life grates; there is an immense, universal grating whose source lies in those ridiculous little grains of sand. At the level of matter, there are no little things, because everything is made of little things, and that absurd reaction of doubt or fear is the incalculable equivalent of the mental misjudgment that makes us shut the door on a brilliant opportunity. We are constantly shutting the door on Harmony, turning our backs on the miracle, locking out possibilities, and making ourselves sick into the bargain. For, at the material level, this Harmony does not flow in majestic symphonies through the great arteries of the spirit; it uses what it has. It percolates through minuscule channels, fragile filaments quivering within our material consciousness; it enters in droplets, spurts, discrete quanta that look like nothing a passing breath, a flicker of a smile, a wave of ease without reason which change everything. We do not notice the change because we live in our normal chaos, our usual suffocation, but the seeker, who has become a little clearer, begins to notice, to sense those minute changes of density, those sudden obstructions, those minuscule expansions, those air pockets in his material substance. He sees the almost instant effect of a tiny little emanation of doubt, an absurd fear or tensing up without apparent cause, a ridiculous and morbid imagination crossing his atmosphere. He discovers a thousand sly little pulsations, deceitful palpitations, dark impulses in the great material pond. He puts his finger on fear, the great, voracious and retractile Fear which covers the world like the protoplasm inside its gelatine membrane the slightest touch, the least breath of air, the tiniest ray of sun, and it contracts, shuts the door and rolls up into a ball in its membrane. The immediate reaction to everything is NO; then, sometimes, a yes blurted out, as if impelled by the same fear of missing something. He discovers the fantastic morbid and defeatist imagination of matter, as if, for matter, life represented a kind of dreadful invasion from which it had never quite recovered, a fall perhaps from the original bliss of the stone, an irruption of death into its peaceful routine. Everything is liable to bring catastrophe the great catastrophe of Life expectation of the worst, anticipation of the worst, almost a wish and call for the worst, so this tragedy of life may be stopped at last and everything return to the peace and beatific immobility of dust. He discovers how diseases break out, matter decays, substance ages the great difficulty of living, the contraction onto self, the suffocation inside, the hardening of all the little arteries through which a drop of all-curing harmony might have seeped in. He hears his fill of petty whining, small grudges, matter's wounded negations, and above all above all its despairing leitmotif: This is impossible, that is impossible.... For matter, everything is impossible, because the only sure possibility is the inviolable immobility of the stone. Because all movement of life and hope is still a stirring of death. And it shuts the door, turns off the light, refuses the miracle we all refuse the miracle. We are firmly seated atop our cancer, the doubters of the great immortal Harmony, the dwarves of the earth who believe in pain, believe in disease, believe in suffering, believe in death: This is impossible, impossible, impossible....
So the seeker learns of Harmony. He learns it step by step, by trial and error, tiny little errors that sow disease and confusion. At this stage, the experience no longer takes place in the intellect or heart; it takes place in the body. There is a minute play of sensations, as fleeting as must have been the first quiver of the radiolarian under the temperature changes in the Gulf Stream, and as laden with physical consequences as a storm over the lovely wheat fields of the mind or a typhoon over the murky seas of the vital. We are so dense and blind on our higher levels that we need to be hit over the head to understand that the man in front of us is angry and that murder is lurking in those eyes so transparent. But matter is refined; the more we experience it, the more we discover its incredible receptivity, working in both directions, alas. A hundred times or a thousand times, the seeker is confronted with those microtyphoons, those minute whirlwinds that abruptly overturn the whole equilibrium of the being, becloud everything, give a taste of ashes and despair to the slightest gesture, decompose the air he breathes and decompose everything an instantaneous general decomposition for one second, ten seconds. A hardening of everything. The seeker is suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue; he sees illness coming and it is indeed coming straight at him. Which illness? The Illness. And just behind, lying in wait, death. In one second, ten seconds, one goes straight to the point; one touches the thing. It is right there, irrefutable: the whole mechanism out in the open, like a sudden call of death. Yet, outside, everything is the same. The circumstances are the same, the gestures the same; the sun still shines and the body comes and goes as usual. But everything is changed. It is a flash-death, an instantaneous cholera. Then it vanishes, dissipates like a cloud, one hardly knows why. But if one gives in, one truly falls ill, breaks a leg or has a real accident. And the seeker starts learning the reason for those minuscule reversals of equilibrium. He tracks down a minuscule hell, which is perhaps the first seed of the great million-faced Evil, the first hardening of death's great blissful petrification. Everything is contained there, in a black spark. But the day we catch hold of that tiny poisonous vibration, we will have the secret of immortality, or at least that of the prolongation of life at will. We die because we give in, and we give in in thousands of little instances. The choice between death and immortality must be made again at every instant.
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
in the Veda and Upanishads a petty thing to be overpassed and
abandoned? and should we not reach towards the utter Ineffable
1.12 - Love The Creator, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
But if this were all it did, it would only give a greater scope to its egoism; the egoism itself must yield and at every point where this is done, the being, whatever be its limits, touches the absolute. However petty, obscure, inconscient it be, it so enters into contact with the divine; if egoism opens even one of its doors, that is enough for a power of love to arise out of the Absolute. For this love which is so patient and passive in the being is yet the very activity of the Eternal.
If it were not so the being could abolish all its limits and become conscious of the Absolute within it and yet in the world of relativities nothing more divine would appear.
1.12 - ON THE FLIES OF THE MARKETPLACE, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
They think a lot about you with their petty soulsyou always seem problematic to them. Everything that
one thinks about a lot becomes problematic.
--
their petty souls think, "Guilt is every great existence."
Even when you are gentle to them they still feel
1.12 - The Divine Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
small to man's imagination or great, petty in scope or wide, can
be equally used in the progress towards liberation or for selfdiscipline. This much is also true that after liberation a man
--
and petty rule and every noble heart would reject it to follow
rather the divine vow of Amitabha Buddha, the sublime prayer
1.12 - The Sociology of Superman, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
In itself, this change of power would not be enough to change the world if it were confined to only a few individuals. Actually, from the very beginning, from the very first steps, the seeker has realized that this yoga of the superman was not an individual yoga, though the individual is the starting point and instrument of the work, but a collective yoga, a form of concentrated evolution in which the individual is but an outpost, the spreader of the possibility, the embodier and transmitter of the new vibration. It is a yoga of the earth. What difference would a glorious superman make, sitting all alone on his vain throne of harmony? Although we suppose that the first primates which unknowingly did the yoga of the mind must not have been legion; and yet the mental possibility did spread from one to another. It was there, in the air, pressing upon the old simian structures. Similarly, the superman possibility is there, in the air. Its time has come. It is liberally hammering at human consciousnesses and countries men are unknowingly and unwittingly doing the yoga of the superman. This is not a theory we are advancing but an evolutionary fact, whether we like it or not. Only, the main difference between the premental era and ours is that human consciousness, however closed, stubborn, obscure and petty, have become capable of perceiving the direction of their own evolution and hence of accelerating and lending themselves to the process. That was the sole real purpose of the mental era: to lead us irresistibly to the point where we had to pass into something else, all together, by the very development of our consciousness and the very force that each of us and each country had accumulated in a little individual bubble. And the new level of integration will prove to us that the superman is not a denial of man but his fulfillment, not a denial of the mind but its rightful placement among the many tools, known and unknown, that man must use until the day he enters into possession of the direct power of Truth.
This understanding of the great Goal or rather of the next goal, for the development is infinite is one of the keys to collective realization. It takes only a little crack in the human consciousness, a tiny call for air, a very small prayer, one day, without reason, for the new Possibility to rush in and change our whole way of seeing and doing things. It does not expect great efforts or arduous discipline, as we have said; it awaits a moment of abandon, a tiny little cry inside, a little flame that awakens. And once men a few men have tasted that wine, they will never be able to go back to the old routine of suffering.
--
It is therefore probable that for a long time this City under construction will be a place where negative possibilities will be exacerbated as much as the positive ones, under the relentless pressure of the beacon of Truth. And falsehood is skilled at holding on to insignificant details, resistance at sticking to everyday trifles, which become the very sign of refusal. Falsehood knows how to make great sacrifices. It can follow a discipline, extol an ideal, collect merit badges and Brownie points, but it betrays itself in the insignificant that is its last refuge. It is really in matter that the game is played out. This City of the Future is a battlefield, a difficult adventure. What is decided over there with machine guns, guerrilla warfare and glorious deeds is decided here with sordid details and an invisible warfare against falsehood. But a single victory won over petty human egoism is more pregnant with consequences for the earth than the rearranging of all the frontiers of Asia, for this frontier and this egoism are the original barbed wire that divides the world.
For that matter, the apprentice superman could begin his battle very early, not just in himself but in his children, and not just from their birth but right from their conception.
1.13 - BOOK THE THIRTEENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
If on such petty merits you confer
So vast a prize, let each his portion share;
1.13 - The Lord of the Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nature, the impersonal and infinite in life, the impersonal and infinite in his own subjectivity, the less he is bound by his ego and by the circle of the finite, the more he feels a sense of largeness, peace, pure happiness. The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which the finite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, is transitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-sense and its finite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to find this world for ever full of transience and suffering, anityam asukham; the finite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity for this fundamental reason that the finite is not the whole or the highest truth of life; life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite. It is for this reason that the Gita opens its gospel of works by insisting on the Brahmic consciousness, the impersonal life, that great object of the discipline of the ancient sages. For the impersonal, the infinite, the One in which all
The Lord of the Sacrifice
1.15 - The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Lord of all existences"; and we have to read in the light of these ideas this passage we find before us and its declaration that by the knowledge of his divine birth and divine works men come to the Divine and by becoming full of him and even as he and taking refuge in him they arrive at his nature and status of being, madbhavam. For then we shall understand the divine birth and its object, not as an isolated and miraculous phenomenon, but in its proper place in the whole scheme of the world-manifestation; without that we cannot arrive at its divine mystery, but shall either scout it altogether or accept it ignorantly and, it may be, superstitiously or fall into the petty and superficial ideas of the
150
1.15 - The Worship of the Oak, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
reflects the pretensions of a whole class of petty sovereigns who
reigned of old, each over his little canton, in the oak-clad
1.16 - Dianus and Diana, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
champaign country around was still parcelled out among the petty
tribes who composed the Latin League, the sacred grove is known to
1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the Inconscient, if a mask, is an effective mask of the Spirit; it imposes on the evolving life and soul the law of a difficult emergence. Life and consciousness, no less than Matter, obey in their first appearance the law of fragmentation. Life organises itself physically round the plasm, the cell, psychologically round the small separative fragmentary ego. Consciousness itself has to concentrate its small beginnings in a poor surface formation and hide behind the veil of this limited surface existence the depths and infinities of its own being. It has to grow slowly in an external formulation till it is ready to break the crust between this petty outer figure of ourselves, which we think to be the whole, and the concealed self within us. Even the spiritual being seems to obey this law of fragmentation and manifest as a unit in the whole a spark of itself that evolves into an individual psyche. It is this little ego, this fragmented consciousness, this concealed soul-spark on which is imposed the task of meeting and striving with the forces of the universe, entering into contact with all that seems to it not itself, increasing under the pressure of inner and outer Nature till it can become one with all existence. It has to grow into self-knowledge and world-knowledge, to get within itself and discover that it is a spiritual being, to get outside of itself and discover its larger truth as the cosmic Individual, to get beyond itself and know and live in some supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. For this immense task it is equipped only with the instruments of its original Ignorance. Its limited being is the cause of all the difficulty, discord, struggle, division that mars life. The limitation of its consciousness, unable to dominate or assimilate the contacts of the universal Energy, is the cause of all its suffering, pain and sorrow. Its limited power of consciousness formulated in an ignorant will unable to grasp or follow the right law of its life and action is the cause of all its error, wrongdoing and evil. There is no other true cause; for all apparent causes are themselves circumstance and result of this original sin of the being. Only when it rises and widens out of this limited separative consciousness into the oneness of the liberated Spirit, can it escape from these results of its growth out of the Inconscience.
If we see this as the truth behind Life, we can understand at once why it has had to follow its present curve of ignorant self-formulation. But also we see what through it all it is obscurely seeking, trying to grasp and form, feeling out for in its own higher impulses and deepest motives, and why these are in ituseless, perturbing and chimerical if it were only an animal product of inconscient Nature,these urgings towards self-discovery, mastery, unity, freedom from its lower self, spiritual release. Evolving out of its first involved condition in Matter and in plant life, effecting a first imperfect organised consciousness in the animal it arrives in man, the mental being, at the possibility of a new, a conscious evolution which will bring it to its goal and at a certain stage of his development it wakes in him the overmastering impulse to pass on from mental to spiritual being. Life cannot arrive at its secret ultimates by following its first infrarational motive forces of instinct and desire; for all here is a groping and seeking without finding, a field of brief satisfactions stamped with the Inconscients seal of insufficiency and impermanence. But neither can human reason give it what it searches after; for reason can only establish half-lights and a provisional order. Therefore with man as he is the upward urge in life cannot rest satisfied always; its evolutionary impulse cannot stop short at this transitional term, this half-achievement. It has to aim at a higher scale of consciousness, deliver out of life and mind something that is still latent and inchoate.
1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Until now, however, hardly anything except our soul has been immortal, because it is the truth of the Spirit within us, passing from one life to the next, growing, evolving, becoming more and more conscious. The mind, too, as it becomes sufficiently integrated around the central Truth of our being, as it thinks the Truth and wants the Truth, is immortal. One can fairly easily remember one's past formations: some truths appear exceedingly familiar, some yearnings for truth inexplicably poignant. The vital also is capable of immortality as it becomes sufficiently integrated with the central psychic Truth: we emerge into another dimension, as familiar as eternity, though this is rather uncommon since our life-force is generally engrossed in all kinds of petty activities instead of building a true life. The more we go down the scale of consciousness, the thicker the falsehood and the more real is death naturally, because in essence falsehood means decay. The vital is already fairly obscure, but the body is full of falsehood. Old age and illnesses are among its most prominent falsehoods; how could what is True become old, ugly,
worn-out, or ill? Truth is so obviously radiant, beautiful, luminous,
--
they reached not an end." But Agastya was not easily discouraged; his reply is magnificently characteristic of the conquerors these rishis indeed were: "Not in vain is the labour which the gods protect. Let us have the taste of even all the contesting forces, let us conquer indeed even here, let us run this battle-race of a hundred leadings." (I.179) To be sure, it is a hydra. Night after night, in his sleep or with his eyes wide open, the seeker uncovers very strange worlds. One after another, he unearths all the birthplaces of human perversion, human wars, human concentration camps, where everything we live here is being prepared; he catches in their dens all the sordid forces that move the petty and cruel men.
A lone discoverer in these menacing realms Guarded like termite cities from the sun.376
--
but from that very share of human illness one has the courage to acknowledge and to take upon oneself. In any case, the illness undeniably exists, only one person closes his eyes to it and escapes into ecstasy, while the other person rolls up his sleeves and gets to work with his test tubes. When an older disciple once bitterly complained about the odd human mixture in the Ashram and all those "impossible" individuals who were in it, Sri Aurobindo replied: It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Ashram which is a "laboratory" . . . for a spiritual and supramental yoga, humanity should be variously represented. For the problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements favourable and unfavorable. The element favourable carries in him a mixture of these two things. If only sattwic [virtuous] and cultured men come for yoga, men without very much of the vital difficulty in them, then, because the difficulty of the vital element in terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well be that the endeavour would fail. 382 In a moment of remorse, another disciple wrote to Sri Aurobindo, "What disciples we are! . . . You should have chosen or called some better stuff perhaps somebody like Z." Sri Aurobindo replied: As to the disciple, I agree! Yes, but would the better stuff, supposing it to exist, be typical of humanity? To deal with a few exceptional types would hardly solve the problem. And would they consent to follow my path that is another question. And if they were put to the test, would not the common humanity suddenly reveal itself that is still another question.383 I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, empty of petty egoism,
who will be instruments of God.384
--
O petty adventurers in an infinite world And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
1.201 - Socrates, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
not become petty and small-minded through this kind of servitude.
Instead he will turn towards the vast sea of the beautiful and while contemplating it he will give birth to many beautiful, indeed magnificent, discourses and thoughts in a boundless love of wisdom until there, streng thened and invigorated, he discerns a unique kind of knowledge, which is knowledge of a beauty whose nature I will now describe. And please try to pay attention as closely as you can, she went on.
1.20 - Equality and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
vanity of the world's differences and distinctions, the superiority of the inner calm, peace, light, self-dependence. It is an equality of philosophic indifference; it brings a high calm, but not the greater spiritual joy; it is an isolated freedom, a wisdom like that of the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the cliff-top whence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuous waters from which he has escaped, - in the end something after all aloof and ineffective. The Gita admits the philosophic motive of indifference as a preliminary movement; but the indifference to which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate word can be at all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. It is indeed a position as of one seated above, udasnavat, but as the Divine is seated above, having no need at all in the world, yet he does works always and is present everywhere supporting, helping, guiding the labour of creatures. This equality is founded upon oneness with all beings. It brings in what is wanting to the philosophic equality; for its soul is the soul of peace, but also it is the soul of love. It sees all beings without exception in the Divine, it is one self with the Self of all existences and therefore it is in supreme sympathy with all of them. Without exception, ases.en.a, not only with all that is good and fair and pleases; nothing and no one, however vile, fallen, criminal, repellent in appearance, can be excluded from this universal, this whole-souled sympathy and spiritual oneness. Here there is no room, not merely for hatred or anger or uncharitableness, but for aloofness, disdain or any petty pride of superiority. A divine compassion for the ignorance of the struggling mind, a divine will to pour forth on it all light and power and happiness there will be, indeed, for the apparent man; but for the divine Soul within him there will be more, there will be adoration and love. For from all, from the thief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the saint and the sage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, "This is I." "He who loves Me in all beings," - what greater word of power for the utmost intensities and profundities of divine and universal love, has been uttered by any philosophy or any religion?
Resignation is the basis of a kind of religious equality, submission to the divine will, a patient bearing of the cross, a
1.22 - ON THE GIFT-GIVING VIRTUE, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
concerned about petty evil, but great things are possible
only where great evil is harnessed.
1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
by a petty chief with his own sacred name. Yet there are tribes and
people who submit to this tyranny of words as their fathers did
1.31 - Adonis in Cyprus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
was Paphos on the south-western side of the island. Among the petty
kingdoms into which Cyprus was divided from the earliest times until
1.32 - Expounds these words of the Paternoster Fiat voluntas tua sicut in coelo et in terra. Describes how much is accomplished by those who repeat these words with full resolution and how well, #The Way of Perfection, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
and raise us above all petty earthly things, and above ourselves, in order to prepare us to receive
great favours from Him, for His rewards for our service will not end with this life. So much does
1.3.4.01 - The Beginning and the End, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
God is all existence. Existence is a representation of ineffable Being. Being is neither eternal nor temporary, neither infinite nor limited, neither one nor many; it is nothing that any word of our speech can describe nor any thought of our mentality can conceive. The word existence unduly limits it; eternity & infinity are too petty conceptions; the term Being is an x representing not an unknown but an unknowable value.
All values proceed from the Brahman, but it is itself beyond all values.
1.3.4.02 - The Hour of God, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
power of the Breath by thy petty instruments, but trust and go forward.
But most keep thy soul clear, even if for a while, of the clamour of the ego. Then shall a fire march before thee in the night and the storm be thy helper and thy flag shall wave on the highest height of the greatness that was to be conquered.
1.34 - Continues the same subject. This is very suitable for reading after the reception of the Most Holy Sacrament., #The Way of Perfection, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
to enjoy these things while here on earth: would He, then, have us trouble about so petty a matter
as praying for food? As if He did not know that, once we begin to worry about the needs of the
1.3.5.02 - Man and the Supermind, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He is a narrowness that reaches towards ungrasped widenesses, a littleness straining towards grandeurs which are beyond him, a dwarf enamoured of the heights. His mind is a darkened ray in the splendours of the universal Mind. His life is a striving exulting and suffering wave, an eager passion-tossed and sorrow-stricken or a blindly and dully toiling petty moment of the universal Life. His body is a labouring perishable speck in the material universe. An immortal soul is somewhere hidden within him and gives out from time to time some sparks of its presence, and an eternal spirit is above and overshadows with its wings and upholds with its power this soul continuity in his nature. But that greater spirit is obstructed from descent by the hard lid of his constructed personality and this inner radiant soul is wrapped, stifled and oppressed in dense outer coatings. In all but a few it is seldom active, in many hardly perceptible. The soul and spirit in man seem rather to exist above and behind his formed nature than to be a part of its visible reality; subliminal in his inner being or superconscient above in some unreached status, they are in his outer consciousness possibilities rather than things realised and present. The spirit is in course of birth rather than born in Matter.
This imperfect being with his hampered, confused, illordered and mostly ineffective consciousness cannot be the end and highest height of the mysterious upward surge of Nature.
1.44 - Demeter and Persephone, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
was still a petty independent state, and before the stately
procession of the Mysteries had begun to defile, in bright September
15.08 - Ashram - Inner and Outer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I will tell you a story today, but of another kind. I will tell you of a dream, or a vision that I had sometime ago. It was an ashram, I say an ashram for it was not quite like our ashram although there was a great similarity between the two. In some respects it was like our ashram and in other respects somewhat unlike. First of all the whole ashram was in one place, a consolidated organisation, not houses here and there scattered about: there were no buildings or houses belonging to other people or other organisations, also the buildings were beautiful to look at and the general lay-out artistic, but all the activities we have were there. The school was there, the playground was there, the library also, but all in an orderly arrangement. The Mother was also there, she was going from place to place, observing all and speaking to people. Among the people, curiously, some I seemed to recognise, some of those even who are here now, there were many strangers from other countries, a good many of them. Regarding those who are here now and whom I seemed to recognise there also, the impression is rather vague and I cannot name them. But some of those who were here and passed away I recognised very well, they had almost the same face and features but in a new, fresh and younger form. They were active and handsome young men, young women I remember Sri Aurobindo quoting from the Rigveda: The Vedic Rishi speaks of a happy herd of cows grazing in green fields; the Rishi adds: even those among them that were old have become young now. The cow represented for the Rishi the light, the sun's ray, the purity of consciousness. Perhaps the image came from the actual life of the Rishis of that time, the cattle they reared, the domestic animals about them, the natural scenery around them, and all that was an important part of their ordinary daily life. A whole herd of cattle all white is a beautiful picture. Even so there was something in the atmosphere of the ashram which gave it a special quality, it was clear pure, limpid and transparent, there was a strange luminosity in it, and it was a very happy atmosphere. While you are there, you feel free and at ease and there were no petty feelings that we have here in the normal life of the world, no anger, no jealousy, no selfishness, no ugliness: there was a happy coordination of all persons and things.
My feeling is that this ashram that I saw was in fact the inner reality of our ashram here, that inner ashram which is within us all; what we see at present is the outer form, the material form which is a good deal deformed and even falsified in many ways. Indeed that inner ashram has an other worldly atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere of rarefied heights. I have told you very often that those who are here are fortunate, they brea the this atmosphere and in spite of their faults and foibles, and no matter what they do, they are in contact with something of the inner beauty and fragrance. I do not know whether you have heard what Mother said more than once, that all the children here, when they live here for sometime, imbibe and carry a new atmosphere. And she could recognise a person from a distance, even from a great distance, not by his face or physical features but by the atmosphere he carried that he belonged to the ashram, very different from the atmosphere an outsider normally carries. It is an atmosphere or aura made of happiness and purity and luminosity. All the ashram children are surrounded by it because it is Mother's own atmosphere. Therefore in these days, she used to say, these children should not go out into the outside world even in their holidays, because, when they go out, she said, she had seen it, they lose this ashram atmosphere and when they come back, they are coated with a thick layer of the mud of the ordinary world, and it took her a lot of time and trouble to rub and scrub and clean the dross upon the body, to made it shine as before. You may remember here in this connection a Ramakrishna story about the sinners who went to the Ganges for a bath to purify themselves; they leave their sins on the shore or the sins leave them as they get into the Ganges water, but the sins wait for them there on the bank and as soon as they come back purified of their sins, the sins lying in wait jump on them again and the sinners remain always sinners. Here naturally you are not destined to remain sinners always.
1.56 - The Public Expulsion of Evils, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
as petty larceny, fighting, and assault, escaped with impunity; only
treason and murder were taken account of and the malefactors
1.70 - Morality 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
In the lands of Hinduism and (to a less extent) of Islam, the Sultan, the Dewan, the Maharajah, the Emir, or whatsoever they call "the Grand Pandjandrum Himself, with the little round button on top," it is almost a 100 per cent rule that the button works loose and is lost! Even in less exalted circles, any absolute ruler, on however petty a scale, is liable to go the whole hog in an unexceptionably hoggish fashion. He has none to gainsay him, and he sees no reason for controlling himself. This suits nearly everybody pretty well; the shrewd Wazir can govern while his "master" fills up on "The King's Peg" (we must try one when champagne is once again reasonably cheap) and all the other sensuous and sensual delights unstinted. The result is that by the time he is twenty he was probably married at 12 he is no longer fitted to carry out his very first duty to the State, the production of an heir.
Quite contrary to this is the career of the "Holy Man." Accustomed to the severest physical toil, inured to all the rigours of climate, aloof from every noxious excess, he becomes a very champion of virility. (Of course, there are exceptions, but the average "holy man" is a fairly tall fellow of his hands). More, he has been particularly trained for this form of asceticism by all sorts of secret methods and practices; some of these, by the way, I was able to learn myself, and found surprisingly efficacious.
1913 11 28p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
[O Divine Master, grant that today may bring to us a completer consecration to Thy Will, a more integral gift of ourselves to Thy work, a more total forgetfulness of self, a greater illumination, a purer love. Grant that in a communion growing ever deeper, more constant and entire, we may be united always more and more closely to Thee and become Thy servitors worthy of Thee. Remove from us all egoism, root out all petty vanity, greed and obscurity. May we be all ablaze with Thy divine Love; make us Thy torches in the world.]1
A silent hymn of praise rises from my heart like the white smoke of incense of the perfumes of the East.
1914 03 10p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the silence of the night Thy Peace reigned over all things, in the silence of my heart Thy Peace reigns always; and when these two silences were united, Thy Peace was so powerful that no disturbance of any kind could resist it. Then I thought of all those who were watching over the boat to safeguard and protect our course, and in gratefulness I wanted to make Thy Peace spring up and live in their hearts; then I thought of all those who, confident and free from care, slept the sleep of inconscience, and with solicitude for their miseries, pity for their latent suffering which would arise in them when they awoke, I wanted that a little of Thy Peace might live in their hearts and awaken in them the life of the spirit, the light that dispels ignorance. Then I thought of all the inhabitants of this vast sea, both visible and invisible, and I willed that Thy Peace might spread over them. Then I thought of those we had left far behind and whose affection goes with us, and with a great tenderness I wanted Thy conscious and lasting Peace for them, the plenitude of Thy Peace as far as they could receive it. Then I thought of all those towards whom we are going, who are troubled by childish preoccupations and fight in ignorance and egoism for petty rivalries of interest; and ardently, in a great aspiration, I asked for them the full light of Thy Peace. Then I thought of all those we know, all those we do not know, all the life in the making, all that has changed its form, all that is not yet in form, and for all these, even as for all that I cannot think about, for all that is present to my memory and for all that I forget, in a deep contemplation and mute adoration I implored Thy Peace.
***
1916 12 08p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thou didst wake up the vital being with the magic wand of Thy impulsion and say to it: Awake, bend the bow of thy will, for soon the hour of action will come. Suddenly awakened, the vital being rose up, stretched itself and shook off the dust of its long torpidity; from the elasticity of its members it realised that it was still vigorous and fit for action. And with an ardent faith it answered the sovereign call: Here I am, what dost Thou want of me, O Lord? But before another word could be pronounced, the mind intervened in its turn and, having bowed down to the Master as a mark of obedience, spoke to him thus: Thou knowest, O Lord, that I am surrendered to Thee and that I try my best to be a faithful and pure intermediary of Thy supreme Will. But when I turn my gaze to the earth, I see that however great men may be, their field of action is always terribly restricted. A man, who in his mind and even in his vital being is as vast as the universe or at least as vast as the earth, as soon as he begins to act, becomes enclosed in the narrow bounds of a material action, very limited in its field and results. Whether he be the founder of a religion or a political reformer, he who acts becomes a petty little stone in the general edifice, a grain of sand in the immense dune of human activities. So I do not see any realisable action worthy of the whole beings concentrating on it and making it its purpose of existence. The vital being delights in adventure; but should it be allowed to fling itself into some lamentable adventure unworthy of an instrument conscious of Thy Presence?Fear nothing, was the reply. The vital being will not be allowed to set itself in motion, it will not be asked of thee to contri bute all the effort of thy organising faculties, except when the action proposed is vast and complete enough to fully and usefully employ all the qualities of the being. What exactly this action will be, thou wilt know when it comes to thee. But I am warning thee even now so that thou mayst be prepared not to reject it. I also warn both thee and the vital being that the time for the small, quiet, uniform and peaceful life will be over. There will be effort, danger, the unforeseen, insecurity, but also intensity. Thou wert made for this role. After having accepted for long years to forget it completely, because the time had not come and thou too wert not ready, wake up now to the consciousness that this is indeed thy true role, that it was for this thou wert created.
The vital being was the first to awake to consciousness and, with the enthusiasm natural to it, exclaimed: I am ready, O Lord, Thou mayst rely upon me! The mind, weaker and more timid, though more docile too, added: What Thou willest, I will. Thou knowest well, O Lord, that I belong entirely to Thee. But shall I be able to prove equal to the task, shall I have the power of organising what the vital being has the capacity to realise?It is to prepare thee for this that I am working at the moment; this is why thou art undergoing a discipline of plasticity and enrichment. Do not worry about anything: power comes with the need. Not because thou hast been confined, even as the vital being, to very small activities at a time when this was useful, to allow things which had to be prepared the time for preparationnot because of this, I say, art thou incapable of living outside these smallnesses in a field of action consonant with thy true stature. I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not only invisibly, in a hidden way, but also openly before the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou wilt be.
1916 12 12p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My mind was worried about being so constantly turned towards such petty things, moving in so narrow a circle of practical and immediate thoughts.
It has learned to see Thee in everything, Lord, and in the least thing it is aware of Thee and rejoices in Thee. But even while delighting in Thee thus and recognising Thee in the most futile things and activities as well as in the vastest and noblest, it wonders why these prevail over the others. Many a time during these last months has it tried to react against this tendency but always in vain; is it because Thou findest it well thus, or because it is incapable of being otherwise? It put the question to Thee, and as always Thy smile came to comfort it; but the precise answer has not made itself heard.
--- Overview of noun petty
The noun petty has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. petit larceny, petty larceny, petty ::: (larceny of property having a value less than some amount (the amount varies by locale))
--- Overview of adj petty
The adj petty has 3 senses (no senses from tagged texts)
1. junior-grade, lower-ranking, lowly, petty, secondary, subaltern ::: (inferior in rank or status; "the junior faculty"; "a lowly corporal"; "petty officialdom"; "a subordinate functionary")
2. fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial ::: ((informal) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction")
3. petty, small-minded ::: (contemptibly narrow in outlook; "petty little comments"; "disgusted with their small-minded pettiness")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun petty
1 sense of petty
Sense 1
petit larceny, petty larceny, petty
=> larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing
=> felony
=> crime, offense, criminal offense, criminal offence, offence, law-breaking
=> transgression, evildoing
=> wrongdoing, wrongful conduct, misconduct, actus reus
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun petty
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun petty
1 sense of petty
Sense 1
petit larceny, petty larceny, petty
=> larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing
--- Similarity of adj petty
3 senses of petty
Sense 1
junior-grade, lower-ranking, lowly, petty(prenominal), secondary, subaltern
=> junior (vs. senior)
Sense 2
fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial
=> unimportant (vs. important)
Sense 3
petty, small-minded
=> narrow-minded (vs. broad-minded), narrow
--- Antonyms of adj petty
3 senses of petty
Sense 1
junior-grade, lower-ranking, lowly, petty(prenominal), secondary, subaltern
INDIRECT (VIA junior) -> senior
Sense 2
fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial
INDIRECT (VIA unimportant) -> important, of import
Sense 3
petty, small-minded
INDIRECT (VIA narrow-minded) -> broad-minded
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun petty
1 sense of petty
Sense 1
petit larceny, petty larceny, petty
-> larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing
=> breach of trust with fraudulent intent
=> embezzlement, peculation, defalcation, misapplication, misappropriation
=> pilferage
=> shoplifting, shrinkage
=> robbery
=> biopiracy
=> grand larceny, grand theft
=> petit larceny, petty larceny, petty
=> skimming
=> rustling
--- Pertainyms of adj petty
3 senses of petty
Sense 1
junior-grade, lower-ranking, lowly, petty(prenominal), secondary, subaltern
Sense 2
fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial
Sense 3
petty, small-minded
--- Derived Forms of adj petty
3 senses of petty
Sense 1
junior-grade, lower-ranking, lowly, petty(prenominal), secondary, subaltern
RELATED TO->(noun) pettiness#2
=> pettiness, triviality, slightness, puniness
Sense 2
fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial
RELATED TO->(noun) pettiness#3
=> pettiness, littleness, smallness
Sense 3
petty, small-minded
RELATED TO->(noun) pettiness#1
=> pettiness
--- Grep of noun petty
chief petty officer
petty
petty apartheid
petty bourgeoisie
petty cash
petty criticism
petty juror
petty jury
petty larceny
petty morel
petty officer
petty spurge
petty whin
senior chief petty officer
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/261888.Jo_Petty
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3278542.John_E_Petty
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/414190.Geoffrey_Petty
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5503.Kate_Petty
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6572346.Audrey_Petty
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Goodreads author - Heather_W_Petty
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Ladyhawke(1985) - The film is set in medieval Europe. Phillipe "The Mouse" Gaston (Matthew Broderick), a peasant thief, is imprisoned in the dungeons of Aquila and set for execution for his petty crimes - but he escapes by crawling through the prison sewers to freedom. He makes a run for it into the countryside away...
100 Proof(1997) - Based in part on an actual incident, the independent drama 100 Proof records one especially bad day in the lives of Rae (Pamela Stewart) and Carla (Tara Bellando), two tough but misused women living in a small Kentucky town. Rae and Carla get by through a combination of low-paying jobs, petty theft,...
Black Scorpion(1995) - Darcy is a cop who is also a supehero named Black Scorpion at night who kicks and beats evildoers to a pulp. She soon catches wind of an asthmatic mad scientist who plans on tainting the city's air supply with a toxin. Only Darcy in her superhero garb can stop him with the assistance of a petty thie...
The Onion Field(1979) - Greg Powell is a disturbed ex-con who recruits Jimmy Smith (aka Jimmy Youngblood), a petty thief, as his partner in crime. Powell panics one night when the two of them are pulled over by a pair of cops for broken brake-lights. Powell decides to kidnap the cops and Smith, as always, reluctantly goes...
Busting(1974) - LA cops get in over their heads when they don't heed orders from above and go after a big crime boss. While higher ups in the police department want the cop duo to just focus on nabbing petty criminals, the team does so while still going after LA kingpin Rizzo. Various fist fights, chases, shootouts...
Men of Honor(2000) - Men of Honor (released in the UK and Ireland as Men of Honour) is a 2000 drama film, starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. The film was directed by George Tillman, Jr. It is inspired by the true story of Master chief petty officer Carl Brashear, the first African American master diver in the...
Thirteen(2003) - A thirteen-year-old girl's relationship with her mother is put to the test as she discovers drugs, sex, and petty crime in the company of her cool but troubled best friend.
Solo: A Star Wars Story(2018) - Flight school flunkie and petty criminal Han Solo gets recruited by Tobias Beckett for an intergalactic mission backed by gangster Dryden Vos. He teams up with his future Wookiee co-pilot Chewbacca, his childhood friend QiRa and suave smuggler Lando Calrissian, owner of the Millenium Falcon. Thandi...
No Deposit, No Return(1976) - During school-break, two kids are to stay with their rich Grandpa but they would rather join their mother overseas, so, in need of plane-ticket cash, they convince two petty-criminals to fake-kidnap them for a ransom they could all share.
Back Roads (2018) ::: 6.5/10 -- 1h 41min | Crime, Drama, Thriller | 7 December 2018 (USA) -- In 1993, Harley's dad is shot dead and his mom goes to prison. He has to earn money and look after his 3 kid sisters. No college. Over 2 years, family secrets are slowly revealed. Will a good therapist be enough? Director: Alex Pettyfer Writers:
Gyangusuta ::: TV-MA | 24min | Animation, Action, Drama | TV Series (2015) Episode Guide 13 episodes Gyangusuta Poster In the city of Ergastulum, a shady ville filled with made men and petty thieves, whores on the make and cops on the take, there are some deeds too dirty for even its jaded inhabitants to ... S Stars: Mamiko Noto, Felecia Angelle, Jun'ichi Suwabe
Irma Vep (1996) ::: 7.0/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 39min | Comedy, Drama | 30 April 1997 (USA) -- A Chinese movie actress, in France to star in a remake of "Les Vampires", finds petty intrigues and clashing egos on the set. Director: Olivier Assayas Writer: Olivier Assayas
Jason's Lyric (1994) ::: 6.6/10 -- R | 1h 59min | Crime, Drama, Romance | 28 September 1994 (USA) -- Two brothers, survivors of family tragedy, take different life paths: one falls for a high-spirited waitress and dreams of success, the other follows a life of petty crime. Their lives reconnect in shattering fashion. Director: Doug McHenry Writer:
Jesus' Son (1999) ::: 6.9/10 -- R | 1h 47min | Drama | 7 July 2000 (USA) -- A young man turns from drug addiction and petty crime to a life redeemed by a discovery of compassion. Director: Alison Maclean
Jesus' Son (1999) ::: 6.9/10 -- R | 1h 47min | Drama | 7 July 2000 (USA) -- A young man turns from drug addiction and petty crime to a life redeemed by a discovery of compassion. Director: Alison Maclean Writers: Denis Johnson (book), Elizabeth Cuthrell (screenplay) | 2 more credits Stars:
Kagemusha (1980) ::: 8.0/10 -- PG | 2h 42min | Drama, History, War | 10 October 1980 (USA) -- A petty thief with an utter resemblance to a samurai warlord is hired as the lord's double. When the warlord later dies the thief is forced to take up arms in his place. Director: Akira Kurosawa Writers:
Night Nurse (1931) ::: 7.0/10 -- Passed | 1h 12min | Comedy, Crime, Drama | 8 August 1931 (USA) -- A nurse enlists the help of a petty criminal to foil a sinister plot to murder two children. Director: William A. Wellman Writers: Grace Perkins (from the novel by) (as Dora Macy), Oliver H.P. Garrett
Oliver & Company (1988) ::: 6.7/10 -- G | 1h 14min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy | 18 November 1988 (USA) -- A lost and alone kitten joins a gang of dogs engaged in petty larceny in New York City. Director: George Scribner Writers: Jim Cox (animation screenplay), Tim Disney (animation screenplay) (as
Sword Art Online Abridged ::: TV-MA | Animation, Action, Comedy | TV Series (2013- ) Episode Guide 15 episodes Sword Art Online Abridged Poster Non-official parody of the popular anime Sword Art Online. Creators: Matthew J. Kok, Mackenzie Murdock, Jon Swinnard Stars: Matthew J. Kok, Carrie Johnston, Cole Petty
The 400 Blows (1959) ::: 8.1/10 -- Les quatre cents coups (original title) -- The 400 Blows Poster -- A young boy, left without attention, delves into a life of petty crime. Director: Franois Truffaut Writers: Franois Truffaut (scenario), Marcel Moussy (adaptation) (as M. Moussy)
The Brain (1969) ::: 6.9/10 -- Le cerveau (original title) -- The Brain Poster -- When NATO transfers some of its funds from Paris to Brussels by train, a criminal mastermind posing as a British colonel plans to steal it but two petty French thieves also have the same intent. Director: Grard Oury Writers:
The Poker House (2008) ::: 6.4/10 -- R | 1h 33min | Drama | 2008 (USA) -- A dramatization of Lori Petty's teenage years spent in small town Iowa. Director: Lori Petty Writers: Lori Petty (screenplay), David Alan Grier (screenplay) | 1 more credit
Thirteen (2003) ::: 6.8/10 -- R | 1h 40min | Drama | 19 September 2003 (USA) -- A thirteen-year-old girl's relationship with her mother is put to the test as she discovers drugs, sex, and petty crime in the company of her cool but troubled best friend. Director: Catherine Hardwicke Writers:
Time of the Gypsies (1988) ::: 8.2/10 -- Dom za vesanje (original title) -- Time of the Gypsies Poster In this luminous tale set in the area around Sarajevo and in Italy, Perhan, an engaging young Romany (gypsy) with telekinetic powers, is seduced by the quick-cash world of petty crime, which threatens to destroy him and those he loves. Director: Emir Kusturica Writers: Emir Kusturica, Gordan Mihic
Trailer Park Boys (1999) ::: 7.9/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 7min | Comedy | 15 July 1999 (Canada) -- Two petty felons have a documentary made about their life in a trailer park. Director: Mike Clattenburg Writers: Mike Clattenburg, John Paul Tremblay | 1 more credit Stars:
Wanda (1970) ::: 7.1/10 -- GP | 1h 42min | Crime, Drama | 14 January 1971 (UK) -- Wanda, a lonely housewife, drifts through mining country until she meets a petty thief who takes her in. Director: Barbara Loden Writer: Barbara Loden Stars:
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Gungrave -- -- Madhouse -- 26 eps -- Game -- Action Drama Sci-Fi Seinen Super Power -- Gungrave Gungrave -- Brandon Heat and Harry MacDowel, two friends so close they could be called brothers, receive an abrupt and violent reminder one fateful day of how appallingly merciless the world around them can be. Their whole lives before then were simple and easygoing, consisting largely of local brawls, seducing women, and committing petty theft to make a living and pass the time. What they failed to realize is that in this cruel world, happiness is fleeting, and change is inevitable. -- -- Enter Millennion, the largest and most infamous mafia syndicate in the area, which accepts Brandon and Harry into their ranks and starts them at the bottom of the food chain. Harry has ambitions to ascend the ranks and one day replace Big Daddy as the supreme leader of Millennion, while Brandon only wishes to support his friend and appease Big Daddy who has taken custody of the woman Brandon loves. -- -- Based off the third-person shooter video game under the same name, Gungrave is an epic story of friendship, betrayal, and avarice that spans the course of several years, ultimately tying back to the gripping and foreboding first episode, all the while building up to the story's thrilling conclusion. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation, Geneon Entertainment USA -- TV - Oct 7, 2003 -- 157,169 7.86
Katanagatari -- -- White Fox -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Adventure Historical Martial Arts Romance -- Katanagatari Katanagatari -- In an Edo-era Japan lush with a variety of sword-fighting styles, Shichika Yasuri practices the most unique one: Kyotouryuu, a technique in which the user's own body is wielded as a blade. The enigmatic seventh head of the Kyotouryuu school, Shichika lives quietly in exile with his sister Nanami until one day—the wildly ambitious strategist Togame barges into their lives. -- -- Togame brazenly requests that Shichika help in her mission to collect twelve unique swords, known as the "Deviant Blades," for the shogunate. Shichika accepts, interested in the girl herself rather than petty politics, and thus sets out on a journey. Standing in their way are the fierce wielders of these legendary weapons as well as other power-hungry entities who seek to thwart Togame's objective. In order to prevail against their enemies, the duo must become an unbreakable team as they forge ahead on a path of uncertainty and peril. -- -- -- Licensor: -- NIS America, Inc. -- 457,873 8.36
No Game No Life -- -- Madhouse -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Game Adventure Comedy Supernatural Ecchi Fantasy -- No Game No Life No Game No Life -- No Game No Life is a surreal comedy that follows Sora and Shiro, shut-in NEET siblings and the online gamer duo behind the legendary username "Blank." They view the real world as just another lousy game; however, a strange e-mail challenging them to a chess match changes everything—the brother and sister are plunged into an otherworldly realm where they meet Tet, the God of Games. -- -- The mysterious god welcomes Sora and Shiro to Disboard, a world where all forms of conflict—from petty squabbles to the fate of whole countries—are settled not through war, but by way of high-stake games. This system works thanks to a fundamental rule wherein each party must wager something they deem to be of equal value to the other party's wager. In this strange land where the very idea of humanity is reduced to child's play, the indifferent genius gamer duo of Sora and Shiro have finally found a real reason to keep playing games: to unite the sixteen races of Disboard, defeat Tet, and become the gods of this new, gaming-is-everything world. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 1,835,953 8.17
Qualidea Code -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Magic Supernatural -- Qualidea Code Qualidea Code -- On a quiet and peaceful day, the skies split open and extradimensional beings, designated as the Unknown, launch a swift and brutal attack against humanity. To protect the future of the country, all of Japan's children are cryogenically frozen until the end of the war to keep them out of harm's way. -- -- Several years pass, and humanity has established a foothold in a corner of Japan, which now serves as the frontline of the war. No longer facing humanity's extinction, the children are awakened from their slumber. It is then discovered that, while in cryogenesis, the children had developed Worlds, supernatural powers unique to each person. The six most powerful children are given command of the reclaimed cities, using their powers to defend the strongholds against the continuing invasion. Childhood friends Ichiya Suzaku and Canaria Utara lead Tokyo, siblings Kasumi and Asuha Chigusa manage Chiba, and Maihime Tenkawa and Hotaru Rindou oversee Kanagawa. -- -- Over time, the almost routine attacks from the Unknown and the clashing personalities of the city heads and subheads cultivate petty rivalries, leading to constant arguments between the three cities. With the Unknown suddenly increasing the pressure of their attacks, the three cities' leaders must learn how to work together or risk losing the last line of defense against humanity's extinction. -- -- 141,255 6.50
Samurai Flamenco -- -- Manglobe -- 22 eps -- Original -- Action Comedy Parody Super Power -- Samurai Flamenco Samurai Flamenco -- "A hero will never give up, never hide, never be defeated and never accept evil!" -- -- Firmly believing these words, Masayoshi Hazama has been obsessed with superhero shows since childhood. By day, he earns his living as a famous model, and by night, he becomes the gallant hero Samurai Flamenco. Armed with only his superhero costume, he seeks to bring justice to the city and faces anybody who tries to break the law—even rebellious juveniles and people who litter on the street. -- -- Masayoshi's heroic antics later catch the attention of the public, leading to the fateful discovery of his identity by policeman Hidenori Gotou. Although initially telling Masayoshi to leave the crime-busting activities to the police, Gotou ends up joining him in his antics. However, things soon escalate from preventing littering and petty thefts to bizarre adventures that involve even the fate of the world. Together with their newfound comrades, Masayoshi and Gotou embark on a battle with the world and themselves in order to find the true meaning of being a hero—with or without superpowers. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 116,563 6.90
Stranger: Mukou Hadan -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Historical Samurai -- Stranger: Mukou Hadan Stranger: Mukou Hadan -- In the Sengoku period of Japan, a young orphan named Kotarou and his dog Tobimaru steal from unsuspecting villagers in order to make ends meet. However, Kotarou is forced to remain on the run when he finds himself being hunted down by assassins sent by China's Ming Dynasty for mysterious reasons not involving his petty crimes. -- -- Fortunately, the duo run into Nanashi, a ronin who has taken refuge in a small temple, when Kotarou is attacked and Tobimaru poisoned. Although the samurai saves the helpless pair from their pursuers, he feels that there is no need to help them further; but when offered a gem in exchange for his services as a bodyguard, he reluctantly accepts Kotarou's offer of employment—just until Tobimaru is healed and the two reach their destination. As the three set out on a perilous journey, it soon becomes evident that their path is riddled with danger, as the Ming Dynasty has now sent a terrifying swordsman after them to capture Kotarou and fulfill a certain prophecy. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment, Funimation -- Movie - Sep 29, 2007 -- 267,914 8.31
102 Petty France
Adam Petty
Adam Pettyjohn
Adria Petty
Alex Pettyfer
American Girl (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
Angelique Pettyjohn
Angie Petty
Annie Florence Petty
Breakdown (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
Brian G. Pettyjohn
Bryce Petty
BusemannPetty problem
Change of Heart (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice, 7th Marquess of Lansdowne
Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice, 9th Marquess of Lansdowne
Charley Pettys
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CrawfordPettyjohn House
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Echo (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album)
Eddy Pettybourne
Elizabeth Petty, Baroness Shelburne
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First master chief petty officer
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Francis Pettygrove
George Petty
George Petty-Fitzmaurice, 8th Marquess of Lansdowne
Greatest Hits (Tom Petty album)
Harrison Petty
Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice
Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne
Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 4th Marquess of Lansdowne
Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne
Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 6th Marquess of Lansdowne
Horace Petty
I Need to Know (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
Jeremy Petty
John Petty
John Petty, 1st Earl of Shelburne
John Petty Jr.
John Petty (priest)
John Petty (primitive Methodist minister)
Joseph Petty
J. T. Petty
Keith A. Petty
Kerrin Petty
Kyle Petty
Kyle Petty's No Fear Racing
Kyle Petty Charity Ride Across America
Lead petty officer
Learning to Fly (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
List of awards and nominations received by Tom Petty
List of fictional chief petty officers
Lord Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice
Louisa Petty, Countess of Shelburne
Master chief petty officer
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Mattupetty Dam
Maud Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marchioness of Lansdowne
Maximilian Petty
Mojo (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album)
Norfolk Island Court of Petty Sessions
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Petty
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Playback (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album)
Proceedings Between Sankey and Petty
Richard E. Petty
Richard Petty
Richard Petty Motorsports
Room at the Top (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
Ross Haylett-Petty
Ross Petty
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Senior chief petty officer
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Shannon Pettypiece
Ted Petty Invitational
The Life of Sir William Petty, 16231687
The Petty Girl
The Roy Petty Show
Tom Petty
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (album)
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