Pettiness Quotes

The creation of man is evidence for the love of God, the preservation of man is evidence for the patience of God, and Christ is evidence for the forgiveness of God. It is when we are wrapped up in our own little peeves that we begin to displace His benevolence with malevolence.

~ Criss Jami

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

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

~ Iain Pears

You don't have to knock anyone off their game to win yours. It doesn’t build you up to tear others down.

~ Mandy Hale

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

~ Dean Koontz

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

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

~ Susan Sontag

You can't discuss the ocean with a well frog - he's limited by the space he lives in. You can't discuss ice with a summer insect - he's bound to a single season.

~ Zhuangzi

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

~ Christopher Hitchens

Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control.

~ Jung Chang

Your tears are never invisible---there is always an insecure woman that lights up when you point them out.

~ Shannon L. Alder

He was going to hurt the people he hated, but inside he didn't feel any real sense of satisfaction. He hated them all the more for having made him feel so small, so petty and mean, which was all he felt just then. But it wasn't enough to stop him.

~ Riccardo Bruni

To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is.

~ Pema Chödrön

Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up?

~ Sean Covey

More than jealousy or possessiveness pettiness kills love.

~ Marty Rubin

Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

~ Paul Fussell

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

~ Sebastian Faulks