Pettiness Quotes

“Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up?”
― Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide

“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, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

“Art creates new dimensions, opens our scope, and transcends us from demeaning "pettiness" that haunts the minds of emotionally underprivileged people. ("When is Art?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If the scars of our daily reality overwhelm the beat of our life, we can at all times decide to start from square one, look up at the sky, being conscious of our pettiness, and enjoy the sparks of the stars to find the missing links. ("Man without Qualities" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“Your tears are never invisible---there is always an insecure woman that lights up when you point them out.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“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, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“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, The Visitor

“Every day, God grants us the precious gift of life. Yet every day, we squander it with our selfish, petty concerns, rather than helping someone as He helps us.”
― Kirn Hans, Behind My Mask

“Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“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, The Dream of Scipio

“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, The Volcano Lover

“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, Brother Odd

“Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Don’t believe the noise. Those mean, petty, hateful voices will never be the majority. They only seem loud and pervasive, because they have the idle time to broadcast their negativity. The rest of us are too busy with real efforts to make the world a better place.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“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, Killosophy

“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, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.”
― Dennis Lehane, The Given Day

“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

“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, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“It's taxing to consider the circumstances that can take an unmarked human canvas and make it rage-filled and petty and lost. It's not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you. But their actions can sometimes make sense: what's easier than trying to get better is trying to break something else down.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Southern themes will range from generous and luscious love to cruel and bitter hate, but no one can ever claim that the South is petty or indifferent.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“I am sure they will be very grateful.”
How would you know? I wanted to say. Often those men in most need hate most to be grateful, and will strike at you just to feel whole again.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Isn't that petty?"
"Anna, you have not yet seen pettiness. When a couple of tough guys like the general and Lugala Tsu decide to confront each other, vistas of pettiness open up that you and I can barely comprehend.”
― Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords

“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, The Lion and the Rose

“Don't let the pettiness of life prevent you from enjoying God's plenty.”
― Bernard Kelvin Clive

“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, The Name of the Rose

“I felt offended. So offended that I planned to ignore for the next few weeks the "friends" who'd sent me those pictures. (I'm very organized in my pettiness, and I like to plan ahead.)”
― Gabourey Sidibe, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare

“Mercy streams falls on the needy who shows pity to the poor..”
― Manny Godson

“Actually it is annoying to see a grown up exhibiting pettiness in a way that shows they are proud of it. Worse if they are senior government officials.”
― DON SANTO