Petty laws breed great crimes. [ Ouida ]
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. [ Jul. Caes ]
My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time. [ William Shakespeare ]
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. [ Emerson ]
Let each task present its petty good to thee. [ Robert Browning ]
Better abridge petty charges, than stoop to petty gettings. [ Proverb ]
To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. Temperance, courage, love, are made up of the same jewels. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
As wholesome meat corrupteth to little worms, so good forms and orders corrupt into a number of petty observances. [ Bacon ]
It hath been well said that the archflatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self. [ Bacon ]
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. [ William Shakespeare ]
The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character. [ William Matthews ]
The more we can be raised above the petty vexations and pleasures of this world into the eternal life to come, the more shall we be prepared to enter into that eternal life whenever God shall please to call us hence. [ Dean Stanley ]
Just to be good, to keep life pure from degrading elements, to make it constantly helpful in little ways to those who are touched by it, to keep one's spirit always sweet and avoid all manner of petty anger and irritability, - that is an ideal as noble as it is difficult. [ Edward Howard Griggs ]
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]