Top 100 Lesser Quotes
#2. I will be angry until my dying day, Mr Catchpool. Greater sinners persecuting lesser sinners in the name of morality - that's something worth raging about.
Sophie Hannah
#3. Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.
Soren Kierkegaard
#4. Lucifer, how, after a dozen millennia in Hell, could you possibly lose your way?" the Devil asked incredulously. "Well," the lesser demon began, "It is a rather large place ...
Keith B. Darrell
#5. Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.
Matt Haig
#6. This is the way a person always gains courage; when he fears a greater danger, he always has the courage to face a lesser one; when he is exceedingly afraid of one danger, it is as if the others did not exist at all.
Soren Kierkegaard
#7. No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.
D.H. Lawrence
#9. A secret told is mine to tell. Of truth and lies, the lesser hell.
Sally Gardner
#10. That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.
Richard Dawkins
#11. And yet more bright
Shines out the Julian star,
As moon outglows each lesser light.
[Lat., Micat inter omnes
Iulium sidus, velut inter ignes
Luna minores.]
Horace
#12. The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.
Thomas Aquinas
#13. The God gives simpler problems to lesser men.
Brent Weeks
#14. Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.
Samuel Beckett
#15. [A lesser light asked Ummon Are there multiple futures Ummon answered Does a dog have fleas]
Dan Simmons
#16. It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye.
J. M. W. Turner
#17. The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects. The lesser are loved and praised. The even lesser are feared. The least are despised.
Laozi
#18. When I was growing up, I didn't see me in the movies except in certain lesser roles. If it wasn't funny, I wasn't there. Then Sidney Poitier came along, and he wasn't funny. He was just good. There's me. So that was my pattern.
Morgan Freeman
#19. But now inquiry is being made concerning these issues. First, can any believer enlist in the military? Second, can any soldier, even those of the rank and file or lesser grades who neither engage in pagan sacrifices nor capital punishment, be admitted into the church? No on both counts.
Tertullian
#21. Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days and months and years must be passed in the chase of that bubble, reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still.
Donald Grant Mitchell
#22. It is a well known and very important fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#23. If we subject religious claims to a lesser degree of scrutiny, we should not be surprised if religious people subject us to a greater degree of servitude.
Stifyn Emrys
#24. The fact that you have failed to get the lesser proves conclusively that you deserve the greater.
Christian D. Larson
#25. My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too.
Amy Bloom
#26. We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. Don't be impressed by darkness. Jesus didn't do the opposite of whatever the devil did. He did what He saw the Father doing ... The moment I have a lesser sense of Him and a greater sense of the problem, I will live in reaction to the problem.
Bill Johnson
#28. Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the persuit of evil.
David Gemmell
#29. Throw away too much of your past and you abandon the person who walked those days. When you pare away at yourself you can reinvent, that's true enough, but such whittling always seems to reveal a lesser man, and promises to leave you with nothing at the end.
Mark Lawrence
#30. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?
Peter Watts
#31. It's just that unwinding makes slavery look good. It's always the lesser of two evils.
Neal Shusterman
#32. Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.
Marcel Proust
#33. People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong
they may be mistaken.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
#34. The most difficult thing in music is still to write a melody of several bars which can be self-sufficient. That is the secret of music. While the technique should be as perfected as possible, that is a lesser essential Anybody can acquire a brilliant technique Melody alone permits a work to survive.
Darius Milhaud
#35. Growing up loving the Bible made me apt to love other books. I don't love them in the same way I love the Bible, but a lesser love came easily. The splendor of sunlight does not take away
John Mark Reynolds
#36. Big whirls have little whirls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whirls have lesser whirls,
And so on to viscosity.
Lewis Fry Richardson
#37. I have an unshakable belief that mankind's higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess-hidden, it is true, but there all the same.
Helen Keller
#38. The real purpose of money is to manipulate others and make them feel lesser than you.
Ransom Riggs
#39. Listening is one of the lesser-known skills that mistresses offer.
Betty Jane Wylie
#40. When the time comes for you to leave this earth, if it doesn't become a lesser place with your absence, then you have wasted your life.
Shaun Hick
#42. I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.
John Darnielle
#43. We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#44. Of course, Admiral Ackbar is a student of history, and in many cases smaller, lesser forces have outmatched and outfoxed their betters. The Ghostfinder fleet versus the Sith armada. The Mandalorians versus the Grand Army of the Republic. And, of course, the Rebel Alliance versus the Empire. History
Chuck Wendig
#45. Give up the lesser comforts for the greater happiness.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#46. Life is just a series of choices. We try to always make the best ones, but really we're just settling for the lesser of two evils. Or at least trying to.
S.L. Jennings
#47. The relinquishing of the lesser is the gaining of the greater. Give up all and you gain all.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#48. Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
Thomas Nagel
#49. Are we Pakistanis, children of a lesser God? Is there one law for the west and one for us? Is our democracy supposed to be only democracy if you give us a no objection certificate?
Imran Khan
#50. One has got to choose between the two evils, also between the lesser of the two evils in the matter of food, and therefore vegetarian food has got to he taken by man in order to sustain human life.
Morarji Desai
#51. Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.
James Richardson
#52. Given lesser opportunities, Kissinger would have done very well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley.
Lewis H. Lapham
#53. By the time the sun burns itself out or global warming does us in, or something else happens in-between, I had to tell this story from the avenue of the less-known and the lesser seen.
Mahesh Ubhayakar
#54. If I don't fight every day to 'fix' my eyes on Jesus, my ADD soul will look to a million lesser things.
Matt Papa
#56. Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.
William Butler Yeats
#57. Today, India consumes about 682 watts per capita, far lesser than developed nations. As India develops, it will definitely require a lot more energy.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#58. Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.
Marilynne Robinson
#59. We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.
Flannery O'Connor
#60. It's always the lesser of two evils.'
'I don't see why there have to be any evils at all.'
-Connor
Neal Shusterman
#61. Magnify the father, why bother with something lesser?
LeCrae
#62. Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
Baltasar Gracian
#63. I had the impression in art school that cartooning was thought of as a lesser art than painting because cartoons are reproduced, so the "work" is not the single thing like a painting, but instead is the reproduced image.
Roz Chast
#64. Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity.
Lewis Fry Richardson
#66. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter - - - for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself ... Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
Sylvia Plath
#67. It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied.
Teju Cole
#68. There's always another option.
There's always another one.
It's never only 'this' or 'that,'
The moon or else the sun.
Don't sigh and choose the greater
Or lesser of two plights.
But look to see the stars beyond
For options vast and bright.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#69. I think I should be here alone to rethink the world - I do. I want these lesser humans gone.
Roseanne Barr
#70. The side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#71. I vote because even the lesser of two evils is the lesser of two evils.
Ellen Goodman
#72. If there is a change, it is usually for the lesser rather than the greater; many people seem to lose God along life's way.
Yann Martel
#73. A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.
Euclid
#74. While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining.
Meg Jay
#75. So what'd you do to the lesser?" a male voice said. "I lit his cigarette with a sawed-off," another one answered. "He didn't come down for breakfast, you feel me?
J.R. Ward
#76. To family, whether by blood or by affection. We'd all be lesser people without them.
Jeaniene Frost
#77. This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.
Andrzej Stasiuk
#78. If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Max Ehrmann
#79. The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.
H. Allen Smith
#80. So unless you're stronger than Samson and smarter than Solomon, don't violate your relationship with God by pursuing romantic relations with non-Christians. Love for Jesus must come ahead of all lesser loves.
David Feddes
#81. As shines the moon amid the lesser fires.
Horace
#82. Bravery is not strength in the face of a far lesser foe. Bravery is the exact opposite of that.
Hank Green
#83. The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron
and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring
embody the American dream of Eden.
Lewis H. Lapham
#84. The lesser the talent, the longer they spent on the red carpet.
Rupert Smith
#85. The more restricted a method, the lesser the opportunity for one's individual freedom of expression.
Bruce Lee
#86. I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.
William Monahan
#87. The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like
Kate Millett
#88. Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
Rose Macaulay
#89. The only difference between working on a huge-budget film and a lesser-budget film, is the quality of lunch and dinner.
Ving Rhames
#90. Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other. With the greater consciousness of the issues involved comes a lesser assurance that an alternative is possible.
Gordon H. Clark
#92. Abortion is not the lesser of two evils. It is a crime. It is to throw someone out in order to save another.
Pope Francis
#93. I thought of Anna then, long long sessions, twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes and even as long as half an hour daily. I obtain these figures by the addition of other, lesser figures. That must have been my way of loving.
Samuel Beckett
#94. You don't wallow or mope. You aren't allowed that luxury; guilt is for lesser men. You simply need to do what is expected.
Brandon Sanderson
#95. That human, he's a lesser waiting to happen, in my opinion
nothing less, nothing more
J.R. Ward
#96. M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
Marcel Proust
#97. My friends, we should consider ourselves fortunate, not because we are any greater or lesser because we face adversity, rather we simply rejoice in the opportunity to face it.
Michael Joling
#98. For why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would? Alfred Lord Tennyson: Idylls of the King
K.H. Rennie
#99. If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos.
Robert Breault
#100. In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything she did offended someone.
Murasaki Shikibu
