Paltry Quotes

#1. Karl ached to stroke her, to explore her delicate features with his hand and reveal what the paltry candle light could not; the feel of her hair, the curvature of her neck, the warmth of her skin.

Jack Croxall

#2. Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#3. The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.

Rachel Hartman

#4. Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please.

Oliver Goldsmith

#5. There is no problem that is not improved by effort, and no effort that is too paltry to be worth undertaking.

Sam Waterston

#6. I suspect that children want their parents to be busy; they don't want to have to fill your schedule with their paltry needs. Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are.

Lionel Shriver

#7. When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name.

Thomas Paine

#8. The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

George Sand

#9. American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

H.L. Mencken

#10. If rejection and priviledge are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgement of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light.

Milan Kundera

#11. [I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.

Rick Moody

#12. An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress

W.B.Yeats

#13. Tis an old lesson; time approves it true, And those who know it best, deplore it most; When all is won that all desire to woo, The paltry prize is hardly worth the cost.

Lord Byron

#14. I did not steal your paltry goods!

Mark Twain

#15. Why should we not ... instead of the paltry offerings we make, do something that will prove that we are really in earnest in claiming to be followers of him who, though he was rich, for our sake became poor?

Lottie Moon

#16. The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Soren Kierkegaard

#17. I had thought you were a better man, Mr Reid, a man of your word, but I see that you are nothing but a paltry hommelette.'
'An omelette?'
'Yes, your word is not worth a dam.

Amitav Ghosh

#18. The median savings of households 10 years from retirement is a paltry $12,000; nearly one-third of those 55-64 have no savings.

Anonymous

#19. Use your God given time wisely, don't waste it in paltry things.

Euginia Herlihy

#20. I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.

Tracy K. Smith

#21. I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.

Fanny Kemble

#22. Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man-yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

Marcus Aurelius

#23. What a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of the other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

Albert Einstein

#24. She, at least, ought to have known that he was wearing a mask, and having found that out, she should have torn it from his face, whenever they were alone together ... Her love for him had been paltry and weak, easily crushed by her own pride

Emmuska Orczy

#25. I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think i behaved in a paltry manner (Charles Darwin)

Abram Kardiner

#26. We live in a society created by an empire
That's based on terror ... welcome to the One World Era,
A complete interruption to your lil' paltry-ass life,
That you thought you was livin, and what you been given.

Coolio

#27. The vocabulary for discussing smells, tastes and textures, the primary characteristics of wine, seems paltry compared with the far better developed lexicon for sights and sounds.

Anonymous

#28. Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

Voltaire

#29. The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#30. Today, I sold my heart. The price was paltry. It cost me everything.

Eden Butler

#31. I didn't care at this point and busied myself texting a message to Sydney on the Love Phone, letting her know that my art was a paltry thing compared to the brilliance of her beauty. She texted back: This is me rolling my eyes. To which I replied: I love you too.

Richelle Mead

#32. One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation.

Walter Scott

#33. The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated - I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . .

Alain De Botton

#34. Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#35. 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

#36. Now, when any vicious simpleton excites my disgust by his paltry ribaldry ...

Charlotte Bronte

#37. It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation.

Carol Shields

#38. Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

P. J. O'Rourke

#39. Ten or twelve couples? No, no, Dassett would not be talking of red carpets and awnings for such a paltry affair as that!' said his lordship. These ominous words struck a chill into his wife's soul.

Georgette Heyer

#40. You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit.

Demosthenes

#41. My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.

Joseph Howe

#42. Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

Glen Duncan

#43. But she is right, at least in this: Looking to promote oneself at the expense of other women, setting oneself up as a creature unlike any other, is paltry device, and one that has kept us women 'in our place' for as much of time as history can recall.

Sinead Murphy

#44. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#45. Mostly I couldn't bear ... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

Gail Caldwell

#46. Life and death- what paltry words, what tarnished bookends,what unjust summation for drawing breath one moment and failing to release it the next.

Rebecca Rasmussen

#47. What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others ... And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

Roberto Bolano

#48. If a man is to have a fault, it should be a passionate one, like insatiable curiosity. It would be a pity to be damned for something paltry.

Gary Jennings

#49. President Obama has tried to spin the paltry new job creation numbers as 'a step in the right direction.' But, clearly, the small growth in jobs isn't even keeping up with population growth, much less returning the workforce to a healthy level.

Bob Beauprez

#50. In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#51. Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.

Carl Sagan

#52. Christian scholarship will be a poor and paltry thing, worth little attention, until the Christian scholar, under the control of his authentic commitment, devises theories that lead to promising, interesting, fruitful, challenging lines of research.

Craig G. Bartholomew

#53. Reality seemed so paltry next to castles - dungeons - in the air.

Pico Iyer

#54. Love had still seemed like such a paltry thing in the face of all my doubts then, much the way it felt now. David had worries my love couldn't touch, fears my love couldn't easily dispel. My love seemed like a well-worn blanket instead of the titanium shield I needed.

Andrea Lochen

#55. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man." ~ 'The Black Cat.

Edgar Allan Poe

#56. Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.

Serge Daney

#57. Although there was no enemy or danger to be perceived, they felt the apprehension and doubt of those who have come unaware upon some awe-inspiring place where they themselves are paltry fellows of no account.

Richard Adams

#58. We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

Angela Carter

#59. None of these things are foretold to me; but either to my paltry body, or property, or reputation, or children, or wife. But to me all omens are lucky, if I will. For whichever of these things happens, it is in my control to derive advantage from it.

Epictetus

#60. No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.

Knut Hamsun

#61. The Charkha in the hands of a poor widow brings a paltry price to her, in the hands of Jawaharlal; it is an instrument of India's freedom.

Mahatma Gandhi

#62. It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.

David Gilmour

#63. So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

D.H. Lawrence

#64. Your heart may be paltry compared with the heart of a great saint, but your heart is what God wants from you.

Peter Kreeft

#65. [She] is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex by undervaluing their own, and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.

Jane Austen

#66. How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Vladimir Nabokov

#67. 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

#68. I am of the level with common Astrologers; who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.

Jonathan Swift

#69. As Darwin said by keeping women at home their achievements were paltry compared to men's which proved women were biologically inferior. And he should know because he was a Genius. You probably learned about him at school.

Jacky Fleming

#70. One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical ... for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Soren Kierkegaard

#71. 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

#72. Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.

Bonnie Friedman

#73. These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen
give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity sees
no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.

Bram Stoker

#74. Surprised? That was like saying the Middle East was a little tumultuous. That the ocean was big enough to swim in. That Channing Tatum was a wee bit attractive. Surprised was a paltry word for what I felt.

Jenny B. Jones

#75. Drawn by conceit from reason's plan
How vain is that poor creature man;
How pleas'd in ev'ry paltry elf
To grate about that thing himself.

Charles Churchill

#76. Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

Honore De Balzac

#77. I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It's straightforward. But people almost never say, "Die!" Paltry, prudent hypocrites!

Osamu Dazai

#78. I said: 'Thou thing of patches, rings,
Pins, necklaces and suchlike things,
Disguiser of the female form,
Thou paltry, gilded poisonous worm!

William Blake

#79. Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe.

Jonathan Franzen

#80. From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

John Updike

#81. Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.

Honore De Balzac

#82. Instead of destroying an area for a paltry amount of oil, we should be increasing fuel standards for automobiles and focusing our efforts on biofuels and other alternatives.

Raul Grijalva

#83. The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful-.

Emily Dickinson

#84. available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC.

Jonathan Franzen

#85. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe

#86. Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.

Edward R. Murrow

#87. Science knows no politics. Are we in this frenzy of [the Depression] economy, brought about by those who control the wealth of this country, seeking to put a barrier on science and research for the paltry sum of $39,113 out of an appropriation of $100,000,000?

Fiorello H. La Guardia

#88. Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slaves? What a paltry imagination you do have. Mine, I fear, sometimes seems excessive, even to me.

Bernard Cornwell

#89. Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

William Cowper

#90. People you've known, seemingly forever, may claim to have love for you, but when gossip's tainted tongue whips you - they don't show enough love to weigh your history against false witness. Be that as it may, press forward as the dust settles. Your purpose is much bigger than their paltriness.

T.F. Hodge