Top 87 Petty Life Quotes
#1. A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.
Walter Bagehot
#2. Peter had spent his whole life in a town where fights were either drunken and friendly, or silent and petty. True war was foreign to him. He thought of how scared and confused he had been when the battle broke out in the Nest; he was in a different world now.
Jonathan Auxier
#3. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#4. Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures.
Richard Matheson
#5. I wanted ... people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are the children of the earth, part of the cosmos.
Hermann Hesse
#6. Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.
Alexander Herzen
#7. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
David Foster Wallace
#8. They're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial.
Marisha Pessl
#9. There are long periods when life seems a small, dull round, a petty business with no point, and then suddenly we are caught up in some great event which gives us a glimpse of the solid and durable foundations of our existence.
Queen Elizabeth II
#10. Let it go. That's my philosophy: learn to not give a fuck, at least about petty shit. Life will be much simpler.
Cherrie Lynn
#11. You spend your life dreaming, running 'round in a trance, You hang out forever and still miss the dance, And if you get lucky, you might find someone, To help you get over the pain that will come.
Tom Petty
#12. The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows.
George Eliot
#13. 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
#14. Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#15. It's very easy to be cynical about the hall of fame. But on the other hand, it's really a beautiful thing for someone like me. I dedicated my entire life to this music.
Tom Petty
#16. Back you fly to your perch, ashamed as well as frustrated. Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable.
Glenway Wescott
#17. Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
Honore De Balzac
#18. Where is the fun of living if you are going to make yourself a slave to all sorts of petty rules? asked Patty wearily.
Jean Webster
#19. There's obviously some strange correspondence between the general outline of a life and that stream of petty events in which a person is constantly involved and regards as insignificant.
Victor Pelevin
#20. You get into your late fifties, people start falling like flies all around you. I don't take life for granted any more. I'm really glad to be here.
Tom Petty
#21. A person can allow a tyrannical world to bully them. One can kowtow to the demands of petty tormentors; blithely accept being the drummer boy for other people's private parade. Alternatively, a person can seek to obtain autonomy over their life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#22. Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way.
Stendhal
#23. I've spent most of my life playing with Tom Petty, and he's a damn good songwriter.
Benmont Tench
#24. In particular, I'd realized that although I possessed all the elements of a happy life, too often I took my circumstances for granted and allowed myself to become overly vexed by petty annoyances or fleeting worries. I'd wanted to appreciate my life more, and to live up to it better.
Gretchen Rubin
#25. The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.
Rex Stout
#26. I am a daughter, a son of God's, part of God's royal family. In the perspective of eternity, many things of this world are petty, beneath me: Vulgarity, stinginess, greed, grudges.
Ken Untener
#27. The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#28. I'm not interested in the TV much. I quit watching the news a couple years ago and my outlook on life has gotten a whole lot better.
Tom Petty
#29. ...all the great issues in human life make their appearance on Jane Austen's narrow stage. True, it's only the stage of petty domestic circumstance, but that, after all, is the only stage where most of us are likely to meet them.
Ian Watt
#30. Subduing and subdued, the petty strife, Which clouds the colour of domestic life; The sober comfort, all the peace which springs From the large aggregate of little things; On these small cares of daughter, wife or friend, The almost sacred joys of home depend.
Hannah More
#31. Why should people importune the Lord about small trials and petty ailments, and at the same time neglect to ask His guidance on matters of love and marriage which make or mar one's life?
Nephi Anderson
#32. She preferred to nurture healthy relationships with a few women, like Shelby, a genuinely loyal friend, and weed out weak and petty imposters who passed through her life.
Sarah Jo Smith
#33. You saw everything inside me, every pathway to my heart. Every thought, profound to petty. You laughed away the bad and celebrated the good.
To be known, really known, is the essence of love. To live without love is a shadow life.
Suzanne Hayes
#34. The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence ...
Samuel Johnson
#35. I always wanted to be a musician, 100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory, I did voice training and piano lessons, and while I was a decent musician, it didn't seem like enough for me. I felt like I wanted to make more than just music.
Adria Petty
#36. Her laugh did something to him, Quill realized. Touched some part of him that admired her indefatigable spirit. Despite her discomfort and distress at being drenched, she was in possession of the sort of temperament that did not allow the petty annoyances of life to dampen her spirit.
Manda Collins
#37. Life's to short to spend it fighting when you could be holding the one you love. And love's to rare to squnder it with petty concerns. The Apolloite groom to Rafael
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#38. Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction and events without reason. Without a purpose life is trivial, petty, and pointless.
Rick Warren
#39. You can work hard, do everything that you think is right, but one thing you'll never overcome in life is fate. You can't control fate.
Richard Petty
#40. It is better to lose everything you have to keep the balance of justice level, than to live a life of petty privilege devoid of true freedom.
Bryant H. McGill
#41. A beautiful life is about spending your time passionately, being happy with who you are inside, and not worrying about everyone's petty judgments. If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for everyone's approval. You don't need anyone's approval to be happy or to follow your heart.
Shivesh Thakur
#42. One of my major shortcomings - I'm vindictive. I don't know why that is. Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It's a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.
Andy Rooney
#43. He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed happily, and listened to the wind sweeping down from the mountains, to the chirping of night birds.
Khaled Hosseini
#44. Sometimes life, will get you down, break your heart, steal your crown.
Tom Petty
#45. Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics.
Vladimir Odoevsky
#47. 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.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
#48. 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
#49. When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity ... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others
Robert Greene
#50. Working on a ranch is heaven. It's a hard life, featuring plenty of hard work, and yet at the same time it's an easy life. You're outside all the time. Most days it's just you and the animals. You don't have to deal with people or offices or any petty bullshit. You just do your job.
Chris Kyle
#51. To mourn deeply for the death of another loosens from myself the petty desire for, and the animal adherence to life. We have gained the end of the philosopher, and view without shrinking the coffin and the pall.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#52. The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
James Russell Lowell
#53. Have a policy of pre-emptive forgiveness. Refuse to get offended by petty things. Make a decision early on to cut the other person some slack in everyday life. Then you can take comfort in knowing they'll do it for you, as well. Accepting each other, flaws and all, is what love is all about.
Gaelen Foley
#54. What she can't get into her narrow mind is that we're above such things as love. Our whole aim - the whole sense of our life - is to avoid petty illusions that stop us being free and happy. On, on, on!
Anton Chekhov
#55. Many writers have reported being able to forestall the petty annoyances of life by maintaining the shared illusion that they are working at something productive...a facility they share with prostitutes and attorneys.
Kenneth B. Lifshitz
#56. Forgiveness is an embrace, across all barriers, against all odds, in defiance of all that is mean and petty and vindictive and cruel in this life.
Kent Nerburn
#57. I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it.
Sophie Scholl
#58. Petty unselfishness," she repeated. "I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learnt to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves.
E. M. Forster
#59. And all of a sudden I saw that if life seems awfully petty most of the time, every now and then there is something noble and beautiful and almost pure that lifts us suddenly out of the pettiness and lets us share in it a little.
Laurence Yep
#60. I don't think it's a good attitude in your life to feel that you have to be rich to have self-esteem.
Tom Petty
#61. All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.
Robert Higgs
#62. Is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day in human life?
Swami Vivekananda
#63. I know he hasn't a mean or petty bone in him, but one can err on the side of caution as well as rashness.
Raymond E. Feist
#64. One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime.
Gregory Maguire
#65. Men spend their life down here in the worship of petty (or mean) interests and the search of perishable things, and with that ("et avec cela", Fr.) they pretend to perpetuate for all eternity their self ("moi", Fr.) so hardly worthy ("digne", Fr.) of it.
African Spir
#66. 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
#67. Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.
Tom Petty
#68. Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world. And if you do the latter, you're not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
Irvin D. Yalom
#69. What I've learned about marriage: You need to have each other's back; you have to be a kind of team going through life.
Tom Petty
#70. The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering ... so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment.
Abdu'l- Baha
#72. My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature
Josephine Hart
#73. You have been reproaching other people all your life - you have been always sure you yourself are right: it is because you have not a mind large enough to see that there is anything better than your own conduct and your own petty aims.
George Eliot
#74. Such is life. Sometimes we do not even want to know how much pain we cause others, for fear of spoiling our own petty pleasures. And when the time comes to face the consequences, it is too late to be sorry.
Menelaos Stephanides
#75. Monsieur Josserand died very quietly - a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings that he had ever loved.
Emile Zola
#76. I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.
Lorrie Moore
#77. I didn't miss out on a family life because of racing. I had one because of it.
Richard Petty
#78. Do not quarrel ... with your lot in life. Do not complain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with.
William Henry Drummond
#79. It wasn't a lack of attraction to her husband that caused her problems. It was life. It was traffic. It was the Miami Dade Water and Sewer bills, it was trying to get ahead, and trying to be on time. Petty little thing, but zillions of them fused together.
Heather Graham
#80. Petty human squabbles over borders and oil and creed vanish in the knowledge that this living marble surrounded by infinite emptiness is our shared home, and more, a home we share with, and owe to, the most wonderful inventions of life.
Nick Lane
#81. Once it was believed that to bring these creatures to manhood it was enough to feed them, clothe them, and look to their everyday needs; but we see now that the result of this has been to turn out petty shopkeepers, village politicians, hollow technicians devoid of an inner life.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#82. Come! Let us lay a lance in rest,
And tilt at windmills under a wild sky!
For who would live so petty and unblest
That dare not tilt at something ere he die;
Rather than, screened by safe majority,
Preserve his little life to little end,
And never raise a rebel cry!
John Galsworthy
#83. Life punishes those who have things in abundance by making them worry about petty things like: what to wear, or, which car to drive.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#84. You had life by the tail and didn't know it.
Kyle Petty
#85. What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
Ivan Turgenev
#86. She closes my door behind her and all the petty stresses of life reappear, eager to make up for lost time. I've developed a phobia of that door closing for the last time, of losing her in any way or of being lost.
Thomm Quackenbush
#87. Since the things we do determine the character of life, no blessed person can become unhappy. For he will never do those things which are hateful and petty.
Aristotle.
