Paltry Quotes

“Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!”

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

“Paltry supply with capable means is one face of iniquity.”

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

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

“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.”

“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!”

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

“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.”