Paltry quotes:

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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
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
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling. -- Honore de Balzac
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
There is no problem that is not improved by effort, and no effort that is too paltry to be worth undertaking. -- Sam Waterston
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
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
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
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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. -- William Butler Yeats
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. -- Edgar Allan Poe
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
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 honor or observation. -- Walter Scott
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
The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author. -- George Sand
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick -- William Butler Yeats
The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful-. -- Emily Dickinson
The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity. -- Soren Kierkegaard
It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations. -- David Gilmour
Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain. -- Glen Duncan
The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods. -- Rachel Hartman
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 -- William Butler Yeats
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
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
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
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
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
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

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