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.
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
There is no problem that is not improved by effort, and no effort that is too paltry to be worth undertaking.
Use your God given time wisely, don't waste it in paltry things.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
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.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing,
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 miser...
[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.
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.
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It's straightforward. But people almost never say, "Die!" Paltry, prudent hypocrites!
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.
Life and death- what paltry words, what tarnished bookends,what unjust summation for drawing breath one moment and failing to release it the next.
