paltriness

I do not propose to be thwarted by such paltriness!

There came over him a look of meanness and of paltriness.

He often dramatized his trees as a means to emphasize man's paltriness in comparison to nature.

The workmen left, cursing the paltriness of their pay, the crowd dispersed.

"My lady, that would reduce Lunarian space trade to paltriness."

He found himself involved in an argument about silver wrapping-paper only serving to accentuate the paltriness of a gift.

A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that.

Oh the paltriness!

"I ignore such paltriness," said Cugel.

I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture.

If so, your delusion is now stripped away from you for ever and you behold yourself in your naked paltriness.'

They thought the seeker of truth-'n'-beauty (see above) would be past such paltriness.

Or would such an offering insult them, or offend them, in its lack of worth, in its paltriness?

To deflate the campaign, they needed only to open up the Sary Shagan facility and reveal the paltriness of its lasers.

Although he was a natural philosopher, Aristotle refused to place him among the other great Pre-Socratic philosophers "because of the paltriness of his thought."

The vices of paltriness and vulgar chintziness "do not bring serious discredit, since they are not injurious to others, nor are they excessively unseemly".

Still, he scoffed at the paltriness of sums like $10 million to $12 million that have been bandied about in the media in recent months, saying, "Don't insult me.

In a way, of course, Cyrano is from the moon, from a realm of vaulting fancy that disdains the paltriness and mediocrity of the society in which he finds himself.

Just as many of the country's most admirable leaders eschew the paltriness of modern politics, the most brilliant, captivating entertainers aspire to something other than a night-time cable talk show.

The extremes to be avoided in order to achieve this virtue are paltriness (Rackham) or chintziness (Sachs) on the one hand and tastelessness or vulgarity on the other.

"We are not without misgivings about the paltriness of the $20,000 cap, especially in light of the decline in the value of the dollar since 1971," it said, "but we cannot correctly declare the statute to be unconstitutional.

By his own account they offered him "only paltriness and condescension, such as they might have offered a grocer," for at that time it was not yet clear whether this new pursuit would be the province of land-owning dilettantes or truly scientific explorers.

But there is an evident paltriness to his home life; something's missing, or out of whack, and even though Skyler is pregnant, you don't feel that this is a family with a future, because it doesn't seem to have much of a present.

For the third, there was the pang in his body, physical, yet presumably more to do with the mind: a regret for the paltriness of his life; grief about an existence that seemed in perpetual stalemate now because of a devouring sense of loss and betrayal, and yet a certainty of the possibility of something else.