What is "pettiness"

Usage examples of "pettiness".

The Allegiancy, for nearly two thousand years, had utilized the best within each of those who served it, remaining impervious to their inevitable, mortal pettiness.

Believe this and it surely follows, as concave implies convex, that by daily converse and association with these great ones we take their breeding, their manners, earn their magnanimity, make ours their gifts of courtesy, unselfishness, mansuetude, high seated pride, scorn of pettiness, wholesome plentiful jovial laughter.

The sabotage was so undramatic it was scarcely more than adult vandalism, but why such pettiness, why not totally disabling acts?

During the yearlong separation, the meetings, the filing, and the final six months of waiting, not once had she indulged in an outburst of anger or display of pettiness, though she had felt very petty a time or two.

What might have gladdened and elevated poor suffering and blinded humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art, like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection, such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, has now, as an invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest falsifications of truth and impossible efforts of imitation.

I hated the neighborhood, the pettiness of it, the closeted, cloistered, blinkered, racist, philistine, ghettoized narrowness of Queens and environs.

John Quincy grew discouraged with the pettiness and hypocrisies of politics.

Chambaraya took all her strength, all her weakness, the shameful tangles of her jealousies and pettiness, the purity of her courage, and accepted them all with the same perfect serenity.

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur.

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur.

Adams's pride in his brilliant son could not have been greater, as he let him know when at times John Quincy grew discouraged with the pettiness and hypocrisies of politics.

His wife certainly spared no details of the naggings, bickerings and pettiness that ensued during her state visits in Greenville.

It was a relief to visit their houses and escape the pettinesses and sexual jealousies which were starting to infect the other girls near to Jalila’s own age.

The light played gently in her mind, dispersing old night-shadows, pettinesses, the little, nagging memories of dreams.

Turing’s definition of artificial intelligence demands that thinking computers have all the same failings and pettinesses that real, live, flesh-and-blood life forms are prone to.