Lesser Quotes

1. "Perlopiù solo ciò che è falso ha in sé un certo spirito. E' come se in questo modo gli uomini volessero esprimere la loro avversione per la realtà, che è assolutamente priva di fantasia... Anche lo scrittore più scadente è in grado di inventare delle storie che sono migliori della vita reale. Noi questa vita riusciamo a sopportarla soltanto perchè la viviamo in maniera del tutto irreale. Non c'è nulla di più squallido e desolante che finire macinati per davvero dalla mola della vita. Perchè si diventa esattamente come tutti gli altri."
Author: Alexander Lernet Holenia

2. "Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all."
Author: Andrzej Sapkowski

3. "The Bible describes a God who is a thousand things to His children, even though some of these are beyond our ability to understand. So when people insist on humanly reasonable theologies to satisfy their need to believe, the lesser god they're buying is not the God of Scripture. We must beware of recreating an image of God that makes us feel better."
Author: Beth Moore

4. "I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father."
Author: Carlisle Floyd

5. "George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism—the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it—is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

6. "I want to go into the sympathy card business. . . Forget sappy messages about overcoming. I want ones that say NOW YOU'LL BE A LESSER PERSON THAN YOU WERE or WE CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND or I CAN UNDERSTAND BECAUSE SOMEONE I KNOW DIED TOO or maybe something about how grief can make your skin feel sore and bruised and electric because that's how my skin has felt ever since, except for my hands."
Author: Courtney Summers

7. "Religion, like science, is only noteworthy when it emphasizes a matter of what is true rather than whose belief is greater or lesser or which deity works for whom. Sincere religion and tested science are similar in that their assertions can be argued logically and objectively; otherwise, we get false cults and babble."
Author: Criss Jami

8. "It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

9. "I had done the sitcom thing to lesser and lesser degrees of success."
Author: David Alan Grier

10. "Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the persuit of evil."
Author: David Gemmell

11. "I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it's extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think nothing better than these long slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost o sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but still with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

12. "As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing."
Author: Francois De La Rochefoucauld

13. "LIBERATION LEADS TO LIBERATION. These are the first words of truth — not truth in quotation marks but truth in the real meaning of the word; truth which is not merely theoretical, not simply a word, but truth that can be realized in practice. The meaning behind these words may be explained as follows: By liberation is meant the liberation which is the aim of all schools, all religions, at all times. This liberation can indeed be very great. All men desire it and strive after it. But it cannot be attained without the first liberation, a lesser liberation. The great liberation is liberation from influences outside us. The lesser liberation is liberation from influences within us."
Author: G.I. Gurdjieff

14. "We say that the most dangerouscriminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Comparedto him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heartgoes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; theymerely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wishthe property to become their property that they may more perfectlyrespect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; theywish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamistsrespect marriage, or they would not go through the highlyceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. Butphilosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect humanlife; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life inthemselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesserlives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much asother people's."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

16. "Prima di sposarsi, Emma aveva creduto d'amare; ma la felicità che avrebbe dovuto nascere dal quell'amore non era venuta, e pensava che doveva essersi sbagliata. Ella cercava ora, di sapere che cosa volessero esattamente dire, nella vita, le parole felicità, passione ed ebbrezza, che le erano sembrate tanto belle, lette nei libri"
Author: Gustave Flaubert

17. "I'm just deeply disappointed that once again we may have to settle for the lesser of two evils."
Author: Howard Dean

18. "He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. "Give him one more chance."
Author: Ian Fleming

19. "Holy Christ! There was a frickin' melee in the alley. Lessers. Brothers. Two civilians crouched and quivering in the middle. And big bad Butch O'Neal."
Author: J.R. Ward

20. "Now the Elves made many rings; but secretly Sauron made One Ring to rule all the others, and their power was bound up with it, to be subject wholly to it and to last only so long as it too should last. And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring; for the power of the Elven-rings was very great, and that which should govern them must be a thing of surpassing potency; and Sauron forged it in the Mountain of Fire in the Land of Shadow. And while he wore the One Ring he could perceive all the things that were done by means of the lesser rings, and he could see and govern the very thoughts of those that wore them."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

21. "So the days slipped away, as each morning dawned bright and fair, and each evening followed cool and clear. But autumn was waning fast; slowly the golden light faded to pale silver, and the lingering leaves fell from the naked trees. A wind began to blow chill from the Misty Mountains to the east. The Hunter's Moon waxed round in the night sky, and put to flight all the lesser stars. But low in the South one star shone red. Every night, as the Moon waned again, it shone brighter and brighter. Frodo could see it from his window, deep in the heavens, burning like a watchful eye that glared above the trees on the brink of the valley."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

22. "...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to delivery our blows gently."
Author: James E. McWilliams

23. "There is no sexuality that is greater or lesser than another."
Author: Jasmine Guy

24. "To be rejected by someone doesn't mean you should also reject yourself or that you should think of yourself as a lesser person. It doesn't mean that nobody will ever love you anymore. Remember that only ONE person has rejected you at the moment, and it only hurt so much because to you, that person's opinion symbolized the opinion of the whole world, of God."
Author: Jocelyn Soriano

25. "Haunting the library as a kid, reading poetry books when I was not reading bird books, I had been astonished at how often birds were mentioned in British poetry. Songsters like nightingales and Sky Larks appeared in literally dozens of works, going back beyond Shakespeare, back beyond Chaucer. Entire poems dedicated to such birds were written by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many lesser-known poets. I had run across half a dozen British poems just about Sky Larks; Thomas Hardy had even written a poem about Shelley's poem about the Sky Lark. The love of birds and of the English language were intermingled in British literary history.Somehow we Americans had failed to import this English love of birds along with the language, except in diluted form. But we had imported a few of the English birds themselves — along with birds from practically everywhere else."
Author: Kenn Kaufman

26. "Abaddon opened his mouth to continue, but Lucifer waved his hand and a gag appeared over the lesser demon's mouth. "So, you really think that the awful world that the humans have built for themselves would have been better without me? May I remind you that Revelation shows that while me and all of my followers are confined in the eternal abyss, the Almighty has shown himself to the world and proven his existence, and everyone knows for a fact that Jesus died for them, the humans will still hate the Almighty and gladly flock to my banner when I am released. So, Abaddon, look into my eyes and tell me that the awful things of the world wouldn't have happened without me."Abaddon looked into the Demon Lord's eyes and couldn't say it, but that was mostly because of the gag."
Author: Kenneth Evers

27. "Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?"
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton

28. "Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses.But there's nothing like a book."
Author: Laurie R. King

29. "You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others."
Author: Leonardo Da Vinci

30. "Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark"
Author: M.R. James

31. "When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil."
Author: Max Lerner

32. "Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment."
Author: Nevada Barr

33. "Most sketch aficionados have an enormous amount of respect for 'Mr. Show.' I didn't have HBO back then, so I was always trying to find episodes. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross became celebrities, and Jay Johnston - who's lesser known, but brilliant - deserves a lot of credit, too."
Author: Nick Swardson

34. "A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonised expulsion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

35. "A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family."
Author: Philippa Gregory

36. "She will not come back, but her beauty, her voice, will echo until the end of time. Shebelieved in something beyond herself, and her death gave her voice power it didn't havein life. She was pure, like your father. We, you and I"—he touches my chest with theback of his index ?nger—"are dirty. We are made for blood. Rough hands. Dirty hearts.We are lesser creatures in the grand scheme of things, but without us men of war, noone except those of Lykos would hear Eo's song. Without our rough hands, the dreams ofthe pure hearts would never be built."
Author: Pierce Brown

37. "The lesser mysteries of loveFor he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful form; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of the outward form."
Author: Plato

38. "If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils."
Author: Rajneesh

39. "That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation."
Author: Richard Dawkins

40. "The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots."
Author: Rudolf Rocker

41. "Gods, I love this place," Locke said, drumming his fingers against his thighs. "Sometimes I think this whole city was put here simply because the gods must adore crime. Pickpockets rob the common folk, merchants rob anyone they can dupe, Capa Barsavi robs the robbers and the common folk, the lesser nobles rob nearly everyone, and Duke Nicovante occasionally runs off with his army and robs the shit out of Tal Verarr or Jerem, not to mention what he does to his own nobles and his common folk."
Author: Scott Lynch

42. "It's clear that when we're this outnumbered by the creatures, we have to take a page from the British Empire and rule the lesser species through intimidation. That's why the single most important thing you can do as a human is to dominate an animal. Need more proof?"Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." I'd say that about covers it."
Author: Stephen Colbert

43. "Many surround themselves with luminaries, but in so doing they dull their own sparkle. If you want to shine bright, look to the heavens and see how the brightest star always stands apart from those lesser shining stars."
Author: Stephen Richards

44. "If we subject religious claims to a lesser degree of scrutiny, we should not be surprised if religious people subject us to a greater degree of servitude."
Author: Stifyn Emrys

45. "Greater sins do sooner startle the soul, and awaken and rouse up the soul to repentance, than lesser sins do. Little sins often slide into the soul, and breed, and work secretly and undiscernably in the soul, till they come to be so strong, as to trample upon the soul, and to cut the throat of the soul."
Author: Thomas Brooks

46. "Let us search into the records of Holy Writ, if out of this their great charter, there be not a seal grant of a lesser, though like privilege, and this by virtue of Christ, in that we have the honour to be accounted Abraham's seed as truly as they."
Author: Thomas Goodwin

47. "There now remain only a few books, which they call books of the lesser prophets; and as I have already shown that the greater are impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the priests, and both be forgotten together."
Author: Thomas Paine

48. "The highest men are calm, silent and unknown...The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations the leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines."
Author: Tom Robbins

49. "Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time."
Author: Walter Kaufmann

50. "TO A CHILD, BEHELD IN SUMMER RAIMENTLittle girl, one lesser garmentwill suffice to clothe your crotch,Hide that undiscovered cavernWhere old Time will wind his watch."
Author: William Gaddis

Lesser Quotes Pictures