Small Things Quotes

1. "So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one's own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?"
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

2. "The front of my head feels like a house, and the thoughts reside within different set places that I can rearrange like furniture, but mostly I don't. I come from a furniture-dodging tribe. We tiptoe around the pieces as they remain in place. I'm thinking that way again. Strange, the small things that make us proud."
Author: Alice Randall

3. "The life spills over, some days.She cannot be at rest,Wishes she could explodeLike that red tree—The one that bursts into fireAll this week.Senses her infinite smallnessBut can't seize it,Recognizes the folly of desire,The folly of withdrawal—Kicks at the curb, the pavement,If only she could, at this moment,When what she's doing is ploddingTo the bus stop, to go to school,Passing that fiery tree—if only she couldBe making love,Be making a painting,Be exploding, be speeding through the universeLike a photon, like a showerOf yellow flames—She believes if she could only catch upWith the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,Then she would be at rest—If she could forget school,Climb the tree,Be the tree,burn like that."
Author: Alicia Ostriker

4. "The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It's a mistake to think it's the small things we control and not the large, it's the other way around! We can't stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see."
Author: Anne Michaels

5. "Our town was small enough that I never developed a healthy fear of strangers. To me, they were exciting things, gift-wrapped and full of possibilities, the sweet smell of somewhere else wafting from them like perfume."
Author: April Genevieve Tucholke

6. "It is very telling what we don't hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: "The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president." Or: "He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure." Or: "She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day." Or: "He never made it to his kid's Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time." Or: "While she didn't have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night." Or: "His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared." Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh."
Author: Arianna Huffington

7. "He decides he wants both more or less. He'd like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other's brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning."
Author: Ben Fountain

8. "Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do."
Author: Ben Fountain

9. "As a small kid, I came across things like these early Edward Gorey books in department-store bookstores. These were these really unusual objects to me. I didn't know how they fit into the comic world or into newspaper comics."
Author: Ben Katchor

10. "Attacking a provincial lord in his manor house, surrounded by guards...Honestly, Kell, I'd nearly forgotten how foolhardy you can be."Foolhardy?" Kelsier asked with a laugh. "that wasn't foolhardy - that was just a small diversion. You should see some of the things I'm planning to do!Dockson stood for a moment then he laughed too. "By the Lord Ruler, it's good to have you back, kell! I'm afraid I've grown rather boring during the last few years""We'll fix that" Kelsier promised."
Author: Brandon Sanderson

11. "On grass, it can be the small things that decide a match."
Author: Caroline Wozniacki

12. "No matter how small and unimportant what we are doing may seem, if we do it well, it may soon become the step that will lead us to better things."
Author: Channing Pollock

13. "He had no cause for self-reproach on the score of neglect, or want of thought, for he had been devoted to her service; and yet a hundret little occasions rose up before him on which he fancied he might have been more zealous, and more earnest, and wished he had been. We need be careful how we deal with those about us; when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done; of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired. There is no remorse so deep, as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time."
Author: Charles Dickens

14. "Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind."
Author: Charlotte M. Mason

15. "[Julie] had lived a great deal among lies, before plumping for a small life of her own, a sincere and restricted life from which all pretense, even in matters sensual, was banished. How many crazy decisions and allegiances to successive aspects fo the truth! Had she not, one day when her costume for a fancy dress had demanded short hair, cut off the great chestnut mane that fell below her waist when she let it down? 'I could have hired a wig,' she thought. 'I might also, at a pinch, have passed the rest of my life with Becker or Espivant. If it comes to that, I could also have gone on stirring puddings in a saucepan at Carneilhan. The things "one might have done" are, in fact, the things one could not do..."
Author: Colette

16. "Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember "Life is too short to be little"."
Author: Dale Carnegie

17. "We climbed, he first and I behind, until though a small round opening ahead of us, I saw the lovely things the heavens hold, and we came out to see once more the stars."
Author: Dante Alighieri

18. "Of course he knew what kinds of thoughts these were: the not-always-true ones, conveniently forgetting the other times, when he and Christine had bickered at the smallest thing, aggravated by the other's mere constant presence, and sometimes even said awful things--irreversible and stinging-- that lingered like a foul odor for a long time afterward. Then there were long stretches of calm. And yet the bickering, the irritation, that too was part of the delicate glue that kept them together, still feeling something, even when they grew, sometimes for long periods, bored with each other, tired of each other, before settling back into their more usual, tamed and tamped down but still real and extant love."
Author: Daphne Kalotay

19. "Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man's cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man's temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow's feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up.He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away."
Author: David Malouf

20. "You may be capable of great things,But life consists of small things."
Author: Deng Ming Dao

21. "The man who wants a garden fair,or small or very big,With flowers growing here and there,Must bend his back and dig.The things are mighty few on earthThat wishes can attain.Whate'er we want of any worthWe've got to work to gain.It matters not what goal you seek,It's secret here reposes:You've got to dig from week to weekTo get Results or Roses."
Author: Edgar A. Guest

22. "Make it your habit not to be critical about small things."
Author: Edward Everett Hale

23. "Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified."
Author: Evelyn Waugh

24. "The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out."
Author: Hilary Mantel

25. "Asking where memory is "located" in the brain is like asking where running is located in the body. There are certainly parts of the body that are more important (the legs) or less important (the little fingers) in performing the task of running but, in the end, it is an activity that requires complex coordination among a great many body parts and muscle groups. To extend the analogy, looking for differences between memory systems is like looking for differences between running and walking. There certainly are many differences, but the main difference is that running requires more coordination among the different body parts and can be disrupted by small things (such as a corn on the toe) that may not interfere with walking at all. Are we to conclude, then, that running is located in the corn on your toe?"
Author: Ian Neath

26. "God hides great things in little things. In every young girl, God hides a great woman; in every young boy, He hides a great man; in a small seed, He hides a big forest! A little is never inadequate if God's hands are its creator! Don't despise little things!"
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

27. "Beneath these was a small silver-edged photo album, and Emma breathed in at the sight of the engraved names: Tommy and Emma. She found herself smiling; she'd known somehow that he would have been a Tommy. And if he'd never had the chance to become any of the other things she'd imagined for him, she was happy that at least he'd had that."
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

28. "Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you."
Author: Jim Rohn

29. "It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put there faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potential moral units- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coat-tails."
Author: John Steinbeck

30. "For a man to be great, he must not dwell on small things, though he may enjoy them."
Author: Joseph Smith Jr.

31. "From "Lady In Waiting" in the anthology The Morgue :Now I have yet to meet the corpse could hold up its end of a conversation, so at most I might whistle while fixin' one up ‘stead of engagin' myself in any small talk that's goin' to be so one-sided anyways. But Cindy Flowers' corpse weren't no ordinary body when it walked upright, and it sure weren't ordinary just because it was lyin' before me in a pine wood box. So for the first time I felt the need to get a few things said to one of our visitors, and I leaned down to get myself real close to her face. Her eyes was closed ‘cause Pa had already sewed her lids shut."
Author: Ken Goldman

32. "Keep it, keep it!" I answered. "You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn't amount to anything—about everything I own in the world."
Author: Knut Hamsun

33. "My grandmother valued even the smallest of things."
Author: Koichi Tanaka

34. "She felt a small shudder of fear. Fear was always a part of life for the people. Because of fear, they made shelter and found food and grew things. For the same reason, weapons were stored, waiting. There was fear of cold, of sickness and hunger. There was fear of beasts."
Author: Lois Lowry

35. "Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously. Not keep the eyes so narrowed down to the small dispairs.Those people who say forgive and forget, I say they not right. Not so simple. I say, find right medicine. Bitterness must be just right for problem. Then swallow it, think of good things can do when no longer sick."
Author: Lydia Kwa

36. "It's about glowing lights and small things that are big."
Author: Markus Zusak

37. "Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he had long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landman's heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in brambles of salmonberry and oblivion."
Author: Michael Chabon

38. "He runs City Hall like a small family business and keeps everybody on a short rein. They do only that which they know is safe and that which he tells them to do. So many things that should logically be solved several rungs below finally come to him."
Author: Mike Royko

39. "Do small things with great love."
Author: Mother Teresa

40. "It is not what to do, but how much love we put into the doing. We can do not greats, only small things with great love." - Mother Theresa"
Author: Mother Teresa

41. "Even if you've never experienced the wonderful things in life, only after something has been contaminated and marred will it become a beautiful thing. Pain can be healed with gentle care, darkness can be removed with sunlight. Don't underestimate the small things. Everything is significant."
Author: Natsuki Takaya

42. "All roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them. ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster - The Inimitable Jeeves"
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

43. "Life is rich it's full of gifts-the more you have the more there is to share. You know its men with small souls who think there isn't enough to go around. They fight to keep their little grasp on their tiny piece of the world and they're always angry because they're never satisfied. They're cursed with a hole they can never fill. They may get things done but they can never keep what they've achieved."
Author: Phyllis Curott

44. "Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity - by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than to be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things."
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

45. "Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay."
Author: Sallust

46. "It's sad that in a world of billions, people can still feel isolated and alone. Sometimes all it takes to brighten up someone's day is a smile or kind word, or the generous actions of a complete stranger. Small things, the tiny details, these are the things that matter in life — the little glint in the eye, curve of a lip, nod of a head, wave of a hand — such minuscule movements have huge ripple effects."
Author: Shaun Hick

47. "She'd not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that it would remain possible to get caught up in the moment of a simple pleasure before remembering."
Author: Tess Thompson

48. "When a man desires a thing too much, he at once becomes ill at ease. A proud and avaricious man never rests, whereas he who is poor and humble of heart lives in a world of peace. An unmortified man is quickly tempted and overcome in small, trifling evils; his spirit is weak, in a measure carnal and inclined to sensual things; he can hardly abstain from earthly desires. Hence it makes him sad to forego them; he is quick to anger if reproved. Yet if he satisfies his desires, remorse of conscience overwhelms him because he followed his passions and they did not lead to the peace he sought."
Author: Thomas à Kempis

49. "It is not really a small thing when in small things we resist self."
Author: Thomas à Kempis

50. "The world promises things that are temporal and small, and it is served with great eagerness. I (Christ) promise things that are great and eternal, and the hearts of mortals are slow to stir."
Author: Thomas à Kempis

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