Pastoral Resources

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

Seeks painted trifles and fantastic toys, and eagerly pursues imaginary joys.

I have been an 'Official' all my life, without the least turn for it. I never could attain a true official manner, which is highly artificial and handles trifles with ludicrously disproportionate gravity.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

He that shuns trifles must shun the world.

A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

A great proportion of the wretchedness which has embittered married life, has originated in a negligence of trifles.

Women are only children of a larger growth. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.