A life devoted to trifles, not only takes away the inclination, but the capacity for higher pursuits. The truths of Christianity have scarcely more influence on a frivolous than on a profligate character.
Hannah More
The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips, though they cannot speak.
William Makepeace Thackeray
He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
Great merit, or great failings, will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked in the general run of the world.
Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield
Those who place their affections at first on trifles for amusement, will find these become at last their most serious concerns.
Oliver Goldsmith
Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man, or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling, and useless things, than they deserved.
Plato
Johnson well says, "He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything." Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things.
Charles Simmons
Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
Henry Cabot Lodge
Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
Henry Cabot Lodge
It is with trifles and when he is off guard that a man best reveals his character.
Arthur Schopenhauer
For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.
Bible
Little deeds of kindness, little words of love, Help to make earth happy, like the heaven above.
Julia F. Carney
Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances.
Livy