Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.
Silence - Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
If I set for myself a task, be it so trifling, I shall see it through. How else shall I have confidence in myself to do important things?
Contentions for trifles can get but a trifling victory.
For our discussion is on no trifling matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives.
True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
It chills my blood to hear the blest Supreme Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme.
To a philosopher no circumstance, however trifling, is too minute.
He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.
However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.
The young are in great danger. Much evil results from their light and trifling reading. Much time is lost which should be spent in useful employment. Some would even deprive themselves of sleep that they might finish some ridiculous love story.
There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.
For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal.
A lack of patience in trifling matters might lead to the disruption of great project.
Trifling favors are readily acknowledged, though cheaply esteemed; but important ones are most rarely remembered.
What struck me most in England was the perception that only those works which have a practical tendency awake attention and command respect, while the purely scientific, which possess far greater merit are almost unknown. And yet the latter are the proper source from which the others flow. Practice alone can never lead to the discovery of a truth or a principle. In Germany it is quite the contrary. Here in the eyes of scientific men no value, or at least but a trifling one, is placed upon the practical results. The enrichment of science is alone considered worthy attention.
There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, grave, and severe; it is always in the light, and the faults and errors fall to our share. It defies incompetency, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.
I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.