Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 1, 2025
He was nothing more than a gambler's agent. It was not troubling him any just at this moment, but it was not at all a mystery now, what he was. As in the case of Waterman & Company, he sized up these men shrewdly, judging some to be weak, some foolish, some clever, some slow, but in the main all small-minded or deficient because they were agents, tools, or gamblers.
Whatever opinion might be formed of their probable efficacy out of doors, or of the sanity of the man who sat in his office and scrawled them out, the thieves themselves mocked and ridiculed them, and called the small-minded military man set over them a "Barmey" humbug. "What does it matter," they would say to each other, "how we walk?
And because to magnify and to diminish always have respect to something, by comparison with which the large-minded man makes himself great and the small-minded man makes himself small, it results therefrom that the magnanimous man always makes others less than they are, and the pusillanimous makes others always greater.
But I have put this particular case before you, as an artist rather than an Italian, to show what I mean when I object to a "German future for Europe." I object to something which believes very much in itself, and in which I do not in the least believe. I object to something which is conceited and small-minded; but which also has that kind of pertinacity which always belongs to lunatics.
The Small-minded man is deficient, both as regards himself, and also as regards the estimation of the Great-minded: while the Vain man is in excess as regards himself, but does not get beyond the Great-minded man.
Do not be so small-minded as to contest and resent authority. You sometimes hear a servant say, "That's not my place," or "I won't be put upon." You never hear a true lady speak in that temper, and yet, is there any difference in spirit between this tone which you would condemn, and your own way of answering back?
So harshly has the small-minded policy of penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the men who perished fighting fire.
Thackeray says, "He who meanly admires mean things." It has been said that by reason of writing so much about snobs that Thackeray came to see snobbishness where there was none. But certain it is he laid a smart but kindly finger on many a small-minded prejudice. Several times in this book you have heard of sizars and commoners, stupid distinctions which are happily now done away with.
To picture a man without some sort of poetry well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as . . . the Harrow boys.
Again, he who values himself highly without just grounds is a Vain man: though the name must not be applied to every case of unduly high self-estimation. He that values himself below his real worth is Small-minded, and whether that worth is great, moderate, or small, his own estimate falls below it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking