But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.''

``You are much mistaken if you expect to influence me by such a paltry attack as this.

If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

``The king has made him a baron, and can make him a peer, but he can not make him a gentleman, and the Count of Morcerf is too aristocratic to consent, for the paltry sum of two million francs, to a mesalliance.

No doubt M. Danglars has sacrificed them to the selfish consideration of gaining some thousands of paltry francs.

They have generally, therefore, been educated at the public expense; and their numbers are everywhere so great, as commonly to reduce the price of their labour to a very paltry recompence.

All the rest of the produce properly belonged to him too, either as rent for his land, or as profit upon this paltry capital.

Instead of piddling for the little prizes which are to be found in what may be called the paltry raffle of colony faction, they might then hope, from the presumption which men naturally have in their own ability and good fortune, to draw some of the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics.

But to execute a great number of little works, in which nothing that can be done can make any great appearance, or excite the smallest degree of admiration in any traveller, and which, in short, have nothing to recommend them but their extreme utility, is a business which appears, in every respect, too mean and paltry to merit the attention of so great a magistrate.

When the parish happened to be situated in a great city, it divided all the inhabitants into two parties; and when that city happened, either to constitute itself a little republic, or to be the head and capital of a little republic, as in the case with many of the considerable cities in Switzerland and Holland, every paltry dispute of this kind, over and above exasperating the animosity of all their other factions, threatened to leave behind it, both a new schism in the church, and a new faction in the state.

He lost all patience when he considered the laziness and want of charity of his squire Sancho; for to the best of his belief he had only given himself five lashes, a number paltry and disproportioned to the vast number required.

My love would have been devoted--would have trod your paltry whimpering under foot!'

For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.

Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

His father had left in his will £100,000 (roughly £7 million at today's rate), and though 'Willie' was the eldest son and heir, because of his nationalist leanings, he was left with only a 'paltry' £800, the bulk having been passed to his younger brother, Edward Gibson (1873–1928), father of the 3rd Baron Ashbourne.

… It’s more PR and a dangerous delay in acting decisively.” The penalties were paltry, Wilstein wrote, and the program still didn’t call for random, unannounced, year-round testing, nor did it include amphetamines.

It refers to the paltry belongings of an almost penniless person.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s musical episode, 'Once More, with Feeling', registers a paltry outstanding music direction nomination.

Enraged by this new tax, Kéraban decides to take his associates to Scutari by traveling seven hundred leagues around the perimeter of the Black Sea so that he won’t have to pay the paltry 10 paras tax.

Im lamented that if he had at least 20,000 men instead of the paltry 3,000, he would have headed north to invade Mukden (then-Qing capital) himself, which may have changed the outcome of the war.

This, despite the fact that its paltry 1,000 watts could scarcely be heard in West Palm Beach during the day!

these biographical facts are paltry in the extreme but we must resist the urge to embellish them with fanciful stories, as the medieval biographers did, or engage in idle speculation about al-Farabi’s ethnicity or religious affiliation on the basis of contrived interpretations of his works, as many modern scholars have done."