“Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles life.”
Satire VI, l. 208.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)
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Edward Young 110
English poet 1683–1765Related quotes

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Development of negatives, p. 108

“It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all.”
Source: Under Two Flags (1867), Chapter I
Context: It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all. Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh when they lie in a ditch with their own knee-joint and their hunter's spine broken over the double post and rails: it is the mud that has choked up your horn just when you wanted to rally the pack; it's the whip who carries you off to a division just when you've sat down to your turbot; it's the ten seconds by which you miss the train; it's the dust that gets in your eyes as you go down to Epsom; it's the pretty little rose note that went by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from madame; it's the dog that always will run wild into the birds; it's the cook who always will season the white soup wrong—it is these that are the bores of life, and that try the temper of your philosophy.

“Oh, are not the pleasures in life, in this daily round, trifling compared with the pains!”
Satin parva res est voluptatum in vita atque in aetate agunda praequam quod molestum est?
Amphitryon, Act II, scene 2.
Amphitryon

“A trifling debt makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him an enemy.”
Leve aes alienum debitorem facit, grave inimicum.
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XIX: On worldliness and retirement, Line 11.

De iride (On the rainbow) Note this prediction of optical scientific instruments like the telescope and microscope, not to be utilized until 250 years later.

“Since trifles make the sum of human things,
And half our misery from our foibles springs.”
Sensibility.