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Small Quotes

Big ideas about being underestimated.

Several of these small quotes come from people describing being dismissed early — a company written off as minor before it grew, a hometown that never gets credited. If scale itself interests you more, the Big collection makes the opposite case.

I spent a lot of time in a small town in France, growing up.

Quotes by Timothee Chalamet

Knuckleball pitching is a very small fraternity.

Quotes by Tim Wakefield

Auburn is a very small, quiet college town, a different kind of place geographically and culturally.

Quotes by Tim Hudson

President Obama's policies have been categorical failures for our country. Unemployment is over nine percent, our deficits are growing, and small businesses are being burdened with regulations.

Quotes by Tim Griffin

When you're small, you either are funny, or you get beat up a lot.

Quotes by Tim Conway

Denmark can be very small, provincial, and mediocre.

Quotes by Thomas Vinterberg

I would say that all the singles that I have put out are collectively just a small piece of the artist that Thomas Rhett wants to be.

Quotes by Thomas Rhett

Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the...

Quotes by Thomas P.M. Barnett

One of our key strategies has been to restructure traditional high schools into small learning communities with personalized attention and a range of options.

Quotes by Thomas Menino

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

A kaiseki meal is like that, very small courses over a long period of time.

Quotes by Thomas Keller

Utopia would mean a park - some large, some small - every four or five blocks.

Quotes by Thomas Hoving

In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came...

Quotes by Thomas Friedman

Law enforcement officers are entrusted with a tremendous responsibility; that is why we hold them to such a high standard. With that said, there are a small number of officers who have not lived up to that standard.

Quotes by Thom Tillis

Farmers the world over, in dealing with costs, returns and risks, are calculating economic agents. Within their small, individual, allocative domain, they are fine-tuning entrepreneurs, tuning so subtly that many experts fail to recognize how efficient they are.

Quotes by Theodore Schultz

Change is incremental. Change is small.

Quotes by Theodore Melfi

Small does not mean insignificant.

Quotes by Theo Paphitis

A small business can survive for a while without making a profit, but if its cashflow dries up, the impact is fatal.

Quotes by Theo Paphitis

There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.

Quotes by Terry Teachout

The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics.

Quotes by Terry Teachout

Frequently Asked Questions

Do these quotes only talk about small in terms of size?
Not at all — "small" here ranges from company size to towns to personal ambition. One speaker even once thought a company was "a small company ripping off our copyrights," before it turned out to be a much bigger deal than expected. For more on how scale plays out in the working world, see Business quotes.
What do these quotes say about small towns?
One is blunt about it: "Small towns are the worst for getting recognised." It's a candid take on how a smaller community can limit visibility or opportunity, at least in this speaker's experience.
Is being small always seen negatively in these quotes?
No — one turns it into something aspirational: "I want to be in the small percentage of women who don't settle for conventional roles." Here, "small" describes an exclusive, admirable group rather than a limitation. If you'd rather explore the opposite end of scale, Big quotes covers bigger ambitions too.
How does this collection compare small and great?
One quote draws a direct contrast: "Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous." It suggests smallness here is linked to pettiness, while greatness is linked to generosity of spirit. Explore that idea further in Great quotes.
Is there a common thread tying these small quotes together?
Mostly that "small" is relative here — it can mean underestimated, limiting, exclusive, or even petty depending on context, and these four quotes touch on nearly every version of that. For more everyday words examined from every angle, check out Always quotes.

Others use the word to describe standing apart from convention rather than physical size, and one older line frames small speech as narrow-minded rather than short. Compare with Great quotes or Business quotes for related angles.