Diminish Quotes - Page 21

• As relationships progress, the time you spend smooching diminishes. Where kissing was once an enjoyable entree unto itself, it becomes a mere appetizer couples hasten through on the way to the main course.

  Jenna McCarthy

  Couple, Kissing, Progress

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• Envying another's beauty will diminish your own. But when you praise beauty in others your own beauty deepens.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Attitude, Praise

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• These fiery trials are designed to make you stronger, but they have the potential to diminish or even destroy your trust in the Son of God and to weaken your resolve to keep your promises to Him. These trials are often camouflaged, making them difficult to identify. They take root in our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our sensitivities, or in those things that matter most to us. A real but manageable test for one can be a fiery trial for another.

  Neil L. Andersen

  Real, Adversity, Son

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• Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.

  Herbert Spencer

  Science, Humanity, Growth

  Herbert Spencer (1873). “Social Statics; Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, & the First of Them Developed”, p.79

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• In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Science, Animal, Giving

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• Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.

  Mark Twain

  Dark, Doors, Sobriety

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.383, Courier Corporation

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• Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it's nothing.

  Marlon Riggs

  Gay, Justice, Diversity

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• Convince your enemy that he will gain very little by attacking you; this will diminish his enthusiasm

  Sun Tzu

  Art, War, Enemy

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• Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence - neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish - it is an imponderably valuable gift. Each of us has a few minutes a day or a few hours a week which we could donate to an old folks home or a children's hospital ward. The elderly whose pillows we plump or whose water pitchers we refill may or may not thank us for our gift, but the gift is upholding the foundation of the universe.

  Maya Angelou

  Time, Children, War

  Maya Angelou (2011). “Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now”, p.10, Bantam

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• There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Patience, Names, Doe

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• [The loss-of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Military, Distance, Moving

  "Conflict and Defense: A General Theory". Book by Kenneth E. Boulding, p. 245, 1962.

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• The vital air of friendship is composed of confidence. Friendship perishes in proportion as this air diminishes.

  Philibert Joseph Roux

  Friendship, Air, Proportion

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• Grief diminishes when it has nothing to grow upon.

  Publilius Syrus

  Growing Up, Grief, Grows

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• To envy is to draw circles that isolate us from others, to take small, bitter trips that diminish the traveler.

  Phyllis Grissim-Theroux

  Circles, Envy, Bitter

  "Night Lights: Bedtime Stories for Parents in the Dark". Book by Phyllis Grissim-Theroux, 1987.

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• If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner,
  And take to light claret instead of pale ale;
  Look down with an utter contempt upon butter,
  And never touch bread till its toasted--or stale.

  Henry Sambrooke Leigh

  Light, Wish, Looks

  Henry Sambrooke Leigh (1869). “Carols of Cockayne”, p.186

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• My own view, for what it's worth, is that sexuality is lovely, there cannot be too much of it, it is self-limiting if it is satisfactory, and satisfaction diminishes tension and clears the mind for attention and learning.

  Paul Goodman

  Sex, Self, Views

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• One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.

  Sigmund Freud

  Mean, Emotional, Long

  Sigmund Freud, Ernst L. Freud (1960). “Letters of Sigmund Freud”, p.28, Courier Corporation

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• Every time you win, it diminishes the fear a little bit. You never really cancel the fear of losing; you keep challenging it.

  Arthur Ashe

  Fear, Winning, Greatness

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• The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

  H. L. Mencken

  Marriage, Wedding, Men

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• What you think upon grows. Whatever you allow to occupy your mind you magnify in your life. Whether the subject of your thought be good or bad, the law works and the condition grows. Any subject that you keep out of your mind tends to diminish in your life, because what you do not use atrophies. The more you think of grievances, the more such trials you will continue to receive; the more you think of the good fortune you have had, the more good fortune will come to you.

  Emmet Fox

  Gratitude, Thinking, Law

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• To those who scare peace loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends.

  John Ashcroft

  America, Giving, People

  "Ashcroft: Critics of new terror measures undermine effort", December 7, 2001.

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• There is a diabolical trio existing in the natural man, implacable, inextinguishable, co-operative and consentaneous, pride, envy, and hate; pride that makes us fancy we deserve all the goods that others possess; envy that some should be admired while we are overlooked; and hate, because all that is bestowed on others, diminishes the sum we think due to ourselves.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Hate, Pride, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1828). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think”, p.216

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• We can be content with simplicity because the deepest most satisfying delights God gives us through creation are free gifts from nature and from loving relationships with people. After your basic needs are met, accumulated money begins to diminish your capacity for these pleasures rather than increase them. Buying things contributes absolutely nothing to the heart's capacity for joy.

  John Piper

  Heart, Free Gifts, Buying Things

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• When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.

  Adam Smith

  Complaining, Decay, Prosperity

  Adam Smith (2007). “The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, p.60, Harriman House Limited

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