Diminishing Quotes

1. "Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world."
Author: Albert Schweitzer

2. "As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists."
Author: Arne Glimcher

3. "Wikipedia was a big help for science, especially science communication, and it shows no sign of diminishing in importance."
Author: Aubrey De Grey

4. "I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him, it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and in that insisting on getting my own way all the time without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself....In one form or another, it is what we all must go through in order to grow up."
Author: Barack Obama

5. "Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect"
Author: Bertrand Russell

6. "We have to harden our hearts and think of the greater good.""The plan is, our exposure to her is supposed to purify us. But it seems more like her exposure to us is diminishing her."
Author: Bill Willingham

7. "Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick. ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state."
Author: Chris Hedges

8. "An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness."
Author: Clara Barton

9. "Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage--oop!--yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more."
Author: Dave Eggers

10. "Any concerns that Romney will adopt McCain's milquetoast campaign model are quickly diminishing."
Author: David Limbaugh

11. "As long as my heart's still in it, I'll keep going. If the passion's there, why stop?...There'll likely be a point of diminishing returns, a point where my strength will begin to wane. Until then, I'll just keep plodding onward, putting one foot in front of the other to the best of my ability. Smiling the entire time."
Author: Dean Karnazes

12. "War is usually fought over diminishing resources, particulary those that we perceive to be extremely valuable."
Author: Dennis Weaver

13. "If we had a hydrogen economy worldwide, every nation on earth could create its own energy source to support its economy, and the threat of war over diminishing resources would just evaporate."
Author: Dennis Weaver

14. "But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned, and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand à la charté des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spanning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes."
Author: Edith Wharton

15. "Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen."
Author: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

16. "The U.S. should be equally responsible for diminishing the cocaine market within the United States as it is in fighting the drug elsewhere."
Author: Evo Morales

17. "No one can fail to see that the power of the Church among large numbers in many communities is today diminishing, or has already ceased."
Author: Felix Adler

18. "The average married man, if he had the energy, could have sex with several women without diminishing the affection and desire he felt for his wife. But women like Judith- unlike truly liberated females like Barbara and Arlene- could not simply accept a man as a temporary instrument of pleasure; they wanted soft lights and promises, not just a penis but the man attached to it."
Author: Gay Talese

19. "Hardy's poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many poems. Sometimes it involves creating a picture, as in ‘Snow in the Suburbs', which allows the eye to follow the cascading snow set off by a sparrow alighting on a tree; or it employs the camera effect, as in ‘On the Departure Platform', which tracks the gradually diminishing form and disappearance of a muslin-gowned girl among those boarding the train. However, Hardy is also a poet of social observation. His humanistic sympathies emerge in a variety of poems drawing upon his experience of both Dorset and London."
Author: Geoffrey Harvey

20. "The system has for its object an increase of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer, living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last."
Author: Henry Charles Carey

21. "We knew it was all wrong. We knew we were diminishing ourselves in ways we couldn't even name, and we wept sometimes at memories of better days, but we no longer saw a choice. We were doing our best to survive. The equations at the roots of our problems were complex, and we were far too exhausted to solve them."
Author: Isaac Marion

22. "Growing numbers of people, in their work, come into contact with a diminishing fragment of reality; as their world shrinks, so does their language."
Author: Ivan Klíma

23. "In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

24. "We developed during the 1990s a series of budget process rules that helped us bring to heel these deficits, diminishing every year and moving the budget so into surplus."
Author: John Spratt

25. "Now that our media companies and it appears are policies are traded for cash, what is there to check the continuing consolidation of power and diminishing of democracy?"
Author: Joichi Ito

26. "Soap operas are such a great way to break-in to the industry. The diminishing landscape of daytime TV means it's going to be harder for young talent to get discovered."
Author: Josh Duhamel

27. "Miss Aubrey, come and have pity on us. We are reading novels and feel our manliness diminishing by the moment. Come restore our vanity, do, and tell us we look the dashing officers we once were."
Author: Julie Klassen

28. "Three hours later they watched the Ile de France slip out toward the flat blue distance of the open sea and sky. How astouding, Andras thought, that a ship that size could shrink to the size of a house, and then to the size of a car; the size of a desk, a book, a shoe, a walnut, a grain of rice, a grain of sand. How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic."
Author: Julie Orringer

29. "Many Buddhist temple priests regard their parishioners as possessions and fear their departure as a diminishing of assets."
Author: Kentetsu Takamori

30. "Formerly (it had begun almost from childhood and kept growing till full maturity), whenever he had tried to do something that would be good for everyone, for mankind, for Russia, for the district, for the whole village, he had noticed that thinking about it was pleasant, but the doing itself was always awkward, there was no full assurance that the thing was absolutely necessary, and the doing itself, which at the start had seemed so big, kept diminishing and diminishing, dwindling to nothing; while now, after his marriage, when he began to limit himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer experienced any joy at the thought of what he was doing, he felt certain that his work was necessary, saw that it turned out much better than before and that it was expanding more and more."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

31. "We are all the spirit sons and daughters of a loving God who is our Father. We are part of His family. He is not a father in some allegorical or poetic sense. He is literally the Father of our spirits. He cares for each one of us. Though this world has a way of diminishing and demeaning men and women, the reality is we are all of royal, divine lineage. In that unprecedented appearance of the Father and the Son in the Sacred Grove, the very first word spoken by the Father of us all was the personal name of Joseph. Such is our Father's personal relationship with each of us. He knows our names and yearns for us to become worthy to return to live with Him."
Author: M. Russell Ballard

32. "It is the mythical, the romantic seduction of the pseudoknowledge, i.e. the folkore - both popular and scientific - that propagates quickly and easily through society, hiding and diminishing the powerful reality of what the new ideas and technologies can offer to humanity."
Author: Manuel Toharia Cortés

33. "I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory … each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about.Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping … I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time."
Author: Margaret Atwood

34. "The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future."
Author: Marya Mannes

35. "I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order te make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it."
Author: Maurice Blanchot

36. "The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."
Author: Michael Pollan

37. "The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs."
Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

38. "No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered "The Ancestor." Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries-- no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy-- are related to me to different degrees. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. The same is true when we infer relationship among species."
Author: Neil Shubin

39. "Kay very calmly and sweetly said, "You know, Pat, how much better do you think Lea Henry and Cindy Noble are going to get at this point?" She was saying ease up—it's enough. I had reached the point of diminishing returns. "I think they are both trying really hard to please you, but how much more can they possibly do?" she said. "I just wonder if you've really thought about that."
Author: Pat Summitt

40. "I therefore declare, that if you wish any remission of the taxation which falls upon the homes of the people of England and Wales, you can only find it by reducing the great military establishments, and diminishing the money paid to fighting men in time of peace."
Author: Richard Cobden

41. "They're not a question of additional benefits. I mean, they touch every aspect of life. Your partner is sick. Social Security. I mean, it's pervasive. It's not as though, well, there's this little Federal sphere and it's only a tax question. It's as Justice Kennedy said, 1100 statutes, and it affects every area of life. And so he was really diminishing what the State has said is marriage. You're saying, no, State said two kinds of marriage; the full marriage, and then this sort of skim milk marriage."
Author: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

42. "He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy."
Author: Sarah Vowell

43. "For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys."
Author: Seneca

44. "December stillness, teach me through your treesThat loom along the west, one with the land,The veiled evangel of your mysteries.While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the downDeepens, and dusk embues me where I stand,With grave diminishings of green and brown,Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;And let me learn your secret from the sky,Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birdsIn lone remote migration beating by.December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,Teach me to travel far and bear my loads."
Author: Siegfried Sassoon

45. "The violence seems to be diminishing. They've stared into the abyss a bit. I think they've all concluded that further violence... is not in their interests."
Author: Stephen Hadley

46. "Justin Martyr explained the distinction and the sameness of the Father and the Son with the analogy of a candle. The flame can pass from one candle to another without changing in quality or diminishing the first."
Author: Thomas F. Madden

47. "The law of diminishing returns is something I really believe in."
Author: Thomas Keller

48. "I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery hold."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

49. "In the notseeing and the hardknowing as though in a cave he seemed to see a diminishing row of suavely shaped urns in moonlight, blanched."
Author: William Faulkner

50. "And the very old men--some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years."
Author: William Faulkner

Diminishing Quotes Pictures