Top 428 Diminished Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not 'naturally' in charge as men.

I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiralling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true - If you hold it away from yourself long enough, do you lose it entirely? If no one cares for you at all, do you even really exist?

I can't tell you how many people have asked me to show them Stray Cat Strut and that little diminished run on the C. I guess my brain is wired backwards. I don't know what possessed me to do that, but I did.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.

When I lived in Delhi, it was burdened with so many futures - fast roads, malls, flyovers - that one felt almost obliged to be hopeful. Now that hope has diminished, you can feel the city going into a frenzy to reinvent itself. I miss living there.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.

Every time you encounter something that forces you to “handle it,” your self-esteem is raised considerably. You learn to trust that you will survive, no matter what happens. And in this way your fears are diminished immeasurably.

One of the unique things about the human brain is that it can do only what it thinks it can do. The minute you say 'my memory isn't what it used to be' or 'I can't remember a thing today.' You are actually training your brain to live up to your diminished expectations.

Obviously, there's always a battle over philosophical leanings and persuasions, but the bottom line here is that Americans need to understand that this is an ideology in jihadist terrorism that is dangerous beyond words, and we need the moderate Muslim voices to be heard here if this is to be diminished in Islam itself.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It's a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest.

Look at the sky. Does its sapphire hue dim when you take a single breath? Are the stars drawn closer when you weep? The sky cannot be diminished so. Thus it is with the spirit: it is a thing without beginning or end.

While there continue to be critics of the Comcast-NBC merger, it's hard to argue that competition in news and entertainment has diminished as a result, given the rise of Netflix and Amazon and the explosion in entertainment options that followed the merger.

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.

Once the public loses confidence in a president's leadership at a time of war, once they don't trust him anymore, once his credibility is sharply diminished, how does he get it back?

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.

By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it.

Nothing disturbs me more than the downward trend of productivity in our nation today. The consequences of a decrease in productivity are a diminished standard of living, higher labor costs, less competitive prices, and more inflation.

The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds.

When I look at the galaxies on a clear night - when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged . . . I rejoice that I am a part of it.

A disturbing possibility exists that the television experience has not merely blurred the distinctions between the real and the unreal for steady viewers, but that by doing so it has dulled their sensitivities to real events. For when the reality of a situation is diminished, people are able to react to it less emotionally, more as spectators.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

His knowledge of books had in some degree diminished his knowledge of the world.

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

You are quaffing drink from a hundred fountains: whenever any of these hundred yields less, your pleasure is diminished. But when the sublime fountain gushes from within you, no longer need you steal from the other fountains.

I had learned this lesson so many times before. It was the great inner truth that didn't require the support of logic. Every time I loved, I lost, and I was diminished. I wondered how much of me would be left after tomorrow.

Do I want to spend my diminished working hours writing or answering email? Now I have somebody read through them. If someone has something really important to tell me I write back. Otherwise they get the auto reply.

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.

When people say that kids change your life, it's no small feat what they do. I've stressed about competition my whole life, but the minute I held my son Blaise in my arms for the first time, those stresses diminished.

I do think prayer is powerful and it is not to be diminished. Some of us who are struggling to put food on the table and are wondering where the next paycheck is coming from or have dangerous health situations and they don't have access to appropriate care do pray - do pray for yourselves and for others.

Everyone believes that the prospect for a civil war has diminished significantly over the past several days. All the mainstream leaders of Iraq believe that civil war must be avoided. It's very positive that they are all saying it.

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

The importance of first-week sales has kind of diminished, in our opinion, in the industry, and we don't really know what it really means anymore. It is what it is in the industry. And for us, it's all about the endgame, not where it begins.

Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigalityand misconduct. By what a frugal man annually saves he not onlyaffords maintenance to an additional number of productive hands?but?he establishes as it were a perpetual fund for the maintenance of an equal number in all times to come.

The personality problem is so tough when you're not able to pay people. It's bad enough when you can pay people, but, when you have people working for free, often their motivation is diminished considerably.

Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.

Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.

And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.

You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.

The citizen is becoming a pawn in a game where nobody knows the rules, where everybody consequently doubts that there are rules at all, and where the vocabulary has been diminished to such an extent that nobody is even sure what the game is all about.

There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.

Whenever people say 'women's soccer,' I want to correct them to say 'soccer.' Every girl has had their sport diminished because they're girls.

A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn't need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished and manipulated by people with agendas.

For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared.

This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage.

My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.

The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.

My diminished girth, in tailor phraseology, was hardly conceivable even by my own friends, or my respected medical adviser, until I put on my former clothing, over what I now wear, which is a thoroughly convincing proof of the remarkable change.

Though we still come first in the sphere of gas export, national production has diminished due to the increasing volumes of hydrogenation for the electric power industry and therefore there is a lower need for gas at thermal power plants.

Physical courage to a person of honour is easier and less risky than acts that could subject him to embarrassment or humiliation or a diminished career or reputation. These things he must live with. To die for honor is an easier thought to bear.

The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

As a recluse I couldn't bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.

It has become increasingly difficult for states or the federal government to apply the death penalty. But why even try? Nothing is accomplished, and while the chances of making a mistake are now diminished - DNA can prove guilt as well as innocence - life in prison is a worthy substitute.

Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes less than themselves.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.

Abortions can be, and frequently are, traumatizing, as are other invasive surgeries performed to the sexual and internal organs. All or any of these 'violations' can cause loss of vitality, diminished capacity for erotic connection and pleasure, and other symptoms of trauma.

When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.