Diffuse Quotes

The soul is indestructible and its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set at night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I felt a wave of longing roll out of me, but not the way it usually did, diffuse and sad. This was hopeful, as though it had been coaxed out by a whispered promise. ~ Michele Jaffe

It's an old, established rule, but "golden hour" lighting is ideal because the first and last hours of sunlight are diffuse and warm. For that reason, women with photos taken outside during those hours tended to look great. ~ Amy Webb

Your late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view to emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country; but I despair of seeing it. ~ George Washington

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture. ~ Tom Robbins

[It would not be long] ere the whole surface of this country would be channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country. ~ Samuel Morse

When your attention is diffuse, it's like a broad, weak beam of light that doesn't reveal much. Concentration brings the weak beam down to a single, sharply focused, supremely bright, exponentially more illuminating point. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I use this brand called Ouidad; they're great. Not Your Mother's is another one. Garnier Fructis. I use a bunch of stuff. Literally, I just throw a huge concoction of stuff in my hair after I get out of the shower, and then I diffuse it. ~ Tori Kelly

Tree At My Window
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather. ~ Robert Frost

We can only diffuse kindness, to the souls filled with bitterness. This is the greatest deeds to awaken their good spirit. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

But see, Orion sheds unwholesome dews; Arise, the pines a noxious shade diffuse; Sharp Boreas blows, and nature feels decay, Time conquers all, and we must time obey. ~ Alexander Pope

It is amazing how little effort most people make to improve control of their attention. If reading a book seems too difficult, instead of sharpening concentration we tend to set it aside and instead turn on the television, which not only requires minimal attention, but in fact tends to diffuse what little it commands with choppy editing, commercial interruptions, and generally inane content. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Beards grow out so fast that if you shave every day, there isn't much of a window for anyone to use them against you - and shaved stubble is too diffuse to make a decent channel anyway. ~ Jim Butcher

It takes a number of years to learn to hold the mind perfectly in one place. But each day we do it a little better, and in the doing we're releasing energy that is taking our mind in higher diffuse planes of attention. ~ Frederick Lenz

Are-are you leaving?"
She saw his shoulders stiffen at the sound of her voice, and when he turned and looked at her, she could almost feel the effort he was exerting to keep his rage under control. "You're leaving," he bit out.
In silent, helpless protest Elizabeth shook her head and started slowly across the carpet, dimly aware that this was worse, much worse than merely standing up in front of several hundred lords in the House.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you," he warned softly.
"Do-do what?" Elizabeth said shakily.
"Get any nearer to me."
She stopped cold, her mind registering the physical threat in his voice, refusing to believe it, her gaze searching his granite features.
"Ian," she began, stretching her hand out in a gesture of mute appeal, then letting it fall to her side when her beseeching move got nothing from him but a blast of contempt from his eyes. "I realize," she began again, her voice trembling with emotion while she tried to think how to begin to diffuse his wrath, "that you must despise me for what I've done."
"You're right."
"But," Elizabeth continued bravely, "I am prepared to do anything, anything to try to atone for it. No matter how it must seem to you now, I never stopped loving-"
His voice cracked like a whiplash. "Shut up!"
"No, you have to listen to me," she said, speaking more quickly now, driven by panic and an awful sense of foreboding that nothing she could do or say would ever make him ~ Judith McNaught

social Left is a minority, too, and it is a minority aspiring to dominate our institutions at a time when those institutions are particularly weak and diffuse. ~ Yuval Levin

What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive - such as Roger Ebert - while others disappear without a twinkle. ~ James Wolcott

When the late Bishop was appointed, about thirty-two years ago, to diffuse the light of the Gospel through this extensive portion of His Majesty's dominions, it was even a greater spiritual, than a natural wilderness. ~ John Strachan

Fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Bion
From the Greek of Moschus
Published from the Hunt manuscripts by Forman, "Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1876.
Ye Dorian woods and waves, lament aloud,
Augment your tide, O streams, with fruitless tears,
For the beloved Bion is no more.
Let every tender herb and plant and flower,
From each dejected bud and drooping bloom,
Shed dews of liquid sorrow, and with breath
Of melancholy sweetness on the wind
Diffuse its languid love; let roses blush,
Anemones grow paler for the loss
Their dells have known; and thou, O hyacinth,
Utter thy legend now - yet more, dumb flower,
Than 'Ah! alas!' - thine is no common grief
Bion the [sweetest singer] is no more.
NOTE:
_2 tears]sorrow (as alternative) Hunt manuscript ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan

000-x02 Dissociative reaction
This reaction represents a type of gross personality disorganization, the basis of which is a neurotic disturbance, although the diffuse dissociation seen in some casts may occasionally appear psychotic. The personality disorganization may result in aimless running or "freezing." The repressed impulse giving rise to the anxiety may be discharged by, or deflected into, various symptomatic expressions, such as depersonalization, dissociated personality, stupor, fugue, amnesia, dream state, somnambulism, etc. The diagnosis will specify symptomatic manifestations.
These reactions must be differentiated from schizoid personality, from schizophrenic reaction, and from analogous symptoms in some other types of neurotic reactions. Formerly, this reaction has been classified as a type of "conversion hysteria. ~ American Psychiatric Association

If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant. ~ William Winwood Reade

Most of all, I blamed the Icelander for the society and emotional remoteness and irrelevance of birds, that feathered people who seemed to reign over us all with economy of presence and with illicit incentive, perhaps waiting for the epoch in which humanity jettisoned our limbs to reunite with the worms so that their beaks might claim the kingdom which had eluded the diffuse protests of thrashing wings for so long. Oh yes, the birds could go get fucked best of all! ~ Kirk Marshall

One way of watering down the effects of violence is to approach it in a more lighthearted way. I don't mean to say that you laugh when somebody has their arm sawn off, but you can diffuse fear with humour. ~ Colin Baker

There are inner sufferings so subtle and so diffuse that we can't tell whether they belong to the body or the soul, whether they're an anxiety that comes from our feeling that life is futile or an indisposition originating in some organic abyss such as the stomach, liver or brain. How often my normal self-awareness becomes turbid with the stirred dregs of an anguished stagnation! How often it hurts me to exist, with a nausea so indefinite I'm not sure if it's tedium or a warning that I'm about to vomit! How often… ~ Fernando Pessoa

So my thing is we want come in and diffuse anything that's not real, anything that doesn't associate with real hip-hop. We want to be the one that says, 'Yo, we want to help build and build a bigger and better industry.' I'm just like, 'Yo, with talent from Toronto, Vancouver, Quebec. Who's paying attention?' ~ Raekwon

Let the music diffuse all the tension. ~ Nas

Nobody should ever mistake and think that our country [USA] is weakened, or that authority is diffuse and unspecified, and that we are vulnerable. ~ Michael Bloomberg

The bestway to diffuse an argument is to listen first, second, and last. ~ Anabel Jensen

So many synapses,' Drisana said. 'Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.'
Danlo made a fist and asked, 'What do the synapses look like?'
'They're modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.' She didn't explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume's computer stored and imprinted language. 'The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses' natural evolution.'
Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. 'The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?'
'Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.'
'And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another's mind, yes?'
'Yes, Danlo.'
'And not just the learning – isn't this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?'
'Almost anything.'
'What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?'
'Certainly.'
'And nightmares?'
Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. 'No one would imprint a nightmare into another.'
'But it is possible, yes? ~ David Zindell

You can only diffuse light in dark places. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen. ~ Freya Stark

There is a Sufi story about a man who is so good that the angels ask God to give him the gift of miracles. God wisely tells them to ask him if that is what he would wish.

So the angels visit this good man and offer him first the gift of healing by hands, then the gift of conversion of souls, and lastly the gift of virtue. He refuses them all. They insist that he choose a gift or they will choose one for him. "Very well," he replies. "I ask that I may do a great deal of good without ever knowing it." The story ends this way:

The angels were perplexed. They took counsel and resolved upon the following plan: Every time the saint's shadow fell behind him it would have the power to cure disease, soothe pain, and comfort sorrow. As he walked, behind him the shadow made arid paths green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave clear water to dried up brooks, fresh color to pale children, and joy to unhappy men and women. The saint simply went about his daily life diffusing virtue as the stars diffuse light and the flowers scent, without ever being aware of it. The people respecting his humility followed him silently, never speaking to him about his miracles. Soon they even forgot his name and called him "the Holy Shadow. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country. ~ Noah Webster

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool. ~ Linda Stone

The cafeteria in the Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world - and forever it shall be - with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, aweapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding. ~ Max Stirner

Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother ("in the loving calm of your arms," says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.
Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.) ~ Roland Barthes

See yonder leafless tree against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And ever subdividing separate,
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,
As if they loved the element, & hasted
To dissipate their being into it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think when you're dealing with very tenuous scenes and difficult and heavy subject matter, it's important to be close intimately with your cast as friends, and be able to diffuse a lot of that tension and trust each other with the work. ~ Jack Falahee

Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow. ~ Charles Dickens

It takes a rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion - that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different from a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance - is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling - feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously. ~ Maria Popova

The military forces of the revolutionary adversary are diffuse. One is never sure whether one has destroyed them unless one is ready to destroy a large portion of the population, and this usually conflicts with the political aim of the war and hence also violates a fundamental Clausewitzian principle ~ Anatol Rapoport

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute. ~ Robert Adams

I learned early in life that laughter is a great way to diffuse and uncomfortable situation, so I began to use that as a tool, throughout my life. ~ Romany Malco

I tell my students they can procrastinate as long as they follow three rules: 1. No going onto the computer during their procrastination time. It's just too engrossing. 2. Before procrastinating, identify the easiest homework problem. (No solving is necessary at this point.) 3. Copy the equation or equations that are needed to solve the problem onto a small piece of paper and carry the paper around until they are ready to quit procrastinating and get back to work. "I have found this approach to be helpful because it allows the problem to linger in diffuse mode - students are working on it even while they are procrastinating." - Elizabeth Ploughman, Lecturer of Physics, Camosun College, Victoria, British Columbia ~ Barbara Oakley

For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers. ~ Pete Hamill

The most feared situation is to end up inadvertently in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blamed. Yet this is exactly what happens in a structure that systematically diffuses responsibility. It is because managers fear blame-time that they diffuse responsibility; however such a diffusion inevitably means that someone, somewhere is going to become a scapegoat when things go wrong. ~ Robert Jackall

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility. (p. 43) ~ Gail Jones

In the case of climate change, the threat is long-term and diffuse and requires broad international action for the benefit of people decades in the future. And in politics, the urgent always trumps the important, and that is what makes it a very difficult and challenging issue. ~ Martin Rees

The execution of the deed is sometimes masterfully done, in the most ingenious fashion, yet the control of the individual actions that comprise it, the origin of those actions, is diffuse and is associated with various morbid sensations. Rather like a dream. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Even in rainier areas, where dust is less inexorable and submits to brooms and rags, it is generally detested, because dust is not organized and is therefore considered aesthetically bankrupt. Our light is not kind to faint diffuse spreading things. Our soft comfortable light flatters carefully organized, formally structured things like wedding cakes with their scrolls and overlapping flounces.
It takes the mortal storms of a star to transform dust into something incandescent. Our dust, shambling and subtractive as it is, would be radiant, if we were close enough to such a star, to that deep and dangerous light, and we would be ravished by the vision - emerald shreds veined in gold, diamond bursts fraught with deep-red flashes, aqua and violet and icy-green astral manifestations, splintery blinking harbor of light, dust as it can be, the quintessence of dust. ~ Amy Leach

Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen ~ Jose Saramago

The Eighth doth demonstrate that the motion of the infinity of worlds [8] is not the result of external motive force, but of their own nature, and that despite this there existeth an infinite motor force.

The Ninth sheweth how infinite motion may be intensively verified in each of the worlds. To this we should add that since each moving body at the same time moveth itself and is moved, needs must that it may be seen in every point of the circle that it describeth around its own centre. And this objection we discharge on other occasions when it will be permissible to present the more diffuse doctrine. ~ Giordano Bruno

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Try to find someone with a sense of humor. That's an important thing to have because when you get into an argument, one of the best ways to diffuse it is to be funny. You don't want to hide away from a point, because some points are serious, but you'd rather have a discussion that was a discussion, rather than an argument. ~ Ed Sheeran

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation. ~ Leslie Jamison

Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it's way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love. ~ Haruki Murakami

Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest. ~ Victor Hugo

Advertising, as a single entity capable of creating vast changes in our social structure, simply does not exist. Its impact is too diffuse, too omnidirectional. ~ Prince William Of Hesse-Kassel

Maybe fate's arithmetic is so diffuse that it's not arithmetic at all. ~ David Levithan

The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups. ~ Charles Wheelan

All renewables, much as I love them, are diffuse. They all have a small power per unit area, and we have to live with that fact. ~ David J. C. MacKay

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.
Interviewer: You're not a religious man?
No. And I do suppose that science has taken, to a large extent and for a number of people, has taken the place of religion.
Interviewer: What do you mean by that?
That one can have more belief in scientific cures or scientific miracles than you do in God miracles. It's inevitable that we will eventually diffuse into nothingness ... ~ Bill Blass

Second only to the sea, the Miami sky has been the greatest comfort in my life past 50. On a good day, when the wind blows from the south, the light here is diffuse and forgiving. ~ Iggy Pop

Love, certainly, might be a momentarily strong force capable of moving individuals in strange and remarkable ways, but given sufficient time and the relentless weathering effects of repetition it will always and ultimately diffuse into boredom and melancholy. ~ John Zande

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

...as sound politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and virtuous. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest. ~ Victor Hugo

The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community. ~ Cherie Carter-Scott

War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased. Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life. ~ Henry Clay

In every human society, there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort and to diffuse their influence universally and equally. ~ Cesare Beccaria

Directing is such alchemy, it's so easy to fail. And I've seen people who are great at their jobs because everybody has a go. Editors, DPs, actors, craft services guy, everybody wants to try it out but it is such a diffuse but necessary set of skills that you never know which one this person might lack. ~ Joss Whedon

An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Some say that life has no form, that it is extremely diffuse. I think I can agree with them ... A life without conclusions is painful. ~ Soseki Natsume

Mercer," Polly says, "we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very un-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation."
They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling.
"Well," Mercer says, after a moment, "that was certainly - "
"I will hit you with a shovel," Polly Cradle murmurs. ~ Nick Harkaway

The Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner, they found hospitals, prisons and schools. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Each time you send love in response to hate, you diffuse the hate. ~ Wayne Dyer

The tincture of night began to diffuse the soup of the afternoon.
Lord Vetinari considered the sentence, and found it good. He liked 'tincture' particularly. Tincture. Tincture. It was a distinguished word, and pleasantly countered by the flatness of 'soup'. Yes. In which may well be found the croutons of teatime. ~ Terry Pratchett

Governments do not necessarily act in the national interest, especially when making detailed microeconomic interventions. Instead, they are influenced by interest group pressures. The kinds of interventions that new trade theory suggests can raise national income will typically raise the welfare of small, fortunate groups by large amounts, while imposing costs on larger, more diffuse groups. ~ Paul Krugman

It's so diffuse
being alive. Suddenly one is aware
that nobody really gives a damn. ~ Amiri Baraka

Keep a sense of humor. Over and over, I see that levity helps diffuse practically any difficult situation - which ~ Gretchen Rubin

Gregor Mendel's years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity. ~ James Gleick

As yet, though we live in a culture in which images are the dominant currency of communication, we have been unable to form an adequate picture of the future. Despite the new electronic power to create instant image flow, the ability to see the more diffuse Postmodern connections . . . has become more difficult. . . . It is harder to visualize a multinational identity than a local entity. We can only see the world by forming a picture through various specialized mediations. . . . We now lack a convincing vision... ~ Scott Bukatman

In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page. ~ Hilary Mantel

Ty removed his fingers from Zane's back as he saw the shiver run through him, and he pressed his lips tightly together, looking up and away in disgust as he resigned himself to what he was about to do. Broaching the subject could possibly cost him his job if Zane went tattling to the higher-ups about sexual harassment or some shit, but Ty was going to do it anyway. "Anything you need to say to me?"
...
The visual of Ty's nude body flashed behind Zane's eyelids, and he spoke before he thought better of it. "Nothing you want to hear," he murmured as he faced the mirror, hoping to diffuse the situation. "Thanks for the help," he added, wanting desperately to get away from this tension.
...
"You sure about that?" Ty asked as his stomach fluttered nervously. His voice finally betrayed the nerves. "Trying to be a real partner to you here, Zane. If you need to tell me something, then here's your chance. ~ Abigail Roux

General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general ... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary. Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity. ~ Daniel Webster

It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father, it is to identify you,
It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided,
Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form'd in you,
You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

The threads that were spun are gather'd, the weft crosses the warp, the pattern is systematic.

The preparations have every one been justified,
The orchestra have sufficiently tuned their instruments, the baton has given the signal.

The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now housed,
He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those that to look upon and be with is enough. ~ Walt Whitman

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. ~ George Eliot

It is a strange fact, but incontestable, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men's minds than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause. ~ Mary Shelley

Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy
of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

I felt I wrote my views of my experience with mere encouragement I got in Earth, I researched like a wanderer did, with songs of my creation ever had in me and I would be pleased to give away my knowledge to mankind like my ashes I diffuse with my society. ~ Nithin Purple

Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip - and here I have in mind malicious gossip - be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
The character of gossip that distinguishes it from rumor is that gossip consists typically of stories that are designated to ruin the reputation of some identifiable person or persons. If the perpetrators remain anonymous, the victim is clearly specified. There is, arguably, something of a disguised democratic voice about gossip in the sense that it is propagated only to the extent that others find it in their interest to retell the story.13 If they don't, it disappears. Above all, most gossip is a discourse about social rules that have been violated. A person's reputation can be damaged by stories about his tightfistedness, his insulting words, his cheating, or his clothing only if the public among whom such tales circulate have shared standards of generosity, polite speech, honesty, and appropriate dress. Without an accepted normat ~ James C. Scott

The episodes were multiplying, and nothing he did seemed to make a difference. He'd tried avoiding his power, on the theory that it was a kind of battery, one that charged with use. When that didn't work, Victor changed tactics, and tried using his power more, on the theory that perhaps it was a charge he had to diffuse. But that approach yielded the same results--again the buzz grew louder, again it became physical, again Victor died. ~ V.E. Schwab

Childhood doesn't exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams. ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

It takes rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion -- that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different than a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance -- is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling -- feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.
Love, Margaret implies in her letter to Sam, is never to be taken for granted -- it is to be met moment by moment, on its ever-changing terms. ~ Maria Popova

Our real work is prayer. What good is the cold iron of our frantic little efforts unless first we heat it in the furnace of our prayer? Only heat will diffuse heat. ~ Mother Maribel