Diluted Quotes

I used to think then that all the tragic events of life were written down in books and that what went on outside was just diluted crap. ~ Henry Miller

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley ~ Nicholas Murray

Muhammad once was talking to a crowd
of chieftains, princes with great influence,
when a poor blind man interrupted him.

Muhammad frowned and said to the man,
"Let me attend to these visitors.
This is a rare chance,
whereas you are already my friend.
We'll have ample time."

Then somebody nearby said, "That blind man
may be worth a hundred kings. Remember the proverb, Human beings are mines."

World-power means nothing. Only the unsayable, jeweled inner life matters.

Muhammad replied, "Do not think that I'm concerned with being acknowledged by these authorities.

If a beetle moves toward rosewater, it proves
that the solution is diluted. Beetles
love dung, not rose essence.

If a coin is eager to be tested
by the touchstone, that coin
itself may be a touchstone.

A thief loves the night.
I am day. I reveal essences.

A calf thinks God is a cow.
A donkey's theology changes
when someone new pets it
and gives it what it wants.

I am not a cow, or thistles for camels
to browse on. People who insult me
are only polishing the mirror ~ Rumi

As a mother you have thoughts. You get interrupted. You forget.
You are distracted. Your thoughts and ideas become fragmented,
diluted, or simply evaporate. You must have faith that you will
again have a thought. Creativity is the string upon
which you hang the pearls of your identity,
your authentic presence.
- Suzi Banks Baum ~ Suzi Banks Baum

To me, tea taste like dried lawn-clippings, diluted leaf mould, watered-down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid. ~ Maggie O'Farrell

Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap - and refills are free. Being largely without flavor, it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.

This contrast can stand for the differences between America and Europe - differences nowadays asserted with increased frequency and not a little acrimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The mutual criticisms are familiar. To American commentators Europe is 'stagnant.' Its workers, employers, and regulations lack the flexibility and adaptability of their U.S. counterparts. The costs of European social welfare payments and public services are 'unsustainable.' Europe's aging and 'cossetted' populations are underproductive and self-satisfied. In a globalized world, the 'European social model' is a doomed mirage. This conclusion is typically drawn even by 'liberal' American observers, who differ from conservative (and neoconservative) critics only in deriving no pleasure from it.

To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in trouble a ~ Tony Judt

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted. ~ Anna Brackett

Is the person I was before dead? Or will the worst things that happened to me eventually get diluted by the rest of my life, become just a part of the story that I've always been writing? ~ Rebecca Rosenblum

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought. ~ Wilhelm Dilthey

Pride is not your friend.
He would have you think he is, that he affords you strength and courage, but in truth he robs you of your health and by slow, diluted degrees steals your might. He is a crafty and cunning liar who would have you think that stubborn, unapologetic, superior, boastful, and popular are admirable traits. Pride would convince you that being right is more crucial than being kind. He would have you sever relationships, even turn your back on family and friends rather than utter a humble apology. To do so is beneath you, pride would say. He would have you fight like a raptor and gnash your teeth while jutting out an inflexible jaw to defend and protect him, regardless of who is hurt in the process. He would use and demean you in order to puff up and fortify himself. He would destroy your life and every meaningful association before casting you aside without a hint of remorse.
Again, Pride is not your friend. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don't know and even the people you don't want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face. ~ Lemony Snicket

As children we all wonder - we wonder all the time. And that gets lost in adulthood. It gets beaten out, it gets filtered out or diluted out. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves. ~ Joanna Russ

Something clamped tight inside her suddenly eased. He had been right. She did not have to grip her pain. She could let it go. The memory was still there. It had not vanished, but it had changed. It was a memory, a thing from her past. This wound could close and heal. The injury done to her was over. She did not have to keep it as a part of herself. She could allow herself to heal. Her tears were diluted in the rain that ran down her face. ~ Robin Hobb

I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence. ~ Flannery O'Connor

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I ha ~ Jeanette Winterson

Can we feel contrition for other people's crimes? Can we feel contrition for crimes we have not committed personally, but have subsequently profited from? How can we formulate the criteria for contrition to make them applicable to collective responsibility for historical crimes? Perhaps like this:
We freely admit that our predecessors have done wrong and that we are profiting from it.
We ask forgiveness of those who were wronged and of their descendants.
We promise to do our best to make amends to those who were wronged for the effects that still remain.
The larger the collective, the more diluted the personal responsibility. The less intimate the contrition, the greater the risk that it will just be hollow ceremony. ~ Sven Lindqvist

Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman, Even the more repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power. ~ Plato

I get really scared about how the Internet is shifting and changing everyone's minds, and the way we see ourselves and interact online. Everything is so diluted now. ~ Feist

When I'd woken the next morning, I'd done so in a dislocated world of dimmed daylight and diluted colors, a sodden world, feeling like I was a castaway on an alien planet. ~ Keith Houghton

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I can conceive of a time when all souls are stretched to the point of breaking, but for all I know that could have happened centuries ago. There is something curious about man's constant dilution of himself in pursuit of this equilibrium of a risk-free life - who is to say this dilution does not also apply to the soul? Spread ever more thinly...each generation pulled tighter in its further departure from man's initial purpose and evolution, until that simple, honest soul is so thin that it becomes diluted beyond salvation? ~ Matt Corton

Why, when a poison is diluted in water to the point where it cannot by physically detected, does the previously toxic solution then become therapeutic? When the substance itself is gone, and all that is left is the information from the vibration, both poison and medicine become the same. ~ Masaru Emoto

[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins

With this kind of camera-phone madness we have got, moments are diluted into self-contained edited experiences. ~ Doc Brown

Rs 6500 crore disclosed under compliance window of black money & foreign assets law. People fear the law that has now been created. Stringent provisions will not be diluted despite pressures. ~ Narendra Modi

He missed her reassurance. The way she stole his disquiet and diluted it, and how her unconcern would pull him through their day. She never dismissed his worries, she just disentangled them, smoothing down the edges and spreading them out until they became thin and insignificant ~ Joanna Cannon

Drink water between meals instead of with them so that the digestive juices will not be diluted. ~ Jane Fonda

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets. ~ Denis Diderot

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape.

"Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said.

Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon.

The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person.

But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being.

Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society.

Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance.

Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience.

According to the ~ Emma Elsworth

[Prostitution] is ultimately an experience we all share. But diluted. I think many of us, maybe all of us, are really selling and not knowing we're doing it. The question lies than in who among us could stand, or will have to stand on Broadway tonight. ~ Kate Millett

Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume. ~ Richard Whately

Our teaching may contain nothing impious, nothing diluted. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted? ~ Terry Eagleton

Germany is to be contained from outside and heterogenized from the inside by influx, 'diluted' so to speak. ~ Joschka Fischer

heroin is diluted/cut before becoming a joey or bags. ~ Jeffrey Archer

There's real potency in metal. Metal fans love metal as if it's a nation they would fight for. It's not diluted by pop culture. ~ Feist

My "heart". Does that pitiful organ still represent anything? It lies motionless in my chest, pumping no blood, serving no purpose, and yet my feelings still seem to originate inside its cold walls. My muted sadness, my vague longing, my rare flickers of joy. They pool in the center of my chest and seep out of there, diluted and faint, but real. ~ Isaac Marion

What's he doing?" I asked, leaning over the side of the boat, searching for him beneath the water. If the tow rope had gotten tangled, he might need help. And someone would need to go in the water with him, perhaps accidentally sliding against him down where no one else could see.
"Boo!" A handful of bryozoa rushed up at me from the lake.
I screamed (for once I didn't have to think about this girl-reaction) and fell backward into the boat. Sean hefted himself over the side with one arm, holding the bryozoan high in the other hand. It dripped green slime through his fingers. "Bwa-ha-ha!" He came after me.
I squealed again. It was so unbelievably fantastic that he was flirting with me, but bryozoa was involved. Was it worth it? No. I paused on the side of the boat, ready to jump back into the water myself. He might chase me around the lake with the bryozoa, but at least it would be diluted. On second thought, I didn't particularly want to jump into the very waters the bryozoa had come from.
Sean solved the problem for me. He slipped behind me and showed me he was holding the ties of my bikini in his free hand. If I jumped, Sean would take possession of my bikini top.
I had thought about double knotting my bikini. I'd hoped against hope that Stage Two: Bikini would work, and that Sean might try something like this. Of course, I didn't really want my top to come off in front of everyone. Nay, in front of anyone. But I'd checked the double knots in the mi ~ Jennifer Echols

In the white man's world, language, too
and the way which the white man thinks of it
has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language
for the Word itself
as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word. ~ N. Scott Momaday

Almost anything can be stretched to serve more people by being added to a white sauce or canned gravy or undiluted or very slightly diluted canned soup and served over noodles or rice. With chops or chocolate eclairs, however, the only solution is to claim you don't like them. ~ Jo Coudert

Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted. ~ Amos Tversky

When any institution becomes large and compartmentalized, with departments and subdepartments, then the conscience of the institution will often become so fragmented and diluted as to be virtually nonexistent, and the organization becomes inherently evil. ~ M. Scott Peck

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter ... [Language] is being eroded
it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us. ~ Ralph Fiennes

Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness. ~ David Nicholls

There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but wherever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or televisions. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even that great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by a crystal ball. ~ Simon Blackburn

The Mississippi looks like diluted mud by day but by night it's again the grand and majestic river of the days of tomahawks and coonskin caps. ~ Rodney P. Romig

Trying to preach to the world and simultaneously be accepted and elevated in it leads to a diluted message and lifestyle of compromise and contradiction. ~ Hope D. Blackwell

Simon," Isabelle interrupted, "you're talking like a nerd."
She said it almost fondly, but it freaked Simon out more. "And I don't know how to be smooth, sexy vampire Simon for you, either!"
Isabelle's perfect mouth curved, like a dark half-moon in her pale face. "You were never that smooth, Simon."
"Oh," said Simon. "Oh, thank God. I know you've had a lot of boyfriends. I remember that was a faerie, and"
another flash of memory, this time most unwelcome
"a ... Lord Montgomery? You dated a member of the nobility? How am I ever going to compete with that?"
Isabelle still looked fond, but it was diluted with a good deal of impatience. "You're Lord Montgomery, Simon! ~ Cassandra Clare

Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine. ~ Henry James

It is no response to assert that the Patriot Act has been useful; what you need to explain is how any particular safeguard would have so diluted investigative powers that it would have frustrated an investigation and created a security harm outweighing the benefit to civil liberties. If you'd rather trade scary stories, that's fine too - just let me know so I can buy a bag of marshmallows before our next round. ~ Julian Sanchez

From my standpoint, I want to work with homeland security, justice to make sure that U.S. citizens' vote is not diluted. ~ Rick Scott

Intensity of belief is diluted with age. But perhaps wisdom is in seeing our own failures, how we misdirected our energies? Nothing is entirely pure or sacred or certain as we grow older. ~ Adib Khan

There is an old Italian proverb about the nature of translation: "Traddutore, traditore!" This means simply, "Translators-traitors!" Of course, as you can see, something is lost in the translation of this pithy expression: there is great similarity in both the spelling and the pronunciation of the original saying, but these get diluted once they are put in English dress. Even the translation of this proverb illustrates its truth! ~ Daniel Wallace

What I learned then was there is a certain power in a three piece band. The more people you put on that stage, the more diluted it becomes. ~ Greg Lake

The whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington
only that they are subdued to the ruling passion. ~ Storm Jameson

The sharp scents made my throat ache. I had been up such hillsides before, and smelled these same spring scents. But then the pine and grass scent had been diluted with the smell of petrol fumes from the road below and the voices of day trippers replaced those of the jays. Last time I walked such a path, the ground was littered with sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts instead of mallow blossoms and violets. Sandwich wrappers seemed a reasonable enough price to pay, I supposed, for such blessings of civilization as antibiotics and telephones, but just for the moment, I was willing to settle for the violets. I badly needed a little peace, and I felt it here. ~ Diana Gabaldon

This internal sea. The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads ay poisonous flotsam and jetsam ... that poison is diluted by the sea, but once the ocean rolls out, it leaves the shite behind, inside ma body. It takes as well as gives, it washes away ma endorphins, ma pain resistance centres; they take a long time tae come back. ~ Irvine Welsh

He was staring down another loss, and, though he had to be logical, though he knew her to be logical, he saw the stricken look of betrayal on her face, and all of those arguments threatened to fly away from him. What was history anyway but the lies of the winning few? Why was it worth protecting, when it forgot the starving child under siege, the slave woman on her deathbed, the man lost at sea? It was an imperfect record written by a biased hand, diluted to garner the most agreement from competing parties. He was tempted to see her point, to imagine that she could realign the past and present and future into something beautiful. God, if anyone was capable of it, it would be her. ~ Alexandra Bracken

On our way to the hotel, the pleasure of looking at boundless turquoise water surfaces was diluted by seeing a scary and very large military boat, floating by with marine solders on board and carrying real arms and guns! Our jaws fell; we watched them as if we were hypnotized, while the marines watched us too, with serious expressions on their sunburned faces. ~ Sahara Sanders

Now and then, in philosophers or artists, one finds a passionate and exaggerated worship of 'pure forms': no one should doubt that a person who so needs the surface must once have made an unfortunate grab underneath it. Perhaps these burnt children, the born artists who find their only joy in trying to falsify life's images (as if taking protracted revenge against it-), perhaps they may even belong to a hierarchy: we could tell the degree to which they are sick of life by how much they wish to see its image adulterated, diluted, transcendentalized, apotheosized- we could count the homines religiosi among the artists, as their highest class. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance. ~ Zoe Heller

Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily. ~ Bertrand Russell

Clearly in the eyes of the consumer; the brand has not been diluted, but we must guard against that happening at all costs. ~ Richard Branson

Embracing your true self radiates a natural beauty that cannot be diluted or ignored. Confident, powerful, untamable, badass you! ~ Steve Maraboli

Wine was served during the meal (rich and heavy, it was usually diluted with water), but the real drinking began once the food had been cleared away. This was the commissatio - a ceremonial drinking competition at which goblets had to be drained in a single gulp. Healths were drunk. This was the time for conversation and debate, which might last well into the evening, and was the Roman equivalent to the Greek symposium. ~ Anthony Everitt

Time. Either you are for it or against it. So be here now. Not later. Do what you want to do, and with the people you love. Learn to appreciate time and make doing so a habit. And if you want to do nothing, then enjoy doing it well. Why do anything by half? Why live a life diluted? What's the use? ~ Carew Papritz

The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted. ~ Galen Rowell

A true yogi may remain dutifully in the world; there, he is like butter on water and not like the easily-diluted milk of unchurned and undisciplined humanity. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

There he is like butter on water, and not like the unchurned, easily diluted milk of undisciplined humanity. Fulfilling one's earthly responsibilities need not separate man from God, provided he maintains mental uninvolvement with egotistical desires and plays his part in life as a willing instrument of the Divine. There ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy. ~ Steve Maraboli

Don't let the evil actions of broken people define your view of our world! Don't be terrorized into a diluted, hopeless reality. ~ Steve Maraboli

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London's organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to ...
How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object
whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug
and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. ~ Alain De Botton

I no longer wished to have a diluted life, made faint by living according to the norms and values of an older generation who'd forgotten what it felt like to have the impassioned representatives of soul and spirit lobby their vessel with an unrelenting persistence to take them on an adventure. ~ Ken Ilgunas

The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

Why is it the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.
It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It is so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greetings card saying 'Congratulations on your engagement.' But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me. I want the diluted version, the happy language, the insignificant gestures. The saggy armchair of cliches. It's all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar. I don't have to be frightened, look, my grandma and grandad did it, he in a stiff collar and club tie, she in white muslin straining a little at the life underneath. They did it, my parents did it, now I will do it won't I, arms outstretched, not to hold you, just to keep my balance, sleepwalking to that armchair. How happy we will be. How happy everyone will be. And they all lived happily ever after. ~ Jeanette Winterson

How does it feel to be a part of this beautifully ingenious design. I have faith that there is a chosen moment in which my soul will expand infinitely free from time and space. Some may find that foolish but I have reasons for my beliefs that are uniquely my own. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies making up the universe. Earth is only one planet of billions orbiting inside just one of these 500,000 billion or more galaxies. And I myself am one person. One of over seven billion people living on our dynamic little planet. Instead of being diluted by this infinitesimal proportion I accept it as a challenge and I use science to strengthen my spirituality. It provokes curiosity and redefines my view of logical thinking. I believe that existence is based on the exchange of energy and functionality. Energy is expended to carry out varying tasks ensuring the function of an organism. This is evident in every life form and has been the founding principle supporting lifetimes of discoveries. Energy is spent with purpose. I can't help but draw the conclusion that the energy required to create the universe itself was done so for a purpose. You and I were created with a purpose. -Tavia Rahki Smith ~ Tavia Rahki Smith

I think also there's no question that Lincoln has been diluted down through history in some way, almost by becoming as iconic as he is, in a way he's become diluted. ~ James Spader

Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster.
We weren't completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We'd had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine.
We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same.
We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities.
In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares.
At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. "This is too much!" she said. "You can't dump all the ~ Sharon Creech

Still, when I went back home I searched my father's face for what I thought was Mexican-ness, something still visible in him but diluted in me. I had his mouth, his brown eyes, but my skin was lighter. My hair was fine and dark brown, while his was thick and silvering at the temples. What was I looking for, though? Who knew how much of his ancestry, and thus mine, was indigenous and how much European? I realized I was seeking a trace of purity, as if such a thing existed - as if one's roots could be a single clean bright plunge like a carrot, instead of the complicated dirty tangle that most of us actually had. Essentialist was an accusation my friends and classmates had flung around liberally in arguments, yet secretly maybe we all wanted it for ourselves in some way or another - to have an essence. To be an identity. ~ Chelsey Johnson

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind - as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think all music - not just rap - has fallen into this very diluted, delusional state, where everyone's singing about money and having cars, and having all this fun; when really, people are losing their homes. ~ Ice-T

At Time Warner, I had ten percent of the stock after the merger. But when we merged with AOL, I was diluted down to three percent. ~ Ted Turner

Your doubts do nothing than pouring cold water on your enviable dreams. Just keep doubts away from you and you will not dilute your success story! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

It seems that our humanity inadvertently smears various lines as it touches the prose of the divine. And when that happens we end up with a humanized god that is God incessantly diluted by our handling of the script. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Let them get at the books themselves, and do not let them be flooded with diluted talk from the lips of their teacher. The less the parents 'talk-in' and expound their rations of knowledge and thought to the children they are educating, the better for the children ... Children must be allowed to ruminate, must be left alone with their own thoughts. ~ Charlotte Mason

If you want to touch the other shore badly enough, barring an impossible situation, you will. If your desire is diluted for any reason, you'll never make it. ~ Diana Nyad

I can think of no better way to die than as a martyr for my race and my way of life," Smyrt said. "And if the Colonial Union dies with us, then I will welcome its diluted population as our honor guard into hell. ~ John Scalzi

The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of other people's houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else. ~ Lucy Dillon

Far from merely being a larger England, the United States had become something quite different: an incubator of lost or diluted British freedoms. As the Liberty Bell was originally cast in England but rang out in America, so those guarantees of the 'rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects' have found their truest expression across the Atlantic. 'That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy,' wrote George Orwell in 1941. 'It is our job to see that it stays there.' In Britain and beyond, that rifle has long been taken away. England's bell has fallen silent. Americans would do well to ensure that the crack in theirs grows no larger. ~ Charles C.W. Cooke

I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life. ~ Gavin McInnes

One mode of anti-frontier and anti-self-reliance propaganda is contemporary hysteria about gun control – a part of the materialistic determinism of the hour. To the superficial minds of "Liberals," collectivists, Marxians, et al., instruments are supposed to act upon man, and men (no longer self-reliant) merely to be acted upon: to them, murder lies in the gun and not in the soul of man. So they think that to deprive men of guns would prevent man from murder!

"What the Power Boys – the insiders – behind the gun controls really want, of course, is not to control guns but to control us. They want registration so that they can confiscate; they want to confiscate so that they will have power and we shall be powerless – even as we live today upon a wild frontier demanding ever more self-reliance.

"On the old frontier, men had to rely upon themselves and had to be armed until there were sound laws and until law-enforcement officers could enforce the laws. Today laws against thieves, muggers, thugs, rapist, arsonists, looters, murderers (thanks largely to the "Liberal" majority on the Supreme Court) are diluted almost to the point of abolition; the Marshal Dillons of the world, thanks to the same Court, are disarmed or emasculated, they are told to respect the "rights" of thieves, muggers, thugs, rapists, arsonists, looters, muggers, above the right of good citizens to be secure from such felons.

"Good citizens, deprived of the processes of the law o ~ Edward Merrill Root

The story of Daniel and his friends is a clarion call to our generation to be courageous; not to lose our nerve and allow the expression of our faith to be diluted and squeezed out of the public space and thus rendered spineless and ineffective. Their story will also tell us that this objective is not likely to be achieved without cost. ~ John C. Lennox

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest ... no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak ... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism ... true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Good writers always have a strong sense of who they are and who they are not. Like actors, their boundaries are strong, and fluid. They have a deep understanding of the human condition, and an empathy that is not so diffuse that it is diluted. ~ Suzy Davies

The ranks of the Marines were now diluted with reservists, at least 50 percent. Few of them were mentally prepared to fight, or physically hardened to war. Inch'on, luckily, had been easy. But now, on the frozen hills above Yudam-ni, the Marines, regular and reservist alike, faced reality. Because their officers were tough-minded, because their discipline was tight, and because their esprit - that indefinable emotion of a fighting man for his standard, his regiment, and the men around him, was unbroken - weak and strong alike, they would face it well. ~ T.R. Fehrenbach

What's the good of these great fragile fits of enthusiasm, these jaded jumps of joys? We know nothing anymore, but the dead stars; we gaze at their faces; and we gasp with pleasure. Our mouths are dry as the lost beaches, and our eyes turn aimlessly and without hope. Now all that remain are these cafés where we meet to drink these cool drinks, these diluted spirits, and the tables are stickier than the pavements where our shadows of the day before have fallen. ~ Andre Breton