Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again. [ Browning ]

Then, rising with Aurora's light,
The muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine.
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when invention fails.
To scratch your head and bite your nails. [ Swift ]

Impatience does not diminish, but always augments the evil. [ Proverb ]

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. [ Shenstone ]

Riches amassed in haste will diminish; but those collected by hand and little by little will multiply. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

It is an invariable maxim that words which add nothing to the sense or to the clearness must diminish the force of the expression. [ Campbell ]

Extremes touch: he who wants no favors from Fortune may be said to have obtained the very greatest that she can bestow, in realizing an independence which no changes can diminish. [ Chatfield ]