Quotes About Absence

I was court-martialled in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.

Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Prolonged absence makes the heart forget.

Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.

History will help to remedy intellectual faults such as excessive concentration on one line of thought, absence of understanding for other points of view, belief in simple solutions, lack of balance of mind, absence of an imaginative understanding.

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

Let's get rid of the suffering and bring real peace, which is not just the absence of war, but the absence of all negativity.

Until recent times, absence of evidence for his [Jehovah's] existence has not been sufficient to rule him out. However, we now have enough knowledge that we can identify many places where there should be evidence, but there is not. The absence of that evidence allows us to rule out the existence of this God beyond a reasonable doubt.

To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.

poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development.

Happiness is the absence of suffering. I think it's an interesting way of looking at it. I think the absence of suffering exists very rarely in the world we live in.

I'd been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedom—one from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.

Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.

Would a soul continually eye His everlasting tenderness and compassion...[then] it could not bear an hour's absence from Him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour.

A tree, young or old, if admired, remains a definite vision, and when after long absence it is visited again, the meeting place is approached with feelings of pleasure and curiosity as to how one's friend had fared, even with thoughts as to what changes may come to tree or visitor since first they met; this may seem like a foolish sentiment - perhaps it is. But, after all, sentiment is mingled with most that's best in life.

The appalling crackdown that we witnessed in Hama and other Syrian cities on 30 and 31 July only erode the regime's legitimacy and increase resentment. In the absence of an end to the senseless violence and a genuine process of political reform, we will continue to pursue further EU sanctions.

In my work, I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever.

The world sees peace as the absence of conflict or pain, but Jesus offers us solace despite our suffering.

Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.

In fall 1967, I was given leave of absence by the National Public Affairs Research Foundation to move to Redondo Beach, California, to work on a short-term research contract with TRW.

Women need to see ourselves as individuals capable of creating change. That is what political and economic power is all about: having a voice, being able to shape the future. Women's absence from decision-making positions has deprived the country of a necessary perspective.

Desire, liberated from its ties to the ego, realizes that it has no other aspiration than the fullness of Mahamudra and, as it sees in the same impulse that this plenitude is innate and limitless, it no longer aspires to any realization whatsoever. There is no longer anything but intimate vibration, continuous sacred tremoring, and the absence of localization in time and space.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

Among Jews, there is an absence of drunkenness, always a fruitful source of domestic strife and misconduct.

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.

Contractile movements arise, sometimes at the instigation of external stimuli but sometimes also in the absence of any apparent external influence.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

The Killing Fields, my character's teachings frame the movie and the argument of his lectures is the challenge of dealing with the painfulness of life in the absence of faith.

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.

The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning.

Health can be defined negatively, as the absence of illness, functionally, as the ability to cope with everyday activities, or positively, as fitness and well-being. It has also been noted that in the modern world, health still has a moral dimension.

I think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence... images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc.

Success doesn't mean the absence of failures; it means the attainment of ultimate objectives.

It's hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It's much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation.

To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.

Personally, I do not see in Canada it would be a feasible thing if any Ministry organized taking over both the Health and the Disease of the entire community... even in the most favourable circumstances... there would be that absence of competition and that sense of independence... I do not believe it would be good for the profession or good for the Public.

The existence of tricks does not imply the absence of magic.

You left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence or in absence.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

I think I've got a peculiar disease. I call it the curse of history, and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one's life. So I decided to forget and throw myself into the future.

Cooperation isn't the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict.

In the absence of certainty, instinct is all you can follow.