Quotes About Absence

Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.

Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. So many look to eradicate fear from their lives, when that is an impossible task. You can certainly experience moments in absence of fear, however accept that fear will be with you whenever you are in the process of living creatively. The challenge is to go ahead regardless, simply notice the feeling and manage being courageous.

Prayer and a holy life are one. They mutually act and react. Neither can survive alone. The absence of the one is the absence of the other.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.

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.

Peace is not just the mere absence of violence or disturbance. It's when there is a possibility of conflict, but you deliberately avoid violence and adopt methods to solve the problem through peaceful means. That is real peace.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

Relaxation is the absence of worry.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

I took a leave of absence from the internet company where I was working and bought a camera and a copy of Final Cut Pro editing software and made my first feature film, "Street Fight." It followed a crazy, racially charged mayoral election in Newark, NJ in which a young guy named Cory Booker was taking on the political machine of that city. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar and Emmy and was a real example of DIY film-making.

In 1916 I was discharged from military service, or rather, given a sort of leave of absence on the understanding that I might be recalled within a few months. And so I was a free man, at least for a while.

If you had only truth, goodness, and harmony on your side, and the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.

I watch her blond head until it disappears around the bend, and I feel bare, like there's nothing left to protect me against pain. Her absence stings worst of all.

Courage is not the absence of fear and pain, but the affirmation of life despite fear and pain.

The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.

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

for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.

Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.

Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is the ability to operate effectively even while totally terrified.

Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.

But what I found most interesting was that Aaron had apparently found a way to pass the time without her. Beside him, holding his hand, was a Moroi girl who looked about eleven but had to be older, unless he'd become a pedophile during our absence.

Nothing marks the change from the city to the country so much as the absence of grinding noises. The country is never silent. But its sounds are separate, distinct, and as it were, articulate.

I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence.

In drawing an inference or conclusion from facts proved, regard must always be had to the nature of the particular case, and the facility that appears to be afforded, either of explanation or contradiction. No person is to be required to explain or contradict, until enough has been proved to warrant a reasonable and just conclusion against him, in the absence of explanation or contradiction.

Good health is not the absence of symptoms, it is the presence of peace.

When you're having a bad day at work, a lot of times it's your head. When you're having good days, a lot of times it's the absence of the mind.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

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.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. So long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.

Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.

There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

Courage isn't the absence of fear, but a decision that what we want is more important than what we are afraid of.

It wasn't a dance, but the complete absence of noise and movement, the silence, that brought me in contact with myself.

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.

Do you believe there is some place that will make thesoul less thirsty? In that great absence you will find nothing.

People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?

You cannot know, and become, that which you are, in the absence of that which you are not, as I have already explained to you.