Quotes About Absence

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.

Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.

Peace is not just the absence of war. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith.

Assuredly, meeting after absence, is one of - ah, no! - it is life's most delicious feeling.

We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.

apparent contradiction ... is often the opportunity for new discovery in science; and it even may be said that the absence of apparent contradiction is due to our want of perception, since our knowledge of laws and causes is so small compared to their total sum.

Does the presence of pain mean the absence of God? I try to help people see that God uses pain, that pain is one of the ways God shapes us into the kind of beings He wants us to be for eternity.

It is a tragedy that religion for us means, today, nothing more than restrictions on food and drink, nothing more than adherence to absence of superiority and inferiority.

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.

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

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

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.

What is at stake is how to answer the potential threat Iraq represents with the risk of proliferation of WMD. Baghdad's regime did use such weapons in the past. Today, a number of evidences may lead to think that, over the past four years, in the absence of international inspectors, this country has continued armament programs.

I have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life. Indeed if I were required to make a sharp division in the very nature of people, I would be tempted to make it there: readers and nonreaders of books... It is astonishing how the presence or absence of this habit so consistently characterizes an individual in other respects; it is as though it were a kind of barometer of temperament, of personality, even of character. Aside from that, for me it constituted something like sanity insurance.

Faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.

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.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.

It's so much a part of me that it's almost hard to describe myself in the absence of it. I know that for me it means asking for guidance, and that in the toughest times there's a personal savior that I can rely on. And I'm very grateful to my parents for giving me that.

i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone

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.

A keystone habit leads to other positive habits and disciplines. These positive traits start a chain reaction that produces other positive outcomes. The presence of these important habits help you become more faithful in other areas of your life. On the other hand, the absence of these key disciplines can impact you negatively.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

Faith is the element that builds the bridge in the absence of concrete evidence.

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

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

There are absolute atheists ... Absolute atheism is in no way a mere absence of belief in God. It is rather a refusal of God, a fight against God, a challenge to God.

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

Inner silence is not just the absence of thoughts. No! Silence is the blossoming of our indomitable inner will. Silence is our inner wisdom-light.

In order to thoroughly enjoy anything, one must feel the absence of it at times.

Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive.

: There are only two on-buttons for fear, in any permutation you want. One is when something that shouldn't be is, meaning a presence. And, the other one is an absence.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

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

The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.

[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.

In the absence of wake-up calls, many of us never really confront the critical issues of life.

Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.

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.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.

His absence will haunt their hallways, and he will be a space they can't fill. And then time will pass, and the hole will be gone, like when an organ is removed and the body's fluids flow into the space it leaves. Humans can't tolerate emptiness for long.