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.

Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists, combined. So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.

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

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

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

The US ... cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth ... it lives in a perpetual present. in the US everything human is artificial. The country is without hope. What is arresting here is ... both the absence of architecture in the cities and the dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies.

My only real solace? Sleep. In the absence of an explanation of anything, for everything, I live for it and what it can bring.

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.

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 the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Wherefore also these Kinds [elements] occupied different places even before the universe was organised and generated out of them. Before that time, in truth, all these were in a state devoid of reason or measure, but when the work of setting in order this Universe was being undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, although possessing some traces of their known nature, were yet disposed as everything is likely to be in the absence of God; and inasmuch as this was then their natural condition, God began by first marking them out into shapes by means of forms and numbers.

Peace is the absence of war, but beyond that peace is a commodity unlike any other. Peace is security. Peace is a mindset. Peace is a way of living. Peace is the capacity to transcend past hurts - to break cycles of violence and forge new pathways that say, I would like to make sure we live as a community where there is justice, security, and development for all members. At the end of the day, peace is an investment; it is something you create by investing in a way of life and monitoring where your resources go.

The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God - that is love. Love is the salute of the angels to the stars. How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love! How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world.

How can you raise the level of consciousness on this? How can you get the federal government to take the responsibility? Florida does not have a foreign policy. This is a federal policy or absence of federal policy. It's so clear that we're not being treated fairly. We have to come up with a solution. It hurts your head trying to figure out what to do.

Britain is leaving and has de facto left the European Union; however, it has not withdrawn from its special relationship with the United States and I believe that the UK's relations with Russia depend on Britain's special relationship with the United States rather than on its presence in or absence from the European Union.

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.

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.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

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.

...perhaps that is what ultimately unites us as a world: the fact that, no matter how prosperous a nation, how developed, all share the plight and embarrassment of having so many suffering children. We are united by our neglect, our abuse, our absence of love. Have we forgotten about the children, and thus forsaken the next generation?

And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.

The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.

We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

Is not absence death to those who love?

The nation as the horizon of an identity that you want to come into being as a fundamental absence of something that is compromised, something that needs to be rescued or made - these matters preoccupy the third world writer. It is seductive for a Marxist understanding of literary practice and production in the sense that it says that material culture determines literary output.

Ego means self-identification with thinking, to be trapped in thought, which means to have a mental image of "me" based on thought and emotions. So ego is there in the absence of a witnessing presence.

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

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

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.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.

In the [John F.] Kennedy case, I believe the absence of a conspiracy can be proved to a virtual certainty.

The absence of romance from my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

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

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.

Absence cools moderate passions, and inflames violent ones; just as the wind blows out candles, but kindles fires.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

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

How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe.

I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin'. I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as being a judge was concerned... I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.

In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.

In the absence of that, I am happy to play solo, but I don't think there is any comparison.

The truth is there's so many great TV shows out there now that none of us take absence of awards personally. The most important feedback is the feedback we get from the fans.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.